So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

When pandemic hit in 2020 I found myself out of work. Until then I used to have a java based pirate gameserver of a MMORPG as a hobby.

When pandemic hit I noticed that online players count increased from like 70 to 200 without much advertising because purely of people being stuck in home. So i decided to scale and spent 2 years with that. What a wild ride it was.

So i invested a bit in ads, managed to reach around 500 online players, opened my own company and launched a couple other successful spinoffs of that gameserver.

First year it was a goldmine but I was doing 10-14 hour days because I had to take care of everything (web, advertising, payment integrations, player support and also developing the server itself, ddos protections and etc.). I made quite a bit of money, saved for a downpayment for mortgage and got an apartment.

Second year I noticed that there was a lot of competition and online players count dropped, but I double downed on this and invested a lot into the product itself and spent most of the time developing a perfect gameserver that would be the big bang while also maintaining existing ones. Clasic overengineering mistake. As you can guess, I crashed and burned on all levels, never even managed to launch my final project because simply the scope was too big and I had trouble finding decent devs to outsource it to, since it was a very niche gameserver.

In the end I learned a lot especially about my own limits and ownership, now Im back to being a dev but working as a contractor.

I believe having actual business owner experience allows me to have different perspective and I can bring more to the table rather than focusing on crunching tasks.

If I spend 50% of my time in meetings, 30% of my time doing things for support/helpdesk which I'm not allowed to automate, 10% as a technical consult and 10% helping other devs... am I even a developer anymore?

First rant: but I'm so triggered and everyone needs a break from all the EU and PC rants.

It's time to defend JavaScript. That's right, the best frikin language in the universe.

Features:
incredible async code (await/async)
universal support on almost everything connected to the internet
runs on almost all platforms including natively
dynamically interpreted but also internally compiled (like Perl)
gave birth to JSON (you're welcome ppl who remember that the X in AJAX stood for XML)

All these people ranting about JS don't understand that JS isn't frikin magic. It does what it needs to do well.

If you're using it for compute-heavy machine learning, or to maintain a 100k LOC project without Typescript, then why'd you shoot yourself in the foot?

As a proud JS developer I gotta scroll through all these posts gushing over the other languages. Why does nobody rant about using Python for bitcoin mining or Erlang to create a media player?

Cuz if you use the wrong tool for the right job, it's of course gonna blow up in your face.

For example, there was a post claiming JS developers were "scared" of multithreading and only stick in their comfort zone. Like WTF when NodeJS came out everything was multithreaded. It took some brave developers to step out of the comfort zone to embrace the event loop.

For a web app, things like PHP and Node should only be doing light transforms between the database information and HTML anyways. You get one thread to handle the server because you're keeping other threads open to interface with databases and the filesystem. The Nexus.js dev ranting on all us JS devs and doesn't realize that nobody's actual web server is CPU bound because of writing HTML bodies, thats why we only use 1 thread. We use other worker threads to do the heavy lifting (yes there is a C++ bridge look it up)

Anyways TL;DR plz respect JS developers we're people too. ES7 is magic and please don't shit on ES3 or we'll start shitting on the Python 2-3 conversion (need to maintain an outdated binary just cuz people leave out ()'s in their print statements)

Or at least agree that VB.NET is an abomination and insult to the beauty that is TI-84 BASIC

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).

Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.

At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).

My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.

Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).

All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.

But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.

After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.

That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.

Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.

Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Ok going to rant about other developers this time.

Can you please stop doing just the minimal amount of work on your games/apps?!

I understand you may not have the time to go through with a fine tooth comb but just delay it, delay it and finish the product to a state that doesn't feel half assed and broken right at the get go.

A small note that the thing that triggered me with this is Android Devs at the moment, with Google requiring you support the adaptive icons and a newer SDK, so many Devs are just scraping by and putting in no effort to bring things up to date (also put more effort into adaptive icons rather than just putting your old square Icon on a white background)

This shit is just leading to everything being 'early access' or in a constant 'beta' stage with the promise of polish later.

Don't be that guy, put the extra few days of polish in... Just please...

Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447

pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.

when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)

one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.

i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"

jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"

seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???

it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.

JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.

Product Manager: We’re assigning you to the Guest Checkout project.

I look at the Guest Checkout epic in JIRA and see it only includes frontend scope. Nothing about backend implementation.

I also find an older ticket about guest checkout. It was written by the former Product Manager. It explicitly says our admin switch for guest checkout no longer works because rebuilt checkout to use react. Why does no one bother to check the backlog??? I found this just by searching “guest checkout.”

Me: Um, our website doesn’t support guest checkout.

PM: What?! But the admin has a guest checkout option that can be turned on and off.

