We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

Back in the days...

Parents: get off that computer it will get you nowhere in life!

Me:But im programming not playing games..I want to become a programmer...

Parents:programming or games it's all the same! Take an example of your sister who actually achieved something with her studies (she's a doctor)

Me today asa computer engineer...receiving paycheck higher than my sister who is a doctor and not to mention I got a car of the company and living very comfortably.

Parents can't believe it.

#rekt

Moral of the story: never let anyone tell you what to do. Keep doing what you truly love and get real good at it!😉

An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."
He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. 
The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for one week and do ANYTHING you want."   
Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.  
 Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess and that I'll stay with you for one week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?"   
The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool."

The twisted life of a software engineer

Life of a software engineer.

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.

Employer: so why do you want to join this organization?

Engineer: well like i said in the first 4 interviews, I love desks. Sitting behind them. Standing behind them.

Employer: are you a standing or sitting man?

Engineer: i like to sit in the morning and then switch up to stand at lunch.

Employer: a man with a plan. Very good. Do you remember anything from school?

Engineer: not a goddamn thing.

Employer: perfect. You don't need math. Just emails. You like emails?

Engineer: love emails.

Employer: there's gonna be a lot of emails.

Engineer: can't get enough emails.

Employer: perfect. Do you like a clear separation between life and work?

Engineer: oh not at all. I like it to muddy together in a never ending hell.

Employer: alright and you're familiar with work culture?

Engineer: oh those hours i work for free?

Employer: yes.

Engineer: I love that bullshit.

Employer: alright terrific. And are you familiar with the hate hierarchy?

Engineer: yeah the tech's hate the engineers, the engineers hate the tech's and the managers hate everyb-

Employer: everybody. Perfect. Alright I- honestly I think we'd like to make an offer.

Engineer: well, first I gotta leverage that with my current employer for a raise. And if they don't budge, I'll jump shut.

Employer: no loyalty at all?

Engineer: not at all.

Employer: you're hired.

Can't get into details but today took probably like 10 years of my life in the form of stress. On top of that I'm currently the on call Linux engineer so I can't drink much 😥

God fucking damnit.

Just had to get that out.

Just needed to

Life as a test engineer.

Dropped out to grow a business I co-founded. Respect to all those that finished. I was already working a six figure salary as a software engineer before I even started at a university. I decided to attend though to have a more complete resume. One day a professor explained that we could look forward to doing really "advanced concepts" like web services OUR SENIOR YEAR. That was already daily life for me. Our business was starting to grow quickly and it needed more and more of my time. I chose the business and for me, that was the correct choice.

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

I know a guy who writes everything in Haskell.

He started learning it because his parents got him into a math school (and math schools in Russia use either Python or Haskell), he liked it, but later he dropped out. Today, apart from Haskell, he only really knows HTML and CSS, and maybe some JavaScript.

He writes backend AND frontend in Haskell and uses some kind of JRPC stuff to manage all that. He told me that his life is a pure heaven. He IS RELEVANT (!!!!!!), his apps always run without bugs (because in Haskell you can mathematically prove that there are no bugs), they are performant, faster than C (because you can't write a complex enough app in C that will be as efficient as compiled Haskell, because it's you vs compiler). He doesn't have any problems in life whatsoever. He never got burned out, he never got anxiety or depression. He doesn't act pretentiously and stuff, he's just a normal person who rarely even mentions that he can program.

Science says it can't be done! You can't only know Haskell and be a relevant software engineer! You know what, he didn't _know_ it was impossible. He's like that grandpa from a meme, he got Alzheimers, but because of it he forgot that he had Alzheimers, and now remembers everything.

The fun thing is that he looks like a typical gopnik, with adidas suits and stuff.

What a gem of a person.

Neighbor: So what do you do for work?

Me: I'm a software engineer.

Neighbor: Oh I don't even know what that means. What exactly do you do?

Me: I write code for Fortune 500 companies while sitting on my couch in my underwear.

Data Analyst: “the task failed in test, can we try running it in production?”

My life as a Data Engineer.

😢😢😢

#LongRant

I AM SO FUCKING PISSED RIGHT NOW OF ALL YOU DICKHEADS WHO DON'T KNOW SHIT 'BOUT PROGRAMING AND STILL QUALIFY FOR THE NEXT ROUND!

Background: I am a final year student of Computer Science. This time of the year, companies come to the campus to recruit potential employees for their vacant positions. But during the COVID-19 times, the number of such companies and jobs have gone a little down. Two companies came to our university for recruitment — DXC Technology and Hanu Software. I cleared the aptitude/code test for DXC and appeared for the interview, which went fairly well. Waiting on the results. The rant is about the other company.

The Story: I am learning and working on Cloud (AWS specifically) for the past 1 year. I have a cloud Certification in Oracle and working my way to get Azure Certified. Hanu Software, which is a core cloud company (works on Azure) came to our campus for the recruitment (Cloud Engineer). Their test had these sections —
1. Personality (54 Questions; 15 minutes)

2. Verbal (20 Questions; 20 minutes)

3. Reasoning (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

4. Technical (25 Questions; 25 minutes)

5. Quantitative (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

As soon as I finished my Interview with DXC, I had my Hanu test within 30 minutes. I have a Mac so the test by default started on Safari. After completing 4 sections, I receive a mail in Junk from Hanu which stated that only Chrome or Firefox can be used to give the test. AHH! And on Safari.. the platform on which the test was being conducted didn't ask me for any camera permission (the test is monitored, can't even change windows/switch tabs). I then changed the browser to Mozilla Firefox and somehow finish the test. After finishing, I call up my classmates to find out how their test go. Know what? FUCKING TWATS USED GOOGLE LENS TO FIND OUT THE ANSWERS!

Last night, the list of qualifying students arrived and obviously I didn't make it to the list, but those dumbfucks did who don't even know what Cloud technology is or how it works. Neither they could do any average level program, nor have the communication skills. HOW?! HOW THEM AND NOT ME? Life is very unfair sometimes. I couldn't sleep at night.

PS: If you made this far, thank you for reading this rant (and sorry for it being so long). Makes it better to be able to share with someone. If you could, then please guide me (online resources/recommendations) to be better at competitive programming, or help me enhance my resume/linkedin or if you could refer me for an entry level position at your organisation, I would eternally be grateful. Thank you once again. And sorry for the long rant.

When no one told you that being a software engineer would entail putting up with other peoples shitty code for the rest of your life

TL;DR
A "friend" is a tech fraud. Faking his resume as a software engineer! Only interested on the salary. This is unfair to all of us putting the hours of effort/practice just to improve our craft! 😠😤

I have a "friend" who is faking his resume, putting fake experiences and putting jargons not even related to tech just to make himself smart. He's using his customer service rep experience to talk confidently. His resume fcking long, 3 pages of fakery. I can't help, but to laugh when he sent it to me.

He has a tech degree, but worked in a BPO industry for 4 years, then recently, he quit. He got jealous with the lucrative software development industry and he wants to relearn coding, as a friend and I like sharing my knowledge, I agreed to guide him in the process.

After 3 moths, he got his first job, but unfortunately he got fired after two weeks because he commited sensitive data to the remote repo.

Then after a month, he got his second job and worked there for 6 months, he still don't know what his doing and always ask me solutions when he is stuck.

He got his 3rd job, remote work with high compensation. Fast forward after 3 months, he only got 1 month of salary, the other 2 wasn't given for unknown reason, my best guess is the company noticed his experience on paper does not match on real life.

Currently, he's working on another remote work with same compensation as before, and he still asks me super simple questions from time to time.

This is so unfair to all the devs who truly deserves the opportunity.

Don't you just love it when upper Management people that never wrote a line of code in their life tell you, the software engineer peasant, to refactor all of your projects with Inclusive Terminology?

I mean I'll do it, the company is just protecting their image and money... But I blame the sick mind that came up with this in the first place.... It's implying that all sofware engineers are somehow racist and sexist and I'm somewhat offended by that notion. Whoever started this trend should seriously burn in hell.

P. S.
Apparently "the elderly" is also non-inclusive and should be referred to as "older adult"... What the fuck?

Do you not realize that you're just disassembling words and nothing else? Also "AIDS patient" should be referred to as "person living with AIDS"... Ok? Same fucking thing? If not even worse? At least "patient" kinda invokes that professional help is given... A person living with AIDS just implies you're infected and seeking no help...

You help no one with this non-issue bullshit. All your replacements will be deemed outdated and non-inclusive in the next 5 years again... Fucking hell... Waste of time and money

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

I fucking want to skin alive my engineering senior director and VP.

Fucking piece of shit people. Looking at their faces from behind the screen, I can sense them stink doneky balls.

They have made my life hell.

The entire tech architecture is absolute shit in nature and engineers cannot even build a single blue colour button without creating a major fuss about it.

Every single aspect of product is built kept in my only the engineer persona. Everyone else can go and suck a racoon's dick.

And they have no concept of tech debt. They just keep building and building stuff. And then build some more.

Entire engineering org is in rush to ship shit at the end of sprint and if they don't then VP and Director are pissed. So to keep those two half witted donkeys happy, these people ship garbage. And all they comment is "cool, very cool".

And hence, entire fucking product is built because it's cool irrespective of whether it solves a problem or not.

A single user role authorisation or authentication is so fucking complex that it would take an eternity for even a developer to figure what's happening.

Fucking toxic human wastes.

There's a company wide mandate to use a certain tech stack, design guidelines, and a vision that all teams have to align. But these faggots are going in opposite direction to do what they feel like and forcing everyone else to ignore all other engagements or alignments with other teams.

