Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

Fuck my life sometimes.
I'd just finished my work for an ongoing project, it's been over 6 months only to be dragged out to be told another system needs an immediate change which at best will take 3-4 weeks.

Like seriously just let my mind come off down from the completion of previous project before dropping a new barrel of insanity on my desk 😬

I like being busy, don't get me wrong. but damn not even a day of recovery 😓

Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:

1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...

2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...

So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?

Before 2012, I always worked in cubicles and had weekly status meetings. In 2012 I moved to a big city and learnt there was something worse than cubes: the open work plan. Marketed as a way to increase coloration, the open work space is really just the result of real estate prices being expensive in cities and how desks are cheaper than 3-cube walls.

Up until 2013, we'd usually just have the weekly status meeting. Here are your tasks for the week. I'd do them at my own pace. Some days fast, some days slow, but they'd all get done by the end of the week and I'd proudly go down my list of stuff I had done.

Since then, it's all been "agile" and "stand-ups" every. fucking. day. The work is endless. A Product Owner once told me that stand ups weren't suppose to be status meetings; that you were only suppose to say if you're blocked or need help. But in every place I've worked at, they're daily status reports. You have to preform every day.

I really hate IT today more than ever. I miss the cube. I miss the weekly status reports. Today things are so high stress and higher paced and the work is endless. You can't even really pace yourself anymore.

No idea how I ended up here. So basically started with simple wordpress websites, transitioned to react. This move was the hardest.

Then caught up on node and mongodb. And before i knew i was doing db, backend and front end tasks. Now i know bits and pieces of everything

I don’t like the term “full stack dev”. I personally feel like I’m a Jack of all trades and master of none. There’s so much to learn if you’re a full stack developer. Endless possibilities, endless rants and endless frustration 🤯

For 2 weeks I was scheduled to work on a project. After tirelessly asking the useless PM for a list of tasks I should work on I gave up and worked on another project.

Fast forward 2 weeks and now that the PM wants me to fill in a form they are more than capable of completing (API request) I am getting endless 'kind reminder' emails. How can someone be such a cunt!

Venting my frustration about this incompetent idiot here is likely stopping me saying something I would otherwise be fired for.

Drupal is such a fucking wortless and infuriating hinder in software development.
I've been a software developer for the past 6 years, I have worked with many different frameworks and technologies in both backend and frontend, such as .net, react, php, you get the idea.
In my current project, we have been forced to use Drupal as backend. Initially I had no complaints, but after trying to use it for the past month, I'm beyond mad at the ridiculous and overly complicated way of doing the most basic tasks in existence.
Not only is installing Drupal such a dependency hell, that we had to modify our entire ecosystem just to accommodate for Drupal's versioning, but it's just a crutch that we have to carry around and make ridiculous exceptions for.
I've seen other projects made in Drupal by professional companies, and not a single one of them actually makes use of the CMS that is meant to be the entire point of this piece of shit.
Instead, we have to make a regular backend database, force the PHP code into Drupal's modules and then try for the impossible of making use of the pointless structure system integrated in Drupal.
It's almost pointless since we still had to make a react application to actually do the pages, since Drupal is limited as hell when it comes to personalization.
Just to end up with this error message: "The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later." no explanation, no nothing, just going after an endless debugging using [drush] commands.

Anyway, I fucking hate Drupal

It was one of those "I need more coffee days"..
I was writing some checking function called "check" (now to clarify my company is not coding oop style so no classes etc.) And as I went on I included another file for some functions and what not. Pretty normal stuff right? Right. In that file I required there also was a function called "check".
Guess who tried to use the "check" function of the imported file in the "check" function?! Right! A Fucking genius aka. me!!
So I tried to figure out why the page wouldn't load and why the server was starting to lag more and more.
After killing all the apache tasks three times i finally realized what I did.
Took me 10 minutes to figure out that i was causing endless recursion. That day wasn't my best and clearly not filled with enough coffee.

