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The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).
I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.
I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.
He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.
But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.
Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.
But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.
So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.
I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.
We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.
Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.
That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.
Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.
1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out
So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.
I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:
Never underestimate the power of friendship.21 -
Prototype devRant rubber duck. Depending on my craft skills, might have a variety of dev themed capes too
34 -
Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
I've always tried to live by the philosophy that you should never burn bridges, but my god some recruiters make it very difficult. I've had a handful of occasions where I've had to type out a nasty email to a recruiter and then just not send it after I realized I wouldn't want it getting around/you never know who they known.
The latest incident where I did this was with a recruiter who emailed me 3 times within a week. But my issue wasn't with the amount of emails or even the fact that he was shopping me frontend positions despite my resume clearly stating I'm a backend dev/data engineer.
My issue was... THE GUY FUCKING REFERRED TO HIMSELF AS "BATMAN". That's right - an adult human being so desperate to get the attention of developers that he set his email name to "Batman", signs his emails "Full name - A.K.A. Batman", and lists his phone number like "BatPhone: xxx.xxx.xxxx"
If I didn't find him so pretentious and he actually sent me a kind of relevant position, what would I do? Pick up the phone and call him and say "hey Batman." Jesus fucking Christ. What an absurd gimmick. Maybe I'm overreacting but it seems so childish.
And you know what, if the guy read my resume and sent me relevant stuff I probably would have said "meh, he's doing good work, if he wants to stand out/be silly whatever." But no, he didn't even look at my skills. Instead he thought 3 shitty emails where he called himself Batman would convince me to write back to him.
I was close to sending him a ridiculous response and signing it "Robin", but decided it wasn't worth it.30 -
So because of the sheer number of interviews I’ve been doing I’m starting to get a bit brazen with them since I’ve started to really not give a fuck about most of them and I’ve started to notice patterns in common lines of questioning resulting in this unexpected gem today:
Interviewer: So we always start our devs off on the bottom end of our salary band.
Dev: Either give me the top or I’m not interested.
Interviewer: 😡. But if we start you at the top of the salary band we’ll have nothing to give you later. 🥺.
Dev: No need, I’ll take the money up front. Companies don’t give raises these days anyway, it’s just a carrot to dangle in front of the naive.
Interviewer: 😡. Well if all you care about is money so focussed on money you’ll just leave if a better offer comes around!
Dev: All the more reason to give me the highest number possible to defend against that possibility.
Interviewer: 😡. But there are other devs on the team with similar experience that will be making less than you.
Dev: Sounds like they fell for the negging and guilt tripping you are currently attempting on me in order to save a buck. Salary is not based on your skills or experience anymore, it’s based on your ability to negotiate. Here’s mine.
Interviewer: ………………. I’ll pass you along to the hiring manager.
Dev: ???? wtf
HOW THE FUCK DID THAT ACTUALLY WORK ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME I WAS TRYING TO GET THEM TO HANG UP FOR SHITS AND GIGGLES AND NOW I’M LOOKING AT A 20K RAISE ALL BECAUSE I CONTINUALLY TOLD THEM TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES??? THIS IS ACTUALLY WHAT IT TAKES TO BE TREATED PROPERLY BY A COMPANY???14 -
Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.
I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.
Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.
Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.
Anyway.
Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.
This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.
Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.
It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.
It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.22 -
Interviewer: "Hi, we are searching for a junior frontend dev with 1 year of experience and strong skills with Angular".
Me: "I have never used Angular before but I have 4 years of experience, It's not a problem for me to study it and use it quickly".
Interviewer: "Eh no, we are searching for someone with very strong Angular skills".
Me: "That's fine, but sorry how can a junior dev with just 1 year of experience have already strong skills with Angular? He must have also strong skills with JavaScript in general and It's quite impossible".
Interviewer: "Ehh... ehm.... ehmm..."11 -
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
On being a woman in tech...
You lads probably have (and my fellow ladies certainly have) heard of "impostor syndrome" and, if you don't experience it, you possibly wonder what living with it is like.
Here's an example from this weekend.
Be me, about 5 years into my career, graduated from a top college, feeling decent but still unsure of skill.
Company gets a 4 week trial of an online learning website. It includes optional assessments, so that you know where in the video lessons to start. Rankings are novice, proficient, expert.
Hear from our QA that he got ranked "proficient." Which is a pretty broad category, but I become super afraid that I'll also be assessed as "proficient" and it will look like I have the same dev skills as a fucking QA (our management overlords can see our scores).
Boyfriend has me do some deep breathing before starting the test, because it's obvious how stressed I am.
Finally take it and get ranked "expert", in the 97th percentile, even though some technical difficulties made me miss four questions in a row. I decide to use my do over, and get ranked "expert" again, this time in the 99th percentile.
You'd think I'd be like, "Lawl, I can't believe I'd get the same score as our QA!" And there is some of that. But there's also the thoughts of, "that test could have been more thorough," "that score wasn't real because I resaw a question and got the right answer the second time," and "99th percentile isn't that great on a platform where new developers are over represented."
And this is all despite the fact that, if you were to ask someone how confident I am, the answer would probably "confident as hell."
Not saying this to start any fights. Figured it could be some interesting insight into a world that some people don't experience! (not that males aren't allowed to have impostor syndrome!)16 -
I'm hiring and I'm fucking done with recruiters buttering up skills etc and sending me BS candidates.
Interview earlier today...
CV: MySql skill level 10 (out of 10)
Reality: Can't write a simple JOIN!
Yesterday...
CV: PHP 6+ years exp, self proclaimed ninja/jedi/oracle.
Reality:
[Me]: Write me a function to map an array to x.
[Ninja]: What's an array?
I've come to the conclusion that the type of dev I want on my team is highly unlikely to be looking for work much less using some piece of shit shady agent to find work so I need to hunt him / her down personally and can use the phenomenally large recruiters fee as a hiring bonus / incentive.
Only problem now is finding quality full stack devs in the area (Johannesburg, South Africa).
I'm thinking of posting a 'challenge' job add to filter out good candidates - some kind of code challenge to be solved that gives them my contact info. Any one have any creative ideas I could try?31 -
Manager: You can’t define an async function without using await.
Dev: Yes you can.
Manager: Well you shouldn’t, there’s no point!
Dev: Yes there is. It can turn blocking synchronous logic into work performed concurrently. In this case the perform—
Manager: It’s called async *await*. Async *AWAIT*! Did you hear the two parts to that? You shouldn’t ever have one without the other. THEY GO TOGETHER. Worrying about concurrency is for people who use callbacks which just goes to show how out of date your skills are. I’m reading a book on javascript and there are so many advanced techniques out there that I haven’t even seen you use ONCE!
Dev: …
*I looked at the book he’s reading, it’s from the < ES6 era… no wonder he doesn’t see me using any of those archaic patterns/hacks/workarounds…*13 -
Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)
First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:
Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).
We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".
1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.
1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"
Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.
CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.
When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!
So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.
I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.
Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.
Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.
Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.
So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off
I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine
.... happy job hunting everyone!10 -
Manager: How come the push to prod didn’t happen?
Dev: We told you at the scrum yesterday. To reiterate, our dev environment was crashing so it’s not safe to push to prod until that is fixed.
Manager: Ok well lets set a goal to fix that and push to prod happens today so that it guaranteed happens.
Dev: That was our goal yesterday and it definitely didn’t happen.
Manager: I AM AWARE OF THAT. The corrective action is that this time compliance with the goal is 100% ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY!!
Dev: We’ll do our best, can’t guarantee anything until we figure out what the nature of what is occurring on dev though.
Manager: NO. I AM THE BOSS. YOU WILL 100% ABSOLUTELY COMPLY WITH THIS. THAT IS AN ORDER. YOU WILL SUCCESSFULLY GET THIS UPDATE OUT TO PROD TODAY. ANYTHING LESS THAN THAT SHALL BE CONSIDERED INSUBORDINATION. I WANT STATUS UPDATES EVERY 15 MINUTES ON WHERE WE ARE AT WITH THIS.
Dev: …
Dev: Can I get you to send me that request in an email?
*Manager leaves the meeting*
// *****************************
Job search is ticking along. It’s tough going though because I currently make ~120k and the best offers I’ve received so far are all ~70k because “You only have 2 years experience so you couldn’t possibly have the skills to be worth 120k. You are are junior level developer and 70K is already overpaying for you. We can pay you more later™. No we will not give you that in writing”. Ah well, the hunt continues.17 -
Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.
Me: ok.
[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]
Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.
[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]
Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.
Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.
[two days later shows to Manager2]
Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.
Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)
Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]
...
Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)
Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf
Me: I quit
- - -
Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.4 -
Guy I work with: Hey can I borrow you for a minute
Me: sure. What do you need?
Him: so this is a project me an the other dev worked on
Me thinking: Well I know he did it all and sent you the project so don't tell me you worked on it
Him: so we use it to do this and this and send an email to this new account I made because (2 minute explanation)
Me thinking: I don't care. Just tell me what your issue is! I already know what it is and does from what you told me the last time when you showed me. Which took an hour of my time.
Him: so he sent me this code which is called <Descriptive name> and in the method we have variables call <descriptive name> and it returns a <variable name>
Me thinking: You mother fucker! I don't give a shit what your method is named, what it the variable names are, and you don't need to read through every line of code to me! Just from the descriptive name you just said I know what it does! What the fuck is your issue!?
Him: we also have these other methods. This one is called <Descriptive name> which does...
Me: are you fucking seriously going to read me your code line by line and tell me what you named your variables AGAIN!?
Him: and we named this one <descriptive name>
Me: you mother fucker...
Him: and it calls this stored procedure. (Literally opens the stored procedure and shows me) and it is called...which has parameters called... And it is a select query that inserts
45 minutes later after he finishes explaining all 3 pages of his code and his 5 stored procedures that the other dev wrote...
Him: So anyway, back to this method. I need to know where to put this method. The other dev said to put it in this file, but where do you think I should put it in here? Should I place it after this last one or before it?
Me thinking: You fucking wasted my fucking time just to ask where to place your mother fucking method that the other dev sent to you in a project with only 3 files, all less than 500 lines of code with comments and regions that actually tell you what you should put there and 5 small stored procedures that were not even relevant to your issue! Why the fuck did you need to treat me as a rubber ducky which would fly away if you did have one because you didn't have an issue, you just didn't know where to put your fucking code! FUCK YOUR METHOD!
Me: Where ever you want
Him: Well I think it won't work if I placed it before this method.
I walked away after that. What a waste of time and an insult to my skills and really unchallenging. He's been coding for years and still can't understand anything code related. I'm tired if helping him. Every time he needs something he always has to read through and explain his shit just to ask me things like this. One time he asked me what to name his variable and another his project. More recently he asked why he couldn't get his project he found online to work. The error clearly stated he needed to use c# 7. His initial solution was to change his sql connection string. 😑
He should just go back to setting up computers and fixing printers. At least then he would never be in the office to bug me or the other dev with things like this.7 -
who ever has this as their skill set are legends!!
made me laugh going through thousands of lines of skills :D
"
A little bit of Lua in my life
A little bit of JS is all i need
A little bit of bash is what i see
A little bit of JSON in the sun
A little bit of Python all night long
A little bit of TCL here i am
A little bit of this makes me your dev
"1 -
> Gained the skills to atleast land an internship
> Hyped asf
> Start applying for jobs
> Hyped asf
> Days go by without a response
> Hype starts dying
> Gets a REAL email delivered to my inbox asking to come in for an interview
> Hype levels regenerated
> Interview goes great and both founder and senior dev are fine with hiring me
> Founder needs to talk with co-founder first before giving the go and said he will get back to me in a day or two.
> The hype is too real
> 5 days go by without a reponse
> Hype levels: all time low
> Decide to follow up, founder said he left for a conference before the co-founder came back to talk about it and said he will get with her and let me know in a few days.
> The hypening is back
> A week goes by with no response
> I'm dead inside rn.8 -
I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.
As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.
In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.
There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.
I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.
The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.
And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.
Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.
And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!
The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!
It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.
I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.
Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.
Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.
This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.
Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!10 -
Once I had to do a 'hands on' pair programming session for a position I applied for... Together with the lead dev we would switch coding every 15 minutes It was somewhat of a horror story...
The assignment was to implement an password reset flow, connecting it to the api and then handling the entire password reset flow, in Angular becahs ye know has to be Angular...
After drafting the ui and setting up the click events, I wanted to hookup the api calls, but then it was time to switch around...
The fucktard dev first started to adjust my classmappings to be more in line with his preference, without touching the css classnames... Ok... Micro managing ... Check...
So after breaking the styles, he wrote the fetches to the api endpoints and that was his 15 minutes of shame...
I continued only to find out the endpoints we were using had errors in them and would not return anything workable...
The dev said he'd tested the endpoint before and it worked, but clearly it didn't...
After about an hour of going back and forth trying to get this to work he got a call from a client because server was down (surprise), he excused himself and had to prioritize on this, running out and leaving me there for the remaining morning ...
I just sat there waiting for the HR checkout talk, only to lean towards rejecting the position...
Fucking waste of time, and in the end the feedback was they doubted MY TECHNICAL SKILLS ... And wouldn't make me an offer 😂👍 nice story bro...
K THX BAI!7 -
While not entirely related, I've been looking for new jobs lately and its starting to really fucking annoy me that I see front end requirements in nearly every goddamn backend dev position I come across 🤬
My front end skills are bad and while I do understand its necessity, I don't give a single fuck about it personally.19 -
This community really motivates me to master my skills and learn new stuff to become a great dev. Thank you!4
-
Non-dev activity that made me a better dev?
That's an easy one.
Playing the piano. Or better: learning to play the piano.
(With the help of my teacher) I developed many skills that help me learn faster and I learned how to properly use and organize my time.5 -
2017 Recap + DEVBANNER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
1. So, let's recap my 2017 first. It was awesome
Here is some list that I can remember
- finding my hobby (fsx, vatsim)
- finding computers aren't genius
- creating a new language
- major improvements in my unity skills
- found out i am friendly
- getting a job at google in a dream
- creating my banner in krita --> devbanner collab :D
- Logo creation fail
- CS class apply fail
- getting free stickers for the first time of my life
- getting death threats (lol)
- finishing my first ever big c# project
- got offensive words from a bot that i am a f***ing d***head.
- getting downvotes after creating such a shitty meme
- getting my rant featured in twitter
- finding that my friends love my game
- getting a sneak peak at the src of devrant
- coding with turbo c
- not using git cuz too lazy
- finds out msdn is god
- slowly hating unity, but likes it cuz it is using c#
- reaching level 2 in google foobar
- started 100+ projects this year and finished about 6 of them.
- devRant motivated me a lot
2. devBanner stuffs
So, how it all started is when I wanted to create my own logo. Some people will remember it. The one with arrows and cozyplales written on it. Then, I created my own banner with Krita (their text tool sucked). After that, due to some suggestions by the community, I decided to create a collab. From then, many people contributed to the devBanner project. Special thanks to @Kimmax for his awesome prototype of the frontend made during I was sleeping.
Now, before I talk more, I want to talk something. I don't post a rant about my collab cuz i want to get upvotes. I just want more people to use this simple creation software. You can literally use them anywhere, and it is FOSS.
Well....
If you want to create again, you can do so at https://devbanner.center
If you want to contribute, please do so by visiting https://github.com/devBanner
We are looking for a skilled frontend dev who can do the basic web stuffs. (we don't use frameworks currently for our frontend)
---------------------
Thanks everyone for making 2017 awesome. Can't wait to welcome 2018. Happy new year everyone, and I will drop my banner here.
21 -
!dev What pisses me off about today's job market is that the following idea is a naive one:
Let's just find a junior position and learn on the job so you can demonstrate your skills to your employer so they can promote you.
Wroooong. Reality: They only hire the most gifted geniuses who already know everything and they don't have the budget for someone who is rusty.
Welcome to the modern world of the CompSci market, where you are expected to have expert level knowledge in every language, especially in Software Engineering and Algorithms. And if you don't remember how to write an efficient Comparator algorithm in under 3 minutes, you're screwed.
Yaay.6 -
My dev skills currently feel like England in the mid 1600's.
Everyone around me has already conquered some projects while I sit in the side fighting a civil war with myself while having very humble accomplishments.
But I'll show them. I'll show them all. While they grow weak and weary over the ages, I'm slowly but surely getting stronger.
In the end I will conquer and rule the waves like no other. I will build a dev empire that will be remembered for years to come.3 -
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 -
Life of a junior self-taught dev with a sysadmin job:
1)At work, desperately try to script and automate every task, even when it isn't nessecary.
2)Learn dev skills from tutorials and web courses at every minute of your free time.
3)When returning home get self-guilt because you're procrastinating instead of doing an all-night development like your dev friends
4)The only productive thing you do is more tutorials and courses because you feel your dev skills aren't high enough for a self project
Frustrated.13 -
Gaming anytime!
The reason I become intrested in computers was gaming.
Given I started out as a game dev, playing games helps me think more about it and imporve my skills.
Also sometimes it reduces my productivity :P3 -
This happened a while back but thought it would be an interesting story.
So there is this guy, I'll call him Jack. Jack was a weirdo. He just graduated high school but thought of himself as very hot in terms of dev skills. He boasted lots of good programs, that are the best in industry, except they don't work (like the best proven file compressor, that just can't decompress anything because of some "bugs"). He also entered language holy wars quite actively, saying that Delphi is the best platform ever.
Aaanyway, a couple of years pass. Jack is now a student. Jack tries to make some money, so he talks to some guy, that offers him a "job" at the tax office, where he has to modernize the data infrastructure of the tax authorities. If you think this sounds very wrong, then you're 100% correct. But it gets better. After 2 months of work, the guy manages to do that. It's a simple CRUD application after all.
So everything works, but the guy who gave him this job refused to pay. He stalled and then just stopped answering the phone. Jack is now furious. So what he does, is publish the databases online, so everyone could see the income of every citizen. Authorities are in panic. They send the police to his door. They seize his computer and lock him up for a few days.