These two people should be skinned alive in town square during noon and then left there until they dehydrate entirely. Fucking baboons.

I am so fucking pissed with such mindset.

Today, at a dinner party, someone acted surprised when they discovered that I was an Integrations Engineer because (quote) "You look too normal for a Dev".

What the hell? Why do people always assume that who works at IT must live their whole life at a desk, wear glasses and have 0 social skills?

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

Programmer Influencers piss me off to Jupiter and back.

The ones who talk about just being a programmer, and don't do normal tutorials and solve a real-world problem and demonstrate it.

"i iNcREaSeD mY pRoDuCTiViTy bY 90%. hErE's HoW"

"tOp 10 lAnGuAGeS yOu sHoUlD lEaRn iN 2023"

"dAy iN thE LiFe oF a SoFtWaRe EnGiNeEr"

"HeRE's hOw yOu cAn wRiTe bUg fReE cOdE"

fuck you to the tech software engineer who would sexually harass me for over a year straight and would simply NOT GET THE FUCKING POINT that I'M NOT FUCKING INTERESTED.

Worst mistake of my life.

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

So we started looking into docker. As always I needed to do the research and I was fine with it.

We have 4 projects that are sold into one suite so logically I follow the microservices build structure.

3 months later after everything has been set up, we get called into a meeting. The whole suite should be a monolith as microservices doesn't make sense to the people planning everything.

Ok pulled my current plans out abd made everything a monolith. Just note I also get pulled away to other Business Units to do work for them.

Get pulled into another meeting 2 months later. Why isn't the docker containers in microservices!? It is stupid running as a monolith and we should've done our jobs better etc...

After the meeting my manager and I just sighed and walked to the office. So basically 5 months doing the the exact same thing we did in 3 weeks.

Now they want to develop other services and want to strip every method into a microservice and bundle it together.

Life of a DevOps engineer right!

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

After 'Dev' deployed a service using Azure ServiceBus, a particular queue/client was receiving errors.

Dev: "Looking at the logs, client is getting faulted."
Me: 'What is the error being logged?'
Dev: 'Client is faulted'
Me: 'No, that is our error when the client is either unable to connect or there is an exception in the middle of sending a message. What is the exception from Azure?'
Dev: 'Client is faulted. That's it. I'm going to have to re-engineer the code to implement a retry policy.'
<OK, I smell someone cooking up some solution finding, so I dig into the logs a little further>
Me: "Looks like an invalid connection string. The actual exception being thrown and logged is from the Azure client connection string builder. The value cannot be null."
Dev: "No, I'm looking right at the connection string in the config. Looks fine."
Me: "Looks correct on your machine, but what is actually being deployed to the server?"
<I could tell he was getting agitated>
<Dev clicks around, about 10 min. later>
Dev: "Aha!..I found it. The connection string in the config on the main branch is wrong, in fact, the entry is missing."
<dev fixes, re-deploys, life is good, I document the error and the root cause>
Boss: "Great job Dev."

*sigh* ..go teamwork?

Hey I got reminded of a funny story.

A friend of mine and me were in internships in the same company. The company was specialized in territory resources management (managing water for agriculture, money to build industrial zones...). He got the interesting internship (water predictory modeling) and I got... The repairs of a reference sheet manager that never happened to work. It was in C# and ASP.NET and I was in second year of CS. I expected the code to be nice and clear since it was made by a just graduated engineer with +5years of studies.

I was very wrong.

This guy may never have touched a web server in his life, used static variables to keep sessions instead of... well... sessions, did code everything in the pages event handlers (even LinQ stuff et al) and I was told to make it maintainable, efficient and functional in 2 months. There were files with +32k LoC.

After 1week of immense despair, I decided I will refactor all the code. Make nice classes, mapping layer, something close to a MVC... So I lost time and got scoled for not being able to make all the modifications as fast as in a cleanly designed code...

After 4 weeks, everything was refactored and I got to wait for the design sheets to change some crystal report views.

At this moment I began to understand were was the problem in this company.

My friend next door got asked to stop his modeling stuff for an emergency project. He had to make an XML converter for our clients to be able to send decentralized electrics bills, and if it was not completed within a week, they would no longer be able to pay until it is done.

This XML converter was a project scheduled 5 years before that. Nobody wanted to do it.

At the same time, I was waiting for the Com Department to give me the design views.

I never saw the design views. Spent one month implementing a golden ratio calculator with arbitrary precision because they ain't give me anything to do until the design were implemented.

Ended with a poor grade because "the work wasn't finished".

My company is providing cloud infrastructure to our customers. For research purposes we are running a little openstack cloud in our laboratory datacenter were we can test stuff before implementing it in the productive environment.

Last week the manager asked me to shut down the cluster over night and only power on the servers when we need it. (about twice a week)

The reason: it produces too much heat.

My answer was: No.
First off thats not how cloud infrastructure works, and how about a proper climate control?

Sometimes i ask myself in which parallel universum our managers live 😑

@MissDirection today I learned what it truly means to be a "codeslut". I understand the decision you made to change your username due to the circumstances but I want you know that I'm now seriously considering prepending 'CodeSlut' to my username.

To be a code slut, in my definition, is to fuck with all things code.
I don't remember the idiot(s) that murked the name with shame, I remember being scornful towards them for their immaturity...But now I know whole the truth, and that what they were also unknowingly shaming was any engineer who has had an interest in anything related to code. Fuck them, in a sense they've fucked themselves, because I personally believe that as developers there's a little (code)slut in each and every one of you. Those who are willing to fuck with all of it and have a damn good time doing it. To dabble in a little bit of this and a little bit of that from time to time. Whether or not we stick with it is irrelevant, it's the experience we gain from it that makes us better people. To shame a code slut is to shame the pursuit of knowledge. And to shame the pursuit of knowledge is to shame my purpose in life. I stand by my pursuit to fuck with it all, no tech is sacred - I will fuck with it!

Please @MissDirection don't let my new username stop you from ever changing yours back to what it was or take this as some form of a personal insult/joke. I'm serious - I understand now. I'm not even sure if you realised it, but QueenCodeSlut held such beauty and truth to it that many(including myself) couldn't even begin to fathom. That is enlightenment of the utmost pulchritude, please accept this username change as a gesture of honor and respect towards you and any other fellow humans with their own endeavors of truth and knowledge.

> at my previous job as mechanical engineer at an HVAC company
> was given recurring monotonous task
> decided to start a sizeable side project to automate it
> people got pissed at me because it worked too well, i.e., took their jerbs
> decided automating things was more fun than actual current job; also, people should be more hyped about continuous improvement
> switched careers into web-development

i.e., my most successful project was the one that changed my life for the better.

I wrote my first line of code at 12. I fell in love with it and continued. I'm 25 now and I'm a software engineer. I don't even have time or energy to work on personal projects anymore. Writing code isn't a hobby anymore. It's a means to survive. Why/how did this happen? When will building things be fun again? Before landing my first job as an engineer, not once did I consider salaries, equity, atmosphere, nor any of the other amenities (or lack thereof) of code as a profession. But, I don't even know when any of that fell into the picture and they've managed to suck the novelty out of a really cool pastime. I'm essentially a well-paid robot. Who did this? What's happening? What can I do to find the freedom I once had? When did I become just another cog in a machine? Should I try my hand in business, bent on making a lot of money so I can retire early and have time to experiment again? Is that unrealistic? Should I buy lottery tickets every paycheck? We only get one life and I realized this. I'm panicking because I know I'm not enjoying myself and that I'm not on track to leave the world better than it was when I was born into it. So much loss. I'm grateful, but this is not cool at all. I want my hobby back.

5 months ago I've decided to back to the programming after 8 years of Civil Engineer careere. Today I'm working at amazing tech startup (BaaS) and every day is an awesome experience, I think that it was one of the best decisions in my life.

Well. I was fresh software engineer. Was so excited to start working on real life codes.
They put me in charge of writing user manual. In 2 different languages 🤐

Software Engineer life 😴😴

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

Life cycle of a Software engineer;P

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

nice, 10k reached before sidtheitclown! (that’s all that actually matters, heh)

so, yes, as promised it’s me… chris from chris’ full stack blog.

I think kiki knew this, as I used to be called fullstackchris… though very briefly... don't know why i was ever worried about the old clowns i used to work for knowing my identity here

i’m a host of react round up, and also an ex-futures trader (that life is / was hidden on Twitter), I’ve recently quit because I’m ALSO still building 4ish SaaS products including The Wheel Screener (wheelscreener.com) and CodeVideo (codevideo.io), over my LLC, Full Stack Craft (fullstackcraft.com)

oh yeah, and on top of that i have a full time job in Switzerland (read: not poor boi 38 or 40 hour work week, 42 minimum)

so yeah, its a fucking lot of shit to do and sometimes it’s too much! glad i have this place to vent

so, don’t be too harsh on me… really, 99% of my bitterness comes from the approximate 5 years of my working life (2018-2023) were taken from me by lying business folk type who actually didn’t know what the FUCK they were doing or talking about, even after promising me they did (at two different companies). Listen, I’m all for people telling me iTs a RiSkY VeNTuRe; i get it. But if you say everything is rock solid (like funding, my future employment, etc.) and it is not, then fuck you; you’re just lying to my face, it has nothing to with management vs employee, engineer vs. non-technical - you’re literally just a *bad person* (sorry, mechanical engineering genes and honesty to the core - sue me) To be sure, I was partially at fault - too optimistic, and too gullible, and I’ve have since learned my lesson. but still working on it. (obviously)

but things are look up - my company is running better than ever, the current job is great with insanely smart people

In the end, it’s always the hardcore engineers who are the most honest, hardworking, respectful, and the best to work with - you people know who you are…

Until then… see you in the next rant!!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Dutifully signed,

🤡

A year ago I posted on here about me going to an interview for my first co-op position.