Me: Those admin options only apply if you’re still using the out-of-the-box solution for the e-commerce platform. Remember how we rebuilt checkout using React? We didn’t build it to support guest checkout. That admin switch doesn’t work anymore. We can ask a backend dev to confirm.

I check the code. The code that relates to the admin switch for guest checkout no longer exists. It’s a dead switch.

BE Dev: We made a lot of customizations since we purchased the e-commerce solution. So yeah, that guest checkout switch doesn’t work.

PM: [to me] …Our BE devs are busy with other projects. Can you do the backend for guest checkout?

😳

Me: You realize I’m just a frontend dev with only some backend knowledge, right? I’m not even close to fullstack. And you want me to architect an entire guest checkout flow? That will work with our current checkout experience? And that is HIPPA compliant? On top of doing the frontend?

So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.

A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.

But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.

He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).

So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.

That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.

As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.

Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...

I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.

Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.

Several years ago I joined the company I currently work for, as a software support person, with the intention of eventually moving toward the development team.

After a few years doing that, I gradually realised that working in the development team for our products didn't seem that appealing after all, so I went for a more technical support role (essentially debugging all the really complicated problems and reporting the bugs to the devs) which I find fascinating - trying to solve these puzzles is an interesting challenge. It can take days, sometimes weeks to get to the bottom of something really inexplicably weird.

As part of this I get to do some internal dev work on the teams projects (nothing that gets used directly by external users though) and have learned loads of things from my boss over the years (even before I joined this team).

It has its frustrating moments of course but I am definitely glad I didn't follow my original intentions of just being a developer on our main products.

Sometimes what you think you want isn't actually what's ideal for you :)

Joined a startup which does webscraping. I never knew that webscraping can be so much monotonous. I feel like I am doing a damn support job. Apart from that websites keep blocking the scrapers, and that is another thing to be fixed. jesus christ, non devs keep asking for ETA about how long would it take to complete a certain task. Thanks to remote work, I have been burnt out every day, and have been working for 14+ hours everyday!!!!! God help me!

var _self = Object.create(Rant);

Hello devs I'm back

A few months ago I joined a software development company and I was pretty specific that I wasn't going to do support or maintenance only feature development, well, this past 3 months I've been doing dev helping stablish good practices and a better architecture for the app, but guess who is joining a support team tomorrow, they sold me the idea of a refactor team, I was trilled and accepted, now they tell me it's a legacy bug fixing team, damn I hate this crap, hope y'all doing better

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

I work for a big bank. I'm going to say pretty much the entire Support team is incompetent.

Oh something went wrong? Escalate to devs... cuz we have no idea wtf to do and don't have the most basic technical problem solving skills...

Bunch of useless monkeys... btw guess what time it is now? And what I'm doing?

I am really stressed rn. I have terrible Imposter's Syndrome coupled with this being my 2nd year as a professional (bootcamp grad) and an extreme lack of insight and support from my company. WFH has only exacerbated it. Im on a 2-ish person team handling some ancient legacy code with no one ever willing to just throw me a fucking bone. My supe is actually on my team and makes up the "ish" part and has always told me to ask questions but when I do he gets pissed and reminds me of all the people who are working and super busy and dont have time to stop what they're doing and help me. Its my first job in tech and I just need to know if this is a consistent thing across the board bc im ready to fucking jump ship. My anxiety levels are through the roof and when I go over our backlog I look at every card and ask myself how tf Im going to grt it done bc Ive never seen any of it before. Initially I thought i landed a great workplace with complete autonomy but now I just dont know. My other teammate has a habit of being condescending, whether he realizes it or not and therefore I just feel like im out here alone trying to figure all this shit out. This sprung from a card ive been working on for 2+ months but cant resolve, finally I just came to the conclusion it was above what im currently capable of and he told me he's "disappointed Im just throwing in the towel" even though ive asked for help from senior devs. Idk what to do, he even told me there'd be cards I may hit a wall on when I first started but this just feels shitty. Ive had other things going on to including surviving a fucking hurricane, having a friend murdered, and having my dad die all within a few weeks time. I am absolutely stretched to my emotional limit, but I dont know if Im overreacting. Anyway, I just needed to vent to people who could understand, thanks for reading.

There's this online game I like to play, basically you can play against 2 or 3 other people / robots. It's been free to play for almost a decade, but recently they decided to limit how many games you can play each day, unless you buy membership. It's not much, about 2€ per month, so I bought it to support the devs, they're doing good work and they're not spamming players with ads, so they need to get money for those servers somewhere.