To sum it all up: Jack took up a job, without any contract, without any NDA, which is completely illegal in of itself, but he did that with the tax authority. And delivered the product before getting paid. And when he understood that he was owned, he published all online. He got bit back. The guy who gave him this job had no consequences for illegally hiring someone and not paying for their work.
Lesson: Don't be Jack11 -
Dev(null networking knowledge): -"i've already deployed the web but it isn't up."
Boss(strong networking skills): Found port 80 blocked.
-Option A: open port 80.
-Option B: disable firewall.
Choose option B.
Me:😐(poker face)5 -
Hello devRant, i think this is my first story here, but i want share my happiness with you.
After working 1 year as C# dev and no reaction of my current company to my claims:
I get a job with 25% more pay, christmas and vacation bonus und 5 more holidays!
Holy fuck that`s so cool.
Hope you guys have a good week!
Please excuse my english skills ;-)4 -
I love the skill requirements section of a junior Dev job advertisement.
To summarise "Basically you'll need all the skills and experience of a senior, but we are gonna pay you much much less". 😔1 -
>> this === rant
<< true
At beginning of this year, I only knew HTML, JS, and CSS so I just applied for offers like "Jr Apprentice Dev in Front-End"
In a interview call, the woman told me that they will send me a test asking about my JS and HTML5 knowledge.
When I look in my inbox, the mail subject says "Back-end Test".
Then I call the woman:
Me: "Hello, I have received the test mail, but maybe it's wrong. I applied for a Front-End position and the test is about backend! "
She: "Do you have skills in JS and HTML5?"
Me: "Yes!, and CSS3"
She: "Well, the test is about that. JS, jQuery, and HTML5"
Me: "..."
Me: "Sorry, that languages are Front-End. In the subject say 'Back-End' and Back-End is PHP, SQL, MySQL, Java, .Net... I don't know nothing about that. I only know HTML, JS, CSS."
She: "It's the same"
Me: "I sorry but it's not the same. Fron-End is client-side, what users sees. Animation, colors, FXs, buttons, forms... And Back-End is server-side, what users doesn't see."
She: "Well, JS, HTML, and CSS is backend for us. We call it that way too"
Me: "Sorry but that is wrong. I invite you to read some basic info. Now I am confused"
Of course that I am not confused. That idi0t was wrong.
Perhaps recruiters should take some info about areas where they are recruiting... (:T)3 -
I'm disappointed with my boss.
I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.
before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.
Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.
After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.
And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.
Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.
Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.
The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.
I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.
He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.
I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.
I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.4 -
Best advice for dev job hunting is work on your soft skills. Don't be a fucking hero, prove your teamwork ability.
Remember all the rules of all religions and social communities can be summed up in one line: "Don't be a dick!"1 -
Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.
It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.
Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.
This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.
Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.
I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)
Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.
By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.
Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.
Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.
It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.
I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.6 -
Today, at a dinner party, someone acted surprised when they discovered that I was an Integrations Engineer because (quote) "You look too normal for a Dev".
What the hell? Why do people always assume that who works at IT must live their whole life at a desk, wear glasses and have 0 social skills?10 -
Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.
Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.
In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.
This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.
It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.
I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.
The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.
On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.
Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.
10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.
There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".
I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.
What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.
Sorry for mixing so many things here.14 -
Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...
You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...
Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.
I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...
I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.
To the future!5 -
Life as a homeless developer.
I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.25 -
Almost every dev on devRant put HTML and CSS as their skills, but damn I suck at HTML and CSS. Bootstrap FTW!15
-
Not really a rant but my biggest fuckup that entirely ruined my IT career and future life
> be me 21yo CS student looking for an internship
> looking for help with my friend and sent him my CV to apply to a big corp
> then I lied that I have sent CV to official email {here the fuck up begins}
> after that I got an instant phone call from a friend of him claiming that the CV was sent properly and I am going to visit a company
> I had a review but it was recorded my CV hasn't got precisely specified technologies so interviewer thought I can manage to work as a dev not an intern
> with my shitty communication skills I managed to "work" there 8days, fucked up someone's computer by deleting his Windows and all data he had and installing Ubuntu instead
> then shit got out of control for an intern I talked a lot of bullshit in this Corp they realized I was there an "alien" and I didn't even know what to do so I wanted to sudo rm - rf myself
> unfortunately my parents woke up that morning I decided to sudo rm - rf and and I am now in mental asylum with fucked up people and the Corp knows where am I and I am going to pay for my stupidity and being naive (I didn't even seen the CEO, I didn't have enough information that I really worked there)
> To sum up, being bipolar, naive and irresponsible has brought me to this point in life. Thank you for reading. I don't see a solution, my parents don't believe me and I feel isolated with this fuckup so I decided to share it as a remark for young people starting in IT. For me it already ended too fast.12 -
Being the only dev in a media company, I believe my coworkers looked upon me as the evil Internet reincarnated into a living person.
Most of them avoided me like a leprous, and I experienced long periods being almost isolated.
I did almost quit so many times I've lost count.
I eventually found another job, where there's lots of love, caring and we all embrace each other's skills. It feels like I'm a butterfly who finally got to break out of my miserable cocoon.2 -
Long rant, sorry.
I’m pretty upset, or let’s say: I want to kick asses and chew gum but I’m all out of gum(The duke TM).
Yesterday we had a discussion in the office about salary basically.
Context: The company has about 150 employees and earns a lot of money. I’m the lead dev for about 1.5 years since I joined.
So I talked to our CEO/HR about a raise since I was hired as a normal fullstack dev(title is lead dev now) but have to:
train my junior(PHP), frontend guy(react), our QA(Automation with cypress atm), our junior devop(gitlab, jenkins, docker) and even assist marketing with GTM and adword campaigns.
I’m a jack of all trades basically since I was a freelancer for big brands for a long time.
I’m fine with helping/training, I like it a lot but I still have to watch everything and be fast with my own stuff. If anything goes wrong, people call me.
That will change since I train them all(They will all be independent soon) but still, doing everything for the same pay feels wrong.
Bottom line: CEO told me it’s cool that they can use all my skills but I won’t get a raise.
The worst/strangest was: My coworkers heard about that(as always in an office) and were like: Everybody should get paid equally because we’re all a team. Uhm, ok?
I just contacted the head hunter which got me that job. I guess I’ll just see what the market has to offer.
It should never be about money but this was confusing. People telling me we should all be equal who are on their mobiles 3h a day and feel underpaid. Check yourself, really.
People who think their pure presence is enough.. Germany -.-25 -
Just got made redundant 😒
Anyone need a web dev in Melbourne?
I have desirable skills such as working myself out of a job..9 -
!dev but actual long rant - about the students in my grade.
TL;DR: 1 asshole in 10 people can ruin everything. Mobbing sucks. I dislike parties.
There's the word "Jahrgang" in Germany which means the people in the same school year as you. I'll refer to it as "my (collective) classmates" although we don't have classes anymore, rather courses and I also mean those I do not have courses with.
With that out of the way, let the rant begin.
It's often the case that people with high logical and intellectual skills (no being arrogant, other people categorize me like that) have a lack of social skills - or empathy.
I'm a kind of an outsider in a way that since 10th grade I stopped trying to attach myself to certain groups since I do not fit in there. I'm fine with that now. Nowadays I can at least socialize with other nerds.
Here's why I dislike the collective of my classmates. This year is my last school year and as always, a big group forms a spirit. They have a theme (superheroes - super boring). I didn't go to any party they threw and I don't plan to go to the graduation ceremony as well since it's an unofficial party and not a school event. I hate parties. I hate alc and drunken teenagers. I didn't attend the "Kursfahrt" - a kind of excursion that's like holidays with your course - mainly because I dislike my "Stammkurs" (main course).
Why? I had a friend in this course. She was short, geeky and I could actually talk to her. Yet some jerks (not intensely) bullied her because "she was awkward" and in the end, she switched school - also because of other reasons.
When she was gone, even those who didn't bully her and who are considered "nice" made fun of her and talked badly about her - and me hanging around with her. So since then, I avoid anything with them that's not 100% school related.
Now they're planning what we call "Abigag" - it's a joke/prank the graduates pull on the school and younger students, something funny like an entrance room full of balloons and many other things. Also, the "Abizeitung", the yearbook the graduates put out with articles about their courses, teacher ranking and quotes etc. Also, a cabaret evening from the graduates to collect money for the graduation party. Cool stuff actually. I thought about taking part.
I'd say my talents are creativity and computer stuff. So a friend chatted with me about nerdy pranks like a school-wide wallpaper change. Or releasing a fake password list of the teachers - claiming we hacked them - with puns and insiders about the teaches. He said he gotta invite me into the WhatsApp group of the Abi prank. Disclaimer: He's one of those people who are socialized but still able to talk with me. He's fine.
Well guess what he told me later:
They don't want me on the team since I distance myself from my classmates. I should either be fully one of them or not at all.
That's enough. Who distances whom? I thought they were happy to have me on board but horse shit! Stuck with ideologies from the 19th century.
They can lick my ***. I don't have anything against most of them in person but as a collective, they're just fucking stupid. I guess it wasn't even the majority saying they don't want me to help. It was probably just the small crew of leading and loud jerks. And no one would disagree with them saying "Why not? He wants to help?" (even if it was their opinion) - they don't have the brain or balls to say anything against the strong idiot leaders. They'll do great later in politics as an adult - they wouldn't criticize Hitler if they were under his "protection".
So I won't take part in making Abi pranks, - but also not the Paper and cabaret eve. They can go jerk off to being part of a huge collection of assholes - which I, in all my pride, am not part of other than on paper.
(Disclaimer: No critics to other outsiders but those who were engaged and responsible for the choice of not letting me help)
If anyone actually read this:
Who were/are you in school times?
A proud outsider like me? Party boi/girl? Engaged striver?25 -
Any bikers around here?
I recently bought my first motor bike ( super cheap ) and I'm excited to add some enhancements to it like GPS logging and collect relevant data about my bike.
Have you don't anything similar to your ride? I would like to put my Dev skills and improve my bike as a hobby.
17 -
!rant
boombodies here. Just wanted to thank this community for being there over the last year. This place has been an absolute haven that has welcomed my frustrations with open arms. As much as I love to bitch, it has been an absolute privilege working in this profession. After spending my 20s in a completely different field host to a vastly different set of values, learning to dev and continuing to hone my skills finally feels like home. And by home, I mean like hearth-coaxed sweat dripping from the balls of a blacksmith and the cocoa at the cottage in the middle of nowhere patiently waiting for his return. I wish each and everyone of you a treacherous and catastrophically dreadful 2023…A burden in which you all bear successfully, and emerge greater and grander than ever.
Actually can you action that by EOD instead? I already promised it to the client.7 -
Please disregard. I just need to vent.
Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.
You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.
You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.
You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.
You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.
Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?
And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.
And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.
Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.
I just want to go back to pure dev.22 -
My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.
Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"
He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.
As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.
Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.
Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.
I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)
3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.
Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".
I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.
I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.
The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.
December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.
I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.
In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.
The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.
In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.
I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.
My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.
HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.
In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.
Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.
As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...
Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!
And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).8 -
It was my internship and I've end up working on a law company specializing on Australian construction laws they're working on a website that will take care of all the paperworks for the contractors. They have a dev team who's working on it but they don't have a web designer. I was accepted for the job as an intern/web designer/tester. I was so happy that I've got a really cool internship as a designer but that's only for a second.
The hell starts on day one. They've told me that they're using agile workflow and that they need to make the website responsive. It was based on bootstrap and gosh their code was so broken. HTML tags overlay on each other, some are unclosed. I've tried to fix the problems and did a great job at that. Made the front page responsive and all laid out. When I went to the next php file it has a different header.php and footer.php and same problems apply and we're not even touching the worst.
They didn't use any version management and they're cowboying everything. Now that the website is on the staging server they use Cpanel text editor to edit the code! My headache started to pileup.
The Australian client asked me to provide icons and fix the colors of the website. Also the typography looks great already. I've fixed almost all the problems and I'm satisfied with the design when suddenly a new co-worker from a famous and expensive college was absorbed by the company. He worked as the marketing specialist who has no experience at web design at all. He told me to do this and that and the whole website changed. He bullied me for my skills in design (I'm an intern) and just took over the whole design. Everyone even the boss listen to him as if everything he say is right. He's skilled at design but not web design. He made the website look like a freakin movie poster.
All my works are for nothing, I got headache for nothing and I've got hated for nothing.
It was the day when I finished my internship. It was a long 3 months. After a month I've heard from my co-interns that the whole dev team was fired including the marketing specialist. Also the whole website is scrapped and has been rebuilt by a single guy who used WordPress which he did in only a month. -
Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!
Anyway, story and rant:
The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.
All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.
This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.
The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000
I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.
I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.
The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.
I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.
She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.
I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.
Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.4 -
Dev memes usually make me cringe. It's like the people who make them are trying too hard; the lack of social skills just jumps off the screen.2
-
Reading books, not sure if you can even call it a non-dev activity since it is essential in my opinion but reading improves my programming skills everyday!
-
Last week I was erasing a 2Gb USB thumb while copying some really important shit to my backup disk. I look at the terminal and see it's taking a lot of time to did zeroes on dev/sdb.
Then I realized that dev/sdb is the backups drive and I just erased the firsts sectors of my only fucking backup.
It's ok, I said, let's see what can TestDisk do for me. And it only could find an empty sad partition that had useless shit on it. Whdd couldn't even find the drive. Cat and dd vomited 160Gb of nothing to a file that couldn't be read. I was lost, because I failed doing something I'm really good at. And I did it because I was to stupid to check fstab...
It's the very first time I couldn't recover data, so I'm thinking about delete "Data recovery" from my resume skills and put "Data cleaning. Really effective. I can send you 160Gb of pure horse shit to prove it" instead.2 -
Not necessarily on here, but Devs tend to bitch about designers and their lack of basic dev skills/understanding (talking about webdev). But when devs try to design it usually ends with a horrendous piece of visual garbage. Respect each others profession and the outcomes will be better. That's why Apple is now one of the most envied companies on the planet.8
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I once worked at a small dev shop with a team of about 5. I was the lead but I was also the only backend developer. Since it was such a small company I also managed the Datacenter... which we had in our building. It was messy, but impressive. Although I seemed to be always stressed and felt like my job was always on the line... I do miss how excited I got when I learned something new. I was then able to talk to my boss about how excited I was to learn it and I can't wait to learn something new. I'm sad because I don't get that excited anymore. Now, I'm not really learning anything new, I'm just posting my skills as a developer. It really bums me out. I only wish that I had a degree in computer science so I can become a teacher and see my students get as excited as I was.4
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Should I actually look into getting a dev job..?
*I have a high school diploma (graduated three years early)
*College dropout (3-4 months, Computer Science - Personal Reasons)
*No prior work experience.
*Good textural communication skills, poor verbal communication skills.
*Currentally unemployed. (NEET :P)
*I have extensive personal experience with Java, and Python. Some Lua. Knowledge of data generation, parsing, Linux, Windows, Terminal(cmd & bash), & Encryption(Ciphers).
*Math, but very little algebra/geometry (though, could easily improve these).
*Work best under preasure.
Remote only.
Think anyone would hire me..?13 -
Hi, some time ago I was looking for a good app on Play Store and Bam! I found devRant. I opened it and the first rant I saw was from aswinmohanme. It was an image of Marilyn Monroe, but somehow created with circles, hope you understand me. I thought this is a great opportunity to test my dev skills so I opened Visual Studio and started coding. Today, after 2 days od work, I finally done it. It was written in C# and I have to say, I'm very proud od my child :^)
Link to repo on GitHub:
https://github.com/adampisula/...
In Debug directory there are some examples of this on action. If you're working on Linux just build this solution with Mono.
4 -
The great thing about coding is, every problem can be solved with logic. And the simplest solution is often the best one.
Often when I don't know what to do, I just keep thinking about what I want to have and break down what I need for that and in the end I always come to a good solution. And it gets easier from time to time. -
My mentor at my current internship helped me improve my debugging skills. He's a great dev and has really good debugging skills. He showed me his ways of approaching things and how I should go about solving difficult problems.
I think he never directly helped me when I got stuck. I ask him like 'I have this confusing problem, can you help me out?' and he's like 'well yes, but actually no" and he almost always tells me that I can figure it out myself. And I do figure it out, eventually.
Now, I seldom feel the need to go to him. I guess that's a good improvement. :)3 -
Okay, seriously, are there some secret question-asking ninja skills i am lacking, or does some people just insist on confusing people and wasting time?
I was working on this small bug. Super tiny. Basically a counter that was way off since it counted some duplicate values. Simple, right?
I decided to ask a clarifying question to the lead dev, since i am still new to the company. Really simple. Do we remove duplicate values, do we ignore them in the count when they occur, or is it actually working as expected?
He decides to answer with a long message on what the issue is. That is not what I asked, so I ask again in a slightly different way, thinking he didn't understand the question.. and he answers the same, in a slightly different way.
We go back and forth like this for 30-40 minutes, until I got tired of it and directly asked "I am asking what solution we want, not what the issue is"..
He finally picks option A. Fine. I made the adjustment and pushed my code. He checks it out, and apparently it's wrong.
After a long series of questions (again), it turns out the solution he now describes is exactly what I listed as option C...
A bug that should take 10 minutes to fix ended up taking over 2 hours. Awesome waste of time.5 -
So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...
I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.
My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.
I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.
Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".
I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?
I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.4 -
Being 25 and just now getting employable dev etc skills is really quite daunting when you learn of the old geniuses like Bill Joy, Linus, Wozniak and then hear daily stories of 16 year olds doing amazing things.
Inexperience in a field where everyone demands experience is scary. Still excited to see where I Can l can get though.11 -
I feel like a piece of shit because I don't want to help my "friend" who has been faking being a web developer for years. He now has a real project he must develop that actually requires writing code (It's a serious project that requires real Javascript skills) and he's basically fucked.
