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TL;DR: Teacher wants to invest in my company 😲
So, just this morning as I headed to class (still in school, 17 years old, from Germany) someone tapped me from behind - a female teacher whom I've only seen a few times (She is a really nice and friendly teacher who teaches economics)
She asked me: Aren't you the young businessman? I've seen your interview, fantastic! (Background info: I recently founded my second firm (Webdevelopment, Design and Marketing) and was quite often in the media (local newspaper, television, radio))
Quite unsure, I responded: "yeah, right".
Promptly she asked: "Is there some way I can invest in your company? Perhaps in stocks?" (Of course we can't offer stocks, we're just a small local company lol)
Me: "There always is a way I guess?" (I was extremely grateful but didn't know how to respond)
Her: "Great! Would you mind sending me an email with your contact info?"
What the fuck just happened. 😂15 -
Today I discovered that we have a CSV export button for an order transaction system, on a page which is completely disconnected from the rest of the website.
It is only being called by an internal server, used by our Data department.
They run selenium to click the button.
Then they import the CSV into a database.
That database is accessed by an admin panel.
That admin panel has an excel export button.
Which is clicked by our CFO. But he got bored of clicking, so he uses IFTTT to schedule a download of the XLS and import it in Google Sheets.
That sheet uses a Salesforce data connector.
Marketing then sends email campaigns based on that Salesforce data...
😒11 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.
Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.
The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.
Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.
At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.
Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)
After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)
We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.
Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.
Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.
For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."
Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.
A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.
Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).10 -
Time for a rant!.
Got a client I've just built a website for and they went live 2 weeks ago.
This morning he sends me an email saying that the website is not good enough because it's not making any sales or getting any traffic.
I send an email back asking if he has a marketing / SEO company... The response was I thought you do that as you said the site would be SEO friendly!!!.
I'm a developer! Not a marketer, fuck off.2 -
I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:
http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y
then:
http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh
Twat Client,
As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.
As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.
After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.
It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.
{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},
I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.
I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.
Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.
As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.
He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.
I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.
Reply from ClientClient:
Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.
Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:
I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.
Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?
Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.
Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?
... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!
My email follow up:
http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV
I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.14 -
Got a marketing email talking about the "No Code" revolution. They're talking to the wrong girl here.
12 -
I received an email from marketing manager requested me to extract all the emails from the all the application and compile it into a CSV and make sure that CSV doesn't have duplicate email's. She wants to send newsletter to all those email's which we don't have permission for.
I permanently deleted that email.3 -
MARKETING FUUUUUCCCKSSSS!!!
The fact that I publish a contact email address on my GitHub profile for email about my fucking GitHub doesn't justify sending me unsolicited shit!! I get that you want your product out there, I get that you don't want to pay for.. you know, regular fucking advertisements, just like everyone else, because your product is entitled to special treatment, right?!
Let me tell you something, Yaren Sahin. Just like with Clark from InVision and the Chinese motherfuckers with their injection moulds from earlier, this is a clear reminder for me to avoid your unethical business like the plague! Fucking piece of shit!!
(better quality screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ZL3ebFZ.png)
Which by the way I'm actually legally allowed to upload, because this email was unsolicited. You know, because unlike those marketing people I happen to know the laws a bit.
4 -
I created an Android app for a client. An intern at his company who is responsible for content updates sent me this email:
Hi,
I'm including a photo of an Android displaying the app on screen, in our latest marketing email.
Will the Android's screen in the photo update itself if I update the content of the actual app?
Best,
Intern
*facepalm*7 -
After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.10 -
This happens when your feedback is too important.
'I’m sorry I didn’t read your marketing email within 2 minutes of getting it. Please forgive me."
2 -
The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.
reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.
facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.
and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.
in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."
newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.
while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."
Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.
I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.
And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.
..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".
an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.
if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.
it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.
And so enters "political idealogy."
How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?
give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.10 -
Every day I feel like Dr. Leonard McCoy.
"I'm an automation expert, not a ..."
* DBA
* ElasticSearch administrator
* Kafka Architect
* Email marketing specialist
* SEO Analyst
* Front end developer
* Doctor
* Project manager
* Accountant8 -
Um.. yea I've published a GDPR contact email on our website, for issues about our privacy policy. Not sure if you Chinese marketing fucks behind the GFW know what this regulation is about though. I'm not interested in your stupid moulds.