But now I kinda regret it; there used to be a whole lot of casual players online all the time, now casual players reach their daily limit and when I log on in the evening, there are almost exclusively paying members left, giving you absolute shit for the tiniest mistakes.

On a completely unrelated note, what casual / relaxing multiplayer games would you recommend that don't require too much thinking & long-term skills?

actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)

So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.

I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.

A little background on project fubar:

Project fubar was started a couple of years ago, by an entirely different set of devs, against an entirely different set of requirements which were never made transparent to this day, on a new platform and framework.

That means it had APIs either outdated or deprecated, front-end logic that did things it wasn't supposed to be doing and lots of scope creep and technical debt.

I had to support and fix fubar for the last few months to prime it for UAT. It was the equivalent of plugging leaks which created more leaks.

Finally, I couldn't take it and asked for a week off. I timed it so it would be right after what would have been the final UAT deployment and I'd be back after they completed their test rounds, so I could fix any new or returning defects.

Today I just found out that fubar got put on hold, that UAT was a failure and all fubar-related work had to stop. I have some mixed feelings on this: I worked hard to get fubar working as business wanted, and I was proud of that. But I also didn't like that fubar was constantly changing in scope and function.

I wonder if anyone else has ever felt the same thing?

So i started an (8 month) internship in January. Team of 4 (2 senior/mid level devs + boss) plus 6 or so other people in our other office overseas. Everything was going really well IMHO. Boss's feedback for halfway through the internship was good too.

First 4/5 months were great: loved the team, got feedback and help when i needed it, wasn't stuck doing support too much, etc.

This all changed when both the devs moved to our other office. My boss works from home a lot and has frequent meetings, so i hardly see him. I have a 1 hour window first thing in the morning if i need help from the devs overseas. After that im on my own.

If i get stuck, even on something very small that a more senior dev could explain in 2 minutes, I'm stuck either unable to work or figuring it out (wasting hours of time) for the rest of the day.

On top of this, since I'm the only one around in our office, im stuck on support every week which takes hours of my time usually. Last week support ate up most of my week, which put me way behind schedule on my other work. (That was an unusually busy week of support.)

Feeling incredibly frustrated right now, just wanted to get this off my chest.

For me it was not do much a choice.

I started out using basic and simple text display (graphics existed but was quite difficult).

For a long time I was the sole or part of a pair of devs so specializing was not possible and once we grew to such a size I already was quite proficient in all areas from hardware to customer support and education.

But from that time onto today I have gravitated towards a more backend role mainly because I lack a good sense or visual design.

I know it something looks good, but doing it my self results in more boring or plain designs where more thought goes into UX than nice looking design.

That said, if we do web applications I can still keep up since it usually is more ux heavy ;)

But when it comes to adding background images, nice color sets and such I gladly defer that to colleagues with a better design sense.

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

Spent 2 hours today doing L1 support work!!! God i hate working with lazy people!!!

2 hours wasted checking for an application bug on all deployed client pcs when the only issue is the printer has no fucking paper!!!

L1 and L2 support exists for these kind of issues!! Do your god damn jobs!!!

Don't you just love it when there is no formal spec. you get a few mspaint slides and told a delivery date, scope and slides are changed by management weekly, not necessarily informing you of it. Then when your failing, deadlines pass you by you still have no clear spec 2 weeks before release, partial backend because core business devs are busy doing support on the legacy systems. No frontend cause it's been changed, redesigned and you've been forced to change frameworks and technology so many times due to corporate policy and legacy systems with another dev group holding your balls with what they allow you to do and use. Id complain but at least we've been told to be agile. This is my life now, we lost all hope and stopped caring. And management wonders why the deadlines and estimates are all off.

My previous employer was an e-commerce company. Most of our customers had use it or lose it funds that had to be spent by December 31 each year. So every year, the devs had to stay online until midnight on New Year’s Eve just in case there was a website issue. I didn’t witness any issue during my time there, or at least I was never contacted for support when I was on NYE duty.

They compensated by giving an extra PTO day for future use. Pre 2020, they’d allow us to leave work two hours early on NYE since the office was in NYC and getting home would be a nightmare. But you’d have to work from home to work the NYE support.

It was “optional”, but we know as a dev it’s not really optional unless you have a life and death reason not to. My first few weeks working there, my grandma had passed away. The funeral was NYE weekend so I was excused from doing the NYE support my first year because I was on bereavement leave.

The last two weeks of December were considered blackout dates for PTO, so everyone (including non devs) was not allowed to take any vacation time during those two weeks. Some people might have a problem with that if they’re into holiday celebrations and family and friend get togethers. They did observe Christmas, so that was the only day off most folks got during those two weeks. Though, the period from Thanksgiving through the end of December was stressful.