He usually would hop on the web and download a template, edit it and get paid. But then again I don't want to help him because he always comes to me and I do all the work and save his ass while he does nothing.
I'm in a rock and a hard place right now because I'm also a dev and I actually have a lot of work to do, unlike his lazy ass.5 -
Current list of developer skills:
* Can find 3rd or 4th best solution to most problems
* Easily ready to accept blame for anything to save time since it's likely my fault anyway
* Caffeine addiction only enough to make you worry, not intervene
* Can explain how JavaScript DOESN'T work, thus getting us both closer to understanding how it does
* Only choke on parts of presentations that aren't critically important, like minor details and Q&A
* Good at smack talking other languages I also don't know how to use
* can make a mean gumbo3 -
I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.
So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.
I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...
~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.
~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!
~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.
~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.
~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.
~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.
~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.
And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...1 -
!dev
monthly mediocre life crisis checklist:
✅ boring job, no learning, taking away 8 hrs/ day
✅ wasting 4-5 hours doomscrolling
✅ being a mediocre Android developer in a shitty company not upgrading his skills
✅ trying to learn webdev from a paid course but not getting any progress there
✅ having 15 paid leaves but a shitty friend cicrle which isn't nterested in going out
✅ 0 solo travel with no knowledge in driving any vehicle
✅ no girlfriend/ lady friends to talk to
✅ porn and boring nature killing any signs of being interesting
✅ gaining fat and ugly body
✅ simping at the gym
✅ hateful parents quarreling with each other everyday
✅ having sad life with no mental peace
things going correct in life
⬜ getting salary on time, able to afford bread
⬜ still try to workout 5d/week
⬜ still try to make small web projects12 -
Happened to me - an experienced dev with most of the experience on the web.
I apply to this company that I had no idea what they do (big mistake on my part). I ace the technical interview, and they follow up with a request for a presentation on a topic, to see how well I can prove a point or understand a technology. So I do that. Everybody is listening carefully. Most people at the office didn't know the basics of what I was talking about, but there was a guy who knew more and asked the tough questions, but I didn't let down.
So we talk again, and again, and all is going well, we're out for a coffee, talk about the future of my career and the company, in a more casual setting. Got to know the CTO, etc. Everything was going stellar.
I was waiting for the offer, but instead I got a generic "We can't continue with your application" together with a notification that I was being blocked by the contact person.
Weirdest interview ever. And this thing really put me down and struck at my self-esteem. I mean was it really hard to mention whether you didn't like my expectations, or my skills, or my "fit for the team"? Or at least not block me like that, it's not like I'm gonna stalk you or anything. I still get birthday notifications on Skype from people I've interviewed with before, and I haven't written them since because they have other stuff to take care about, as do I.
Anyway. I got up and started again. New company. High expectations. High salary expectations. Rejection. Fuck.
Ok, start again. 2 companies this time. Both at the same time. Both make me an offer. Have to turn one down. Harder than I had imagined. The choice that I made literally changed my life for the better. I'm glad I didn't end up at any of the other 2 companies that rejected me.
Even experienced people get bad bitter rejections. Don't have high expectations, and that will help you keep your emotions in check, and fight on.2 -
Changing between projects multiple times a day is as annoying as a homeless chasing you while begging for heroin money.
Today was one of these days I had to fix bugs for 3 different projects with completely different devStacks. The productivity dropped to a new low. Being a fullstack dev is awesome, but please let me do one thing at a time, so I can stay focused!
Dear boss, just fuck off with your managing skills or there will be ultraviolence soon!6 -
The worst part of being a dev
My social dilemma
In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.
Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.
And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.
Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.
Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.
An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.
Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place
But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.
In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.
And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.2 -
Ok, so I already asked when junior is no longer a junior..got mixed answers. Now I'd like to know what defines seniority level in your country?! Years of experience, having wide range of knowledge, great leadership skills, having boobs (joke).. ?!? But seriously, I have no clue what the standards in my country are, and internet is full of different opinions & examples that are making me wanna go cry in a corner.. o.O
Figured some answers from real people might help me get my head around this, so if it's not too much to ask fellow devs here, please answer this questions to help me grasp this better with examples..& non dev folks, you are welcome to comment too!!
A) What country are you guys from?
B) How is seniority defined there?
C) How are you placed by others?
D) If different, where would you place yourselves? Why?13 -
Just saw a role advertised for a front end developer. Skills required amongst other things·
· Integrating with middle-tier microservices such as NodeJS
· .NET Core (2.1+), C# 7.0+ and JAVA
· SQL Server, T-SQL, MySQL
· Azure Dev-ops
There are other standard and expected front end requirements but want someone with 4+ years experience
Salary £19,000 - less than two thirds of the national average salary for non UK folks.
Applications: 0
Hmm I wonder why6 -
Downside of being a developer without design skills & creativity.
--
Yesterday, i created a simple food ordering app for our office. I shared it to my dev colleagues and got a decent feedback (except for the new hire). But when shared it to people like writers and graphic designers. I feel a bit off.
Graphic D: "The app should not use a blue color scheme. because blue is an UNAPPETIZING COLOR", "The yellow color is too vibrant"
Writers: They are blabbing about the grammar and spellings :(
New Hired Dev: Can you share me the codes?
** I always trying to learn how to do webdesign but i think its not really for me :(8 -
My fellow dev (a younger guy) and I have been having a lot of disagreements with the lead dev (obviously a more experienced, older guy).
We can have arguments with him all day long, to explain and convince him that he's not that right, or not right at all.
Or we can keep silent and wait for shit to happen.
I'm already applying the stfu strategy myself... Because the other way round is exhausting.
At the same time, naturally, I'm looking for opportunities somewhere else. And, naturally, in those job ads, they state "X years of experience".
This further sets me off.
I'm sick of having an argument shut down because someone has X more years of experience, at a higher position, thinks he is better.
I am starting to hate people who boasts his years of experience instead of having the real knowledge and skills to create value.9 -
So I help out in a development forum for a framework I use at work. I learned a crap ton by seeing questions people ask, then learning to solve them myself. I have really enjoyed being in that forum that past 4 years.
Yet, I see people who cannot seem to reason themselves out of a paper bag at times. I see questions of I cannot run this linux executable because there are parenthesis in the filename. I mean most console interfaces are just tab complete even with special characters. This is for a developer in their 50s that has been coding 30 years. Or I see other programmers asking basic questions that 5 minutes with the docs would solve. Most of the ones that I have issue with seem to have been a part of that community a lot longer than myself.
How do developers survive without problem solving skills to understand the frameworks or tools they use?
I had another conversation with a dev in another forum about using "man" in Linux to figure out how to use something. They said something to the effect: "try learning awk from a manpage". I explained about how "back in the day" we learned EVERYTHING from man pages. That is why they are called "man" pages.
Is the industry flooded with idiots now?7 -
So here's a story..
Whenever we have a job announcement, whether tech or dev, there's this one guy who applies every single time and never gets selected. I have interviewed him once and learnt that he doesn't in fact have the skills or experience we're looking for. Also someone else with better experience applies everytime. He's been doing this for more than 3 years now.
Now WE feel embarrassed everytime he comes in for interview.
You can't blame him for wanting to work so much with one of the best teams in our tiny country. I gotta say I really admire his perseverance and I think and hope that he's gonna find what he's looking for with that kinda perseverance.2 -
It's rant time!
So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).
I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.
One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.
Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.
6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.
Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.
I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.
Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.1 -
I got an interview with a big multinational software company as a senior dev - the kind of place I never thought I would be privileged or knowledgeable enough to work for and wasnt expecting to get In to...
I aced it. They gave me an offer but - FOR DEVOPS 😬
basically my skills fit in perfectly with the server/ scaling issues they have and are far more valuable there. I know they do, I also know I can fix the issue and will have alot of fun coding it - I just dont think I want to monitor it or anything else.
I mean I do devops stuff all the time in aid of anything I code but their stack is a full time job- im scared that once the toolchain is automated ill be pulled towards sys admin like duties and lose touch with my craft... what do you guys think? Anyone shifted from dev to devops?9 -
i was helping a friend who just started learning how to code and i realized that tutorials don't teach you how to read error messages and how to debug. that's stuff we learn from people, it's tacit knowledge. that's crazy to me, because those are such essential skills to a dev and i think just self learning is not enough. maybe coding is even more of a socially dependent skill than i ever thought. looking at it that way, stackoverflow is a good example of that, I can't really imagine being a dev without the dev community7
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"We're promoting you to be a Team Leader, since you proved your skills to handle tough tasks and bring good solutions, and we're raising your salary by 25%."
That sounded good for me, until I realized that all they need is an interface between them (the boss) and other employees to force their style and monitor every fucking thing that could be different from a dev to another. But since the boss is a sEnIoR with mOrE tHaN 10 years of experience but he does not have any clue about good practices and how to make a code that does not push you to be humiliated by the client, he still thinks that he's the fucking programming God.
That's a shit9 -
So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.
While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.
Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.
He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.
At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.
What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.
I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.
I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.
If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.4 -
First company:
- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.
Second company (very aggravating):
- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.
- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.
- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.
- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!
Third company:
- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!
- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."
- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.2 -
As soon as my own projects income stabilize and outweigh my salary I’ll quit.
I haven’t even read sicp and continued to improve my dev knowledge just because I already can make something that can make me some money. So why spend health and energy polishing interview-passing skills for suits if I personally don’t need them?
World doesn’t revolve around software development.1 -
Dont become a dev if you:
- Cant sit in the office for 8-10 hours a day
- Dont know how to google information/ errors, instead you interrupt your teammates with stupid questions every 5 minutes
- Are a perfectionist and don't like constant change.
- Are neurotic and give up easily. If you get triggered about broken or messy things to the point where it ruins your day to you and everyone else around you. You need to separate your work from your life.
- Don't have good communication skills. Worst I saw was a guy who speaks with a stutter(nobody understands him) and also writes very poorly (nobody understands his emails). Also he gets very angry when you ask additional questions to clarify what he said. How can you work with someone like that?
- Are very sensitive to critique. I prefer someone telling me that my code is shit and telling me why, instead of feeding me delusions and false validation.
- Dont know how to balance working in team and working solo. Nobody likes lone wolfs who are arrogant and not in sync with the team. But also nobody likes to drag teammates who cant think for themselves and even after years of spent in the field are required constant spoonfeeding because they are unable to google and teach themselves with trial and error.14 -
I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.
So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.
I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.
About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.
But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.
Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!
And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.4 -
dev, ~boring
This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.
I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:
1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by
I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.
At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:
"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"
As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.
In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.
Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).
I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:
1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth
Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:
- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it
Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:
- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy
/rant2 -
A friend came to me whether i want to do a project on c++(someone asked him to find a c++ guy).
Me needing money didn’t refuse. Even though i am a Java developer with 0 skills on c++, but wanted to give it a try.
So project started, and it was about a plugin for rhinoceros app(3d graphics app).
The plugin was simple, had some views and some services to upload a file into s3 and some api calls, not something complex..
So i ended up working on the project together with my friend(web dev).
So long story short, we had a lot of issues, but considering we both had no knowledge on c++, we were really lucky to finish the product almost on time(3 days after).
Did no memory management even though i’ve read that we have to do that by our selfs and that c++ doesn’t have garbage collector.
But the plugin worked great even without garbage collector.
Had a lot issues with string manipulation, which almost drive me crazy.
PS: did a post here before taking the project, to ask whether it is a good idea to take the project or not, had some positive and some negative replies, but i deleted the post since i thought i was breaking the NDA i signed 😂😂
PS2: just finished OCAJP 8 last week with a great score😃6 -
If hiring managers really want to hire based on skill, what they should be doing is testing for one thing:
The ability to take a specification, written in general language, notice deficiency, communicate with the 'client' (manager) to hash out what needs done, and the (explicit) ability to read documentation on libraries or tooling outside the dev's core skillset.
If a dev can read a spec, talk to a client to work out whats lacking, and then identify what they need to know and where to find it, thats 90% of the skills they need from what I can see.
tl;dr version of it, is they should be explicit about the requirements for reading/implementing specs and finding the correct documentation.
Something along the lines of
"can you form your letters? Are you able to follow instructions on the back of a cake box? Then there may be a position waiting for you!"8 -
them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...
it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.
also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.
if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..12 -
It finally comes! <enki/>'s invitation code for "the 5-minute daily workout to level up your dev skills" they said.
6 -
My superpower would be the ability to split myself into multiple copies of myself so that I could function as an entire dev company on my own whilst learning the skills to do so without downtime because a copy of you could sleep while another works.
Of course the copies would share their knowledge and can merge back when needed9 -
Many advantages of being a dev:
- You can work on multiple projects simultaneously.
- You solve problems for a living, how cool is that!
- Job security (Even if you get fired or something, you can still earn your bread with your skills)
- Even if you are bed ridden or get in an accident or get old, you can still work(kind of a pessimist).
But the best part is, you get to do what you love(for me its true).1 -
Why are you expected to have people management skills as your experience grows? I don't want to deal with people, I just want to deal with my code 😢😫7
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IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.
You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).
Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.
Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.
At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).
People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".
Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.
I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.
Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.
The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.
Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).
I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.8 -
For a long time, I wanted to be a part of open source communities. I've been a dev for 6 years now.
I have the skills needed to help out but usually I'm fairly unexperienced on working with big teams, code reviews, and build-test systems they often use. So I'm scared as hell to even begin with. I feel unsecure to reach out and ask for helping or send a basic fix / pull-request.
What are your suggestions, how did you start working on open source projects?
Teach me senpai.3 -
The `sed` command skills of my senior dev (team lead) is equal to every skill I (junior dev) have ever acquired until now as a programmer.
Just amazing !1 -
During Summer school (yeah I'm an idiot) I disabled this LanSchool Helper thing with a few lines of powershell script(fuck windows, havent used it since I was like 15) that allowed the teacher to see what the students were doing on their computers. Instead of finishing my failing courses I was then able to spend the rest of my time that Summer honing my programming skills.
I graduated a year late, but had easily become the best programmer that school district had ever seen 😎 And by impressing the kids sitting next to me while I browsed docs, blogs, stack overflow, and youtube - rose to be a Summer school legend.
I am a dev badass. I am legend. 😂11 -
!dev
I had semi-jokingly changed my username from dextel2 to nothappy, because of that one bad day.
But, it is now when I realized that I am actually NOT HAPPY, things are lately rough, I am constantly scared for no reason, I doubt my skills, I doubt myself for no reason, and top of that there's always a chance for another epileptic attack.
I tried and keep trying to distract myself from negative thoughts but the more I try the more I fail, I've become distant with my younger brother, for the record I'm very overprotective about him. I don't even know if he feels the same, as this year ends or every day passes by I feel changed from my past self (not in a good way).
Switched my first job to get another good job, turns out they don't even have any projects and I'm just a guy they are showcasing like they have ONE amateur developer and we are looking for an entire project and it did work for one client which I'm gonna deny personally because the client is not clear about the project itself, I do not care about the consequences, my heart lies in academics and I'll put my 100% in academics, shall I'm kicked.
A lot has happened in this year, but this one is/was unique and very hard to process. I've always been joyful, sarcastic, funny, you name it, but all of it has just vanished, don't know why. I'm also becoming distant from my ONLY 3 friends and parents.8 -
Best thing to be a dev
You create your own tools, problem solving skills that we learn and the best thing that non-tech people treat you as a genius5 -
FUCKING IE!
Anyone please remember to ask if the project|s that you're going to work on do|es need Internet Explorer support.
If it's the case just expect any resemblance of modern frontend development skills go backwards into the backward compatibility territory and never going forward.
I'll start looking for another job, can't be bothered for this payment and regressing my dev skills for client needs.
Again FUCK YOU IE!6 -
Recently I receive a ton of mails from cool/hip/rockstar startups. They all run like this:
"We are a innovative Startup based on a [insert some random stuff or buzzword] blockchain! If you're a student with skills and experience in blockchain, machine learning and AI willing to change the world with our sick technology and make it a better place..."
The best thing about this: since they are a innovative Startup they expect you to work for free.
But who am I to judge something so brand-new and innovative. I contacted them to find out what these dank innovations are about.
They can't even explain what a blockchain is or the basics of ML and AI, they basically just want someone do it for free...
It's still ok since no one is gonna fall for this bait... this morning a friend of mine told me he got a new job... and he even can work from home...
I'm not even mad, I just feel sadness and sorrow specially for him, because he is a good dev and accepts big times underpay and now free work, because he thinks a day off in his CV will lead him to be unemployed 😭
Fucking hate it how people successfuly manipulate kids and youth to them to work 24/7 for minimum wage or even for free and some other douchebags trying to take advantage of this 😡1 -
Honestly, the most underrated skill in tech is communication. Writing clear, succinct emails and telling the story without rambling is a critical skill. If hiring comes down to a wire, I would hire a dev that can communicate well than someone with pure technical skill but zero communication skills.4
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I feel like there should be "dev recruiter" position that people with developer skills could fill. Every time I go to an interview, I just know the person asking me dev related stuff has no fucking clue about anything I'm saying, it's printed all over their faces.
A good developer almost instantly knows if you know your craft or not.
Let's not keep wasting everyone's time -
I had some fun with ChatGPT today. I wondered how good its problem solving skills are. Turns out, it's no better than an entry/junior dev armed with all the docs out there - it knows what's written there, how to use the thing (language/framework/tool/etc.), but it has no "understanding" neither of the problem nor the tool, in a holistic way. It's got the knowledge, but it neither has the skill nor understanding of how/why to use it to solve a problem (any problem beyond plain simple complexity).
So the problem I asked it to solve was related to this one I had: https://devrant.com/rants/6312527 .
It was painful to troubleshoot this problem with ChatGPT. It kept on focusing on this particular problem and reacting to errors while trying to fix its initial solution. It took us a good while. Eventually, it reached a working solution, but it was an ugly, convoluted approach that was not feasible to cover my use case with.