It's been a year now, and I was hired full time as an associate software engineer a few months ago, while still going to school. I'd say that interview a year ago worked out for me.

* Today you have to live within 150 miles of a few cities as we are working on creating "hubs" but it's still remote!

you know what?

fuck you

also, no, an LLM isn't going to solve climate change

jesus christ i am depressed beyond belief. i don't even want to apply, let alone work for any of these companies

next up: "USA only" yeah what the fuck does that mean? US citizen? US timezone? you want to hire a super technical engineer right? SO WHY NOT BE SUPER TECHNICAL IN YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION

just incredible, companies that offer 100-200K salaries and all they have is a website and a fucking chrome extension... what???

i feel like i've been doing wrong my whole life

just end it all

I quit this startup side job coz I was over worked and under paid for 3 years and I decided it wasn't worth the mental fatigue and anxiety. Plus I didn't feel like it added any value to my life other than stress. Gave them at least 2 months notice (since February effective April 30th) coz as the only server side engineer+team lead, I did ALOT. Now they brought this hot shot new CTO who wants me to basically rewrite the entire app before I go while maintaining the existing system and making sure everything functions smoothly (there is a ton I chose to optimise to make things easier for the new dev who they have not hired and I have 4 weeks to go) . The app was built in mongo db now he wants it in mysql. Can't believe ask me this after breaking my neck and falling in and out if depression for this job?!! I want to laugh and scream at the same time.

Family expectations from an engineer in India:

Go fix the ceiling fan, it's very slow these days.
😖

!rant

Super awesome day today.

1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.

I really love my life sometimes.

Automation always fascinated me. Not only it looks and behaves like a life form, it also can perform billions of calculations without making a single mistake while I can’t even multiply double-digit numbers with my double-digit IQ.

If you pick the right components, you can make an immortal, perfect machine that can do its job for centuries, even millennia without a single mistake. There is nothing else on earth that can do this.

There is a robot surgeon and its hands never shake. It’s just flawless. If it fucks up, there is only you to blame, the flawed, pathetic operator.

And now it’s time to remember that it was just a 40s technology all along. And now it’s time to remember that now there is machine learning. A whole new perspective isn’t it. All the mistakes that machines make are sitting in front of the monitors.

No wonder I decided to be an engineer.

Not even 30 yet and I feel like I've reached a point of stagnation in my career. I no longer enjoy writing code. What else is there to do? My life is set up right now so that I must be a software engineer; I don't have much of a choice.

I feel trapped.

When I was a junior engineer I used to hate writing unit tests but now I look forward to writing them.

Well written Unit tests will save your life

So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.

I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)

Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.

Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.

So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..

Former classmate: Our alma mater is looking for alumni to participate in career day. Share what skills you need and the steps you took for your career path!

Me: Thanks for the invite. But I’m not a good role model for this.

FC: Why not? You’re a successful engineer!

Me: So I used my full tuition university scholarship on an art degree because I was too depressed after a long physical illness. Oh, and for some reason a lot of y’all assumed I went to a private uni when I went to the public uni. Then I went to graduate school immediately after and during a recession and ended up with tens of thousands in student debt. Then I did a lot of part time jobs before going to a shady coding bootcamp. I’m lucky to have encountered an advocate and a company willing to take me on as a junior dev. I’m pretty sure I was a diversity hire and I was definitely underpaid. I’m lucky to have moved on from there and to be thriving now. I’d tell the students to skip college (like I had considered) and go into a trade. And I’d also tell them a lot of life is luck and not just hard work.

FC: 😧

Pretty much your life when you have the misfortune of debugging labview 'code' written by an electrical engineer

I don't understand why there is such a hypocritic professionalism in tech industry.

In the careers page ,these companies show smiling people, party images , slides and shit. And while selecting resumes, they want to scan buzzwords to select a particular candidate and hate "actual" introductions.

Like, how would you like to meet someone in a bar , who introduces himself as " a super enthusiastic 10x engineer and a tech enthusiast with a knack of building scalable and industry recognized softwares in x tech for last y years". Dude, introduce yourself as a human not a bot.

There is a clear difference when we are talking about personal stuff and when we are talking about tech in real life, why not maintain that in your resume?

But no, just write a single sentence in first person p.o.v and next thing you know, you see tons of LinkedIn post about "how to write a 'professional' resume"

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

I fucking hate printers. And printers hate me too.

I've been working as a software engineer for almost seven years now, and not a single day as a printer technician, which does not stop my mother from calling me each time a printer breaks down, as she did today. I hop over to her place, the printer is connected via usb into the ethernet socket, but she swears it's been printing an hour ago, and she hasn't moved a thing. - "weird", I think, "it must be connected wirelessly". Suddenly my sister, who's an Arts major, comes over, saying her printer broke down too - "cool so they're both wifi printers". I reset the router and my sister's printer springs back to life.

But my mom's printer, which is old and in bad shape (the printer, not my mom! assholes...), doesn't. It keeps on displaying a weird error message, and fails to receive any print job, whether wired or wireless.

I spent 15 seconds resetting the router, and 15 minutes troubleshooting mom's printer. Nothing worked.
I finally give up and leave the house.

Not a minute goes by and I receive a "your sister fixed the printer" text from mom.

I fucking hate printers.

Dude I want to ask you , It's possible for me to call myself as a software engineer if I always got a cancer when I try to create HTML template ? I'm suck as fuck on front-end, I can't even create a single HTML template even if you give me help with css framework. I don't know what to do with HTML and CSS, they're totally fucked up my life.

Something I have learnt in the past month:

Never settle for a low salary no matter how good a company sounds (unless it's a really prestige company) if they don't realise your worth and don't care about their employees. Salary is important. You are important. And customers are important. Any company that just values money, income, profit and growth over their customer and employee experience is a huge red flag. If your work life is so stressful that it doesn't let you have a good work/life balance then avoid it. What comes above being a developer is being healthy and I think alot of people don't realise this. It may sound good to work as an engineer for a big platform but if they only value themselves you are just a cheap slave, move on and do something respectable and enjoyable.

Just my life lesson in applying for grad jobs.

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

Seriously, at what point did the good, kind, selfless souls who write tutorials and guides online turn into fucking food bloggers?

I've been an engineer about 15 years, so I still have to google most of the code I write as I write it, and this week I've been learning a new framework.

Ten years ago it'd be "here's how to..." then the thing you want to do.

Now it's "For the longest time, I didn't want to use Gradle..." followed by a summary of the last week in their life.

I really don't care about your Journey with Rust, I want to know how to define an optional parameter. I don't give a rat's fucking dick how much faster this is than that, my hands are tied by whoever started this mess - just tell me how to make it work.

I guess there's something to be said for remembering things between sessions.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

Sooooo ok ok. Started my graduate program in August and thus far I have been having to handle it with working as a manager, missing 2 staff member positions at work, as well as dealing with other personal items in my life. It has been exhausting beyond belief and I would not really recommend it for people working full time always on call jobs with a family, like at a..

But one thing that keeps my hopes up is the amount of great knowledge that the professors pass to us through their lectures. Sometimes I would get upset at how highly theoretical the items are, I was expecting to see tons of code in one of the major languages used in A.I(my graduate program has a focus in AI, that is my concentration) and was really disappointed at not seeing more code really. But getting the high level overview of the concepts has been really helpful in forcing me to do extra research in order to reconnect with some of the items that I had never thought of before.

If you follow, for example, different articles or online tutorials representing doing something simple like generating a simple neural network, it sometimes escapes our mind how some of the internal concepts of the activity in question are generated, how and why and the mathematical notions that led researchers reach the conclusions they did. As developers, we are sometimes used to just not caring about how sometimes a thing would work, just as long as it works "we will get back to this later" is a common thing in most tutorials, such as when I started with Java "don't worry about what public static main means, just write it up for now, oh and don't worry about what System.out.println() is, just know that its used to output something into bla bla bla" <---- shit like that is too common and it does not escape ML tutorials.

Its hard man, to focus on understanding the inner details of such a massive field all the time, but truly worth it. And if you do find yourself considering the need for higher education or not, well its more of a personal choice really. There are some very talented people that learn a lot on their own, but having the proper guidance of a body of highly trained industry professionals is always nice, my professors take the time to deal with the students on such a personal level that concepts get acquired faster, everyone in class is an engineer with years of experience, thus having people talk to us at that level is much appreciated and accelerates the process of being educated.

Basically what I am trying to say is that being exposed to different methodologies and theoretical concepts helps a lot for building intuition, specially when you literally have no other option but to git gud. And school is what you make of it, but certainly never a waste.

So according to my Business requirements I have learnt Golang, in addition to being comfortable in C,C++,Java, Android. I have also fixed problems in python. Now they want me to learn UI framework including ReactJS. And when I screw that shit wrapped language in my ass, now they have asked me to also get comfortable with Groovy, Geb and Spock for UI automation. Thats being I have just joined 3 months before. I dont even know where my tears have gone. Have they just dried up? Or sucked back by my eyes? My life already sucks and I already question my life decisions to become a software engineer. Its never ending.

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

How hard is it to understand that a software engineer never has a 123 repeat life? You have to use your brains people.

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

I hate people who think they are always right.

A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.

Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.

And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.

Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.

This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.

In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.

So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.

Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.

