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skype interview with chinese it vp,
vp: do u know cow-computing?
me: sorry what?
vp: cow computing
me: really can't hear you, did u mean actual Cow computing?
vp: i mean cow! you know like in the sky.
me: oohhhh, cloud computing.. (face turns red over embarrassment) -
Story from back then,
D: “We need mac sir”
M: “Is it neccessary?”
D: “well, the project requires us to build stuff for iOS, so...”
M: “let me ask IT Support”
S: “our company’s policy are to use windows machines for all our development needs, windows is better in the long run for developing various software for the current market, it’s future proof and have better performance than macs, macs are only usable to build smaller variety of software, so can you guys use windows laptop instead?”
M: “what he said”
D: “what??!”
M/S: “what?”
*eventually we got macs but jointly bought by the company and the client,
10 -
Had an interview this morning..
Interviewer - have you used github?
Me - yes
Intw - so, you have a profile on github?
Me - yes (** in mind, I don't think github will allow me without that **)
Intw - how many commits have you done?
Me - ** what kinda qust is this ** well,... Yeah... Umm.. A lot! 🙄
Intw - how much is a lot for you?
Me - umm... Well... A lot lot... So many... I mean a lot of... **Long pause** .... You see, I'm a commitment type of guy. ** Wtf did i just say?**
Intw - Whattt!! Then he laughed.
... and I used to think that my days of embarrassing interviews are over. I'm not going to that company doesn't matter what happens. Shitt 😐11 -
A long time ago on a project far far away, I didn't realize there was a src folder, and made my changes in the build folder instead... And to makes matters worse, I asked a co-worker -- an ex-Googler -- for help with the issue I was working on.
Rarely have I been more embarrassed.1 -
When you get so excited you burst out signing "🎶MY CODE IS ON FIRE🎶"(Alicia keys "this girl is on fire" reference) forgetting your in a room with your fellow developers.....
5 minutes later there still laughing4 -
My boss looks unbelievably similar to a character from the Simpsons.
We have a new guy start, he wants to show his wife how uncanny the resemblance is. So he sends her a picture of him... Except he sent it to our boss by accident, this was his first day on the Job.8 -
Really cool. Tesla gave two hackers that found a vulnerability in the Model 3 free cars as a reward. More companies should do that, instead of getting all pissy. I would hope a company wants to know what their vulnerabilities are so that they can avoid embarrassment and the loss of money.3
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Make sure that when developing software and using print outs to test output to not use swear words.
Last presentation when demoing to a customer I ended up on a white page saying: "Shit fuck!!!!!!" Embarrassment was an understatement... 😅1 -
Staring at cursed blinking cursors.
Repairing work of worst thinking workers
Reverse merges or it'll murder the servers, it nurtures despair
Amateur managers, dimwitted savages interrupt all of us janitors
Cleaning up damages, spills and experiments using skills in embarrassment
Explicit foulness, in a minute it's straight to the bowels with weapons of limitless vowels
A bittersweet hateful machete, eviscerates stateful spaghetti
The slow disease flowing from keys knowing it's going to please
The growing unease, no one agrees, there's no guarantees with your useless degrees
Need more drugs, keyboard's crawling with bugs, falling as I chug
A bottle of cognac gotta love all the hacks, no poise for code that lacks
All the noise, gotta relax, before I destroy the syntax.
Excuse me for not making sense.
Too gloomy, aching and tense.10 -
Store Person: Hey there, just these items?
Me: Yep
SP: *scans items* Are you a member of our members club?
Me: Nope
SP: Want to join?
Me: No thanks
SP: Okay because we have this offer currently that you'd only have to pay for 2 of those 3 items you have
Me: Cool but not this time
SP: Ok, well if you ever need more of these you should consider joining, all we need is just your email address
Me: Oh why didn't you say so
SP: Oh so you'll join?
Me: Yeah sure
SP: Okay so what's your name?
Me: You just said all you needed was my email address...
SP: Oh yeah, sorry but the system is asking for your name
Me: Well just leave it blank
SP: I can't... it's giving me this red line here, see *shows me the screen, at which point I see of course they want more than just my name and email*
Me: *pausing* first name "Tony" last name "Montana"
SP: Oh... like Scarface right?
Me: Yep
SP: Ok well... I'm really sorry it's now asking for a mobile number
Me: Yeah I saw we'd get to that, no worries, just give it 0123456789
SP: Ok wow that seems to be fine for the computer
Me: Well Tony Montana probably never had a cellphone did he?
