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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) -
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
I accidentally sent my password to slack channel!!
I have deleted it and changed my password of course, but it still doesn't make the embarrassment go away. Especially because my password is something ridiculous like :
Materialisticbitch88$$$
Some people have already seen it!!
RIP my reputation.
:/18 -
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 😐10 -
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 laughing3 -
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 -
There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.
The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.
I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.
At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.
I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.
Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.
However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.1 -
Worst meeting. Hmm..
Embarrassment wise maybe the one where my boss called me the queen of porn in front of everyone. Yes, classy AF. (Just have to know him to know his sense of humor I guess).
Most cringe worthy meeting was probably when our out of state national director came in and basically told us he has no clue what we do nor does her care to learn. We brought up salaries to him as well as we're in the bottom 8th percentile for the industry in our area with HUMONGOUS work loads, like 20 sites per developer at once. This is a huge multi-million dollar corporation, mind you. We told him some of us have to have 3 jobs to survive and he basically said well you're an at will employee so there's the door. He also took phone calls and sent emails during my one on one meeting which we never finished even though he promised to. But he bought us a shirt, so you know, it's all cool. 🙄10 -
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 -
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.2
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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 -
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).
6 -
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 -
!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 -
*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 -
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 -
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 :/ -
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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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 -
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 -
(long post is long)
This one is for the .net folks. After evaluating the technology top to bottom and even reimplementing several examples I commonly use for smoke testing new technology, I'm just going to call it:
Blazor is the next Silverlight.
It's just beyond the pale in terms of being architecturally flawed, and yet they're rushing it out as hard as possible to coincide with the .Net 5 rebranding silo extravaganza. We are officially entering round 3 of "sacrifice .Net on the altar of enterprise comfort." Get excited.
Since we've arrived here, I can only assume the Asp.net Ajax fiasco is far enough in the past that a new generation of devs doesn't recall its inherent catastrophic weaknesses. The architecture was this:
1. Create a component as a "WebUserControl"
2. Any time a bound DOM operation occurs from user interaction, send a payload back to the server
3. The server runs the code to process the event; it spits back more HTML
Some client-side js then dutifully updates the UI by unceremoniously stuffing the markup into an element's innerHTML property like so much sausage.
If you understand that, you've adequately understood how Blazor works. There's some optimization like signalR WebSockets for update streaming (the first and only time most blazor devs will ever use WebSockets, I even see developers claiming that they're "using SignalR, Idserver4, gRPC, etc." because the template seeds it for them. The hubris.), but that's the gist. The astute viewer will have noticed a few things here, including the disconnect between repaints, inability to blend update operations and transitions, and the potential for absolutely obliterative, connection-volatile, abusive transactional logic flying back and forth to the server. It's the bring out your dead approach to seeing how much of your IT budget is dedicated to paying for bandwidth and CPU time.
Blazor goes a step further in the server-side render scenario and sends every DOM event it binds to the server for processing. These include millisecond-scale events like scroll, which, at least according to GitHub issues, devs are quickly realizing requires debouncing, though they aren't quite sure how to accomplish that. Since this immediately becomes an issue with tickets saying things like, "scroll event crater server, Ugg need help! You said Blazorclub good. Ugg believe, Ugg wants reparations!" the team chooses a great answer to many problems for the wrong reasons:
gRPC
For those who aren't familiar, gRPC has a substantial amount of compression primarily courtesy of a rather excellent binary format developed by Google. Who needs the Quickie Mart, or indeed a sound markup delivery and view strategy when you can compress the shit out of the payload and ignore the problem. (Shhh, I hear you back there, no spoilers. What will happen when even that compression ceases to cut it, indeed). One might look at all this inductive-reasoning-as-development and ask themselves, "butwai?!" The reason is that the server-side story is just a way to buy time to flesh out the even more fundamentally broken browser-side story. To explain that, we need a little perspective.
The relationship between Microsoft and it's enterprise customers is your typical mutually abusive co-dependent relationship. Microsoft goes through phases of tacit disinterest, where it virtually ignores them. And rightly so, the enterprise customers tend to be weaksauce, mono-platform, mono-language types who come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. They want to suckle on the teat of the vendor that enables them to get a plug and play experience for delivering their internal systems.
