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The programmer and the interns part 3.
Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.
I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.
Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.
Without further delay,
Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.
Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.
Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.
Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.
Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.
Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.
Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.23 -
KISS, DRY, Path of Least Resistance, Three Strikes and You Refactor, early returns, no array.map when nothing is returned, only use switch when # cases >= 3.
And using var in javascript instead of let/const to piss off my colleagues (and because I understand function scope well)6 -
Co-worker is in his office.
Co-worker whistles continuously "The rains of Castamere" from the Game of Thrones series.
I like Game of Thrones.
I also like the series' score.
But not the way my co-worker interprets it.
Because it's wrong.
Anyway, he whistles.
Sometimes louder, sometimes less so.
It's very out of tune.
It's annoying.
I can't concentrate, let alone code.
Co-worker goes to a meeting.
Silence.
I delete the bullshit I've written earlier.
Then, I get some coding done.
Then, I'm relaxed again.
Then, Co-worker returns.
Now he hums.
It's the same song.
Over and over again.
Again.
It's not that much out of tune, but it's still annoying.
I can't think, I can't concentrate, let alone code.
My thoughts drift to a certain Red Wedding.
I imagine it in vivid detail.
Strangely, it's a happy place right now.
I imagine throwing my screen through two fucking walls.
I don't do it, because the laws of physics are against me.
But the thought is enough.
I'm at peace, again.
... also, I got to leave early today, so I got that going for me which is nice.
(I already had to tell that co-worker *not* to whistle loudly in the cafeteria - you can hear it in a big part of the building. We had some important customers over and Office Management was not amused.)6 -
Ok c++ professionals out there, I need your opinion on this:
I've only written c++ as a hobby and never in a professional capacity. That other day I noticed that we have a new c++ de developer at the office of which my first impression wasn't the greatest. He started off with complaining about having to help people out a lot (which is very odd as he was brought in to support one of our other developers who isn't as well versed in c++). This triggered me slightly and I decided to look into some of the PRs this guy was reviewing (to see what kind of stuff he had to support with and if it warranted his complaints).
It turns out it was the usual beginner mistakes of overusing raw pointers/deletes and things like not using various other STL containers. I noticed a couple of other issues in the PR that I thought should be addressed early in the projects life cycle, such as perhaps introduce a PCH as a lot of system header includes we're sprinkled everywhere to which our new c++ developer replies "what is pch?". I of course reply what it is and it's use, but I still get the impression that he's never heard of this concept. He also had opinions that we should always use shared_ptr as both return and argument types for any public api method that returns or takes a pointer. This is a real-time audio app, so I countered that with "maybe it's not always a good idea as it will introduce overhead due to the number of times certain methods are called and also might introduce ABI compability issues as its a public api.". Essentially my point was "let's be pragmatic and not religiously enforce certain things".
Does this sound alarming to any of you professional c++ developers or am I just being silly here?9 -
When the monthly scrum retrospective reaches the 90 minute mark...
You know when people are being stress tested and they break by getting up, run around screaming and ultimately knock themselves unconscious by running into a wall?
That. I felt like doing that.
I swear someone activates some sort of gravity well when these meetings begin because time beings to stretch on and o........n....... while they meetings happen.
I began to list things I think I'd rather be doing than be in that meeting.
1) Tax returns.
2) Prostate exam (not old enough to need one yet but at least I'd be out the meeting).
3) Visiting the dentist.
4) Assembling IKEA furniture.
5) Watching soccer at least they have the decency to give you a break in the middle and I find sports as engaging as a dog turd on the sidewalk.
So bored was I that I began to notice notches and holes in the ceiling tiles and when I remarked upon them others became engrossed in them and began to speculate upon their origins.
I don't know who a speaker is, what department they are from, what product they're working on or what's so important about the algorithm they're working on. There is no context, no explanation and half way through a show and tell I had to check we were still in a show and tell.
I was bored shitless. I actually felt physical pain from boredom, I've not felt that way since I was a child.
I really, really hate that scrum is implemented in this way.
It left me with only half an hour of coding time left and really it sapped my energy and motivation to the point where I just went home early.
Excuse my language, but:
Fucking bloody cunting waste of time, I've had more productive moments in the restroom. They need to piss off or committed seppuku, ideally both. Dante got it wrong the seventh level of hell is this. I'm usually a very calm and balanced individual but yesterday, yesterday I just... Fuck! Argh! Fuck you meeting, fuck you.
If you are the type that schedules meetings like this:
May a thousand Jabberwockies plague your nightmares and be it that the next seventy seven times you lay with a human shall ye experience bitter failure! I hope Cthulhu himself visits his "enlightenment" upon you and you fear sleep henceforth.
I'm bringing a rubix cube or juggling balls into the next meeting so that I can say at least I learned something and it wasn't time wasted.3 -
Would you guys get annoyed if someone(me) made a habit of going through your code and cleaned things up, such as clearer naming, untangling ifs with early returns and so on.
I mean doing stuff that doesn't change the behavior, but makes it easier for the next person.9 -
I've gone from a "no early returns" guy to a "return as early as possible to maintain the happy path indented as much to the left as possible" guy.
Looks so much neater now.
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