PS: yes I know oop would have probably eliminated the possibility for this but I'm just adapting to the coding style of my company as I can't really change things since I'm just an intern.

In a country, a long time ago there was a programmer by the name of Alex. He was a programming genius and apart from a few hours of sleep, he was busy developing unique programs for new generation technology firms. Alex was a bachelor and he happily and proudly lived the way he wanted to. He did not have duties, authority over him, bosses to report to, children to take care of, and distractions. He could sit and code for the entire day without getting any break or feeling a bit tired. However, he had no idea that everything in his life was soon going to turn around. Before Marriage: The Bachelor’s Life Alex was the epitome of a modern ‘Play Boy ‘ or every man’s dream. He was fairly dressed, had a classy house, a snazzy car, and a good-paying job. He was in the habit of spending his mornings drinking coffee while browsing through the different coding topics. He comes in the afternoon and spends the evening part of the day with his friends. Life has never been this good. Alex was able to work hard and the more he was innovative, he enjoyed it. It illustrates how a young person would sit for many hours coding at night and not bother about other people around him. He was alone as a bird and as per him, that’s what he wanted to be. He had no peer to tell the truth to, no wife to prepare meals for, no maids to babysit his mess. A man could chow down a pizza for breakfast, lunch, and supper with not even a raised eyebrow from onlookers. He was profiting from living the best life he possibly could. After Marriage: Married Life: Alex & Sarah The climax for Alex is when he marries Sarah on a sunny morning on a fine day. Young people met, and after becoming enamored, started a family and got married to find a new home. Sarah was friendly with people and it was very easy for her to make friends; however, she had little knowledge of technology. Alex had it in his mind that marriage does not change the life you lead and how wrong he was. It was a fairy-tale to have such a perfect life for several days after the marriage. Their nights would be spent in front of the television set with their arms wrapped around each other, eating takeout. Despite this, when the number of days stretched into weeks, and the weeks into months, Alex felt the beginning of a shift in his behavior. The Coding Cave That Transformed into A Home Office Due to the pandemic the coding cave Alex used to have became a home office. Sarah had made up her mind to open her business from home, therefore, she required a home office. Thus, she moved inside the cubicle that Alex had created as his coding cave and left him with no space to code. He now had to code in the living room, because Sarah would incessantly request him to either lower the auditory input of the keys he was typing or to switch off the LCD screen. The Once-Clean Apartment Turns into a Mess Alex was a neat freak, and he adored tidiness, especially in his apartment. But after marriage, his once clean and neat-looking apartment was changed into a dirty one. Although Sarah was not very neat, she used to litter her things anywhere she felt like without being conscious of it. Alex was a programmer and his coding notes were mixed with Sarah's business papers, it irritated him so much. Alex’s to-do list before marriage The to-do list before marriage only comprised coding-related tasks. At marriage, however, he seemed to have developed a longer list of things to do than ever before. Instead of just going to the grocery store to buy some food, Alex seemed to have endless tasks to do mostly around the house. He had to cook for himself, sweep the house, and wash the dishes among other things. This was a new world as far as he was concerned. The Pizza Days Are Over Gone there is no more time for Alex could eat pizza in the morning, afternoon as well and evening. Sarah was very conscious of what she took as food or what her family took as food and therefore ensured that Alex took healthy home-cooked foods. He could not have the pizza anymore but the meals prepared by Sarah were really tasty. Conclusion Therefore from a life before marriage to the life after marriage, it was evident that Alex led two different lives. He went from a playful man with not much responsibility to a man with more responsibilities as a husband and a father. Still, he wouldn’t have it any other way, despite these changes. Later he cherished Sarah and the life they had, and nothing in this world could make him exchange what he had now. Essentially, it was a tricky business being married, but a blessing, and an addition of love, company, and much hilarity too. Therefore, if you are a bachelor reading this, embrace your coding cave and your pizza days because once you utter the words ‘I do,’ all those will be things of the past.But trust me, it's all worth it.