FWIW I think it is interesting to follow its line of thought. Eventually, a pattern emerges of how it tries to solve the problem. And it reminds me a lot of myself on the first week in the IT field :)6 -
1. Find a decent, entry level job at a company for full time
2. Graduate from my two year tech school with my degree
3. Apply/start at a university for my Bachelor's degree.
4. Start actually building my database application project. Its been on the back burner for over a year.
5. Try not to be so doubtful or unsure of dev skills. Try being less anxious to ask for advice or explanations, and dont let lack of knowledge discourage or embarrass me from growing my skills.1 -
I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.
TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.
I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.
I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.
So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.
I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.
So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.
I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.
Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.
The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).
So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.
If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.
I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.
Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.3 -
Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:
Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:
Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:
Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):
Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:1 -
I absolutely hate software to the point where I started converting from sysadmin to becoming more like a dev. That way I could just write my own implementations at will. Easier said than done, that's for sure. And it goes both ways.
I think that in order to be a good dev, you need these skills the most:
- Problem solving skills
- Creativity, you're making stuff
- Logical reasoning
- Connecting the dots
- Reading complex documentation
- Breaking down said documentation
- A strong desire to create order and patterns
- ...
If you don't have the above, you may still be able to become a dev.. but it would be harder for sure, and in some cases acceptance will be lower (seriously, learn to Google!)
One thing I don't think you need in development is mathematics. Sure there's a correlation between it and logic reasoning, but you're not solving big mathematical monsters here. At most you'd probably be dealing with arrays and loops (well.. program logic).
Also, written and spoken English! The language of the internet must be known. If it's not your first language, learn it. All the good (and crucial) documentation out there is in English after all.
One final thing would be security in my opinion, since you're releasing your application to the internet and may even run certain services, and deal with a lot of user data. Making those things secure takes some effort and knowledge on security, but it's so worth it. At the most basic level, it requires a certain mindset: "how would I break this thing I just made?"4 -
Since I already achieved my dream of being employed as a mobile app dev, I'm into creating music now to prove myself I can achieve something with this too. But you know, I'm kinda lost what to do. Like how I was when I started programming 😂
Maybe one day I can combine both skills into something interesting.9 -
// first rant
So this isn't really a "dev" rant but I'm a developer taking my first ever design class. It's a senior level, group based class where we design a mobile OS from the ground up, using any inspiration we like. I love it because I'm the developer and designer for all of the Android apps I've worked on so far. I get to practice my design skills and have a portfolio addition. Neat! It's a pretty easy class too.
But my group. Oh God my group.
I spent a week and a half designing the style guide and it was jam packed with anything we'd need. Typography, icons, rationales, you name it!
But noooo, they can't use it because it's not in sketch. As a Windows user, this is infuriating. So three weeks go by and all this work is done that's SUPER INCONSISTENT. Bad colors, elements off by 3px... I mean even the font sizes are just 1 or 2 off. Seriously, I wish I could just be frank with them and tell them to put in the 1% effort to make it right. It's really not that hard. I just don't want to screw up the peace in my group..2 -
When I was 12 I created my own LEGO manuals and monopoly boardgame variants.
When I was 14 and into gaming I had fun playing with a Q3 level editor for Wolfenstein (GtkRadiant), and drew boardgame maps.
When I was 16 I translated the game battledawn.com to French for in-game currency in return.
When I was 18 I fiddled with texture packs for Minecraft and got interested in Total War mods.
When I was 20 I met a student who studied webdev & design. I was so excited about basic HTML, CSS and later JS and PHP, that I read and learnt some every evening (and even failed an exam because I was learning PHP until 5AM)
I always wanted to use my skills to create something of use to others. Open-source is the perfect avenue for that and is also what enabled me to get here in the first place. And though I m've been professionally employed as dev since 2015, only the last 2 yrs I finally consider myself skilled enough to give back something of quality :)2 -
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. -
!dev (maybe slightly)
I went to a CV Workshop organized by my first school. The presenter was the slightly-arrogant/know-it-all/cool type of guy who's a recruiter and also has his own company he runs. The presentation was OK, even though it took longer than announced. However, there were some things that bugged me. He expects everyone somehow to be extraordinary. Granted he works as a recruiter and his clients would like only the cream of the top, but some of the examples he gave from his personal experience, he seemed to give more gravity on other traits of the candidates than their achievements and qualifications (e.g. rejecting a candidate because she had posted a photo of her clubbing on Facebook). Also, somehow he judges candidates based on their parents profession. Lucky me that I fall into the category he dislikes. Now the fun part (sorry for the long post):
Next week there's a career day. I sent my CV as soon as I got the mail and then I also phoned the person in charge (as per the instructions). Yesterday on the workshop it was said we should resend our CVs by tomorrow on another mail? No problem you may think, but that said recruiter will take a look on them and that means I will have to rework mine just to make sure it is to his liking. I'm no fan of writing mission statements, nor trying to guess what my qualities (aka soft skills) are because what I think I am doesn't mean I actually am.
So now, I'm in a dilemma. Just send the CV as is or get a mental breakdown just so to please that person?
Thanks everyone for your patience and time, I just wanted to pump some steam out me...6 -
The disconnect between the hiring process and the actual job in software development is mind boggling.
They give you an online test in the first step. You can't open a new tab otherwise that's considered cheating.
Holy crap, it doesn't work like that in the actual job. Googling things is a SKILL every dev should possess.
I've started telling hiring managers I'm not interested anymore in the job the second they pass me an online test.
I created a YouTube channel for this exact reason. Go watch me code on camera so you get to know my coding skills better otherwise go fuck yourself.3 -
Another rant reminded me:
I’ve been at the same company for almost five years now, and I’ve seen the dev teams grow: several juniors come in, and even a few that left - or more precisely, was let go. And for each of those that were let go, the root issue with them was always the same: not the lack of skills or ability to learn their trade at job, no. It was always communication issues serious enough to render working with them impossible.
So remember juniors, besides googling and problem solving, the most important skill to master in team-based dev envs is COMMUNICATION. You need to fucking be part of the team or you’re out, no matter how good you are technically. If that’s too hard, either this is the wrong line of work for you or you need to just go solo. It’s that simple, boys, girls, and everyone else on the spectrum.4 -
It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.
Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.4 -
My dev Goals:
- Write better code commenting more.
- Create my first Open Source Project and publish it on GitHub.
- Improve my design skills.1 -
It's been a while DevRant!
Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.
I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.
My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.
My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.
My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:
PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML
I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:
Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.
A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.
This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.
Done with a smile.
Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.
For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.
This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).
I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.
Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)
During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.
Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.
I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.
Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).
Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.
Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.
As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).
I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.
My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.
This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.
I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.
Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).
What would you do in this situation?4 -
!dev *applies to vacancy that says they're looking for someone with 2 years experience in Java, which I have*
*their reply later*: "We're looking for someone who aligns more with our technology needs"
I'm sorry, what? You're explicitly looking for a Java developer, your entire vacancy lists Java skills, yet this is your answer.
What the f. lol2 -
So I got in contact with a recruiter who said they have a possible job for me. The catch is it's in c# (I am a python java dev) and that there is a assessment test for the language to test for competency. I told the recruiter that's fine but I would need a week to highlight the main differences between the two languages and at least do a couple of educational programs for my learning sake. All was fine and that was the plan.
The next day the recruiter notifies me that the test is being called off on account of the company being swarmed. So the recruiter then proposes another similar test (in c#) the recruiter will use to measure my skills and that the recruiter will send the test via email that same day. Later that day I check my email and don't see the test. So I message the recruiter and never get a response. Next day comes and I decide to give the recruiter a call; no response. I then wait until the next day and message him on linkedin that I still needed the test. Linkedin was showing he read the message, but of course didn't respond.
I told my brother about this and he said to send a message saying: "Hi [recruiters name] because of the lack of further feedback I decided to go with another opportunity. Best regards, Lane"
After I send it I get a message the next day from the recruiter saying: "Hey, sorry I haven't gotten back to you. We had to install a new phone system yesterday so it was a busy day."
"I'm going to send it to you today so that you can look at it over the weekend. "
I can't help but think the recruiter is full of shit, but I may be jumping to conclusion. I know they can have a busy schedule, but if you have time to look at a message on linkedin how long would it take to type a short message explaining what's going on? I would like to know any opinions or insights on this.10 -
!dev
For a long time, I thought that the most annoying people on the ski slope are kids overestimating their abilities on a difficult piste or speeding down the slope ignoring others. Boy was I wrong; those kids are nothing compared to all the fucking morons who think that buying the most expensive gear at a local sports store makes them better at skiing.
For the love of god, if you ever consider skiing, just buy some reasonably cheap all-mountain gear, and if you think you need something better, do proper research or find a fucking expert. I'm not talking about those "experts" they have at your local sports store, I'm talking someone who provides gear and support for actual ski clubs and teams, or at least someone working at a dedicated outdoors store who actually owns some of the gear they're selling.
"Oh, but I'm an advanced skier" - right, then why don't you tell me what turning radius, width profile, and flex would best fit you? Thought so.
Look, it's clear just by looking at your $1000 "racing" skis that they have a way shorter turning radius than any competition-level skis, and if you were really going as fast as you think you are, you'd probably spin out on every other turn with such a short radius. Your curved skiing poles aren't fooling anyone either; professionals only use those in super-g and downhill because you need to go insanely fast to notice any advantage over regular poles. And people who race that fast use way more protection than I can see on you.
Okay, it's your gear, it's your body; if you're going to buy overpriced stuff that doesn't make sense or neglect protection, that's up to you. Do you know what's not up to you? Being a fucking moron and ruining skiing for everyone else. Just because you got the most expensive "expert-level" gear, you can't just use it for powder, park, or moguls when you feel like it because you don't fucking know how to ride any of these, even if your gear claims to be good for all types of skiing. And let me tell you, that expensive gear you have is much less forgiving than some entry-level gear if you decide to try other styles of skiing.
I'm fucking tired of people like that. If I go to the resort with lots of powder, I want to ride the powder, not spend most of my time avoiding groups of morons who clearly don't have the right gear and skills for the powder. If I go to the resort with a huge park, I want to ride the park, and I can't do anything if the place is covered by dipshits speeding past the objects and braking in front of the jumps. And if I want to race down the piste, I want to race, I don't want to have a bunch of morons constantly switching side in front of me to avoid "rough" parts they can't ride on. -
I'm currently founding a startup right after graduation. As the CTO with no employees at the moment I'm like every position in the company related to dev and Ops. It's the biggest challenge I've faced as a dev so far. Though I really learn a lot and grow mature pretty fast and it is challenging in a good sense from a technical perspective, I'm facing hard personal problems like insecurity in decision making, doubting my skills since I'm definitely no senior and a mid to high effectiveness to stress.
I've mixed feelings about the pure speed and developments right now, but the good side of things is far more exciting then the bad side is frightening.
What truely pisses me off though, is the missing time to spend here on devRant. FUCK. FML.
Have a good (REST) weekend.4 -
I tried to go for a job as a ReactJS junior dev.. I got my first interview and they liked my prototype.. but..
A week later they reply: "We decided not to go with you because we hired an expert in ReactJS".
Err.. really? You're hiring expert-level ReactJS developers for a junior position?! What the frig.
You want to know what I think? This whole "It's ok that you don't know everything, you'll learn on the job" thing is a hoax. No, the job market doesn't want novices. With every single interview, I'm met with: "but you're not an expert and we can't afford that".
This reminds me of the best advice my professor (seasoned expert in the field, real engineer with more than 20 years experience) once gave me:
"The job market doesn't have the time nor patience to mollycoddle you. When you enter it, you have to already know things to an expert degree because companies want value. They're hiring you because you have these skills and knowledge.
You have to already know what they ask before they ask it. You're required to know things by yesterday, so to speak. It is an exigent industry out there. This is why we bring you the foundations - so that you go further on your own and you can take on any problem"9 -
many many times in the past I had this impostor syndrome in various situations but I never lost faith in my dev skills!
you have to be humble to realise that this situations are fine and that you will learn something from it (not necessarily tech things, but also how life works). Also you have to realise that development as everything else in life is just never ending learning endeavour! When you accept all of that, impostor syndrome goes away forever.
It's been around 3 years since I felt like impostor for the last time because I accepted who I am as a person.
It crawled up on me last week in a different way - I was thinking of myself - what if I am just really good at googling things and understanding how those things work but I am also very capable problem solver so I can understand the principle and apply it to my code.
Then I realised - ok, that's what programmers do! So that's the story of how the impostor syndrome actually become confirmation syndrome!
Folks, believe in yourself, be forgiving to yourself as we all were there, give yourself some time as people don't become good developers overnight - and this is OK.3 -
Just wish I could swap a portion of my dev super powers for something more f’king practical like being able to do DIY or mix cement and lay bricks properly.
Every damn time there’s some small job to be done it turns into a god damn nightmare.
Anyone else as single skilled as me or can you actually do real world skills too?9 -
I'm curious...
I ended up in a job in which I'm the sole developer (state education databases). Good, well paying job. No complaints there, but I haven't been part of a Dev team since my college days almost 15 years ago. I keep up my skills in personal projects.
I use git, like most developers these days, to track my code and move it between my desktop and laptop. However, while I have a GitHub account, I tend to be very"shy" with my code. I usually won't start putting the repository online until the application I'm working on has its intended cute functionality at least... Functional.
That said, I've read articles that suggest developers should almost start their project repositories online right from the start.
My question is... Are there any others like me, holding back their code until it's functional, or do most of you code completely in public (for open source projects, anyway)?3 -
full of contradiction.
If u try freelancing nobody would pay you shit coz theres always someone who'd do it for 100$.
If you do get a good budget freelance project, any Dev you'd consider outsourcing to to split the work with will ask for more than the project is worth.
There's a lot of competition but it's basically made up of
- people from fancy universities who dont know shit coz they think their degree is worth something on its own and expect high salaries off the bat.
- people who figured out the first group are idiots and tried to self learn, so they joined bootcamps that spoon fed them some Laravel and React and now think they are high tier engineers but may not even know their way around a bash terminal
- people who actually know their shit, went through hell to get the skills they have now, could probably spin up a startup on their own
group 3 all left the country tho4 -
So just babbling my shit down here.
(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)
Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.
I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).
I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.
But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.
I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!
I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.
It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .
Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).
Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!
I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)
I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!
When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.
But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !
I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )5 -
If anyone here remembers the first 2 part rant story I posted then you will know that I got unceremoniously laid off by a company that tried to blame me for their bad decissions at one point
Well, a couple of days ago I found out that the senior dev and the owner took a trip to San antonio tx in order to try and look for growth opportunities and more developers. The thing is, being a Mexican company they thought they could go away with half assed solutions and mexican pay charts (to them it is completely reasonable to pay a dev with a degree and experience close to 13.99 an hour) just to find out that shit like that does not fly with American professionals. After I left, no one would monitor their .net implementations , the lead developer being a new php developer himself and not knowing much about .net had to take care of much of the things they had to work with, their API made no sense and it was damn near impossible to connect their services to a mobile platform unless you had ninja like skills and ingenuity.
I hold no grudges and really wish them the best, but it pleases me to know that they know now that their way of doing things is not standard in the U.S. now that makes me happy. -
I have that idea about starting a non dev project, but use some dev skills.
I'm thinking about raising shrimps 🦐 to distribute (maybe at first just for testing). I can use raspberry pi with some sensors (Oxygen and food etc...) to semi-automate the raising process5 -
Hi, I and my dev are finishing our First Game, it's an application because u know, everyone have a smartphone... but this's not the point. I'm an IT student but I didn't graduate yet (maybe next year 🙊) but my dev did a year ago, (yup is older than me), but the fun fact is that I didn't write a single line of code (for this game) because my dev chose me only for my drawing skills 😎 (OK as a future dev I feel a little noob and scared, but no problem I love drawing, even more than programming, less frustrating😉.. sometimes) BTW, this project took 1 year of cooperation and before this an other year (to my dev to learn C# and unity), now we are so close and proud of our creation. As soon as possible I will show you everything 😁 a concept art of our zombie's face just to prove something
p.s. this app an this community it's so funny and, well, kind :)
2 -
have a couple friends now who have gotten dev jobs at microsoft. I've since turned down their offers to apply and have them vouch for me twice now - not sure if their recommendations would mean anything to begin with at such a place.
this has gotten me a lot of criticism from peers and mentors who have chided me for "throwing away a golden ticket" on my resume.
at first I declined because I sure as fuck did not believe I had the skills to last very long there - and truth is I probably still don't.
but now I see it as a case of the cliche "corporate devil" that everything I believe in in terms of software freedom is squarely against.
I mean, I don't really think I have the chops to make it far with the open source and free software communities either, but if I had to pick a dream or a goal to move towards, that would be it. I don't want money or reputation. I just want to be free to tinker with the world as I please.
maybe I'll have the courage next hacktober... but until then, I'm just gonna focus on learning and self-improvement. no one can ridicule me for being a dumbass if I'm actually putting in the effort to learn and improve, right?
would welcome any advice for aspiring open source contributors, as I'm not really sure where to begin that wouldn't make me look like a total hack (pun not intended)5 -
Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?
Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.
So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.
I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.
It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.
I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.
On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.
I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.
Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.
I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.
It dreads me to say it, but I need help.12 -
Loosing faith...
Interesting question.
I don't think skills have something to do with faith.
If you don't know something, ask someone who does.
Even If I cannot solve a problem or deem a problem unsolvable, I usually don't doubt myself.
There are rare moments where I throw a fit, but that's not loosing faith, thats just being angry because my stubborn thick skull cannot make sense of it, which annoys me.
Might sound cocky, but in my opinion dev skills are not "do or die". Problem could be solved at a later time, maybe never. Who cares?
Loosing faith would mean to me that I define myself in some way on the ability to solve sth that doesn't have to be solved at all.
XD
After all, if it doesn't work, I don't give a fuck.