SP: Hahaha tru! Ok so *now* I need your email address
Me: checkem@420blaze.it
SP: I'm sorry what?
Me: check em at 420 blaze dot it
SP: Ok so check *EM*? Like the letter "m" and "check" spelled how?
Me: Nah, like... can I just write it?
SP: Yeah sure *tilts the screen to me and awkardly hands the keyboard over the counter to me*
Me: *writes in the email and feeling smart, adds +companyname before the domain*
SP: Thanks, you'll get an email asking you to confirm you want to be a member
Me: Oh so do I need to confirm the email before I get the discount?
SP: Nope but you should confirm if you want to be a member
Me: *whilst paying* Right, right by the way they pay you extra for each person you sign up right?
SP: Oh no, they don't but it doesn't usually take this long and most people say no anyway
Me: Right that's a shame, I mean I just wouldn't bother to ask people if I didn't get paid extra to do that
Store Person: *chuckling a bit* Oh so what's your job then?
Me: I'm a programmer
SP: Oh so they also pay a programmer for signing up to stuff?
Me: What? No of course not, I'm not being paid for this
SP: Oh so that only makes one of us then, I mean I'm still getting paid right now to just stand here because this is technically working
Me: *forced smile*
Me: *never visits that store again out of sheer embarrassment*
To add further insult to injury their newsletter also had a broken unsubscribe link, didn't need confirmation for them to begin sending you regular spam emails and the address before the company email domain was always some randomly generated string. I resorted to blocking all wildcard instances of the addresses (*@storename.com) But about 2 months later more "Tony Montana check out these hot deals!" styled emails from different services started trickling in with the +companyname included eg. (someotherservice+storename@someotherservice.com). It was clear they'd sold/shared my address to other services so I resorted to deleting the entire email address instead of being constantly reminded what a dumbass I was. Moments after deleting I realised that the filter (*+companyname@*) probably would have rid me of all past, present and future spam...5 -
Still trying to get over my embarrassing noob moment.
In my very first crash course lecture on Python at uni, we were told about having to import modules in order to do fun mathsy stuff in Python, the most important one being numpy.
I typed in the infamous 'from numpy import *', but I got an error - I'd fallen at the first hurdle. Frustrated at this point, I called the lecturer over and asked why it wasn't working.
"You've typed in 'numpty' rather than 'numpy'."
He started laughing uncontrollably whilst I died in embarrassment, and I'm pretty sure that to this day, whenever I pass him in the corridors, he literally sees me as THAT noob.
Still scarred.13 -
I love how positive and ambitious GitLab is despite having that recent embarrassment (and not to mention how quickly they got back on their feet).
Congratulations to both companies!
More here: http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/...
7 -
Idea was to make a little helper utility to be used once (only for myself, not client). But, I've kept adding layers of functionality over layers of functionality ... Long story short - this monstrosity (UI is bad, code not that much) was used for 10+ years (again, only by myself).
Finally, personal embarrassment was too big, so I took wooden stake and monster passed away. All related files deleted (but not before one final screenshot).
7 -
The 5 stages of project management:
1 - the Mission:
Receive a project
2 - the Vision:
Over confidence and optimistic time estimation. Tell people how quick you can finish it.
3 - the Climax:
Adding unnecessary features. Try to be innovative. Think different. Feeling like a Rockstar.
4 - the Bargain:
Does not aware deadline is not far away. Reverse all unnecessary or impractical moomshot features. A bit stressed
5 - the Embarrassment:
Unpredicted obstacles or incidents. Late delivery or fail. Feel like a loser.1 -
*2 days ago in a meeting*
Boss: "We need you to develop this, this .... *adds 10 tasks in Trello*
*1 day ago. less than 24 hours*
Boss: "So , what's new regarding the tasks?"
ME (angry): "You just gave me all those tasks less than 24 hours ago. What kind of news do you expect?"
*Boss leaving to his desk, laughing from embarrassment.*4 -
!dev && rant
There's one thing that you really shouldn't say to someone who's in crutches, no matter how much your reflexes tell you to. "Are you okay?"
Especially when they're going somewhere, and you can't or don't want to help them do so.
Imagine for a second, you yourself are in crutches and have been limping on one leg for a couple 100 meters to go to where you have to, shopping for food so you don't starve. And then, after those couple hundreds of meters, of course that leg that's been doing double duty for that whole period and took unusually big impacts from jumping up and down onto the ground compared to just walking, you can imagine that it is screaming in agony.