I've always wanted to make games, I went into university doing mechanical engineering and while at the start I enjoyed it, getting closer to the end I had a hate for engineering, as this hate grew I ended up trying to learn programming in my spare time, actually I spent my spare doing lots of things which basically gave off the impression I wouldn't be happy with engineering.

After I graduated I decided to do my BCIS and I loved every minute of it, I was fortunate to get a lecturer in my second semester that was an experienced game devloper, someone I look up to and someone who pushed me to my absolute limits, even with the sleepless nights I was still happy with programming, the logical thinking that goes into programming and also the near instant feedback is what I really love.

But as it comes down to it, I've gotten closer to my dream of becoming a game developer, it may only be as a hobby for now but I'm really grateful I have gotten into programming.

So I guess with coding has changed my life for the better, since I know I'd never be happy as an engineer, and even with all the issues I run into I still enjoy it in the end.

Let's see how long this lasts lol

!rant but kinda.
!dev but also dev

Hello, my name is ***** and I already had a few Old Fashions🥃

I've been chasing a big career and success since i was about 12.. the first 8 years of my career I did the same.
for the last two years i decided to slow down, I'm still keeping up with stuff and do a good job but I took a break from wanting to being the next Wozniak.

Im much happier and more relaxes now but I'm at a point where i really wanna do, be and achieve more..

My #1 goal in life is to build a family, having a wife and a few kids. (first gotta be able to talk to women though:/)

i have a very strong desire to have an impact on the world and society to build a life in which at least my (non existing) family could be happy and without worries. but i've no fucking clue how to achieve that. how to have an impact. i don't see a way as a software engineer anymore..

i feel lonely and lost without any fucking perspectives..

i feel like i was better off when i was chasing the big money..

i know dev rant is not the place to do this but i can't talk to my family and i wanted to share my emotions. been alone for 3 months now and it's also about my dev career, that's how i justify to post this to our community here😅

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

I just found out my parents have less than $30 in the bank by the end of each month after all expenses...

We are not living. We are barely surviving....

Every day in my house it is dark and the lights are off. They turn all lights off in order to avoid getting a high electricity bill. I have to use my phone's flashlight as the main source of light in my own house, as if i live in abandoned cottage in the middle of a forest.....

Both my parents are jobless (have been their entire lives). They just borrow money from their family members and grandparents to pay these bills every month. They depended on luck their whole lives. A luck in context of "maybe if i dont work anything at all then a huge pile of money will fall down from the sky!".

So now I, as their son, have to grow up in extreme poverty and fight my way up, because of DUMB, STUPID people. They are good people, but what does being a good person bring if you are fucking stupid and valueless?

I knew i was poor but today i found out i was THIS poor. I had no idea we were THIS much poor. Because today my 4g internet got cut off due to not paying bills. The bill is $30. My dad cant pay it cause he doesnt have $30 in the bank. I was in shock. So i had to pay it

My $8.125 usd an hour backend software engineer + DevOps engineer (2 jobs in 1), is considered as LUXURIOUS SALARY, in the most corrupted country of Europe -- SERBIA 🇷🇸

When i tell the world i make $8 an hour with a computer science degree working as a software engineer, they laugh at me. People mock me "bro even a mcdonalds worker earns $17/hour what are you doing" im doing what i was born into -- born into poverty of a third world shithole country.

With my $8 an hour salary, i am in TOP 3% of the HIGHEST earners in serbia. Can you fucking imagine how miserable lives do people live if this is not even an average salary, but among the ELITE salary? Because the average salary in Serbia, is $3.75 usd an hour, sometimes even less than that.

When people say "its not about luck its about hard work", please, GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.

Go and be born in a shithole third world country. Now on top of that be born in poverty due to poor decisions of your parents. Go ahead and try it. Lets see how hard you fucking have to work to get to the same level compared to someone who was born into for example America, where you get paid 6 figures immediately after graduating computer science. Or on top of that, you're born in a wealthy family in america. Did you work hard to be born in the 1st class freak show or were you LUCKY to be gifted such life?

My whole life i have been fighting to get money and escape this misery due to poor decisions of my parents.

Very ironically, my parents have lived extremely luxurious lives in the 90s. They had 5 cars. 1 huge house with a backyard garage private office private jacuzzi private gym. This house was worth at least 500k in the 90s. Today this house would cost at least 1.5 or 2 million. They went to luxurious travels. Hotels of $5000 per night per person. Literally wasted 45k in 3 days just for hotel. They even GAVE AWAY FOR FREE money to our relatives and cousins, taking them on luxurious vacations for free etc. None of those people appreciated them, none of them came to help them in tough times, everyone forgot about them and abandoned us.

Like i said, my parents are good people, but what does it profit being a good person if you are FUCKING STUPID.

They were extremely LUCKY but their STUPIDNESS has made them broke. I couldn't be THIS much fucking stupid even if i tried hard.

Nobody is coming to save us. No one cares. Its all up to me now. All the pressure and stress and poverty is passed and inherited onto my life now. its up to me to either get rich or end my STUPID bloodline

I am living a very difficult life and no one seems to understand this...

Just bought a laptop for my grandma. She is a very intelligent person, used to be an engineer and traveled across the globe, but she missed out on the computer revolution. Now she's stuck at home alone and terribly bored, so we will introduce her to the internet to socialize and join our zoom parties.
What advice do you have for someone who has plenty of life experience but is completely new to the internet?

I have nothing to rant about, I love my job.

I hate having to deal with our IT service desk. Every time it takes enormous energy to get to the right people and make them understand that no, you are not an idiot, but you actually have a technical issue.

Sure thing they do have a few competent nice folks there too I've gotten to know over time and they indeed have to deal with a ton of dumb non-tech savvy idiots on a daily basis. However, if my job title mentions "software" and "engineer" they should at least assume I'm an idiot in tech. Or something. Every single time I need to open a ticket, even for the simplest "add x to env y", I need to quadruple check that the subject line is moron-friendly because otherwise they would take every chance to respond "nah we can't do that", "that's not us", or "sry that's not allowed". And then I would need to respond, "yes you do:) your slightly more competent colleague just did this for us 2 weeks ago".

Now you might imagine this is on even another level when the problem is complex.

One of our internal apps has been failing because one of the internal APIs managed by a service desk team responds a 500 status code randomly but only when called with a specific internal account managed by another service desk team.
(when I say "managed by", that doesn't mean they maintain it, it just mean they are the only ones who would have access to change something)

Yesterday I spent over a fucking hour writing a super precise essay detailing the issue, proving a million times it's not on our end and that they need to fix it. Now here is an insight to what beautiful "IT service" our service desk provides:

1) ticket gets assigned to a "Connectivity Engineer" lady

2) few hours later she responds and asks me to give her the app and environment IDs and grant her access to those
(naturally everything in my email was ignored including these two IDs)

3) since the app needs to be in prod for the issue, I make a copy isolating the failing part and grant her access to the original "for reference" and the copy to play with

4) few hours later I get an email from the env that some guy called P made changes to the actual app, no changes to the copy
(maybe they immediately fixed the app even though I asked them to only touch the copy)
I also check the env and the live app had been shared with another 2 people giving them editing rights:)

5) another few hours pass and the lady responds that she had been chatting with P (no mention of who tf that guy is) and that P has a suggestion that might work and I should test it, "please see screen shot" for details:

These motherfuckers sent me a fucking screenshot of the env config file where "P has edited a few parameters" that might help. The screenshot had a 16 line part of the config json with a bunch of IDs and Base64 params which HE EDITED LOCALLY.

Again, because I needed a few iterations to realise what I've just witnessed:
These idiots modified some things in the main app (not the copy) for hours. Then came to the conclusion that the config needs some IDs and params updated. They downloaded the config json. Edited it locally. Did not fucking upload it back to the main or test app. Did not test it live. Did not CC in or direct the guy with changes to me. Did not send me the modified config file. Did not even paste the new IDs into the email. But TOOK A FUCKING SCREENSHOT OF THE MODIFIED FILE AND SENT THAT SHIT TO ME. And then had the audacity to ask me to test it when they had access to it and that's literally their fucking job.

I had to compare the fucking screenshot to the live config file and manually type in the changes.

And no, it still doesn't work. And Now I have to get back to them showing it still fails the same way but I just can't deal with these people. Fuck. Was hoping by the time I write it all down it'd be better, and it does feel a bit better, but I still need to get this app fixed. And I can only do it through these... monkeys. I just can't. Talking to these people drains my life energy... I'm just sad.

That moment when you just quit your successful paying job just to have more time to study and try to pass the fucking piece of trash math exam.

Fuck my asshole, fuck my life and fuck that motherfucking college degree. If I don't pass, I will eventually kill my self or quit college.

Jeez, I wonder what was in my head when I enrolled in college, oh wait.. Parents, society brainwashed me to think I need top tier education to be a successful computer programmer engineer.

Fuck you society, fuck my brain, fuck everything.

Me: So I'm going to study CS.
Dad: Are you going to be an engineer?
Me: Well I'll be a software engineer!
Dad: ???
Me: I'll write software for computers.
Dad: So you're not going to really be an engineer? So you are going to waste your life on those stupid computers... What did I do wrong.
😑😑😑

My first experience was in 1998. My grandfather had a computers and even tho he was hesitant to let me use them my mom convinced him saying that I may eventually turn into an engineer like him. I used them mostly for paint and a couple of space shooter games he later got for me. It was great. They always had computers, they even had a c64 at one point and i remember playing with that one as well.
My first computer tho, it was in 2010 while I was in the Army. Still have that lil hp in my office although it does not work anymore.
Nothing speciall really. I've had computers all my life and a mother that was passionate about them. I owe everything I am to my mom. I think that it is because of her that I became a computer scientist.