*Cheers*. -
!rant
alright yall I need ideas, my wife just got fired along with everyone else and I'm going to have to go back to atleast part time freelance work. I need ideas for a developer site to broadcast my skills in android dev, and backend design. any suggestions will be appreciated.5 -
At the job interview to my current position I was asked the classic ”where do you see yourself in X years” question. I replied something along the lines of that I see myself staying if I feel good where I am and long as I have the opportunities for professional growth.
Now with recent developments it’s looking like those opportunities will be bygone pretty soon. I work on a massive legacy codebase, where with the scarcity of current dev resources and the apparent difficulties of procuring additional personnel to the dev dept, it does look like we’ll be limited to maintenance and simple small scale improvements with no room for meaningful projects. Theoretically I could ask to be moved to another product, but realistically that would both be a dick move well as unlikely to happen, as other projects are fully staffed (and made with technologies there’s easier to find personnel to).
As a consequence of this perceived imminent halt in opportunities for self-development at work, I’ve been starting to look for greener pastures. There are some intriguing ones out there. But then I come here, read some rants and comments, and it always becomes abundantly clear I’m good where I’m at right now. So what of it, if my position won’t enable growth out of the box for a while? I can always develop my skills and knowledge on my free time, and besides, the stagnation won’t last forever... right?12 -
the biggest challenge i've faced is to keep up the motivation and lower my frustration where a project enters the AMS phase.
It's so stressful, you stop improving your dev skills and you have to deal with shitty and boring problems everyday. -
Whats the state of mobile development skills demand atm?
Thinking of getting into crossplattform development with flutter or kotlin or enhance my dev skills in native android development (10years exp.) and create me a base project with jetpack compose.
Advice appreciated.3 -
Considering applying to a regular administrative job, where I can use just 1% of my dev skills in BAT files, Excel macros, browser automation with Selenium, and people will be like "oh man, you are like a hacker!!!"1
-
Not strictly a dev-goal, but anyway:
Now that I am responsible for a few people in the company I work for, my goal is to find a balance between managing and dev, and to help them develop their skills, be productive, and enjoy their work. -
Have a question about my career:
So far my career out of uni has been like this:
8 months in first place working as C# .NET dev, creating native desktop apps for windows. job was shitty, was not getting any best practices skills so I left.
12 months in 2nd place working as android dev in a startup. was working all alone and had to rebuilt my app up to 5-6 times to learn best practices. startup didnt care about android app at all so I left and now doing just some small freelance work for them.
3 months in new startup as android dev.Today I was told that its decided to focus on iOS and do all marketing (also uplift of new design) only on iOS. basically for next 3-4 months they don't plan to do much on android side. they saw that I showed some interest in backend and now they are asking me to talk with two other senior guys about starting with some small tasks for me on backend.
Our backend is mainly using python. Also backend guys will be pretty busy for next few months because they will have to deliver many new features in next few upcoming months. I've talked with one of them and he said that this is a bad idea to force frontend to start working on backend. However I feel that he's sort of gateekeping and probably just doesn't want to help me with getting up to speed.
In my defense, my knowledge doesn't end with C# .NET desktop apps and native mobile apps for android.
I have hobbie projects (gameservers) where I worked on websites (php,html,css,javascript,mysql) and also was taking care of a java based gameserver which is hosted in a linux vps.
Also I've had a small hosting "company" where with available tools I've managed to automate VPS(virtual private server) ordering, web hosting ordering and domain ordering. Basically I owned a dedicated server and did everything using whmcs, cpanel and proxmox virtualization.
I trust myself in learning this backend stuff and doing whats required, however I learned everything by myself and I won't follow all of these best practices.
Should I accept more responsibility on backend or should I continue focusing on android?7 -
Reasons to NOT be a dev sounds rather negative so I'd like to propose 3 things that you need to BE a dev as to frame it in a positive light:
- When a problem peaks your interest you want to solve it, you may even be obsessed by it.
- You enjoy learning, not necessarily enjoy school, just enjoy learning new things (even better if it's by your own means)
- Failure may get you down, but you learn and don't give up until you have exhausted all paths to success.
You may need other skills like math, logic and reasoning abilities, being able to handle deadlines, attention to detail, and cope with stress. I've seen people being crap at all of those and if they have the former 3 they, in time, will hone the others enough to make them a productive dev.
No need to be a 9-9-6 code monkey willing to be squeezed by Big Corp for massive profits and a low salary or a 1337 purist coder that only focuses on the crafting side of developing software. That may make you a great coder but not a well rounded developer or individual. Remember, you program machines but you are NOT one.
10 -
God I hate it when devs complain about not having a decent job 😠 And then they're like "Oh, I've been looking for the past 6 months, but every company just ignores me"
Look, hate to be the one to break it to you, but companies are constantly searching for devs, and many companies have such shortage of quality devs, they'll take just about anyone with even remotely relevant skills as long as they have a decent attitude. If you can't find a decent job in this market, well, it's either that nobody needs a dev who spent the last 10 years doing basic UI and simple NodeJS apps, or they don't want a dev who loudly shits on new technologies while acting like their GitHub profile is impressive enough.3 -
Perhaps one of the most important things I will ever learn in life is how powerful regularity is. Read up on a topic once? Understand nothing? Read more random shit on it. Keep reading. And then stare in awe as things fall into place.
I'm writing this out not because people don't know this. Almost everyone knows this. But it's nice to be reminded of it. It's nice to be reminded that learning new things and honing bew skills is never easy. It's nice to be reminded that there's great knowledge and skills waiting to be learned.
This is not meant as motivation so much as it is meant as a reminder. Our colleagues may be garbage. Our clients may be garbage. Our bosses, the interns, the new dev, and almost certainly ourselves, are almost always garbage.
But if you've learned 1-2 new things today, the day wasn't garbage.
I'm just learning move semantics... -
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 -
Is it me or is Software Development basically just Web Development?
I don't hate web development, in fact, I'm learning to become a web dev myself, but everywhere I look, everyone is a web developer.
When looking for a job all the requirements describe skills that are commonly associated with a web developer role despite the title saying Software Developer, all the developer communities I visit are filled with web developers and web dev topics, any topics pertaining to other fields of software development are close to non-existent, and when I go looking into resources for learning the Web Development courses and paths are much more well-supported than other fields.
At first, I was thinking of becoming an Android dev than maybe later learn some web dev but it looks like it would be a better idea to become a web developer since it would be much easier to ingratiate myself into the communities, find resources, communicate with other developers, find a job and I could even use the web dev skills to make mobile apps or apps outside of the web.
Should I stick with Web Dev or continue learning Android?3 -
Saw my previous dev professor in an event, almost 5+ yrs have passed since I last saw her.
We were tied to a team and when she asked me what skills can I contribute I said Web Dev, I swear her face turned sour with disappointment. What's so wrong ?2 -
Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?5 -
Interviewing with three companies. First one extended an offer. I'm expecting an offer from at least one, possibly both, of the others (On-site with Second was yesterday and expecting an offer tomorrow or Mon, phone tech interview (they also had a tech screen) with Three was today and I /rocked/ it, expecting an onsite invite for next week).
The problem with being a badass is that the choice paralysis is SO OVERWHELMING. All three have features that I like and how do I choose.
I think I'm being overly influenced by the weekly massage, onsite barista, free nice breakfast/lunch, and ideal location of Second (the domain is finance, they have $$$). Oh and fucking 25 vacation days and amazing 401k matching. I mean how would I say no to an offer? But what if the work is actually beyond me? But they have seriously cranked their benefits package up to 11.
First is an in house product with external clients. The domain I don't find super interesting, but it has amazing Glassdoor reviews, seems like a decent environment, and really seems like a place to progress and grow as a professional. It is also the lowest salary of the three (both others are through Hired, so I know what they are offering).
Third is a consultancy where I'd really get to keep my skills relevant. Seems mad fast paced, which is a bit intimidating, and I don't know how well I'd handle the context switching of being on multiple projects at a time.
I mean, all of this is counting my chickens before they hatch. But I have a really good feeling about my chsnces with Second, though I suppose I still have a chance to botch my onsite with Third.
Ahhhh. Dev Rant, how did you go about choosing between offers that can't be evaluated on a single axis?1 -
The company I work at acts on a field that I'm quite passionate about but what is frustrating me lately is the fact that people seem to acknowledge way more the programing skills of the leader of another non-dev team that has good ideas but isn't that well versed on the dark arts.
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Last internship : I learned modern opengl, libav and ffmpeg. I even was the only dev on some big contracts. Was a fucking cool internship because I learned everything I wanted to. But my manager had really low social skills. So been able to teach myself all of that was a good thing for everybody, but not for him. When the internship was over I got the worst mark of my promotion for the business with for comment that I didn't enough ask for help Oo wtf dude. Still get the best final markof the promotion and the only one who didn't work on web technologies :p but fuck you should have tell me sooner man...2
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best part of being a dev... job interviews where experience always counts more than education...
i feel being a dev has given me great sarcasm skills -
To do list:
- Become a better dev
- Install Archlinux and Plasma
- Finish teaching my brother C#, F#, SQL
- Learn Xamarin better
- Actually use my programming skills to create useful tools for myself (and maybe my friends and family)
- Finally add one of my personal projects to GitHub -
Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"
"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"
"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"
"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."
"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."
"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."
"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."
"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."
"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"2 -
I've spent so many years not coding, I could never get over the initial hump, which was definitely a mistake. Mistakes are fine, we all make them. The best thing is to learn from them. On the plus side I've learnt firewalls, Web hosting. Windows domains, Azure cloud, virtual machines etc etc, skills which are hopefully very useful for Dev to have. I look forward to joining the ranks of skilled developers. If you are interested in development but are afraid to take the leap. Just go for it, start to learn and play with it. My recommendation for anyone looking for a starting point is a Udemy course called "The Complete ASP.NET MVC 5 course". I'm not affiliated in any way or advertising it. I just think it's brilliant and you get to the fun stuff really quick. You will start with the basics of getting and setting up visual studio. Also. If anyone could recommend other very good courses they know of I would appreciate it
1 -
HELP, ITS A MESS!!
Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .
But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.
I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...
THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)
2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.
3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:
"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "
I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).
WHAT SHOULD I DO???3 -
Everytime I consult with senior devs on how to transition from my sysadmin job and get my first dev job they always tell me to get a CS degree.
Look. I will get that fucking degree eventually. But I want to build up dev skills and learn from a company before killing myself over math crap for 3 years. But it's like a vicious cycle. Every junior position I apply to rejects me because I have no degree.
I'm fucking frustrated and depressed.
What should I do? I want to break from the IT meme and get a dev job.
In the meantime I'm doing small projects and freelancing in my very little free time. But I feel I'll never truly be a developer until I work as one professionally.4 -
Was hiring a front-end dev once. Job ad was for basic html/css and graphic design skills. Perfect part-time job for intern or high school kid to get their feet wet. Boss sits in on interview and after I asked all the necessary questions related to position, boss starts asking him programming related questions similar to my position. (php, Mysql, apis, managing vps, custom shopping cart code )
Way to drop a bomb on a kid who is potentially interested in working here. -
So we have a new guy at our company. I don't know what his job description is, pretty sure not a dev. He comes to the devs and asks how to connect a printer. Some things that ran through my mind:
1. How did you get in the door?
2. There is this place called "Google".
3. Fucking figure it out! (This is my boss's attitude on a lot of things, and I have adopted this as well. Yes, ask for help when stumped, but you better have made an effort.)
Then I remembered this part from Super Star:
https://youtu.be/22F6AnqPGxg?t=19
What I did say was this: "I don't have a PHD cert. Printer Help Desk." It got a good laugh. Somebody else helped him when they had a chance. I think if I had helped I might have sent him things to search on Google. This is not a difficult skill to acquire. Problem solving skills are paramount in this company.2 -
My ideal dev job is a job that requires to think about reality in a different way, a job that requires both programming skills and an open mind.
P.S. I should also earn enough money to buy a Tesla haha1 -
In programming world there is lot of stuff to learn and there is lot to great developers in the world after seeing code and project's of these developers I feel I am very weak in coding currently my confident is quite low cause I cannot make a simple project by my self without seeing a project tutorial video and I don't know how do I improve my dev skills and I feel stuck any suggestions?15
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The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.
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Finally performing that dev rite of passage: working on my personal site.
Would have done it sooner if I had design skills.5 -
A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..
If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..
From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!
Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!
There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..
If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..
Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */
Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!
And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..
One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..
Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.
So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..
And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.
To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it4 -
I was studying a lot the last year, i learned a lot about Machine Learning/Deep Learning, Data Gathering, Data Analysis, ETL, Model Architecture Design, Training, Fine Tuning, Backend Development, DataBases, API Development, ORMs, Rest, GraphQL, OAuth, CI/CD, Docker, Deployment to Production environments like Heroku, Git and more stuff i dont remember while writing this. I built and keep adding stuff to my Github Portafolio.
Im not able to get a job. I started looking for jobs as Data Scientists, no response never. I take a look at freelancer sites, nothing seems to fit my skills. And when there is a minimal fit, they always want a Full Stack Web Developer, i dont know Frontend Development, i dont like do it.
Dont know what to do or how to land any job.
My options aeems to be:
1.Learn Frontend Dev and work as Full Stack in underpaying freelance jobs
2.Keep applying to Remote-Only startups, but they still wants people with 3+ years of experience.
i cant work in my city, here are not any company startup hiring no one, we are 30 years in the past here.
What you do in my place?10 -
I don't know if this can be classified as a legit "regret" or not, but anyway (hence no wk78 tag).
I've always chosen to focus more on the theory behind computers and computing rather than on practical dev skills. Not saying that the more theoretical things aren't fun - concepts from theoretical CS and maths still regularly blow my mind, as do the more "esoteric" languages like Haskell, Idris, and Coq. However, after seeing you fine folks here at dR talk about practical development, it feels like there's a whole world of stuff that I've missed about computers and programming, especially web programming. I think I'll tackle that next when I have some free time, maybe spend some time learning PHP to see what all the hate's about... (really though, it must do something right if it has such a huge userbase, plus, I think devRant uses it too...?)
Anyway, just wanted to say that you folks are really cool and an awesome source of inspiration. Best community ever.3 -
Okay I'm back to Dev Rant tho it still looks new and confusing sometimes, maybe because I'm new to programming world. Well I need some type of advice , I like web development, I started learning PHP (I know it an old language but it all I can help myself with, by learning). Is there any thing I'm missing? Any link on improving my skills ?
I will be glad to learn a lot from the senior developers on here . I really want to go wide into programming I'm ready for the challenges because I know the path isn't always easy!!
Thanks in advance10 -
!dev. Been working on a simple and 'cheap-ish' enclosure for my resin printer to evacuate fumes out a window. 100% not the best or cleanest looking method but I like it. I don't usually do things with my own two hands so this was kinda fun. Probably will do a V2 in the future with my brother teaching me to do more hands on skills. And a MUCH cleaner end result. This was him telling me what i needed to do and me figuring out the how on my own lol
Now to finish v1 I just gotta put the fan controller outside where I can physically touch it. Cut holes for its wires. Then foam anywhere that stick on door foam didn't work that air can escape. Ohhh and attach the actual duct and window parts
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My game design & dev teacher. He was a level designer for an old german game company so he wasn't actually a proper programmer.
What made him a good teacher was he knew what he could teach and what was beyond his skills, and encouraged self study in those areas.
Not that many did, but those who did are all decent devs now. -
I'll never use code hacked by another dev for work.
I got code that only solves one single fucking use case but there are way more to consider ...
The way the problem is solved ... not dev friendly to use, clean code is non existend and did I mention that it doesn't solve many other important use cases?
All has to be refactored and rethinked and everybody complains about why it takes so much time and the code should not be a technical masterpiece.
I'm sick of these bullshit devs, not taking their role as professionals serious.
Devs should not only learn how to code but also to work as a professional. Soft skills shouldn't be optional and the way how IT is seen has to be reshaped.
There are reasons why in these days the developed software has a lot of bugs and is not flexible. Everything has to be done now, changes come so often that they conflict with previous ideas and nobody knows the complete customer specification so the conflict shows in dev phase up.
Most devs work like they are in a hackerspace. Stop doing this.
You can do this in your freetime but stop doing this when you work in a professional environment.2 -
Alright so I've been thinking of taking my skills to the next level and would like to know a few things from PRO C++ DEV out there
1. Is it possible to set up a production level web server with c++, if so why don't i see many and why are there so many with nodejs etc..
2. Client side web pages without Javascript, possible?
3. Well I forgot the other questions I wanted to ask, if I do remember you'd be able to find them in the comments
I believe in a single universal language for coding, hence I place forth such questions9 -
Never doubt myself.
Never questioned my skills...
Because I have few skills.
I'm no dev, an amateur programmer who learned in school (best part, learned logic programming) and stopped programming for years because I had no future without an engineer University course... How mistaked I was.
So I know that I'll spend more time on google on every project I start.
Still doesn't stop me... Until I find out that I can't do what I want (like the time I made all the UI of a web app in JavaScript to use in electron and then found out that I couldn't use a file database, sq lite on that case... one month almost wasted... Almost, kept the UI as a mock up. Did the same mistake two years latter, only to remember like one week latter why I didn't use JS the last time. Doing it in python+Kivy now) I'll just keep pushing, and trying, and learning.
Never stop, never quit, only death is impossible (for now). -
hey devs, i'm a web dev, i'm honestly tired with php, js, html, css, looking for some cool recommendations to learn n enhance skills19
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I get to unleash my creativity.
My classmates && teachers fear me because they think I will screw up their computer/smartphone if they make me unhappy, gives me a virtual protection field from my friends bullshit.
I look cool doing being a dev.
And finally, learning to be a dev improves my logical thinking skills.1 -
I started working for a startup as Server Administrator/ System Integrator beside university to get some dollars with easy work and nice people.