And that's fine. But it's also dull; it's the spouse that lets themselves go, it's the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme. Those aren't the people who keep your platform relevant and competitive. For Microsoft, that crowd has always been the exploratory end of the developer community: alt.net, and more recently, the dotnet core community (StackOverflow 2020's most loved platform, for the haters). Alt.net seeded every competitive advantage the dotnet ecosystem has, and dotnet core capitalized on. Like DI? You're welcome. Are you enjoying MVC? Your gratitude is understood. Cool serializers, gRPC/protobuff, 1st class APIs, metadata-driven clients, code generation, micro ORMs, etc., etc., et al. Dear enterpriseur, you are fucking welcome.
Anyways, b2blazor. So, the front end (Blazor WebAssembly) story begins with the average enterprise FOMO. When enterprises get FOMO, they start to Karen/Kevin super hard, slinging around money, privilege, premiere support tickets, etc. until Microsoft, the distracted boyfriend, eventually turns back and says, "sorry babe, wut was that?" You know, shit like managers unironically looking at cloud reps and demanding to know if "you can handle our load!" Meanwhile, any actual engineer hides under the table facepalming and trying not to die from embarrassment.36 -
A few years ago my boss held a brainstorming meeting to go over features for an internal reporting app. I brought up we should have related business news stories scroll on the page header like Fox business or something. He laughed and said sure. Two things happened after that.
1. Found out the marquee tag still works in chrome.
2. Yeah you bet I put that shit in there.
Anyways a meeting was held a few days after where my boss chewed me out for actually doing it. He showed the app to his boss and got laughed at by his leadership team when they saw news headlines scroll over analytics graphs.
After writing this I realize this is more his embarrassment than mine. Have a great Tuesday fam.7 -
Within our company someone put out a survey for software developers.
The one question was ”What question would you want to ask other software developers at our company?"
One of the responses was "Why am I such an embarrassment to programming?"
I feel like I need to tell this person about devrant.1 -
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.2 -
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 -
I hadn’t intended to sound like I was scolding this person, but it came out that way in a meeting that had a lot of crosstalk and not a lot of opportunities for me to get a word in edgewise. I was new-ish at the company and she happened to be a superior about 4 levels above me in the hierarchy. My boss, who was also in the meeting, asked me, obliquely, how I thought the meeting went. I understood the subtext as, “Dude, you really went off on her. Are you sure that was the right move?”
I was already as embarrassed as I was gonna be prior to his question but now I was in total embarrassment hell. I couldn’t even bring myself to backpedal retroactively and apologize. I was totally mortified.
As it turned out, she had respected my assertiveness. In another meeting a couple years later, as I was strongly advocating a process change for something she was involved in, she actually said, and sincerely, “I really appreciate it when you hold me accountable.”7 -
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 :) -
So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.
context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.
in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.
BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.
so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.
boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?
what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.
but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me3 -
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 -
the decisions we made before we knew better are pretty cringe, uegh
least all that embarrassment makes you remember them tho2 -
Seriously WTF TP-Link?
Bought an Archer T4E Wifi adapter card for my PC. This has got to be the worst piece of shit hardware ever sold.
I mean are you kidding me? This card has two TWO!! antennas sticking out of its back and won't maintain a connection to an access point that I have NO PROBLEM AT ALL connecting to with my fucking phone? And don't even try to connect to the 5G network with this embarrassment of a WIFI card.
Looking at the support forums and loads of people complain about the exact same thing without any reply from this shit company.
Seriously screw you TP-LINK I will never buy any hardware from you again.17 -
#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.
-
!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.6 -
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.
-
One of the people having less experience than me got promoted. I am happy for the developer and it was well deserved. He is hard working after all.
It makes me think about myself, I have worked, and now I am better but still I lack things in terms of being good developer. I understand I need more experience but my personal life and other things will be affected if I didn't get promoted in like 6 months, for that there is not chance on my current company, I have already lost stakeholder's trust and honestly I don't want to be promoted in this company, I really haven't touched anything else than the office work since I started working here.
I want freelance apart from my work. I am learning as a part of my work but the skills I am gaining are company based. Anyway if I get promoted here I'll be stuck here. I dread that.
Ah!!! I am just concerned about the embarrassment I have to face because of this. Although there is a great chance that no one will even think about it but my stupid brain wants to dwell on it.
Anyway, I need to switch the company and apply for mid level developer roles, need to prepare for the interviews now. -
This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
--------------------------
There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))
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