I’m one of those who learned in adulthood. I had lost track of my life and tried to find something to grasp on to. I found inspiration from two friends I have. One who’s been a very gifted software engineer since his early years, and the other who one day unexpectedly turned to university and computer science and started a good work life right away after the studies. After failing miserably at my previous attempt at university I decided to jump ship and give CS a try. It was the best decision of my life. To my surprise programming very much matched many of my personality traits and how I think and make desicions in games and everyday life. After my first few lectures It all came very intuitively to me. Then thruout most of my education (and this is one of my less ”grown up” thoughts) it felt as though I could as well have been a student at Hogwarts and my professors were witches and wizards. Anything was possible and each day we learned new tricks to create the unimaginable. That aside, I now work as a software engineer, but I feel as though the list of things left to learn is endless. I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning.

Don't like the way how to do something? Witte software for it! You need something automated? Develop the autonation algorithms! Don't like how an open source application works? Change it! Don't like how the closed source application works? Fucking reverse engineer and patch it!

Being a developer opens incredibly man doors in the world of information technology, that technology that drives our world, society and so, so many parts of everyone's life. So why on earth wouldn't you want to be a developer?

My image of dream career through different times of my life:
- frontend specs prodigy, css enlightenment, a member of w3c or a similar committee
- indie hacker and entrepreneur, leader of a startup community
- architecture prodigy, expert in scalability
- transsexual evangelist, popular article writer and a rockstar
- hardware engineer: Linux, C, chip and dale’s Gadget-like girlfriends, xkcd, latex, assembly, buying a radio station and a telescope
- scientist like NickyBones, papers, data, more data
- art expert

Though achieving one of this would take the entire life, I had a chance to grasp all of this. WHY does they feel so incompatible? Why do I have to choose?

Why do I feel so sad? Why do I feel like I haven’t achieved anything even though I objectively achieved what I dreamed of like five years ago?

Is it true that it’s in my nature to always seek an environment to feel like a junior in? Is feeling like a junior only pleasant to me because it reminds me of old times when I wasn’t actually this mentally ill and was still happy?

Why do I feel like that arduino and C shit is the equivalent of a red corvette?

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

Can we please make a Over Engineered Section....

This happened a couple of weeks ago...
Hey platform engineer team, we need a environment spun up, it's a static site, THATS IT!

PE Team response.. okay give us a 2 weeks we need to write some terraform, update some terraform module, need you to sign your life away as the aws account owner, then use this internal application to spin up a static site, then customize the yml file to use nuxt, then we will need you to use this other internal tool to push to prod...

ME: ITS a static site... all I need is a s3 bucket, cloudfront, and circleci

I want a software engineer friend with whom I can share the joys and sorrows of professional life

I realized I wouldn’t be great electronics engineer so I switched to computer enginering. Best decision of my life. I have so much comfortable work experience because I am natural in this job

I am a web app developer by profession and software engineer by qualifications but when there is a problem with router, firewall or a server needs to be setup, whether internal or for client, all my employer can see is me. Sometimes i get too tired of this shit. Also I am expected to work at home during night as if I don't have any life outside this field. I need to enjoy my life with I am young. I am twenty and stuck. Fuck it.

It has now become trend for all new startups in my country to follow these three steps.
Step 1 - Attract developers by showing them high CTC.
Step 2 - Make them work mercilessly on intern basis giving them low pay.
Step 3 - Fire them after intern period without giving some valid reasons.

I am fed up now as I have wasted my six months without getting much pay and now I am jobless 😨

I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.

While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.

Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.

So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.

So I'm finally doing the job I was hired to do 2 years ago, with the promise of working 1.5 years ago, and scheduled to work 1 year ago as the project slips about a 1.25 years.

The project is on it's 3.5th year of a 3 year plan and based on the architecture of the project, the project architect started a degree in software architecture 4 years ago. In Latin. When his first language was Japanese and his second was Indian English while this was a US company. And his entire degree was in Lisp, PHP, and html, this project is in C#, and his professional background is in Fortran.

This is a man who is no longer on the project, not allowed to contribute or talk to us about the project, and what little documentation he left us is in Swahili translated from Korean via Google translate from the second year Korean language major exchange student from Russia who got really into meth and Telenovelas.

It is every version of MV* without the M and with every definition of * including some he made up and some that have only been proven to exist via machine learning algorithm written in SQL statements.

This project represents an implementation of the presentation tier of an n-tier application, yet attempts to reimplement the other n-1 tiers in html5 and the dreams of children.

The new lead is a former engineer that couldn't begin coding until he figured out how to map all of his variables to his former cars and girlfriends inclusively and learned his management skills from the big book of micro managers and that one time everyone else in the office was sick but the intern. Who now has a girlfriend whom he works 200 feet from so he isn't 100% thinking with his largest head. At least from observation.

Yet, I still can't bring myself to go be with the whales/become an accountant.

I wake up with so much interest and enthusiasm for programming and tech. It all goes away when I start work at 9 AM. Everyday at 5 PM, I question my career choices. I don't have the interest from the beginning of the day nor the energy to do anything.

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

🌎🌏🌍
The world needs to know the truth
👁️👁️👁️

🔥🔥🔥
Have to make a separate rant for this cause it deserves to be outlined and for the whole world to know the truth about my junkhole trash country Serbia (europe)
🔥🔥🔥

$1000 usd is 6 figures in my currency.

In economy schools they said

If you earn $1200/month usd in serbia you are in TOP 3% of highest earners

If you earn $2500/month usd in serbia you are in TOP 1% of highest earners

This must mean that i am now in TOP what 10% of highest earners in my country?

A bearly over 10,000$ usd a year, is TOP 10% of earners in Serbia. And i have to work 2 or perhaps 3 dev jobs as 1 person to be fortunate enough to be in those TOP 10%

And every day i keep seeing multiple 5 figure and 6 figure USD expensive cars, lambos ferraris brabus g wagons audi rs7 mercedes s class (2023) porsches, and when I say porsches people here LOVE porsches so much more than any other fucking car that porsche has became the most common car here that people drive! A used Porsche is at minimum 80,000$ usd!!! Thats 8+ years working my job, assuming im not spending 1 single cent, just to buy a used porsche, while hundreds of people drive them daily!!!!

My neighbor sold his mercedes s class and bought a GLS AMG 2023 brand new for over 225,000 fucking $!!!! Thats over 225 YEARS OF MY LIFE working this matrix job without spending a cent to buy that car. This is fucking RIDICULOUS

The world HAS to know the truth about corruption and slavery happening in Serbia. I will be the voice of truth that shall not be silenced. Anyone claiming otherwise is working for one of these corrupted shitfucks.

Incredible how corruption and unfairness sets you free out of the box than playing the matrix game. Unreal to me. I knew it was bad but i never knew it was THIS bad

If I was earning a normal wage salary i wouldnt be complaining. A normal wage salary for me is at minimum 100k a year. Or if i have to be generous then high end of 5 figures. Thats the only way to afford to buy one of these cars. Because how else do these fucking people buy them? Obviously not by working a matrix job

If you think i have unrealistic expectations then you need to unfuck your mind and realize that we are working a VERY difficult fucking job in this tech industry, SO difficult that a 100k should be the fucking minimum. Out of sheer respect towards this EXTREME HARD WORK, we DESERVE to get a high compensation in return -- not a fucking survival slavery wage salary bullshit! The moment you realize that you're underpaid if you earn less than 100k as a software engineer, is the moment you have unfucked your mind and now you have found the truth!

I want to rant about tech YouTubers. As one myself, I feel like I do an even exchange with my viewers.

I want your attention, I don't feel like I deserve it, so I teach you something coding related. You get something of value, I get your attention.

But that's not the case with most in this space. Idiots feel like they can spout whatever bullshit they think about.

They're all stupid with their stupid fucking titles and ideas. Let's review some.

Video Title: How much Javascript you should know to get in tech??
Anyone with > 2 braincells: WTF !!!!!

Video Title: How would I start over to learn coding if I could?
My Reaction: Nope, I wouldn't. The things that I did and didn't is exactly what my journey is and I would do it all over again.

And I get the intent, you're trying to put a roadmap for beginners but they're not going to follow exactly how you lay it out. And why are you trying to establish that there is a correct way of learning coding? Everyone learns at different paces at different times. It's a journey not a race.

Video Title: A day in the life of {COMPANY} engineer.
My Reaction: What do you want to show everyone? Your fancy office? Your perks? The job perks which 99% of other devs won't have?

Video Title: How to crack FAANG interviews.
My Reaction: Well, only the top 1% is going to get an interview anyway. You're not acknowledging the fact that the acceptance rate is < 1% in these companies. Creating a video like this creates false expectations in beginner's heads. And they only see these companies as their only shots of making careers. They dont consider startups or starting their own companies.

Video Title: Top 4 dying programming languages.
My Reaction: WTF !!! COBOL was invented in 1959 and there still is demand for it. And my blood started boiling when Tiff in Tech said PHP is a dying language. Like seriously????

Video Title: Top paying programming languages in 2023.
My Reaction: Please, come on. We know it's Java. And 99% of the viewers ain't getting that job. You're just wasting time listing out languages. By the time someone starts from scratch and gets to a position of getting a job, something else will be the new fad.

Video Title: What advice would I give myself when I was starting?
My Reaction: Really? You couldn't think about saying what advice you'd give to your viewers? Are you really that full of narcissism?

