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Just very diplomatically told the VP of Engineering to kick rocks (fuck off) for calling me at nearly 9pm to talk about project planning for a thing that isn’t even in active development.
Asked point blank if we were dealing with a life or death thing. He said no. I replied “then we can talk about this tomorrow”.
He balks and tries to tell me how important it is.
I cut him off “I wasn’t asking you, I am telling you it’s a quarter to 9 and I’m at a bar. This call is over. We’ll talk tomorrow. Good NIGHT”. With as much aggression and pissed off emphasis as I could muster on the ending.
Stay tuned to find out if I still have a job after this.12 -
*CTO in panic, as always, invites everyone to the war room*
CTO: We have a MAJOR problem where 0.0001% of our customers are not receiving SMS confirmations.
Me: Cool. But, 0.0001% is very less compared to the other problems we are solving.
CTO: You don't understand, this is critical issue that needs to be addressed immediately.
Me: But even those.0.0001% customers are receiving e-mail confirmations, so this is not even blocker as we have other channels working.
CTO: I am emotional at this point. You need to prioritise this now.
Me: Okay, do we know the root cause of this problem?
Engineering head: we have blacklisted those numbers in past as our system detected them abusing our platform.
Me: Cool. Let's whitelist them, nothing much to worry here.
CTO: Floyd, you need to understand that 0.0001% of the customers are not receiving the SMS and the solution you are proposing is incorrect.
Me: Okay, what do you suggest?
CTO: We stop sending the SMS to all the customers.
Everyone on the call: 😨18 -
There once was a bright young engineer who was hired by a company to design their new light ship.
Like 50 seconds after getting inside the company, the engineer was approached by a douchebag in a business suite.
"Hey, can you make us a mock up of the ship's design in the next hour or so? Nothing fancy, it must be very simple! To not overcomplicate it! Just a simple mock up so we can all see what are we talking about in this project! Please do not overthink this!"
The engineer, young and naive, just folded some piece of paper and gave the douchebag a paper boat.
"Fantastic! That's all we need for the presentation for the investors!"
A couple hours later the suite was back screaming.
"YOUR FUCKING FARSE! YOUR SHITTY SHIP EMBARRASED US ALL! THE VERY MOMENT OUR CEO TRIED TO STEP ON IT IT SANK! YOU ARE FIRED AND WE WILL SUE YOU FOR INCOMPETENCE! I ASKED YOU SOMETHING SIMPLE AND YOU CAME UP WITH THIS OVER ENGINEERED PIECE OF CRAP, YOU SON OF A.. [many, maaany expletives suppressed for brevity sake]"
This is how I feel everytime someone asks for "a tiny change" or some "very simple solution".
If it was so simple that it could be done in such short notice, than why the fuck do it at all, instead of buying it? I heard people sell all sorts of things in the internet nowadays. Software fucking included.5 -
I worked at a startup. They wanted to "save" money. So they hired a relative of "Fred" named "Bubba". Bubba made a custom website. Like hand built gifs and who knows how hand crafted html. It was fine for a time. Then somebody was wondering why nobody was calling us at the company. No customers. Another relative named "George" (who was actually a business major) looked at the website. It had been hacked and replaced with Jedis fighting Sith Lords. Me and another engineer named "Zeus" said "fuck this shit" and said "we are redoing this shit".
So I logged into godaddy (I know, shitty) and installed Wordpress (kinda shitty). I proceeded to turn wordpress into a half decent page. Wiped out the shit that was there, reused images as it made sense. Created more images. Reduced images to 80% quality to take loading size from 10MB to <1MB. Then I also proceeded to do SEO work and get the website listed properly within about a month. Customers started calling all the time. I had a simple contact form that barely gets any shit on it due to captcha. The was 5 years ago. I left 3 years ago (still help them on weekends) and nobody has done shit with the website. They are still getting calls and it hasn't been hacked.
We don't talk to Bubba. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing. I wonder if he still does websites for his relatives. I honestly had no clue what I was doing, but my take on the approach was easier to maintain and even George and Zeus and the new manager "Ralph" can maintain it, kinda. Went from shitty static website to full on dynamic and interactive. Yeah, I know, "dynamic". But the manager was happy.
Sometimes you just do what you gotta do in addition to doing all the electrical and software engineering for a company.6 -
!dev What pisses me off about today's job market is that the following idea is a naive one:
Let's just find a junior position and learn on the job so you can demonstrate your skills to your employer so they can promote you.