Perhaps that firewall of China could use some further tightening... 😒
4 -
CompanyYouNeverHeardOf sends you IrrelevantNewsletter512... so you hunt for the unsubscribe link, which you find buried in the boilerplate crap at the bottom of the mail, rendered in #eee on a #fff background, in 4-point type, and click that. End up on a web site that asks you like 8 times if you're sure you want to leave and please, reconsider, we're nice folk really, blah blah blah. And then you get *another* email from them saying they received your unsubscribe request, and *then* yet another to confirm that yes, you unsubscribed, and please feel free to re-sub anytime (as if!)
GOD I HATE MARKETEERS!!!1one10 -
My fellow coworker dev just sent a staging site link to our CFO to review some new functionality...
CFO clicks on our corporate HQ link in coworker's email signature instead and berates coworker for sending him the wrong link...
This person is somewhat largely in charge of making decisions that affect our digital marketing, website budgets, and strategy.
I can't make this shit up.6 -
I love it when unethical companies' marketing chaps assume that I care about their SMS garbage more than I get pissed off by it. Damart, I didn't even know about your existence or what the hell you do as a business (selling woman clothes apparently.. am I a woman?!) until you shoved your ad crap into my face, and Unigro I really don't have a pending contract with you so kindly fuck off with your reminders (that are in French but am I a Walloon? No!).
Makes me wonder though, with email I usually just give everyone a different email address to deflect spam - since I can reroute email to any particular address straight to /dev/null on the server if so desired. With SMS and SIM cards that isn't really possible.. hence why I'm always so hesitant about sharing my phone number. In email the addresses are scraped off the internet.. but phone numbers? How do such shitcompanies even obtain those?! Their level of pushiness and unethical behavior boggles my mind.8 -
Never write your email adress on a building. And it you do, don't use web.de (basically German and more shitty version of yahoo). Spoted in a fancy business district in central Berlin.
7 -
Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
So... I’m sitting here doing pretty much nothing, just reading through some rants when all of a sudden I get a wave of emails.
Pinterest!
We noticed a login from a new device or location and want to make sure it’s you.
Device: Firefox, Windows 8
Where: New Jersey, United States (Approximate)
OhhhhhKay then... so there’s a couple of problems with this, 1 I didn’t even know I had a Pinterest account, 2 I don’t have Pinterest in my password manager either.
So I follow the link and fair enough it’s actually pintest, so I attempt to login, to no avail, oh maybe it’s a social login..., ok let’s try google, nope that wasn’t it, deletes account, logins with Facebook, oh here we go, checks logins, 1 random jersey player, deletes account, swaps to Facebook, changes password (this fucker was already 100+ characters) and adds 2FA and contains no new logins 🤔
Ok... so what the fuck, either someone managed to get through a long ass password or something phishy is going on, the email for FB logins is seldomly used (maybe a handful of services at best) as I have another for all the junk and spam bullshit I expect from today’s “marketing”1 -
Wow, I just realized the marketing teams of most of the companies I have been dealing with are some cold sociopaths.
Every other letter that pops in the mailbox is filled with dark patterns trying to guilt me into opting in to their continued spam:
Subject: Most awesome husky puppy!
Look at this beautiful husky puppy. Isn't it beautiful.... It would be sad if something happened to it... But I am afraid... Something will happen to it...
If you don't opt in to our email message... I am afraid we have no choice... We have to kill this puppy. End it's life... We have no choice. I wish we did! Nothing would please us more than keeping this beautiful-beautiful puppy living and playing....
But if you don't opt in... We have to cut it's throat. Leave it lying on the ground, bleeding out as the life slowly fades away from it's pretty blue eyes...
And Remember: it's not us who killed it... IT WAS YOU! YOUR ACTIONS LEAD TO THE DEATH OF THIS PUPPY! YOU.... YOU FILTHY MURDERER!
Pls opt-in ok, then we are all good. Puppy lives! Just opt in. Ok? Yeah, you know what you have to do.3 -
If I uncheck your, by default checked, checkbox to recieve your marketing bullshit emails on your website.
Don't fucking send me an additional email asking me to subscribe.
Fucking cunts!1 -
Ever fuckinn "townhall meeting" at previous workplace. It was such an utter waste of time that even after leaving that place I still rage when thinking about it.
Every 4-6 months they would setup this useless crap of a meeting that drags on for over 1-1.5 hours of execs talking themselves up and trying to convince how great they are. And since they were cheapskates they would send out an email asking everyone to not join from their desks but congregate in the conference rooms to save on the dial-in. The conference rooms didn't have adequate chairs, vantilation or good enough aircon to handle twice/thrice the capacity of people standing in the room.