There are good techies though, it's just that I get angrier and angrier the more YouTube recommends me these stupid videos. Ah, my chest feels lighter now.

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

upcoming life choices :

- leave home( and a lifestyle where i live/eat rent free, save 90% of pay check, start work at 12pm and end at 4pm but still renowned for being the most productive engineer, workout and party) to live near office and wfo 3 days/week

- quit a relaxed job + look for a similar role in highly competitive/unstable economy + stay at home with parents who are very much controlling, and repeatedly quarrelling amongst themselves and/or with me/my choices

yepp, both points are true about my home life: its a physical paradise as well as an emotional hell

When I started uni and I took my first programming subject (Data Structures) I hated it as much as I could. My teacher was a complete @$$hole, he wasn't good at teaching, and most people were failing the subject. When I finished that semester I swore I would never be a programmer...
11 years later and I have a Master's in IT and have been working as a Software Engineer for 6+ years. #life
I wish I had a better experience learning the basics

Proper rant tonight... I was getting an upgrade to my home entertainment today. It needed an engineer visit. What a useless clown he turned out to be.

2 hrs after arriving, he left and things weren't working remotely right at all. But it was Saturday and he was off the clock so I had to suck it up. No option to back out either - it was all activated and I had to accept it.

He spent most of the time arguing with me about my home network was set up and how it was wrong and how it was important for the overall system to work. Being a geek and having done research, I couldn't understand this - that wasn't how it was meant to be, I knew. I accept my home wiring is a bit odd, but I've had a working system for years because it's all necessary.

After all the faffing about and purchase of some new powerline units (which I accept I needed anyway but where unrelated to this set up), looking more into it myself, it is now up and running correctly.

I am thoroughly pissed at the ineptitude of the engineer. He clearly doesn't understand how the system works. He doesn't understand how powerline works and how it's a life saver for people with awkwardly shaped houses or thick walls where Wi-Fi is useless. If he had, we would have had far fewer issues and I wouldn't have had the stress of thinking I'd killed our home entertainment and internet and there was nothing I could do about it.

I don't blame the provider (besides them clearly not providing adequate training). But this was arrogant uselessness. At least I had the knowledge to understand how it was meant to work and get it sorted myself.

Maybe it could be a useful sideline job if I get fed up with developing.

!!!Question here!!!

I am enrolled in a full time course (bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering), currently in second year, will be in third by June 2017, and I have a job offer from a Japan Based Company, so it legal to do the job while being enrolled in a full-time course? Also, if I drop from the course and focus on job, so will that be good?

The package is really good, but the degree is important (at-least in India), I want to know about other parts of the world also.

I am inclined towards joining the job, but then it frightens me as the culture here is (degree is important, talent is not!), but I have faith in myself, after watching many motivational videos on youtube, I feel like following my passion, but then I need to be practical as well.

What to do, what not to do? I need your help, please let me know what are your views?

It's the simple things in life that makes me feel that being programmer is fun.

Copying all jpgs from 100 folders? Done.

Ofc I could have searched the folder via Normal finder search, selected them and then copied like a normal human being but wasting more time to do the same thing is what being an engineer about :D

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 me

!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.

However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.

I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.

I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.

I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.

---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs

Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.

Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!

People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.

And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!

I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?

And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!

The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.

--------

This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.

But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.

2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone

3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .

i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money

Life of a Software Engineer

How do I help a software engineer student be better at developing software?

Background: I have this friend that started university with my young brother, two-or-so years ago my brother finished the career and got his degree while she is still there trying to finish the same career (!), we were looking the chance of changing careers but due to her low grades this is not possible and according to her U's counselor is better that she just finishes the career and gets her degree.

We scheduled a Zoom meeting for Sunday next week, to talk about her pain-points and see what improvement we can chase; issue is that I've never mentored anyone ever in my professional life (my brother from time to time drops a question to me or so, but that's different).

My plan is to either see if she suffers from lack of practice (meaning: she does not write software more often in order to improve her skills) or if it's hard for her to think in abstracts, either way, I believe that the latter improves if you do the former (just correct me if I'm wrong), thus the plan would be to assign her a bunch of programming exercises and have meetings at least once a week during her vacations.

My plan would be for her to actually learn game development with Godot, since the final result is always a game my hope is that having something to show encourages her to do the thing, but, who knows.

Have you ever done something like this for someone with the same issues? What was your experience and what nuggets of knowledge can you lend me?

P.S.: We don't live in the States but in Costa Rica, she does not have to deal with crippling student loans.

People at my home come to me every time they forget the passwords for their emails with no recovery options set and then ask me to recover their password. When I say I can't, I hear the taunt “what's the point of being a software engineer when you can't recover a password" :[

So a while back I added my email as recovery option to everyone's email. Life is good now.

So my math teachers who don't even know a single bit about Dev, even ms paint, came into the IT classroom and said

"Learn hard students, get good marks for Advanced Level and get a scholarship. Then become a software engineer. Then you'll have a wonderful life. You'll have a beautiful wife, beautiful kids, Mercedes, big house. You'll be able to live in relaxation"

Sometimes i motivate myself by going on youtube.com and searching this exact "A day in the life of a software engineer"
then i watch a couple of videos during breakfast and lunch time

and search pretty much anything to do with software development
and also listen to some Lofi beats

Day 8. My suffering with no internet connection... has finally come to an end. I had to call the internet providers from outside of my city (capital) so they can come here and fix the internet. They came within 30 mins and fixed this bullshit in 2 minutes, while the engineers and electricians in my city failed to do it for over 8 days. This is astonishingly mindbending to me

In the city where i live everyone seems to be extremely dumb slave and incompetent to do their jobs while people living in the capital city get shit done asap

Need a good doctor that can actually fucking heal you? Go to capital

Need a good doctor that actually knows how to heal your fucking dog? Go to capital

Want to earn more money? Go to capital

Need an electrician who actually knows how to fix the electrical problem? Call the capital city

Need software engineer who actually fucking knows their shit? Go to capital

Need your dick sucked right? Go to capital

Almost everything seems to be done right and fast by people from outside of my fucking city. Of course there are plenty of shit even they cant do. But people in my city cant do ANYTHING right

Im so frustrated and annoyed. Tired of all the shit. Too much shit happening in my life rn. Life gangfking me from All fking directions

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

I'm an apprentice software engineer, have been for about a year now. I feel so dumb all the time. Used to be I'd just teach myself at my own pace for about a year or two (which was slow, on and off because of life getting in the way). Now I'm surrounded by programmers with decades more experience than me and I can't help but feel inferior.
I want to get better faster but, I work full-time now so I don't know how to supplement my studying. I've been studying linear-algebra online because my maths is crap and I remember one of my colleagues mentioning that it would be useful. But now I'm not sure because apparently discrete mathematics is better.
I also need to keep up with Java since that's what I'm learning in university but, I'm mostly using React/Typescript in my current project. By the time I finish work I don't even want to look at a line code and I lack the self-discipline to force myself to study in the evening.
I need to pick a direction and stick with it but, it's seems to just be increasingly harder as I've gone on.

I just went to a new barber for a haircut. Costed me $8. The barber earned $8 in 20 minutes and immediately went to cut another guy. This means the barber earns $24 per hour.

I, a software engineer with a computer science university degree working in IT tech field as a java backend software engineer on complex government software that sells gas & energy, get paid, and I will be exact to the cent: $3.75 per hour.

This means a barber earns 6.4 TIMES MORE per hour than I do as a software engineer with a computer science degree.

This also means that, it takes me 1 WHOLE DAY to earn as a software engineer with computer science degree, what the barber earns in 1 hour.

Therefore, this further means, after all of life expenses food bills rent taxes etc, that i can barely afford to go to barber. A barber for $8, is not very cheap for me as a software engineer with computer science degree.

I can not explain the utmost disrespect towards me and disappointment to be working as a software engineer with computer science degree.

I, as a software engineer with computer science degree, feel like I am used as an african wage slave to work extremely hard jobs for a below average wage. I am saddened and disgusted. This is shameful and must be illegal.

After all of what I've been through and everything I've seen, it turns out school was everything BUT the path to success. School was a path to failure... A path to eternal wage slave and poverty...

I had the confidence that I was a good engineer most of the time and I have proved it more than once, but now during this period of my life, I suddenly feel weirdly inadequate...

What if there are no weekends?

It really annoys me that many tech recruiters do not have a basic knowledge of the roles they are trying to recruit for and what skill set to look for when they cold message/call potential candidates on LinkedIn.

I make it very clear on my profile that I am a Full Stack Engineer. Still, every other day I get messages about Data Engineering, Frontend Dev or SRE roles. Sometimes a recruiter would insist that I schedule a call with them before they tell me the details, and then I would realize after the call what an absolute waste of time it was.

I have a lot of respect for recruiters. It's not an easy job. But I'm starting to strongly believe that tech recruiters should be made to go through a specialized training to make life easy for themselves and to stop wasting time of people who are not even remotely suitable for their requirements.

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

!tech (sorta)

I am a 24yo Software Engineer guy and had just started working professionally 2 years ago, and most of my work life went in WFH due to covid. Before that, my college was also near to my home, so i have never left my home for more than a few hours to do studies.

Life had went pretty smoothly so far but now I see a lot of hurdles coming into my path . i am 24 and don't have a license for even a 2 wheeler. I don't have a good idea of my own city (but fortunately it has a great infrastructure , so i know how to travel via public transport to anywhere easily). mainly I don't know how to live alone.