((I Know two of the C*Os so I got a had feeling with this. Besides the upcoming story I'm still really happy with my position and career chances here. God bless my Department which has the most funny/rude guys, love you.))
tl;dr:
Guy fakes his Skillset and fuckup whole department, can´t do most of his basic tasks. I had my first and hopefully last interaction with this bastard.
Heres how everything started:
I was more and more involved in the leading processes and decisions.
Heard about a story where and why the whole dev-department was kicked out of his position because they were crappy developers. And cant just believe the stories they told me about the former Dev-Lead
Now I met the former "Development Lead"
I was brought in because we in the IT wondered why he would like to share his local machine password with colleges. After some questions he came out with the Reason.
He is doing home-office for some days a week now and wants his colleges to be able to start his "software". (already confused by that)
The "better IT-guy" in me offered help for automatic deployment CI/CD stuff so that they can use it as an inhouse service.
BIG OOF incoming:
"The code is not in git because I wanted to clean it up before"
"My IDE is the only place where my PHP crap work is running"
"The 'PHP-software' is to complex for this"
My Lead and I were completely speechless,
I understand the decision to kick this "dev-Lead" from the lead position down to a code monkey/ script kid.
Now I´m thinking about getting my Hands on the Lead position after my exams because if such bastards with no clue about basic stuff, no clue about leading, no clue about ci/cd, no clue about generic software stuff get the job I would easily be the "good IT-guy" with more responsibility/ skill.
Now I sit here, hate people that fake their skills and set back work of colleges for multiple months and never asked for help or advice.
And the little "Bastard Operator from Hell" in my just wants to delete all his files, emails account during a migration to completely demotivate the person who failed to be responsible for a team nor their projects.5 -
I got a job opportunity in another country and went there for a 3 weeks trail working, I've worked on two different projects, one was with a CMS called Contao and the other one on WordPress, I'm fluent on WordPress, I've been developing themes for more than three years now.
With Contao I started the learning curve and for 2 weeks I learned a lot of stuff.
Before coming back for Visa stuff and taking care for few documentes needed they asked me if I could still do some freelance stuff from my home country. I said yes and got invited to the GIT repo.
It's been a week now that I'm trying to understand how stuff work and everything that the senior dev wrote is way advanced from everything that I've ever worked.
I couldn't finish more then 5 minor tasks simple CSS and PHP logic and I'm feeling very embarrassed.
I just wrote to the senior dev and told him that I'm way behind with my coding skills and I'm seeing dreams with code that don't work.
3 -
Hey all, just wondering what it was like for you when starting out your career.
I'm a newish dev, been full time for about a year hired right after my internship. My role has a bunch of hats ranging from DevOps/sys admin to software engineering, sort of a weird mashup of skills so it's not pure software engineering. I mainly work with python, Ansible, and some terraform.
However I still just want to say I'm sorely disappointed in my undergrad classes.
I have a "concentration" in software engineering. I did struggle in classes as I was working full time to pay for classes without taking out loans, but I don't really remember learning a whole lot that was useful in industry.
Overall I just feel like just paid money for a degree that didn't teach me very much useful stuff. Maybe I'm just lacking experience? Maybe what I learned I just don't notice myself applying because it's subconscious?
My coworkers have taught me so much, and I'm very thankful they invested that time into me. I still get ripped to shreds during code reviews lmao (definitely not as much compared to when I first started but I'm also still learning and will always be)
Plus our company docs are pretty good so I can always read through them or search our codebase for examples on how to utilize in house tools etc.
I definitely hit the jackpot with this job, just feeling like I should have been prepared more.4 -
Im a php backend dev for over 7 years. (Lately mostly laravel).
Im going to look for a new job and have 2-3 free weeks to try and learn a new language and switch to that in my next job.
Please advise if i should
1. Switch to Python (should be relatively close to php oop) + opens AI jobs opportunity for the future.
2. Switch to NodeJs. (Web/api knowledge similar to php) + will be easier to learn frontend skills later (ie angular/etc)
3. Look for another PHP job. - if 2-3 weeks is not enough time to learn nodejs/python well enough to get an actual job without experience with them.
Really can't decide which path to take, please help10 -
Hello, devRant.
In high school, 11th grade right now. Looking to apply for a webdev internship. Not really for the pay, more for the experience and having something to put on a résumé I guess.
I have done "webdesign" before, but that's only a static blog (for the curious, Jekyll, https://oxylibrium.me/ until July 30 when the domain expires)
They list... "Integrate front-end services with Bootstrap and jQuery" and similar, and they list skills required as "Website Designing".
Do I apply and see how it turns out? Any last words before your (hopefully friendly) neighbourhood python backend dev leaps to unknown waters?
(First post in a while; age++ happened a while ago but was really busy patching life up to post)
Thanks for your time,
Oxy :)1 -
I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.
I want a logic check.
I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.
In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.
College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...
Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*
Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"
Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.
In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.
Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".
I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'
Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.
The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.
So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.
Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.11 -
Okay, going to throw my shame away here.
My chances are slim, but if anyone happen to work in a company that might have a use for a remote intern with skills in Python/Flask, JavaScript, Java or PHP living in GMT+1
I will go for fulltime too but I know chances for that are even slimmer. At this point, I will kill for a $500/month intern opportunity for perspective.
Sincerely,
3rd world country dev4 -
Well, first off I want to actually pass my college classes. You know, the classes I barely find interest in that seem to be very minimal in my coding skills.
Next, take up or join a project for the summer. You know, get my name out there.
Third, make money
Fourth, make something significant in the OSdev community. I absolutely love low-level dev. Now (to myself) Let's do this! -
contrarian dev guru types are just losers who couldn't make it in industry or business with their (lack) of skills, but are so sour and embittered they continue to shovel their own garbage on everyone else
god its just so annoying "oh i do it only this way, and its the RIGHT way, you must do it this way"
this UI feature that literally exists everywhere else? "oh no those are bad, no one uses it and its not a best practice"
get the fuck out of my way, you're just slowing me down2 -
ok,. so i've been into job hunting for a while and i found this rather attractive posting with reasonable salary and work hours, it clearly states "PHP Backend Programming With Laravel", so i applied, a day later, i got in contact with the employer via skype, and to my surprise, the employer told me that skills in c# is required because the job position is for a senior c# dev... smh2
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Im new to devRant and i’m just looking if i could get any tips, example projects i could do to fill my portfolio? Im trying to sharpen my skills in web dev (both back & front + React)4
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!dev
Hello there..
I always wanted to have my first post here be something that pisses the sh!t out of me.
tl;dr: Memes are for braindeads and kids are fucktards
Backstory:
So basicaly I am now having a summerjob before my next semester starts so I can make some cash to buy some overpriced stuff I dont probably need. I work at a factory, 3 shift work and today we had Night shift, so there was me and a bunch of Arab guys, kicking our asses by pure boredom and desperacy.
Act One:
I was bored, opened my phone and decided entertain myself by some funny sh!t I can find on Mark Sugarhills webpage. I was just passing by some random a bit funny stuff and then I found some random ass meme, which doesnt give a single, even distant sence to me.. So since my german is as good as my coding skills (read: complete shit) I couldnt ask for opinion of my fellow coworkers and since its fuck1ng 4am theres noone to ask on messenger or whatever. So I did it... I asked in a goddamn comments, what the fck is that supposed to mean and Aw dear Lawd... I did a mistake.
Act 2:
Like 4 seconds after my question I had a response and I was like 0.o It has to be some Alice of Facebook so I guess someone cool. Oh boy I was never so wrong. The answer... the... FUCKING answer was.... "normie."
What the actual fuck?
Like man statisticaly speaking, there is 200,000 people on this wannabe funny site and since everyone is apparently laughing their asses off, I am the motherfucking original snowflake.
But I wanted to play it cool... was like Uhm sorry, I really tried but cant figure it out.
His fuck-me-sideways-with-rusty-crowbar answer was:
a) The joke is hidden in some random thing we created yesterday and decided to call it a culture
b) "u dumb"
Act 3:
I hope that most of you finally guessed it! Its the second fucking answer and oh sweet mother of pain, please find him, BUT thats where I flipped and fucking lost it.
The fucking nerve to speak to me like that u dissrespectful piece of shit. Go watch some Twitch, while I SSH into ur ass and hit u harder than ur mom her forehead everynight when she realises that she could have swallow you dickhead.
Afterthoughts:
I was always worries that my child would like to be a Rapper, or Youtuber...
But today Im adding being some dumb ass meme creator.8 -
This is a rundown of my day.
Today I had the immense pleasure to continue implementing an web table with server side paging, filters and sorts, and to persist all those values in the url query strings.
Thank fucking god for vue.
And just before sleep, I inflated like 40 balloons for a bday tomorrow and I didn't have an inflator, so let me say this.
FUCK BALLOONS. The brand of these motherfuckers was horrible.
I hate it that they all come with this fucking dust in the bag.
Bitch, I'm putting this shit in my mouth.
Isn't it curious how bitch is like a very powerful insult in the sense that it's very funny but also very validating.
Like you could say that in the middle of argument against a woman and actually win it.
But sadly women don't have an insult against men of which make use, so it's very unfair in my opinion.
In fact there are so many female targeted insults that you kinda feel untouchable as a guy.
Except if a woman insults the size of your dick. That is a fucking tomahawk missile.
Anyhow, not making any type of gender inequality analysis or whatever, I just thought it was a peculiar observation.
Even bigger anyhow , I'm not good at inflating balloons, I'm a web dev, what did you expect? That I could have basic ordinary skills in life.
Helloooo, I said I am a WEB... DEVELOPER.
It's a fucking miracle I am able to complete basic day to day tasks necessary to live.
All I know doing is adding 5 unaudited packages everyday to my current project.
(Just kidding, i'm relatively ok as a coder, but if you actually thought it was true just because of being a web dev, then go eat a dick, and if you didn't like this dyslexia fueled rant, go eat another dick)1 -
fuck it, tell me straight.
Can i live into this tech world with poor math skills and no interest in web dev and designing?
my experience as native mobile dev was enjoyable and still is, but i fear that this is not a very broad career choice.
You see their is blockchain, dapps , hybrid apps, webapps, server designing, tensorflow models and Ai models( though they can be integrated with native apps too i guess ) , and many more tech and therefore jobs that rely on knowing about the webdev. and all i know is how to make a decent native java app.
and why the fuck should i join this web dev cult? its such a fucking mess. 8 different types of text sizes sizes, <b> and <strong> being the same thing, do you know about a thing called abstraction? My android studio would give me fucking murder warnings if i even dared to introduce hard coded texts along with code. and here, an html page is basically text + attributes? fucking kill me.3 -
1. Extend my infosec knowledge further and try getting more work in that area (and less as a dev).
2. Specialize more, dabble less.
3. Learn more !dev skills (military/political history mostly) -
Trying not to get too hyped about AI, ML, Big Data, IoT, RPA. They are big names and I'd rather focus and expand skills in mobile and web dev
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What do you do when you like a crapu dev ?
damn some times its very hard to deal with your shitty skills. And people take advantage of that1 -
age++;
Normally, I'd leave it there like most other people. But this is devRant, not Facebook [citation needed], so let me take the opportunity to talk about a dev-related project I'm mulling over.
A number of years ago, I dropped my music hobby in exchange for focusing on my computer science/programming skills. I'm now at a point where I'm working professionally as a developer, and I've wanted to get back into music for quite some time. Specifically, I want to make music, not just perform it.
Thing is, I've had difficulty trying to find a good platform for uploading WIPs to get feedback from. I'm hesitant to post them on social media platforms for a variety of reasons (though I'm open to budge), so I've been considering alternatives.
So here's my idea: A personal blog made from the ground up that details my journey rediscovering music, including tracking the resources I've used for others to refer to, music samples, etc. I think it would be a great opportunity to not only get feedback on music I've made, but to also incorporate my programming skills with my music hobby.
I'd appreciate any feedback on the idea, as well as any advice/recommended tools for taking on a project like this.4 -
The leader in a dev team should be the BEST DEVELOPER
Not the one with "leadership" or "strong ownership" skills and "team player" or "go getter" attitudes. This is euphemism for promoting someone just because you like them, or because of their charisma.
There are many other industries where charisma can play a role in leadership but software is not one of them. To build good software we need to be objective thinkers, not influencers.15 -
I have a question, but first some background. When I got my first job, it wasn't clear cut what I would do, but I ended up doing frontend. I really liked doing frontend, so I continued doing so and I still do to this day. I even work alongside designers in a design studio, so I feel very much like a frontend developer.
Obviously, the term "frontend" these days implies someone, in some ways, writing a web, mobile or desktop app using javascript. For me, frontend is also about stuff like accessibility, design, code delivery, and understanding the end-users and the designers that may have prototyped something for you.
I have not been active in any other dev communities than this place, but it seems to me like a frontend developer is pretty much the lowest common denominator ( I guess in terms of skills). If I am right, I do not know why, which is why I'm hoping someone could explain.9 -
I have last few months left out of graduation and i don't know what should i learn. There's so much things (web dev , ai/ml, blockchain, android , cloud, ,hybrid apps, gaming, ar/vr, data analysis, security,etc) and as a cs student, i feel i should be knowing them all.
In last 6 years ,
Techs that i liked or got success in :
java, Android,python, data analysis, hybrid apps(flutter)
Techs that i didn't liked or failed in : ai/ml, cloud computing , webdev(css/js) ,hybrid apps(react/angular/ionic/...)
Techs that i didn't tried : security, cryptography, blockchain, open cv , ar/vr, gaming
I am not bound by my likeness or success.
My failures was mainly because i didn't liked those techs and continued further in them. And my success comprises of just launching a few apps, passing in some certification or grabbing an internship opp because of those skills.
But if you think a particular skill is necessary to have as a cs professional then let me know. I just want to earn a lot of money and get out of this mess asap1 -
I'm envious of Backend developers who can just 'see' the problem domain and start creating an architecture. I can't see shit - I just stare blankly at the project and I think: hm, what models do I write?
I know I'm a structured person, but I lack the knowledge and practice. One day I'll be able to do this, but for now I have to keep doing things ad hoc.
I really don't belong in the Backend but unfortunately that's how my career is turning out for now. All I know is I have to get better at this.2 -
is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?
i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :
1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.
2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.
3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .
4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too
compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)
2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.
3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.
4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.
as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.
this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.
this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?
in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?
Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/
mann i want some people skills like these guys10 -
How to cope with getting cockblocked by coronavirus before job change?
I signed a contract for a job in a foreign country. I was excited for the advantages like better work/life balance, finally getting to linux dev env, friendlier company. But now, I can not even apply for work permit because of restrictions.
Due to already having signed contract already, I completely lost my touch with my current job. I hate it so much that I am having unpaid leaves even though I could do nothing since we are working half team at the same time. Dont tell me to “learn new skills”, I tried, it does not work for me. I am not in the mood for learning.
New company is great that they reassured me I would not lost the opportunity, I would join them whenever I can. So I dont fear losing job but uncertainty kills me. European travel ban was up to 15 May, prolonged to 15 june, which prevents me to apply for work visa. I guess this was the last straw that broke camel’s back.14 -
Hi dev!!
I am working on my web development skills from past 7 months. I always wanted to create my youtube channel to share my knowledge about the same.. but now also when I come across some bugs it sometimes become very difficult for me to sort that out..
I want to ask if I should give more time learning the skills completely and after that it would be fair to create my channel or I should start a channel and learn things side by side..2 -
I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks? -
- Stop procrastinate;
- Start a open-source project;
- Go deep in math and logic;
- Perfect my English;
- Learn some soft skills;
- Get a hobby outside dev;
- Get some exercises;
- Master Javascript and CSS.
It's all I can think of now, but I have so much more goals for this year that I will be very busy, and in the end of the day it will all come together.2 -
Listing my skills:
I have published react-native apps.
I can build an extensive backend/API thing with node.JS/a good framework.(worked on something for my countries national football league during an internship as main/only dev)
I have some experience with c# but havent used it since school.
I have no issue getting into new frameworks/languages, as long as its not PHP.
I have experience working in software teams.
I have experience running my own company(Online store selling airsoft supplies - i quit).
Im working towards getting familiar with Tensorflow 2.0.
I have a Cambridge English assessment certificate at grade C2.
I am currently working(for 0 pay for 50% of the shares) on developing a social media app that uses location tracking on a 20-200 meter scale.
I have ADHD and have been spoken on/warned due to its effects( i.e. forgetting to report progress, getting distracted, needing stimulation so i browse youtube(even have it playing in the bottom corner sometimes), poor communication.
Am i worth anything at all as a developer... im getting pretty depressed due to not having an income at this point... and I dont think anyone will hire me4 -
So I was browsing the https://travis-ci.com website and was bothered by the weird gradiants, familiar layout and awkwardly timed animations (normally I only use https://app.travis-ci.com).
I navigated to all their top-level pages and paid attention to the incoherent/ sluggish design (see screenshot). So I got this feeling that it was a cheap-ass Wordpress template purchased from Themeforest and implemented by a webmaster with little to no dev-skills.
Sure enough, I checked the Wappalyzer extension and it is using Wordpress. Compare that to the old https://travis-ci.org which was custom-built on Ember and looks professional.
I'm aware of the negative PR they have generated over the past year but gave them the benefit of doubt and they have been good in their support and credit allotments, but man... that WP site looks so amateurish and marketed to the wrong target group. I don't know maybe I'll be forced to reconsider
4 -
I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.
My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.
apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.
- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.
- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.
- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain
- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :
--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)
- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev
- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company
- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.
- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)
- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.
- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.
- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)
- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/13 -
I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.
So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.
Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.
So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.
And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.
Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?2 -
My dev goal for the new year will be teaching others, and I could use some help!
For quite some time I have been thinking about setting up some kind of community project in my area teaching people who are having a hard time finding a job in their field how to program, specifically web development, in order to advance their job prospects. There is a lot of demand here in Holland and as we all know it doesn't take much more than dedication, disambiguation skills and an almost fanatical fondness for solving puzzles to lead a very happy life as a developer. I'm hoping 2019 will be the year.