The word "shift" in reference to a workday should NEVER be used in a dev environment. There is noservice that needs to constantly be maintained, thats what customer support is for. A shift gives the mentality that you have a set time that you are responsible for a service.

Devs are responsible for finishing a product on a deadline; that is not a shift, that is a fucking workday. I especially hate it when managers refer to them as shifts, because it shows just how little they understand what the devs are doing. They think of bug fixes like they think of flipping burgers; a task that performs a service. It's not a service, stop acting like it is.

I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.

I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)

I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:

1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company

2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)

3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth

4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.

5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.

6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.

7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .

8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.

My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?

we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.

So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?

then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?

if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.

For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.

same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS

for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .

an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".

edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"

but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product

The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad

I'm seeking opinions and thoughts on my predicament.

I have 2ish paths before me.
Next year I resume my studies in Science Communication and Computer Science in particiliar a bachelor of science, I have considered then doing master in managent or computer science.

1) I am able to have a income of about 800 AUD a fortnight (this is to support me during study without requiring work) plus extra from a part time job whilst I study for about 2 years. Throughout this time I would like to skill up in a variety of fields as immensley as possible.

2) I can accept a full time junior web developer job while I study, this job is with a great government research organisation which as a first FT job looks great on a resume, it is is project based work where I get given a project and code and pretty much complete it. The job is flexible, I can mostly work where-ever I want, at home, at a cafe, travelling. With maybe a meeting once a week. The pay is about 65kAUD a year.

Both options are very attractive options with each containing there own pros and cons. With the extra money I could learn more or use it to grow a business or do more.

However without the FT job I could still earn about 1-1.5k a fortnight for alot less time.

I am still discovering what to do in life, I'm very good at public speaking and would like to experience and learn more about lots of different things. My current knowledge is very broad from engineering to CS, graphic design, authoring, trade skills, Digitial design and more.

Ideally I would like to learn how to lead people, to make the world a better place and help people. Figuring out where my strengths lay and where to apply them is difficult as I am fascinated by so many things.

I worry about taking the FT job as it might detract from my studies and lead me to pursueing mostly only web development work as well as take up time that might be better spent on extra study or in a leadership position in a uni club.

The PT job is a IT Systems Technician in the Australian Defence Force.

Which is a interesting experience within itself, different from civilian life and also I would be learning about systems that I might have less experience with.

I have such broad interests in alot of fields that I don't seem to be focussed on select things or areas like other devs I've met, Science Communication is a versitile field, one of my professors expertise is on doctor who and it's role in science engagement, she has written books on it. Others are in public policy or directed podcasts or even made games. Despite my broad interests computer science was always a gield I did well in.

Any thoughts, opinions or questions are welcome.
I have a blog/portfolio I put my work and projects up if it helps people know more about me, you can find it at curiosityplace.wordpress.com

Short : I'm in a situation where I fucking hate to go to office everyday because the business team thinks I'm their bitch

Long : Exactly one year ago I joined this small company, few months ago all the senior devs started working on revamping the old shitty ERP they have into new one.They put me in charge of taking care the support for a project we work before.Now fucking asshole from the BA team sit on my shoulder every day and forcing me to do anything he thinks he want.Right now I'm doing a data migration from massive excel files from client. It's in a shitty format I asked help from senior devs they said it's impossible to import this shit.But my asshole team lead also support that BA fucker.

I can't sleep everyday normally because of stress.My notice period (relieving period) is 3 months.I just feel like every end of day I wanna kill all those motherfuckers

Fucking shitty agencies promoting their marketing solutions. Oh, you can make a shitty WordPress landing page with SEO plugin and launch some ads, just for 500€? Fuck you, and fuck you for not telling your customers how little support you provide, how shitty devs you employ, and how little work you actually do. And royally fuck you for telling customers how everyone else is too expensive for doing a proper job, only to have them come crying for help after your bullshit gets hacked and all your marketing solutions get flagged for spam.

Org is doing a major conversion to containerized solutions and modern technology. Most of which I can wholly support, only 1 catch. everything will need to be ported to Java. we are a mixed shop of largely PHP and Javascript devs with only a handful of devs who actively use Java regularly, this change throws away tons of previously built battle tested code in order to swap to putting all new code on an all new platform. I thought the point of containers was to be able to isolate and run whatever you want within the container and have it highly portable...

The entire AppSync/Amplify SDK for android is a shitfest. The support engineers don't know what the devs are doing, and the devs don't give 2 shits. It shouldn't take 10 fucking hours to configure an existing API and Auth to work with an app and then run into issues with the code that the fucking SDK generates. Fucking buffoons