The worst thing currently happening for me is that my company is transforming from WFH to WFO. The office is in a different metropolitan city which is crazy expensive and short on space. I already am uncomfortable with the idea living on my own but the thoughts of sharing a room/bed with some other guy and having my savings cut from 90 to 50% is worse.

i am hopeful that the financial hit will not be that bad as appraisals are coming, but this picture of hustle is scary. will i indulge into bad habits (drinking, gambling, smoking)? will i loose my health? would i need to wash my clothes and cook my food everyday? would i even have time to think and watch some web series, video tutorial? would i cut cost everywhere? every thing is scary. the market is also very bad right now, i am not getting any interviews even after applying to many places.

how do you prepare yourself to live away from home? Also , how do you prepare your family to live away from you?

(for 2nd question, i am a single child of a nuclear family with rarely any relatives or friends. my parents , especially my mom have been super involved in my life and we both have an exteem8 attachment to each other. i have recently started going away for short trips and travels, but she gets super emotional and concerned on thinking about me living and managing things on my own , away from her)

First Covid and now the war which will probably become World war 3. Despite trying my best to stay positive and work on my skills as a software engineer and a professional, it has really affected my will to keep grinding and hustling in life. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay motivated and on track.

Please tell me I’m not the only one feeling like this.

what is life if not an eventual step towards sadness?

i have been working professionally in wfh setup since 2020 nd have seen my dad work as a businessman for 20 years , then a fulltime wfo job employee for 5 years. i have been a wfo*(hybrid) employee for last 2 months as this is my first wfo job.

everywhere i go, i am told that the "work-life during covid is a lie, a mere anomaly in otherwise horrific work lifestyles" .

let's consider 3 lifestyles.

1. a software engineer graduated in 2023 and starting his first fulltime office job.

- guy goes to office everyday, travels for 2 hours, changes between a metro , rickshaw nd physical walk, works 9 hours in office, again travels b/w different modes for 2 hours to reach back home, have his dinner, watches some videos nd goes to sleep.

- in office there is no one happy, everyone is either bitching about or buttering someone.

- later he moves naar to office in a rented flat and his travel time is replaced by daily chores, like washjng clothes , cleaning home, stockings supllies and cooking etc.

- life goes on. he eventually starts making some assets (home appliances, car, home etc) and starts saving money. he also gets into relationship , then marriage happens, then kids come. the office days are full of office for all nd weekdays remain source of fun and entertainment for all. kids grow, move out and do the same thing over. death

>> souce of sadness :a monotonous life with no time for happiness in everyday life. he even meets more sad people everyday who are again just bitching, cribbing and lamenting

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2. a small scale car mechanic with 2 labour.

- almost same life, just a bit more pressure, as he not only has to make sure that his employees are giving him enough output for their income, he also has to ensure that the business keeps running and generating revenues.

for him, their are no time shifts , he needs to ensure the shop door opens at 9am and closes at 9pm for business, while ensuring all the stocks remain available , revenue and sales are documented and business dealings are done. fuck the family fuck the food, fuck the home, he would sleep in his shop if needed and his future family would be just their to unfuck/provide these ignored essentials.

>>> source of happiness : no time/people to emjoy life

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3. a social media influenza/motivational speaker : these guy hates himself from day 1 . they know they are just a fluke and even though they say they are "not working", they are pulling all the legs to keep their revenue source running : sending posts on trendy things asap, cold mailing, begging for sponserships, publishing content asap.. not sure if a single person exosts who has been a happy social media influenza for last 30 years.

>>> source of sadness : unsatisfactory work, delusional life

---

so what the fuck is wrong with life. i have a board that says "make dotenvironment @64 proud" . i am 24 and following the path of guy 1 in above post. i can prob make myself a proud man by 64 but how can i make myself a "man who lived a happy life" by 64?

Okay so there are a lot of things that are left by us students as "this would be taught to us on job, why bother now?" So i have many questions regarding this:

- is it a safe mentality? I mean University is teaching me, say a,b,c and the job is supposed to be like writing full letters, than am i stupid to stick to just a,b,c and not learning how to write letters beforehand?

- what is even "taught" on job? This is especially directed towards people in Big firms. I mean i can always blame that small ugly startup who treated me badly and not gave me any resources, but why do i feel its going to be same at every other company?

I guess no one is gonna teach me for 6 months on how to write classes with java, or make a ml engineer out of me when i don't know jack shit about ml.... That's the task for college, right?

I feel that when these companies say they "teach", you they mean how to follow instructions regarding agile meetings, how to survive office politics and how to learn quickly and produce an output quickly. I don't think that if i don't know how MVI works, then they are gonna teach me that, would they?i guess not unless they already have someone knowledgeable in that topic

- what about the things that are not taught in our colleges and we wanna make a career in it? Like say Android. From what i have experienced , choosing a career in a subject that's not taught you in grad school immediately takes away some kind of shield from you, as you are expected to know everything beforehand. So again, the same questions bfrom above

i did learned something from job life tho, and that too twice. Once it was when i first encountered an app sample for mvvm and once when i found out a very specific case of how video player is being used in a manner that handled a lot of bugs.

Why i didn't knew those approaches when i was not in job? Well, the first was a theoretical model whose practical implementation was difficult to find online that time and the second was a thing that i myself gave a lot of hours, yet failed to understand. However when i was in the company , i was partnered with a senior dev who himself had once spent 30 days with the source code to find a similar solution.

So again , both of above things could have been done by me had i spent more time trying to learn those "professional tools" and/or dwelve deeper into the tech. And i did felt pretty guilty not knowing about those...

which software/research/project you created in your free time as a hobby recently?

I personally created a small widget app that would allow users to create widgets of PDF files on their mobiles.

i have noticed a personal trend : i tend to spend my free time on language/tools/framework that are somewhat different than my daily job. I am a software engineer building sdks in my job that provide a very commercial set of features for android apps, but ended up creating an hobby app that would utilise android's other cool APIs ( storage, file, permission etc) .

before this project too i was exploring backend and web development, creating small react websites in my past time.

do you also spend time exploring outside yhe frameworks/tools used in your work life? or if not, how do you keep yourself motivated? the lateral part os important for me as i am soon going to a job where i might be exploring android APIs in daily work life and therby making android apps will become boring for me .

i remember before joining an SDK making company, i was trying to come up with an SDK myself lol, which at that time was opposite yo rhe work i was doing in the day

Have you ever considered switching to IT support/help desk?
I mean, sometimes I try to analyze my own situation from a 3rd person perspective and I realize I could have a pretty much stressless job with still enough money to live a normal life.
I have a BSc and MSc(soon to have) in CS, with focus on AI/ML. I've always been a geek with a problem solving attitude, that's why I got into computers in the first place. And now I'm pondering if I should just try an IT Support position, it's the kind of things I used to do as a teenager when a classmate had a network/computer problem, it doesn't even feel like a job to me. I could call it a day, get home at 5/6pm, and spend time on my personal projects (software, infosec) with a fresh mind, going to bed (and sleep) knowing that the next day would be a nice one. No clients wanting a new feature that you gotta implement and push on a production server friday afternoon because your ceo(who is also a pseudo proj manager) just said:"Yes, we can", while you watch the technical debt rising like amazon's stocks.
Maybe this is just the burnout talking, I don't know. Maybe I should just try being a software engineer outside of Uni in the first place, and only then start pondering.
Maybe a sysadmin position...
Have a nice day

You are an eletronics engineer --> you can fix my TV set then...
You are a computer engineer -> you can fix my my Windows laptop...

Life is tough for tech oriented people....

It's really annoying when u focusing on one task, and everything is planned and scheduled properly. And then Ur boss come in and assign u another task again, endless side project.

The real pain...

Okay. I look at myself as a kind of intellectual person. My parents are not believers so I came out quiet normal. As engineer and fan of technology I believe in science and I have a fairly complete look at life and universe at whole, I do not need any religional explanation for anything. I do not believe in the conspiracy theories and in any highly organized global secret society who controll us. I have acquired my view and opinions by systematically rethinking every aspect of life and everything I knew and I was thought before, btw this is the reason I stopped to eat animal products too.

But after all this corona shitshow, I really don't know If the current situation is just rolled by stupidity of media and politics or its really some plan of some people. I mean you can legally buy cigarettes with proven death rate of 10%, they recommend you to drink milk while its ultra carcinogenic and like 60% of population is intolerant, you have to wear mask but not gloves while the virus transference is 90% trough hand contact, and there are many many many questions that makes me paranoid. And now this vaccination stuff with countries almost forcing it in population, ahh... Man, This complete story is too irrational and strange. I start to loose my stable belief system and slide out. I noticed that I am not sure and I am just silent when people talk about these things. I hope this nonsense will end soon.

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

!rant
Anyone from Sweden? I found an engineer position I want to apply for, but was curious about things like quality of life and such.

So I'm having this return to the 70s mood. Not for the 70s themselves but for the pack of tech in everyday life.

Like besides email or worldwide message exchange and wikipedia, what have been the last true innovations?

Media streaming just killed and monopolized other industries. Sure, everything is cheaper, but let's be honest, how much music do we consume? Pretty sure like 80% of people listen to the same 100 songs in their whole lifetime. Do we need limitless streaming? Did it help us somehow beyond giving some dopamine shots?

Social media are and have always been crap for posers, advertising and bots. Small communities make sense, when properly taken care of. The actual issue with social media is the replacement of the so called "Third place". The place you go after work that is not your home. We don't know each other anymore, loneliness is apparently becoming pandemic and people are struggling with this. How is this innovative? For the real time news that are making people freak out?