The marketing exec would go on and on about how great the media visibility is, how many views/likes they had on a linkedin post last month. The sales exec would blabber on about how their team is great and that the customers themselves are lining up and there is no competitor. Straight after the CFO would lecture on how the year is still difficult financially (in disguise justifying the peanuts of pay). The last exec, no matter who that is would specifically raise a point that the previous speakers didn't mention his/her team while thanking others.
This is also not a small company, the total headcount was just over 900 and roughly 500-700 people would be attending these townhalls. Imagine the amount of man hours wasted on that shitshow.6 -
So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.
My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.
You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.
Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.
I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.
I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.
The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊7 -
Marketing sends an average of 3 newsletter per week all year round, and 4-5 per week on Christmas.
Mailchimp makes this so damn easy for them...
We have ~500.000 subscribed customers.
They discovered the new chrome push notifications API and I 'refused' to build anything for it because I already find the amount of email they send unacceptable and I am pretty sure they would abuse of it.
I'm already imagining like 10 push messages a day...
Am I wrong? What would you do?7 -
Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".
We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.
It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]
It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.
It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.
And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.
What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.
Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.
1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.5 -
Kinda all other devs translate incompetent with a lack of knowledge
i would go with not able to recognize his lack of knowledge
Story 1:
once we had a developer, whom was given the task to try out a REST/Json API using Java
after a week he presented his solution,
2 Classes with actual code and a micro-framework for parsing and generating JSON
so i asked him, why he didn't use a framework like jackson or gson, while this presentation he felt pretty offended by this question
a couple of weeks later i met him and he was full of thanks for me, because i showed him, that there are frameworks like that, and even said sorry for feeling offended
- no incompentence here -
Story 2:
once i had a lead dev, who was so self-confident, he refactored (for no reason but refactoring itself) half the app and commited without trying to compile/run test
but not only once, but on a regular basis
as you may imagine, he broke the application multiple times and blamed the other devs
- incompentence warning-
Story 3:
once i had a dev, which wanted to stay up with the latest versions of his libraries
npm update && commit without trying to compile/testing multiple times
- incompentence warning-
Story 4:
once i had a cto
* thought email-marketing is cutting edge
* removed test-systems completely to reduce costs
* liked wordpress
* sets vm to sleep without letting anyone know
- i guess incompetent alert -2 -
me vs marketing guy, again
me: yeah, the database server is not responding, so you cannot log in to post your blog, wait for it to get online.
MG: But, the website is online.
me: web host and database server are two distinct things, they are not the same, *share a screenshot of the error*
MG: Oh okay.
Literally 3 hours later this fucking idiot sends an email and I quote.
"Hi Dev,
@CTO FYI, Someone has removed this code So there is some tracking issue on it.
Please add below google analytics code on the website.
Note: Copy and paste this code as the first item into the <HEAD> of every web page that you want to track. If you already have a Global Site Tag on your page, simply add the config line from the snippet below to your existing Global Site Tag.
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://googletagmanager.com/gtag/..."></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1');
</script>
"
The fucking issue was of him not being able to post his shitty blog, and he shares an email like this, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!2 -
An online shop ... something like Amazon Shopping for South East Asia keeps on sending me their newsletter even though I have already unsubscribed. I wish they'd hire me to take care of their email service.
Although I doubt this is a bug and perhaps one of a schemes of the marketing department and they are already aware of this. Sneaky corporate bastards.
5 -
When scammers want to follow GDPR regulations - the worst SCAM ever 🤦♂️
Long story:
I have just received a SMS message, informing me that my phone number is in several marketing databases. It also had a link to the website called stop-sms.pl, where you're supposed to be able to unsubscribe from those lists. At this moment I felt a little bit confused - the SMS seemed suspicious, but on the other hand who doesn't want to get rid of all this SMS crap. So I carefully followed the link to see the website with a form to fill with personal data - phone number included 😆 If that is not enough to realize that this is just a lame scam website, just below the input where you enter the phone number there are Terms and Conditions where it directly states that: "By filling the form you agree that your personal data (name, email, phone number) will be used for marketing purposes." - WTF?!
Who the f... gets fooled by such crap?! 😂😂😂2 -
Oh boy, this is gonna be good:
TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck
So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:
The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.