What complete courses can you recommend to teach someone how to code, that are fun/inspiring enough to keep someone motivated (and able to go to school and/or make a living in the meantime) until they can use their built up skills and portfolio to get a first job (perhaps 1-2 years)?
I plan on tutoring once or twice a week for a few hours and being available for chat the rest of the week when not working. I have enough experience (and curiosity) to help with any assignment but I do not have that much spare time, which is why I need this resource to be as good as possible, and to need as little extra explanation as possible.
My benchmark is the excellent freecodecamp, but I'm wondering if anything else is available. Bonus points for anything in Dutch, or anything that stands out by explaining things in the clearest way possible, and with great assignments of course.
Also I'd be very interested in any stories about similar (not-for-profit) initiatives, especially from a learner's point of view.
Thanks!1 -
Hello fellow ranters ,
A few weeks ago we started working from home because of the Coronavirus, I have personally found it very hard to perform at work and have lost all motivation to do anything other than the bare minimum required by the company , around a week ago we were officially furloughed , my question to you guys is : what are some things I can do to exercise my brain and make sure my skills stay sharp, I am a JavaScript , node.js dev , I’m talking coding challenges and other things , also can anyone else relate ?8 -
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 -
What was your process to learn to code?
I started out modding Pokemon games for the good old Gameboy Advance around the age of 11. With basic scripts like; walk 3 steps left etc.
After that starten to use Unity 3D (with C#), just copy everything from Google. After a while I could edit some scripts and stuff (painful process...).
I started to do a study Software Engineering, didn't learn that much, just got some errands and little projects from people (the usual, 'oh you can code, I need bla bla) learned pretty much most of my skills there (JavaScript, python, PHP). In the meantime creating games (C#, C++).
Did an internship in game dev. got a job now. Only a bit more that a year from now I have my degree (if everything is going to plan).
That is more or less my process of learning to program. -
Need some advice. I’m a uni student and I really want to go into machine learning, data science, or computer vision. I have most of the skills and I feel I am fairly competent. However, the only professional experiences I have are web dev based. How can I make myself more appealing for data based roles? I really don’t want to do web dev anymore hahahahah5
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!rant
Dev friends! I'm a teacher who is in the process of transitioning into the tech field. I've been working like crazy on and off in my spare time for the past couple years to build my skills and with it a resume. The other day I went to get someone with a developers perspective to proof read it and realised I didn't have anyone!
I hope I don't offend anyone by posting this here but I would appreciate that anyone who is willing and interested, if you would take a look at my resume repo I have and let me know what you think (on GitHub)! Please be critical, that's what makes things better! Side note. I'm constantly baffled by comradery in this community as a whole.
https://github.com/alexmdodge/...3 -
I'm losing faith in my future right now!
I'm dying working for my current employer (read my last two rants) but no one wants to hire me and I'm not sure whether it's my skills, little experience or only halftime availability until I finish studies!
Also, while I'm at it, there are second to none game dev workplaces here, in Poznań (and working as a game dev is a dream <3).1 -
Exercise and sports are good ways of relax and get some discipline. Writting, either blog posts or simply for yourself improves your communication skills. On the communication side, I've specially noticed that I improved by doing talks (dev and no-dev) even if it wasn't for and audiance of more than 30. Games also helped me with problem solving and management. There's a lot a stuff 😅
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Found a job I could have the perfect skills for at my uni's careers fair today. I thought I'd fuck it up but luckily they brought the dev to the stall and he was just as uncomfortable as I was so naturally I felt better.
-
I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)
I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table
Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.
Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.
Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.
All of the above pay the same salary.
Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).
On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.
On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.
I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.
Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.
I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.8 -
That feeling when you realize that the REST API you were trying to consume apparently does not provide a query flag to get for a more detailed response making you think you'll need to fetch one list of items and then fire almost 1,000 requests really does not compare to that feeling when a colleague points out that the REST API in question does in fact support the flag AFTER you implemented the roundabout way.
FUCKING HELL!
I just didn't realize that I could click on GET and POST blocks for the metronome API documentation opening up a frigging pop-up. (See screenshot.)
Why couldn't the information have been more upfront? Only a cursor change on hovering the area could make one thing to click there.
Oh how I blame their lack of a user interface for my blindness.
I thought that it was just a basic documentation that only told you which endpoints exist and expects you to learn by trial of fire. So I searched the interwebs and on their support forum I found an old issue making me think that my round-about way was the way to go m(
Even worse, on the support forum I cannot even leave a comment warning the poor souls comming after me that they should not do the roundabout way as that issue has been long closed.
If you want to see it yourself: https://dcos.github.io/metronome/...
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It's not a real dev regret but it's related to it: Not being able to fix a price or a value for my skills.
It's a real regret.
Just coming out of college I have tried my hand at freelancing at found it real hard to fix a value for what work was offered because I just found it weird to fix a monetary value on something that I've done for free for my entire life ( at school and uni I mean).
To make it worse my first experience was with a grad student who wanted me to complete her project.
Now being from India, I know that we have a stereotype of doing work for a lower price.
But this girl took the cake.
She wanted me to create a custom Image classifier using tensorflow.
It had to train with live images and then detect those images in the live video feed.
It's quite simple but still training the basic network(which would be used to just detect features) would take a decent amount of time and effort.
No pre trained models was also a prerequisite for her.
After hearing all her requirements I asked her what price she was willing to pay.
She said 50$ lump sum.
Being really confused as to what to say to that I just stopped replying.
To this day I have no clue what would be a reasonable price to quote a client like that.
After that I just continued dealing with people I knew personally and am currently doing that as an internship. But entering the proper freelancing system again has become a kinda weird thing in my head now, since I have no clue as to what price to put on my skills.
Is there any advice that any of the more experienced people would give?
Also consider the fact that I'm relatively fresh out of college and have no corporate experience.
Even if you've read my rant and have no advice it's okay. I guess this is a path of self realization after all.3 -
New job is going exactly how I thought it would. The core code is actually pretty good but a lot more complex than what I’d dealt with before. I literally don’t know what I don’t know and my dev skills, especially OOP, are sub-par and I have VERY little time to brush up on them significantly before the big projects hit me like an oncoming train. If there is ANYONE else who has navigated this type of situation successfully, I’d love to hear your experiences.6
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Time for a new laptop, bored with current. Taking community suggestions. May donate current laptop to some poor dev soul in need; has been a trustworthy machine.
I do some of a lot on any given day: c#, PHP, node and typically run vs 2017, phpstorm, datagrip, sql management, webstorm, plus slack, office, etc.
I have terrible browser tab management skills and prefer electron apps over web apps. Am a vm junkie, constantly spinning up linux distros to see something.
Do light gaming when the mood strikes, Spotify or Netflix always on.
Suggest away.8 -
Me in Backend dev contract. Everything worked great because I translated simple themes and worked with modules.
Did some work as full stack to same agency as a favor. Mostly frontend work but ok.
Now being judged as a frontend despite my multiple protests of not being a frontend developer. Nor do I have any interest in improving my skills as one.
It's now affecting my mental health and physical health. Thinking about not renewing that contract. -
Be clear on your aim as a dev.
Be truthful of wat u know.
DONT DONT ever try to outsmart a interviewer who himself is a dev for many years.
Lastly keep cool and backup ur skills. -
Been applying for jobs lately and despite the years of experience and using the latest toys I’ve been finding it harder than ever to even get a positive response to my CV. One thing I’ve been noticing is that companies seem to now not care so much about frontend skills and more about complex algorithms when the role is ui focused, or to have a demand for dev ops experience. Are we really getting back to the days of thinking that jack of all trades can be experts in everything?3
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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 -
I committed a pr which got accepted to a big open source project… and that’s good! I should feel better about my skills!
(Imagine the following as the Simpsons meme where they go: and that’s good, and that’s bad)
But it was just documentation… and that’s bad… maybe I should not feel better about my skills…
But it may save two or plus hours to the next dev who doesn’t understand what’s going wrong! And that’s good! So I should feel better about my skills cause I spent time debugging and going into details and understanding what was happening just to produce a better documentation!
But I have lack of certain vitamins and a bit of depression.
“And… is that good?”
“No, it’s bad, you should feel ashamed of your skills and about the way you answered someone twenty years ago!”3 -
So last week there was a meeting at my workplace. In short the meeting concluded that me and 3 other devs gonna develop a fairly complicated system. I was happy to test my skills after 2 years of bug fixing in already working systems. Yesterday I found out that other people gonna do it with an other technology and I'm stuck with bug fixing for God knows how long...
Ps: feedback shows I'm not a bad dev.7 -
! Rant
https://nodeschool.io//...
Very nice interactive workshops for brushing up on web dev skills ☺1 -
So the other day, an old acquaintance asks me (a noob full stack dev) for advice on what programming langs to languages to learn.
I (like all other noobs eager to help) asked him about his previous programming skills, if any. He says "Yes yes, I did a course on HTML and CSS." To this I ask, what exactly are you looking to do. Back-end development he says.
I am frustrated with people asking me what to learn and how to learn when they are not even willing to do slightest of the work themselves. I am usually very helpful to people, but as a programmer, I would certainly try to do a complete research before I go around asking others.
What do you guys do? How do you handle such questions.4 -
When you see a start up project, and you have all the skills required and you want to join, but you know you don't have enough time ;-;
Rip HSC studing take my dev time
> https://youtu.be/NvQH8b1g3Yw -
I went to an interview a few days ago, just out of curiousity, even though i was sure that i won't be getting any "android developer jobs" there . it was a mega job fair. in one company, me and my friend neil(fake name) went. the interviewer guy was willing to give neil a package upto 10LPA (its a great offer for freshers in my country) based on his current skills of php js, react,angular, ... web stuff .
I had this assumption( and neil did too , we both kind off had the same mindset) that a company teaches us things, we just have to be a little famous/accomplished. So i thought why not? i am accomplished. i got 2 apps on playstore, i am an AAD certified Android dev and know a lot of android stuff, i am quite famous. i am equally as deserving as neil.
But what happenned was something different. When my turn came, the interviewer said " If you have no knowledge of phy/js/node/angular, why are you sitting here?" to which i said " i presumed company would teach me, since i bring some level of expertise from other fields"
so he told me some hard truths **"Companies are fast paced. they don't have time to train you in everything. we seek for candidates having some level of knowledge in the domain, so that we could brush up your skills, increase your knowledge to current requirement and push you to production engineer asap, so that you could be worthy of your salary"**
This is completely correct. i have stuck myself in such a career that its very difficult to sell myself for other job profiles. And from what i have seen, companies seek a very high level of proficiency in this field and rarely recruit freshers( or even if they do, salaries will be aweful)
. Now i am so unsure about what to do next:
A.) keep learning more and more of android and look for job in it. And even if am getting an aweful job offer, just sulk and take it
B.) do open source work/gsoc work?( its a good way to earn more recognition/stipend/knowledge and sometimes even job offers)
C.) learn web dev, data sciences, blockchain, cloud or other stuff that i don't yet know
D.) go back to ds algo / competitive? (because having good competitive knowledge is a safe zone. you are assumed as apure fresher with 0 level of practical knowledge but good level of mathemetics)
I know i am going suck in all of the above except maybe (A) or (B) because (C) is something that am unsure would grab my interest (and even if it did, i am sure i need another 1-2 years to be somewhat good at it) and (D) is something i myself know am uncapable of , i am an average shit in maths(but might mug it all up if i pull all nighters for 1 year)2 -
At what point do you say a junior dev is no longer a junior? What metrics do you use? Like scope of knowledge, impact on team / code decisions, years experience, management skills, etc.?
I feel I'm qualified as a mid level developer now despite only being a junior for a little over a year. I had tons of internships in college and was kind of placed in a role where growing fast was required.
I broke a sweat for most of that ~1 year I worked as a junior and my contributions to my project aren't insignificant
I don't say that to toot my own horn here, I really do want to ground myself in reality. But I don't know if my standards are too low or my organizations standards are too high. FWIW, other devs on my team have commented privately / informally that the junior title isn't super fitting.
I'm still pretty dependent on my boss but that's more for final say of things. He'll often have some input to my work but I'll also be involved with design discussion and take up a large chunk of work without question. On light sprints I'm knocking out 20+ taskhours of work, going closer to 30/40 when things pick up. Not uncommon to kill 10 user stories in a sprint.
I don't know, what do you guys think?8 -
Who have SQL in their profile skills list had the highest ratio of posted rants per dev at +56.0% more than average," "JavaScript devs were almost exactly at the overall average with their amount of complaining, while Objective-C developers appeared to be the most content with -79.9% fewer rants per dev compared with the average."2
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!dev
My time management skills are abysmal. I am in my senior year in school and a few months back decided to appear for the informatics Olympiad. So now I am reading a book on discrete math, while reading books on algorithms and data structures. I code every day for around two hours. I have my math syllabi in school which is all calculus. My physics syllabi consists of all of EM and Optics along with nuclear physics. I haven’t touched chemistry since the beginning of this year. I try to give a considerable amount of time to math and physics because I f***ing love studying those. But doing that means slacking off on the Olympiad stuff. I am completely overwhelmed. My midterms are two weeks away and I am so unprepared. I am really clueless on how to manage time. -
It's quite probably the same for everyone, but especially considering I've had nothing close to formal training in anything that I've learnt or do programming wise I've noticed it a lot.
For me the worst part about being a dev is finally starting to feel happy any comfortable with my skills and progress, only for something to come out of nowhere and make me feel like I know diddly squat. -
Fucked up day. Again. Yesterday and the day before i had to build JS functionalities basically on my own. And JS is still a weak point.
Today i came to the conclusion there is still too much to do and i’m not gonna be able to fix it in time. Again.
Funny shit is; people are pushing for core JS functions and skills because of speed and such, but even the lead dev with 15 years experience is switching to jQuery constantly.
I’m not even sure about his JS skills atm. -
There isn't many Dev bootcamps where i am from but i think they are a great idea for anyone that codes as you can get new ideas and learn new skills no matter what your ability
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So I’ve been putting some thought into this for a week now and this is what I’ve come up with for my dev goals.
- Finish learning C
- Learn GoLang
- Learn ASP.NET
- Get better at focusing
- Build more confidence in my skills
- Complete more projects
I have separate reasons for ASP.NET and GoLang. This year I did pretty good at completing my dev goals if I counted right I completed 6/10 of my goals and I’m proud of that, so I believe in myself to be able to complete these goals.2 -
!rant
I have my 121 in a few days with my new manager and am trying to get a raise either through moving from junior to mid level dev or being given a significant raise , am being paid a tad below the London market rate's lower range for my skill level.
Any advice on how to approach the topic?
Some bits of my background:
I got almost 4 years of exp :
almost 2 working there...
6 months short term contract as a ruby sql dev another company...
1.5 years worked for an abusive joke of a company who took advantage of my naivety since i was fresh out of uni ( did stuff like pressured me to add more features to a pojo system i made for them) barely learned anything there since i was the only IT person there developing solo, the project lasted 1.5 years and was a total mess to finish, so am not too sure of factoring it into my years of exp.
My Qualifications are:
bsc in information systems
Msc in enterprise sw engineering
My "new" Manager is seeking to retire real soon.
The company isn't doing too well but we just landed 2 big customers who are buying the product my team is working on
I Am one of two last devs on my team and we are barely holding on with the load, can't afford the time to train a newbie to join us
my department is soon to be sold (soon according to what mgr says). They have been saying so for 10 months now.
Last year , since the acquisition Is taking so long and funds were running out We were hit by a wave of redundancies which slashed our workforce in august/ july, told we could last till march this year on our funds . Even senior staff were on a reduced work week...but since we Got new customers then money should be coming in again , this should mean thats no longer the case. Even the senior staff have returned to 5 day work weeks.
Am being given only JavaScript work to do despite being hired as a junior java dev, my more senior colleagues dont wanna even touch js with a long stick
Spoke to 3 recruiters , said they got open roles in the junior- mid level range that pay the proper market range if am interested to put my cv through.
Thats like 25% more than I currently make.
Am a bit scared to jump into a mid level position in another company because i lack a bit confidence in my core java skills.
although a senior dev who used to be on my team thinks i can do it.
i recon i can take on the responsibilities of a mid level dev in me existing company since am pretty familiar with the products
I dont get to work with senior devs and learn from them since we are so stretched thin, hence am not really getting the chance to grow my skills
I know i have gaps in my knowledge and skills having not been able work in java for a while hasn't allowed me to fix that too well. I badly need to learn stuff like proper unit testing, not the adhoc rubbish we do at the moment, frameworks like spring etc
Since I have been pretty much pushed into being the js guy for the large chunks of the project over the last year , its kinda funny am the only guy who has the barest idea how some of the client facing stuff works
The new manager does seem to be a nice guy but he is like a politician, a master bullshitter who kept reassuring all is well and the company is fineeee (just ignore the redundancies as the fly past you)
The deal for thr aquisition seem to have sped up according to rumors
And we heard is a massive company buying us, hence things might pick up again and be better than ever
Any ideas how to approach the 121 with him?
Any advice career wise?
Should i push for a raise ?
promotion to mid?
Leave to find a junior to mid level position?
Tought it out and wait for the take over or company crash while trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge ?
Sorry for the length of this post2 -
Junior angular dev, looking for some fun projects to throw on my github. I haven't done any coding for my public github since I started working full time, so it looks like I'm MIA! Want to show off my newly gained skills :)
Anything html/css/boostrap/js/jquery/angular/jasmine/karma/node I'm down for, or if you've got any fun projects related to web development (backend, DB, etc) that's an unfamiliar language I'd probably take a shot at that too!