And then, as I ranted before, AI. It's just... Statistics. Well applied statistics. Is it an actual innovation? No. Serves nothing beyond taking someone's job.
And before some retarded dickhead starts no, it will never create the same amount of jobs as a factory would've done 100 years ago, and prompt engineering is a lie told by the very guys who SELL those products to convince you that their crap is harmless.

Maybe it's about time to hit the brakes for a second and think if the simpler things (NOT the times!) were better, if maybe if we're getting lonely is actually our fault, it's our fault for not calling that old friend for a drink, it's our fault if we keep getting some dopamine shot every minute and are barely able to look people in the eyes, it's our fault for not behaving like human beings?

I hope any engineer will understand how this rant is about consumer-oriented tech and not tech in general.

Im working 6days, than I'm free 4 days. So 2-3 days from those 4, I would like to do some internship, traineeship or call whatever you want, at isp, data center or enterprise, to kick some real life network engineer experience. Basically I have 0 real life experience even I'm preparing to ccnp. Guys, I can't even find unpaid internship... When they hear that I have finished bachelor like 6 years ago, they just don't want to hear from me. I am deeply disappointed. Sometimes I feel that I won't have an it support job even with ccie... I mean I already feel more skilled than the complete IT crowd at the company where I'm working but no one cares. If you have some advice like where to go, please share with me...

How can I get into environmental protection as software engineer? Coral reefs and 🌊 life in general holds my interest the most, but can be anything really.

I would really love to do something meaningful with my skills.

P.S. Not related to protection, but would be really cool to get into sea exploration software + robotics.

Hey all! I'm gonna be graduating soon from grad school and I'm starting to realize that I have no idea what I wanna do with my programming career!

I currently work as QA but have been really working towards being a programmer but the only problem is that I really dislike web applications ... specifically front end.

With most jobs being full stack web apps, I feel like I'm really gonna be limiting myself once I'm applying for junior software engineering jobs.

I'm just wanting your thoughts and some advice on what I should do since in still trying to figure things out. The only goal I have in life for my career at the moment is to be a software engineer.

!dev
!!Lyrics

Really a random post but related to my personal dev-life so maybe it’s at least arguable if it belongs here.

This is one of my all time favorite songs, I can identify myself with it (although I’m reinterpreting some parts).
Back in Highschool I had girlfriends, I had time, I had my entourage, everything except money. All my dad wanted me to become was a rich fucking millionaire. Failure was never accepted, no matter what it was about and everything could always have been done better.
It was pretty much a military childhood. I already loved programming back then but only as a hobby, kinda.
I really wanted to make good money so I started a dev career (with makes gooooood money where I came from). The more I invested in my career, and that was a lot, I more and more lost the understanding of what’s really important, just pursued my goal of being the best fucking dev out there and start my own company in the next 10 years.

Well.. 10 years are over now, I’m still an engineer and I lost everything I had before I started this. Especially friends and relations to women (which I’m not even able to connect to anymore).

In this lyric, the blackbird and raven are the career that just ate me alive. Hope that makes any sense to some of you?..

Anyway, here the lyrics if you wanna read it:
—————————————-
Sons of Anarchy
Come join the murder - white buffalo

There's a blackbird perched outside my window
I hear him calling
I hear him sing
He burns me with his eyes of gold to embers
He sees all my sins
He reads my soul
One day that bird, he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles

Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king

On a blanket made of woven shadows
Flew up to heaven
On a raven's glide
His angels they turn my wings to wax now
I fell like judas, grace denied
On that day that he lied to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles

Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king

I walk among the children of my fathers
The broken wings, betrayal's cost
They call to me but never touch my heart, now
I am too far
I'm too lost
All I can hear is what he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles

Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king

So now I curse that raven's fire
You made me hate, you made me burn
He laughed aloud as he flew from eden
You always knew, you never learn
The crow no longer sings to me
Like Martin Luther
Or Pericles

Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king

I'm curious about where have you learned coding? I had learned Java most of my life, in a university course since the age of 15. It was a special programming course for high school students and out of 6000 students who applied I was one of the lucky 50 that got in after 3 huge tests in logical thinking and math. This was the path I took to have this job now as a full time software engineer. I'm interested to know how all of you guys learned programming and when have you started. Feel free to tell about apps or programs you use as I'd like to further increase my knowledge in other languages too ☺

2 years ago(jan-oct 2020) i was a college student giving his final exams. some of my personal stats were:

- current knowledge of Android Framework and associated stuff(android, java, kotlin, making and deploying apps , best practises, etc) : 30%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/php): 5%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:2%
also
- free time: somewhat
- Personal health: barely caring about

====

Same year i got my first job (oct 2020) which i switched in next year (oct 2021). before joining the next(my current) job, my personal stats were:
- current knowledge of Java : 30%
- current knowledge of Kotlin : 70-80%
- current knowledge of Android and Android Stuff(the framework, making production ready apps, deploying, best practises , etc) : 70-80%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/php): 3-5%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:1%
also:
- Free time: lol, i was working at 1 am too
- Personal health: even lesser caring about, body fats and thick muscles at various places

====

it will be almost a year of me working for these guys in November and this has been an interesting year so far. the stats are:
- current knowledge of Java : 35%
- current knowledge of Kotlin : 20-30%
- current knowledge of Android and Android Stuff(the framework, making production ready apps, deploying, best practises , etc) : 20-30%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/node/react): 20-25%
- current knowledge of new stuff* (cordova,unity,flutter, react native, ios) : 5-10%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:10-15%
also:
- Free time: a good amount of free time, like in addition to weekends and festivals, i take 2-4 leaves every month
- Personal health: improving a lot. loosing weight, gaining muscles, getting better stamina at running and other activities

====

So i am currently at a weird place. As from my stats, you can see that previously i was in a android heavy role in a company that put a lot of pressure, but i was able to become a better sellable dev through it.

My current role is also of an android dev here, but we maintain b2b products and i am sometimes asked to fix bugs in hybrid apps like unity, react native and cordova, so gained a few knowledge there too. and since i have a lot of free time in my hand, i explored a bit of web technologies too (apart from enjoying a relaxing life and focusing on personal health)

However my main concern is that am becoming a less sellable Dev. The lack of exposure/will to work on android tech has made me outdated from a framework that was once my stronghold. remember that i joined my first company purely because of my passion and knowledge of android os.

When i got offer from this company, i also had another, $5000/year lesser offer in hand. both of these offers were very generous , but i went with the greed and took the offer from this company despite knowing that they are looking for someone who will act as a developer-maintainer kind of person, while the other company giving lesser pay had a need of a pure android engineer.

So i am currently 24. should i keep on doing this relaxing but slowly killing job, or go into a painful, pressurizing but probably making me a better "android" engineer job ?

Hi devRant!
I'm here asking for your advice!
I'm a MSc student in my mid 20s, I took a gap year to work as an IT consultant and I'm planning on going back to studying, keeping at the same time a part-time job.

I already have some experience as a data engineer, developer and sys admin. I'm also mastering in applied statistics and data science and have a BSc in physics. I'm planning to relocate around Europe. All I want is a salary I can live with and a good work/study/life balance (perhaps work 24-30hrs a week?).

So far I've checked out a few IT jobs website and I've found some suitable positions. Problem is most of them are fulltime.

Where would you search for such a job? Is there any website/portal I should prefer? How would you proceed?
Should I prefer any place in particular (i.e. Northen countries)?

Thank you in advance <3

Note: I know it's a very broad question, that's because I'm open to any piece of advice you are willing to give me

tests boy
- balding in his late twenties
- thinks that React is a framework
- favorite book is either 1984 or fight club
- came to IT to make an impact but obviously lacks determination to do so. Prefers not to think about it
- doesn’t know why and for what he wakes up every morning. Stopped thinking about it 7 years ago
- has a girlfriend that doesn’t allow him to penetrate her, only hugs and cunnilingus
- already forgot how does a blowjob feel like
- when it’s too hot in his room when he tries to sleep, he gets up and opens the window, and after that he doesn’t want to sleep anymore, and tomorrow is a yet another working day
- unexpected slack message sound he hears when not at the office triggers his fight or flight response
- still salty about CSS vertical-align: middle not instantly centering the element vertically
- just like 5 years ago, every day he thinks that after he learns That New Thing, he’ll begin The Real Life, and his current career state is temporary
- loves to say “it’s not my job” but only says that if absolutely sure that he won’t be reported for that
- uses vscode
- thinks he’s an engineer

Was playing Alchemy 2 and tried to merge Engineer and life but it didn't allowed. Looks like even in game engineers are not allowed to have a life. :(

Any salesforce developers here? What's your day-t-day life like? And can anyone compare and contrast it with their day-to-day as a full-stack or front-end/back-end engineer?

There is a University in Karnataka, India called VTU, whose exam paper re-evaluation fee costs more than the exam fees, moreover they'll fail you to make money.
Syllabus remains outdated from a decade or two. You'll be considered great if you managed to mugup the stuff for exams to take ranks.
If anyone relies on it's syllabus, then it's decided that they're gonna be the donkey among whom it produces every year.
You'll only become a true engineer if you realise this truth and seek the real educational resources online.
I saved myself by dropping off the college an year ago, which was the best thing I've ever done. I can make as many projects I can (fullstack web).
I'm here to find out, are there any successful VTU drop-outs out there? or am I alone (maybe successful in future).....

When you want to improve your life but time isn't enough because you have to earn for a living. To pay bills,l and necessity. It's far easier to find low wage job than pursuing to become a software engineer. Sometimes I eat once in a day and 6 hrs of sleep because I have to improve my programming skills.