So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!
This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.
I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.
Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!
Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...
The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.
But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.
So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)
So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"
So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones6 -
Hello fellas! 👋
I recently told you that I’m planning to pull out Chaaat – a fully open source messenger that doesn’t track you and doesn’t share your data: https://devrant.com/rants/1549251/....
The project is also mentioned here: https://devrant.com/rants/1570178/...
So, I’m here to tell you good news – a great developer, @not-a-muggle, decided to join me, and now we made a team!
I also made some conversations and acquired “chaaat” name from another team on Heroku, so now we have consistent domain name on both Heroku and GitHub Pages.
We have Trello board with very well described tasks almost anyone can do. We also have Slack to have both business and free conversations.
If you’re seeking a place to contribute and gain some NodeJS / React / PWA / WebRTC experience with detailed code review from experienced developer, just mention me here or shoot me an email on hello@miloslav.website. Provide your email so I’ll be able to contact you.
Our main goals are:
1. Have fun and some experience
2. Make it to Chrome Experiments mention
Marketing/advertising help is much appreciated.
Feel free to email me anytime!8 -
How to make those marketing staff of x service stop sending you an email when they don't have unsubscribe link:
1. Reply back asking about the free tier/plan
2. Profit!
2 days and no word from them after spamming me daily about the service3 -
Hmm I have created marketing application. and when it goes live the client comes with approxx.. 10M mails to be sent at once :( Everything worked smoother But client does not have patience to wait.. So he went to the boss.. boss told us heyy you process email one by one .. instead create batch of emails and then sent.. my whole application flow has been changed.,.....
Its like am on 0 to start again
crying in corner ... :(10 -
I finally get the go ahead to push an update to a client site into production. Client then sends out marketing email about changes later that afternoon. The next day the client decides they are not ready to start fulfilling orders from one of the new products I added. Now I have to rush a change to remove the product links from the site.2
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Brave Browser.
There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.
Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:
Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”
If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.
But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:
“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”
Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.
In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.
Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.
I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.
There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.
In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.
Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.15 -
How our MIS/IT department handles problems...
Once upon a time a long time ago, a C level suit opened ransomware from an email with a link in it via Dropbox.
Two years in, even the marketing department, who are all using iMacs for digital media creation, inbound marketing, and website development, and alsohave more common sense than the lowly Excel minions, are still blocked from using Dropbox.
Thank god for Socks5 Proxying and an SSH tunnel to our web server. ;) I can has all the things.
1 -
Listen, i really understand you want to know how much a certain resource is downloaded/viewed and so on. But what gets on my nerves is to sign up my email address every fucking time i want to see your semi-tech-but-actually-selling-you-a-pile-of-sperm-fermented-shit whitepaper . yes i know there is something called disposable email adresses and such... But if stuff is 'free' as you say you have, then make it available free!
Every time i think 'hey, this is actually relevant to my interests, let me read up more on that...' i hit the fucking 'insert your email for a free download'
Fuck off! Put your fucking form in the pits of hell and seal it in a fucking fucking dome next to fucking research subject akira with 99 fucking layers of fucking nuclear blast proof wall domes! I dont want you to fucking send me your fucking spam mails about every ideafart your sales dept has fired becausz they were high on computer cleaner spray tubes and thought 'let's trick those stupid people into our marketing scheme', go and fucking jump into a barrel of highly concentrated radioactive waste!
The only thing you manage to do for me like that is to fucking close the tab i had a slight interest in and never look back again!
Am i the only one getting angry about this?2 -
You may not like GDPR but it will change one important thing - american companies will stop email spam. Srsly, in Europe you always had to check box that you want marketing spam. USA companies always worked in opt-out mode, which is soooo annoying1
-
Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.
Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.
Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.
I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.
Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.9 -
What is it with non-technical managers, especially those in sales, thinking that the solution to all problems is to "just pick up the phone and ring them?" This was *always* his opinion, whether the web service we were using wasn't accepting a valid request (apparently this was best "explained over the phone", I kid you not - have you ever tried speaking JSON?!) or whether we just needed a simple request going in to increase the API limit. I mean I could send an email or log a ticket in a few minutes tops, but you want me to spend 2 hours on hold to a support department only to be told "ah we don't take those requests over the phone, here's the URL, log a ticket."
Then it's always a case of "I don't understand why they're like that, all the guys I speak to are happy to help on the phone". Yeah, beacuse you're in sales & marketing you muppet. Blathering on to each other so you can stroke the egos of yourselves and your companies is kinda in the job description.