I built a portfolio before and deployed it to digital ocean and assigned it to my own google purchased .com, but that's the most "impressive" thing I've done so far.1 -
@all, picture the scene, your employer hired a Dev into an equal level role to you, he was running his own company, handed off to his father and brother. You now hear your employer is purchasing 40% in said company to outsource 'certain' projects too (off shore developers). You don't really rate this developers skills AND the work so far from this outsourced group has been sub par. How does this make you feel? What issues do you perceive? Am i right to feel concerned?5
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Often the dymnamics of Dev teams are like high school cheer leading teams. You need Kevlar for your back. Some teams are toxic. Plan your escape if you are in that situation now. Change the game by learning marketable skills and move on. The market is less tight right now so make your move.
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So the project I have been working on for the past 5 months was finally released yesterday with only very minor problems, this stemmed from both programming side, and users entering data incorrectly.
It has been a rather hectic 5 months. I've had to deal with crap like:
- clients not knowing their own products
- a project manager that didn't document anything (or at least everything into a Google Slides document)
- me writing both requirements AND specifications (I'm a dev, not a PM)
- developers not following said specifications (then having to rewrite all their work)
But the worst thing I think would be the lack of vision from everyone. Everyone sees it as a "project" that should be get it over and done with rather a product that has great potential.
So with the project winding down, and only very few things left to fix/implement. Over these 5 months I learned a lot about domain driven design, Laravel's core, AWS, and just how terrible people are at their jobs. I imagine if I worked with people who gave a damn, or who actually had skills, I probably wouldn't have had such a difficult project.
Right now I'm less stressed but now feel rather exhausted from it all. What kind of things do you to help with the exhaustion and/or slow down of pace?1 -
Currently a front end dev but I want to move to back end development eventually. Any ideas on the best ways to improve my c# skills or places with the best tutorials?1
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Which one of these job types is the easiest to get into(interview and HR-wise, not professionally)?
- Full Stack Developer
- Android Developer
- Backend Developer
- Devops Engineer
I'm a security/sysadmin who wants to move to dev and have some skills and experience in each of them. Do you think they will take that into account?5 -
I started coding after getting into college and was overwhelmed with so many people around me who were already pretty good at it. Slowly I started learning things on my own, getting few internships to apply those skills and built few small projects. Managed to get a dev full time job, spent the last few months learning Spring MVC and Spring Boot. When I now look back, I definitely feel I've walked few miles, although there's still a lot to learn. I once doubted whether I can be any good in the dev world as my peers were bagging good jobs/internships but now it certainly feels that I can move ahead in this path which I liked so much. Yes, programming is stressful and painful sometimes. The learning curve is steep but if this is what excites you, go for it! Spend few months training yourself and then applying what you have learnt. Just, never give up! You can do wonders!
Oops, was I supposed to rant here? That is of course necessary. You can't imagine a dev life without rants but let that be for another post. -
I was doing android apps for a year and a half, but then during the pandemic my hobby gaming projects blew up and I had to quit my fulltime job and focus on them. Spent last year working for myself. I managed to save enough money and got a mortgage for my apartment. Now I feel accomplished what I wanted and Im tired of working alone on my own projects. Its sad doing all these mental gymnastics and not having anyone else to share the results with.
I'm considering getting back into part/full-time position. Main reason is the social aspect, as well as stability. I'm tired of stress, too much responsibility. I want a better work/life balance. Also I think I need a position where they would allow at least 2 days a week working from home.
How to recondition myself and first of all to motivate myself to get back into the rat race? I haven't done android app development in a year and a half, I'm rusty af. I'm a junior at best right now. Also in the past year I got fat and I'm too conscious about my beer belly lol. Thinking of loosing weight and sharpening my app dev skills first, only then applying.
Can anybody advice anything?1 -
Digging tunnels with spoons
So I am a junior full stack dev in biggest e-shop in our region and they have a bad reputation among devs. I knew it, but no one hired me except them because of my lack of experience and skills. But for heaven’s sake - they issue 15 euro keyboard, 8 euro mouse and piece of crap Lenovo v330(i7 but I hate that it’s made of styrofoam). Tell me - am I too spoiled or is is really a disgrace to give someone a cheapest tools available?25 -
I starting developing my skills to a pro level from 1 year and half from now. My skillset is focused on Backend Development + Data Science(Specially Deep Learning), some sort of Machine Learning Engineer. I fill my github with personal projects the last 5 months, and im currently working on a very exciting project that involves all of my skills, its about Developing and deploy a Deep Learning Model for Image Deblurring.
I started to look for work two months to now. I applied to dozens of jobs at startups, no response. I changed my strategy a bit, focusing on early stage startups that dont have infinite money for pay all that senior devs, nothing, not even that startups wish to have me in their teams. I even applied to 2 or 3 and claim to do the job for little payment, arguing im not going for money but experience, nothing. I never got a reply back, not an interview, the few that reach back(like 3, from 3 or 4 dozen of startups), was just for say their are not interested on me.
This is frustrating, what i do on my days is just push forward my personal projects without rest. I will be broke in a few months from now if i dont get a job, im still young, i have 21 years, but i dont have economic support from parents anymore(they are already broke). Truly dont know what to do. Currently my brother is helping me with the money, but he will broke in few months as i say.
The worst of all this case is that i feel capable of get things done, i have skills and i trust in myself. This is not about me having doubts about my skills, but about startups that dont care, they are not interested in me, and the other worst thing is that my profile is in high demand, at least on startups, they always seek for backend devs with Machine Learning knowledge. Im nothing for them, i only want to land that first job, but seems to be impossible.
For add to this situation, im from south america, Venezuela, and im only able to get a remote job, because in my country basically has no Tech Industry, just Agencies everywhere underpaying devs, that as extent, dont care about my profile too!!! this is ridiculous, not even that almost dead Agencies that contract devs for very little payment in my country are interested in me! As extra, my economic situation dont allows me to reallocate, i simple cant afford that. planning to do it, but after land some job for a few months. Anyways coronavirus seems to finally set remote work as the default, maybe this is not a huge factor right now.
I try to find job as freelancer, i check the freelancer sites(Freelancer, Guru and so on) every week more or less, but at least from what i see, there is no Backend-Only gigs for Python Devs, They always ask for Fullstack developers, and Machine Learning gigs i dont even mention them.
Maybe im missing something obvious, but feel incredible that someone that has skills is not capable of land even a freelancer job. Maybe im blind, or maybe im asking too much(I feel the latter is not the case). Or maybe im overestimating my self? i think around that time to time, but is not possible, i have knowledge of Rest/GraphQL APIs Development using frameworks like Flask or DJango(But i like Flask more than DJango, i feel awesome with its microframework approach). Familiarized with containerization and Docker. I can mention knowledge about SQL and DBs(PostgreSQL), ORMs(SQLAlchemy), Open Auth, CI/CD, Unit Testing, Git, Soft DevOps Skills, Design Patterns like MVC or MTV, Serverless Environments, Deep Learning Solutions, end to end: Data Gathering, Preprocessing, Data Analysis, Model Architecture Design, Training and Finetunning. Im familiarized with SotA techniques widely used now days, GANs, Transformers, Residual Networks, U-Nets, Sequence Data, Image Data or high Dimensional Data, Data Augmentation, Regularization, Dropout, All kind of loss functions and Non Linear functions. My toolset is based around Python, with Tensorflow as the main framework, supported by other libraries like pandas, numpy and other Data Science oriented utils.
I know lot of stuff, is not that enough for get a Junior Level underpaid job? truly dont get it, what is required for get a job? not even enough for get an interview?
I have some dev friends and everyone seems to be able to land jobs, why im not landing even an interview?
I will keep pushing my Dev career, is that or starve to death. But i will love to read your suggestions! how i can approach this?
i will leave here my relevant social presence:
https://linkedin.com/in/...
https://github.com/ElPapi42
Thanks in advance!9 -
Suddenly, I find myself in a crossroad situation. I have been offered a position which would align perfectly with my career path aspirations (cloud solutions architect) with double the pay to my current salary. If only those were the only variables in this equation, taking the offer would be a no-brainer. Alas, it is never that simple (unless all you care about are pay and career path, of course)…
So, let’s break it down to pros and cons of jumping ship, shall we?
Pros:
- double pay compared to current salary
- aligns with my career aspiration
- part of a team of cloud solutions architects (mentorship opportunities)
- varying projects (position is at a consultancy firm)
- shares of the company come with the position ($$$ if it grows)
- possibility to influence strategic decisions
- no more 2h+ commutes
Cons:
- it’s a consultancy startup (emphasis on both consultancy and startup)
- 100% wfh
- would mean losing my current team where we are well and truly glued together and have such great vibes (and I value this, very very highly - this really is the main con)
- would mean losing my current work environment, where we have a gym and sauna at the office etc all kinds of stuff that support my athletic lifestyle
- would mean I don’t have as many opportunities to visit my parents anymore (since they live close to my current office but not close to me)
- at my current position I have super interesting projects both ongoing and in the horizon for a long time to come
- would mean eating my words (see previous point, and the fact I’ve said to my TM ”I can see myself staying as long as this job offers me opportunities to keep learning skills that are meaningful to me”), and I value my integrity
- would mean leaving my colleagues in quite a hairy spot, effectively betraying them in my mind (when our lead dev jumped ship a few years ago, he left us in quite a limbo and hands full of shit we didn’t know what to do about… I don’t wish that situation for anyone)
So, to sum it up, my reasons to stay are more those of moral integrity and convenience, well as the will to see the wheels I got rolling to the end, whereas my reasons to go are more personal finances and career oriented. A difficult decision. What to do?14 -
Hey DevRant,
I know there is a range of devs here from novice to expert. So I wanted to get feedback on a platform I was building.
Essentially it's a web platform where Devs can authenticate with their Github profiles and all their repos (non-forked) and pulled to the website to quickly create a portfolio for the users. I currently have two templates users can switch between I plan on adding more if it begins to catch on.
Besides that users will be able to message and find each based on their skills to possibly connect with one another to work on projects together.
I have a lot of features I want to implement, but it wouldn't make sense to do those things now, I would have to wait for the user base to reach a certain milestone.
So I just wanted to share it and get everyone's feedback and possibly if you see value in it to share it with their own companions
Link: http://dev-chain.herokuapp.com -
My first dev job was as an intern. Hired for my skills in Java and C++, had to maintain a big legacy software in VB.NET. I felt kinda lost and disappointed ...
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Upgrading my tech skills.. Once again I feel my personal my personal dev environment and told are much more up-to-date than what I use at work.... Though the book Kim reading is on TDD and was written 3 years ago.
Maybe I should read another on in cloud services and ML... but don't have any motivation for these topics.
I need TDD for work because now we're emphasizing unit test coverage...
I usually only use manual functional tests to verify the final outputs as either the testing framework is broken (JS) or I don't have time to relearn the frameworks for the particular language...
Anyway got off topic... So questions after:
1. Do you ever feel your technologically always more ahead than what you do at work and essentially you bring skills to the job but you don't learn much out of it?
2. How do you test? I actually got into a bit of a argument/discussion with my colleagues about how to implement unit tests. Apparently there are 2 ways to test? Black box vs WhiteBox. She said she tests only Public methods using mock inputs, dependencies. She read online and seems there is an opinion that should only test public functions and if you can't then your app is designed incorrectly, not separated enough.
For me I test the private functions individually (WhiteBox/Java reflection) because the public one is like generateReport and as a whole is like a Pachinko machine, too many unique paths that would need a test case for.
So thoughts? Yes sorry for turning it into a remake I guess...24 -
Firstly give me the skill equivalent to the best in the field. If the rules allow it all of these skills listed and if not any of these :-
1. Computer networking to the point of having the same knowledge as the best in the field. Why? I am curious about that stuff and being able to work as a network engineer if I don't get a good Dev job
2. Cyber security. Why? I enjoy it and being able to make sure my code is not easily exploitable is a cherry on top. Also having a backup job in case I don't get a good dev job
3. Being able to communicate with non dev people about developer or non developer stuff easily and being a really good leader.
4. Being a good developer in whatever language I use and instantly being able to learn new programming languages and frameworks or libraries with ultra in depth information. -
I am feeling a lot doubtful right now.
I am an average undergrad student who has been dedicating efforts in java/Android for most of my college life.
As of now i have decent command over java , launched 2 simple apps on playstore, worked as an android dev intern in 3 companies and make decent medium complexity apps. I will say i am 40-60% down the path of an expert native Android dev.
However apart from Android, am dumb as a stick. I know shit about ai,ml, web dev, js , react, hybrid stuff, and am not very good with competitive programming and system topics ( os, Algorithms, networking, etc)
So this closes a lot of doors for me. I can't apply to some top tier companies as they would either want expert competitive skills or expert Android dev skills.
I had bad experiences with startups which are usually willing take rejected students like me for the post of a droid dev... there is usually low packages , high pressure, and treatment like a slave
So i am very unsure what to do next. I have tried to learn web dev/ ai-ml-data sciences. They are not very interesting to me, but again, what is interest really :/
What should be my focus now?
A) I could be learning competitive and other interview related topics so that i could crack interviews of top companies , and later try to get a position of android developer there.
B) i could focus on become better in Android and start learning things that i don't know like rx, kotlin, etc. I could then hope to crack interview of medium sized app dev companies which would mainly focus on my android knowledge in their interviews
C) i could increase my skill set and learn web dev or ai/ml topics to increase my recruiter pool. It would be like option B, but i will have more medium sized companies willing to take me.
Currently i am in a shit storm. I am about to go into a mass recruiter company in which i have heard would be doing more or less data entry work2 -
I want to know what you do to improve yourself. Hard skills and soft skills.
And because I think it's important to always try to get better, do you have tips to be a better lead dev? -
!dev
Currently, cause holiday camp for the children
Probably a good idea to collect some social skills there, as that's nothing that is required or learned with my dev job -
Worst:
Working on a C# project that took ages (to the point it burnt me out) not long after dealing with a relatively simple static site project that ended up incomplete because one of the team members couldn't be arsed in providing the info needed.
Best:
Working on a project where I get to put my UI/UX, software architecture and fullstack dev skills to the test on a problem I have may benefit others, as I started a new job that pays well. -
Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.
So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.
2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.
So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?
Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)
3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?
4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot9 -
if your dev skills are blockd ny stack overflow & want to let us know. please know that this status is overwhelmedly posted here. thanks
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i wanted some advice on career progression. I am a CS graduate from 2020, have been a decent mobile dev for last 3 years and switched 2 companies so far. i currently have an average ctc (considering i reside in the world's most populated country) as a junior dev.
i want to grow but don't know the next steps. here are my options:
1. stay in the same company . role growth: senior in 2 years , more senior in 4 years . comp growth : avg 10% every year
>> this feels okay-ish path but 10% growth seems very less
2. switch every x years . role growth : unpredictable. comp growth min 30-50%
>> this has been my approach. as i grow bore of a company, i switch . the first time i got a 200% hike, but at that time, i was already earning very less. however companies do not usually take you for a senior role unles you were a senior before, so i think i am losing something here
3. do a masters in tech . comp growth : ? role growth :0
>> this is an unknown territory for me. i haven't heard of anyone bragging about how they did a masters in some tech field and got a better job/position. most people prefer masters in business or do a masters in tech only if they had a poor bachelors degree
4. do a masters in business. comp growth ? role growth?
>> another unknown territory for me. i really wanna consider a managerial position, just because i want to be leading the action , but that's probably because of being a beta guy in all my life and not just the tech/work.
1. managers have a great comp but they also get fired more often than techies. how do you become a good manager/vp/director etc?
2. what are your goals, how do you improve/work upon the goals as a manager?
3. how do you grow as a manager?
honestly i put a lot of tasks and capabilities into one category : the skills of a manager. but i think there might be different roles for such categories. let me know which one is which and if they are worth going into:
1. an x is a person that researches on market trends, other companies, amtheir audience etc and come up with new ideas to implement and improve growth/business of the company
2. an x is a person that makes sure that devs , qa, designers etc are aligned , knows what to do , clears their doubts and ensure the proper functioni5 of the team and timely releases of new features.
3. an x is an ambitious and curious person who can think of new , original ideas.
4. an x is a person with all knowledge of product features.
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in all above statements, is x== junior manager? then what are senior manager, vp, directors, president, tech lead, qa,etc?
also how can one start to become x?6 -
!rant
How much does a freelance front-end web dev (entry level) charge per hour (average market rate)?
Skills: HTML,CSS, JS,Jquery
Experience: At least 1 or 1.5 years
I've googled and the results that came up are those before 2015/2016.
Thanks in advance.5 -
So I'm the only tester at my company, and I've had to adapt a lot of my skills to fit in with our in house expectations. So everything was fine when I focused on trying one component (manual and automation).
Slowly over time I've had more components to test with exact same resource of me.
Eventually my automatic breaks as I could no longer maintain that and all the other manual tests and all the other jobs I do ( light level internal it support, jira ticket rangerling, rollbar (error messages) basic investigation).
My boss keeps saying why is x,y,z not tested / missed while I can point to time periods where was focused on v instead so didn't get to others.
I keep wanting to just hit them with a keyboard until they realise 10± devs to one qa in our environment just isn't going to work.
I keep getting promised some dev time to help with qa so I can play catch up but never seems to arrive.
Don't get me wrong I'm not the best I used to be at testing(before joining I was proud of my abilities, maybe all stick and not enough carrot wears you down)
We keep taking on new work flows that make no sense (create a bug ticket, then a task ticket if bug take more than hour to do, then I'm stuck chasing developers to update their task ticket so I cam update the bug ticket (if its a bug then log sodding log time against it).
I've gotten to point now where I'm stopping my suggestions, explaining why something didn't get dome and will see if they can answer their own stupid questions
At what point do you stop ignoring the voices in your head (metaphorically).
Do other people go through this cycle where feel like pushing a boulder up the hill, for them to either push your boulder down the hill, replace it with a bigger boulder, move to a bigger hill, get you to move more rocks at once or all the above.
I know QA has its quite and busy phases but for me it seems to be constantly busy with no respite4
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