Now imagine someone who comes your way, makes the leg that more than anything wants to sit down somewhere and rest, pause the act of going the way to the beloved place to sit and rest and instead make it take even longer, that person asks you "are you okay?"
OF COURSE I'M OKAY, THAT'S WHY I'M IN FUCKING CRUTCHES!! OF COURSE I'M OKAY, GREAT OBSERVATION SHERLOCK!!!
It's like saying to someone who's so introvert that they haven't opened their mouth even once at a party - likely there because their friends forced them to - "gee, you are silent, aren't you?"
Yes I'm silent, yes I'm introvert!! Why do you point that out? If anything, pretend that I'm not here to begin with!!! Stating that only makes for embarrassment!
Or going back to the leg thing.. this ground my gears more than anything. Every few dozen meters I went and rested on my crutches for a bit, and every hundred or so meters I sat down at whatever I could sit on. And people fucking look judgmentally at you for that apparently. "Look at this guy in crutches, he's sitting down!"
Yeah mate, try limping on one leg for a couple hundred meters and I'll run after you with a whip, looking at you judgmentally every time you even want to *think* about sitting down to rest. Let's see how that goes?
Or rather you fucking judgmental twat, I bet you fat fucking cunt can't even run on 2 legs for a couple hundred meters straight. But let's judge others who are doing such a running exercise for every step they take for wanting to sit and rest, shall we?
No wonder that there's mass shootings every now and then. Such people can make anyone feel fucking murderous!!!4 -
Set out to copy the iOS alarm on android because a) android's stock alarm is fugly and b) all other sleep reminder apps either offer me way too much or no functionality.
Week 1: "Oh, custom UIs need a lot of math... Ok."
Week 2 "Why on earth is my ram usage at 400 mb?!"
Week 6: "I have come to the realisation that android's ByteArrayDecoder should burn in hell.
Week 7: "Man... They sure made the management of intents and pending intents a pain."
Week 10: There. It works. Two classes, 7000 lines of code.... Hmmmm maybe apply MVP."
Week 11: I discovered embarrassment driven development, throw away all my code and start from scratch.
Week 12: Oh ButterKnife, where have you been all my life?
Week 17: I might actually finish this in my life time!
Week 28: Man, this MVP and managing Context, intents, SQLITE DB and pending intents do not mix well.
Week 46: I discover RxJava and Dagger 2
Week 47: I discover that the 'V' in MVP does not refer to an 'Activity'
Week 48: My StudyBudy says to me "Man, exams are only a month away!"
Week 49: I put all your code in my github, delete it locally and focus back on being a student.2 -
The story of how I got my dream job.
I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.
--A few weeks pass--
It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!
I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)
The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.
--D-day--
I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!
Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.
We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.
I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.
--Two days later--
I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.
--A few months later--
I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.
I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).3 -
So this just happened,
Me and my co-worker (we are junior developers) were working on the same bug, it was a post call throwing a server exception.
We had asked for help to debug this issue from a senior developer the day before, he was quite busy with his own tasks.
He is one those kinds who would keep working even if the entire bay is wasting their time, always keeping to himself, needless to say I haven't seen him smile.
Back to my story, he couldn't spare time yesterday so we tried to squash the bug ourselves thinking he might have forgotten we had called him.He then comes out of nowhere, he firsr checks the button bindings, params sent and the call being made.
He then went through the backend code strategically placing the break points, clicks and debugs a few times and then opens the console. BAM!!!!
" D' hell yo !!" Shows up in the console, not just once but multiple times. Turns out I forgot the logger I had placed in the catch block.
He turns to me in super slo-mo looks me in the eye and whispers "what the hell yo!" and kept quite for some time, meanwhile the sense of cringe was slowly creeping on me. That was when he let out a loud blurt and the entire cabin turned to us. Needless to say it was awkward.
His smile was creepy though :/ -
Seriously!? You don't fucking delete or change code because you don't understand it and push it to production, it's the way it is because of reasons you airhead can't comprehend ... ffs the fucker could have asked me and saved us trouble and embarrassment.
Fuck.7 -
Oh the embarrassment you get when you demo something then have countless typos! "dicker" instead of "docker", "pubic" instead of "public". What an icebreaker 😌3
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Yet another day at work:
My job is to write test libraries for web services and test others code. Yes I know to code, and have a niche in software testing.
Sometimes developers (whose code I find bugs in) get so defensive and scream in emails and meetings if I point out an issue in their code.