Grr. This was all a while ago, but I thought of it just now and the pure concept just annoyed me, so here it is. I really hope he's not doing the same thing to guys under him now (but let's be honest, he probably is.)7 -
Worst disturbance: me, with an ANC headset, listening to some music or documentary.
Then a burst of laughing coming through all this sound engineering – the VP marketing, discussing by phone with some 1K-followers "influencer".
Yeah, the same VP that says that she needs silence to focus on the email she's writing when the intern ask her some important question. -
Marketing material for a RasPi-based device that, supposedly, secures all your traffic from hackers by (translated) "encrypting traffic to your router" and "sharding and dispersing your data, so nobody can read it".
Stay tuned to see what it actually does (waiting for an email reply from it's creator)
6 -
So, I just recieved a welcome email from bit.ac, with my email and a random generated password. The fact is that, I have never registered on this website. Did someone just registered with my email? Or maybe it's a new marketing strategy, to collect emails from another databases and send them emails, "reminding" them their email and a random generated password, so that who recieve the email, to be confused and to access the website to see what is all about,resulting that the company gets more traffic & eventually new possible customers?
7 -
Why do these e-marketing companies always have some kind of manager/consultant/strategist/marketeer/whatever to handle emails between me and their devs. Instead of emailing with another technical person and quickly fixing the problem I end up sending one billion emails to someone who has no clue on what needs to be done to fix te problem. From now on my emails contains a part called "to your developer:" explaining the technical part of the email.
And no - I don't want to plan a conference call... just let me code dammit! -
Sooo as of January of this year, I have a new boss, this dude basically acted as my “mentor” for the last year so he’s already tried micromanaging me but bc he wasn’t my boss, I could push back.
Long story short, he is now my manager, he’s the global marketing leader and I’m the marketing director for the Americas (been doing this role for two years) yet he treats me like I’m an idiot, in his words he wants to make sure I’m in control of my team before he lets me lead fully while simultaneously telling me that I need to step up and lead.
I politely asked him to let me lead and stop attending all my team meetings, stop delegating tasks to my team directly and instead consult w me so then I can delegate, and basically to respect the fact that clearly I’ve been successfully doing the job for the last two years.
He said no, that he won’t leave my meetings until he feels I have full control of my team, continues to over involve himself in all my projects, pulling my team in a bunch of directions w new projects and ideas left and right, and burning us all out.
To add insult to injury, he sent me a very “helpful” email detailing how I need to work better and faster and how he expects me and my team at full speed, my team is made up of me, two new hires that are a month old, my marketing manager, and I’m currently hiring for another team member. (This after he led a company restructure of my previous team that resulted in me losing 4 team members in December so I’m rebuilding my team).
I’m already overwhelmed and demotivated, pretty sure he wants me to quit and he has a proven history of bullying his staff, he was actually fired from our parent company for this exact reason a few years ago, he also happens to be European so not sure how rules work over there, but he was rehired by my company. My European colleagues hate him too, but they’re too scared to speak up.
I used to love my job and now i dread it, I drink every day after work and I get anxiety everytime he emails me which is at all hours if the day. Is it worth it documenting his bullshit for HR or should I just cut my losses snd leave?
Appreciate the advice!3 -
So I get this email from google for my development account about these new general data protection regulations and what they're doing with admob and all that good stuff.
I didn't dive too deep and there's nothing crazy in it but it definitely feels like it's spawned on by this "selling you data to advertisers thing."
We live in such a weird society where it's like outrage after outrage. I've never known anybody who has NOT known that their statistics and data was sold to third party for marketing for EVERYTHING they do on the computer or phone. For a DECADE or longer. It always seemed to be such a second hand thought but now out of nowhere everyone has their panties in a wad for something they ALREADY knew.
Are we like that miserable/bored/no hobbies/unsatisfied with our first world life that we have to just flip out about dumb crap all the time? -
So, because some apple user burned down the great snek application i had to do business with browser stack and boy, what an email spam i got from those fuckers. I hope they really read their input. Idiots. Same as rocket chat, just suffering under their marketing department. Unethical beasts. Straight out, losers.
Besides that, impressive software, shouldn't need that much marketing.
10 -
Okta emailed me trying to sell their SSO gubbins.
I actually quite like the idea of being able to abstract away all the providers people might want to log in with, and making it someone else's job to check whether those providers are trustworthy.
But the email is copied to every permutation of my name/surname/initials etc @mydomain.com.
They had no legitimate way to obtain my email address for marketing purposes, so they just guessed it.
And I'm supposed to believe no corners will be cut and no bodges applied in making sure the user is who he claims to be?3 -
Thanks google for creating the illusion of an option to change the shipping address for a repair order. You even mention the new address in your notification email, but when I click on UPS tracking, I can see that you sent the shipment to the old address, which is in a different city where I can't quickly go to pick up my repaired phone. After charging an extra 95,- Euros for additional damage supposedly not covered by my warranty. Lucky you that my old phone had connection problems with the shitty Vodafone station wi-fi router, which is one of the few reasons that I still even want to use a google hardware product. Thanks google for just being slightly less wretched and mediocre than your competitors, that might grant you some more years before you will be buried in history forever. Pixel phones are just like Macbooks: high quality product and good marketing, good enough to make your customer accept everything else being bullshit. Google search is even worse, but based on the same concept: just suck a little less than your competitors but don't waste any effort trying to actually be really good at anything.3
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!rant
I learned something new while trouble shooting an email template today.
There was a weird margin at the end of my template and I have no idea where it came from. I inspected elements and found a 1x1 image.
Turns out it's a tracking link being loaded as an image.
Now I get why they call it a tracking pixel. It's literally 1 pixel.9 -
don't you just hate, when this happens? translated from Slovak we call this "the system of the falling shit" you know this under "hot potato"
email:
from: marketing coworker
to: senior dev 1
* asks for a lot of stuff, deadline yesterday, high priority, on a site for which the jenkins build is crashing every once in a while, because we are migrating all the time so some folders are already deleted or not created yet and the build config is really strict *
forwarded from: senior dev 1
@senior dev 2
forwarded from: senior dev 2
@senior dev 3
forwarded from: senior dev 3
@junior me
ಠ_ಠ fuck me i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯1 -
Just received an email from a marketing company in the US stating that:
"Not liking cookies. Use Google analytics instead to track behavior."
And that "Cookies now losing popularity in the US".
rm -rf /2 -
100th email of the day with the same subject...revised from marketing. Just sort it out and send me the last one
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So I sign up for this fancy pants website were developers rant about shit. They ask me bunch of data mining personal questions upfront like a marketing bitch so I go through and fill out my profile. Ok it's a social site, whatever and nobody gives a fuck about me anyway. I hit save, continue and go to click the email that injects my lies into their database. But I figure I might go back and fix some of the lies I wrote about myself just in case Google craws it and somebody I meet in the future calls me liar. So I spend 10 minutes trying to navigate the whole website to find a way to get back there to edit the lies or even perhaps find some site help relating to profiles. Of course the profile page itself does not do this profile edit stuff and bugger me if there is no help at all on how to use this website. So I did the only thing I could and wrote this rant in the hope somebody knows how the fuck I cover my tracks on devrant.com4
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Do marketing teams are really so retarded to believe that if you spam your new customer's mailbox twice a day with "we missed you", "take a look at our new products" etc etc email/newsletter bullshit it will actually entice them to buy more stuff? Bro, it just makes everyone dislike you, makes you look desperate and it's just straight-up annoying. Unsubscribe and no longer bothered to buy anything from you.2
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(Asking for someone I’ve been mentoring.)
TLDR; Looking for recommended resources on how to code email templates from scratch.
I’ve been helping a friend transition their career from sales to web development and recently he applied for a position as a jr developer for an ecommerce startup. They liked him and they’re willing to create a new position for him where he’ll work with both the marketing department and the development team. He’ll start with building email templates for the marketing department and eventually move on to development as he grows his skills. I’d really appreciate it if I could get some recommended resources for learning how to code email templates from scratch and from PSDs. This would be a life changer for him and I’m trying to do as much as I can to help me out.4 -
Advise for the next email marketing slave robot.
padding works writing Padding (P).
No margin, no floats,... Etc.
Use Foundation email cli and even using it, be prepared for war.... :(2 -
TIL running a proper CRM and Customer Support channel is quite insanely expensive.
All the services charge per agent.
And if you add their other services like email marketing, the price just shoots up.
Had to pull a jugaad, and currently have it split between 3 different platforms - hubspot for customer support, sendinblue for email marketing and zoho for free custom domain email.2 -
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