Today, when I pointed a bug in his repo, a developer questioned me in an email asking if I even understood his code, and as a tester I shouldn’t look at his code and only blackbox test it.
I wish I can educate the defensive developer that sometimes, it’s okay to make mistakes and be corrected. That’s how we deliver services that doesn’t suck in production.10 -
Developing a notification API, sends emails to subscribers, email API can take only 100 IDs at once, so partitioned the email list and send mails in blocks of 100.
Forgot to reset the list after every block, so each new partition got appended to the existing list and kept going on.
Ran it against a test DB, which was recently refreshed with near-prod data !!! Thousands of emails went out of the app server in one shot and everybody receiving numerous duplicate emails. Especially the ones in the very first partition.
Got an incident raised by the CEO himself reg the flurry of emails. But, things were out of our hands, quite literally. All emails are queued up in the exchange server.
Called up the exchange server team, purged the queued emails. No other emails were sent/received during this whole episode.
Thanks to Iterables.partition in the present day.3 -
The reason for half the web-dev world sufferings is that Microsoft won't stop choking their users with explorer or edge, and half of the client are too dumb or lazy to download a different browser to test stuff. Fuck this shit man! Nothing works the way it should on this bitch.
Everytime my manager says- It should work perfectly on IE because client doesn't have any other browser, I curse IE for exisiting. If you can't improve it, just remove it you freakin' sadists. It'll not be an embarrassment to load something better on your OS. If anything, it'll get people to like you maybe. Like you for accepting your fuckery and making a decision in favor of the web dev world and innocent windows users, who only use your explorer to download other browser asap. For just that one time and for all your arrogance, you're making the whole world suffer.3 -
I've been programming professionally for a year and it went without any embarrassing experience, even without thinking about preventing any embarrassment ._.
Am I boring?5 -
My biggest dev epiphany was also my dumbest one. We were working on a payment system for a roadside rescue company where an employee would register payments "in the field".
The challenge was automating input with typeahead and autocompletes in order to lessen the workload as manual input had to be an absolute minimum; this will be used by truck drivers/mechanics as they are trying to hurry to the next customer who has been waiting for 3 hours longer than we said we'd take.
We managed to make the invoice path first (customer has not paid, employee logs personalia needed for billing), but when it came to "paid on site" we almost upended the entire system trying to find a way to fetch user personalia outside of the invoice path.
Neither of us realized it during the days we were banging our heads against it. Realizing we don't need to make an invoice for a job that has been paid for was equal parts relief and utter embarrassment.
Probably my greatest lesson in how important it is to pull my head out of the code once in a while, and to ask myself what I'm trying to do and why. -
I guess talking to a duck helps after all although my duck was actually writing an email to business explaining an issue I am having in a requested change.
Right before I hit send, I go... Ah I get it now!
That saved me from some embarrassment :) -
Wrote a new feature for our flagship product in C. Worked perfectly, no issues. I was told to wait before submitting to SVN.
Because my company is a little cheap in engineering, they took my Green Hills license for another dev to use. I wasn't using it, and now can't compile.
Then, a month later, I was asked to submit my feature to the repo, they needed it in done version, do I did. Still not able to recompile to see if other changes broke anything...
As you probably guessed, no one's code complied after pulling from the repo! Big embarrassment. Weeks later I was told that it wasn't my fault in the end... I don't remember how my code impacted it, but man, it was a bad day for this dev.
Never again!1 -
#define someError ( -1)
int func(params *param)
{
//some code
if(condition)
{
someError ;
}
}
Spent like half and hour on debugger thinking why the fuck does it skip my statement. My manager who was passing by saw me puzzled and asked if he could help, so we spent another 10 minutes without success(tho my manager is technical guy but he had an unlucky moment I guess). Eventually senior manager saw our wtf faces and asked what is going on, it took one question for me to light the bulb "someError is a macro right?"
I guess you can imagine my embarrassment at that moment..
PS: Forgot return keyword before the error code. -
I spent most of my morning trying to fix something. My big breakthrough was when I realized Google didn't have the answer and I was on my own (working on something not in my expertise at all). Within 30 minutes of that it was fixed and I was left with the frustration my morning was gone, embarrassment it took so long, relief it was over, and self empowerment I'd done it on my own.
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!dev
There is no greater embarrassment for me as a german then the Deutsche Bahn. There is no greater accumulation of incompetence than this bundle of dillitants.8 -
The confusion, regret and self loathing I feel looking through old code is only comparable to how I feel seeing pictures of a gangly, 15 year old me on Facebook.
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