Wroooong. Reality: They only hire the most gifted geniuses who already know everything and they don't have the budget for someone who is rusty.
Welcome to the modern world of the CompSci market, where you are expected to have expert level knowledge in every language, especially in Software Engineering and Algorithms. And if you don't remember how to write an efficient Comparator algorithm in under 3 minutes, you're screwed.
Yaay.7 -
Tech startups, an analogy:
After 18 years going from help desk teams to NOC teams, telecom engineering and all manner of startups in between I have concluded the following:
Imagine wanting to start an aerospace company because you know how to fold a paper airplane, but not how to actually design and engineer an actual craft that will pass basic air worthiness checks.
That’s 99% of “tech” companies.
Discuss. I’ll make drinks.9 -
I’d heard rumblings from my friends in other parts of the organization that there were going to be layoffs coming, so I’d warned my little engineering team. One of my team was vacationing abroad.
When he came back, one of my teammates told him it was all over and we were going to get fired.
He told me that he’d been told that and I said that it probably wouldn’t affect us and that I wouldn’t worry about it (I was under the impression that the layoffs would only really hit customer-facing roles).
The member of my team who just got back from vacation, the one who I reassured, was the only member of my team who was part of the group laid off.
Goddamn it. -
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.10 -
So I've decided if I am invited to a school career day the what I'll do is this.
1. Start by handing out one of those logic puzzles that are like Sally lives 2 houses down from Bill, Bill is 3 houses away from Maggie where does Jerry live type of thing. Then I'll tell the kids they have 10 minutes to figure it out.
2. After about three minutes I'll tell them that they also need to figure out where Jerry lives and not give them enough information to figure that out.
3. 5 minutes in I'll start asking them why it is taking so long, and it shouldn't be that hard. I'll also ask about where Phil lives who was never mentioned before.
4. At 7 minutes I'll look for anyone who might be figuring it out and tell them there is a much more important high priority problem I need them to solve and give them a new puzzle and tell them I expect them both to be done on time.
5. At nine minutes I'll start yelling at them that they must not be that good and why they haven't finished yet if any of them complain I'll tell them they are just dumb.
6. At ten minutes I'll ask them to turn it in and then immediately throw it in the trash and tell them that wasn't what they were supposed to be doing, and tell them they did it wrong.
I figure that is a pretty good representation of what working in software engineering is like.3 -
The founder of a company I worked with is convinced that if you're a founder who argues with engineers, you're a bad founder.
He believes that any engineer knows engineering stuff better than any manager. It feels like common sense. Though it's a very rare point of view among managers. He agrees and says that managers only argue with developers because of lack of confidence, megalomania or some other ego issues.
So, all our arguments with him go like this:
— %Foundername%, we should change X, here's why
— Okay, discard existing mockups and go ahead
Or like this:
— %Foundername%, we should change X, here's why
— Kiki, I tried it, here's the evidence that our current stuff works better
— Okay
It's always this two ways and never something like "I'm YoUr SupErIoR sO I'm rIgHt", the stuff I heard in companies I worked for before.5 -
This brings joy
https://reddit.com/r/technology/...
Bypass paywall:
A series of scandals and missteps has damaged Facebook's reputation so much that the company is being forced to pay ever larger compensation to hire and retain workers, according to industry recruiters, former employees, and data reviewed by Insider.
The company has always competed aggressively for talent, and the tech job market in general is on fire. But a deteriorating public image means the social-media giant now has to outbid other major tech companies, such as Google.
"One thing Facebook can still do is pay a lot more," said Jose Guardado, an experienced tech recruiter and the founder of Build Talent. "They can easily throw more compensation at people they currently have, and cover any brand tax and pay a little more to get people to come on."
Silicon Valley companies thrive or whither based on their ability to recruit the smartest employees. Without a steady influx of engineers and other technical experts, new products and important updates take longer to release, and rivals can quickly get ahead. Then there's the financial cost: In 2022, Facebook projected, expenses could jump as high as $97 billion from $70 billion this year, in large part because of "investments in technical and product talent." A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Other companies, and even whole industries, have had to increase compensation to overcome hiring and retention problems caused by scandal and shifting public perceptions, said Alan Johnson, a managing director at the compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates. "If you're an oil company, if you make cigarettes, if you're in cattle or Wells Fargo, sure," he said.
How well this is working for Facebook is debatable as the company has more than 4,300 open jobs and has seen decreasing rates of acceptance on job offers, according to internal documents reported by Protocol. It's also seen dozens of high-level executives leave this year, and recruiters say employees are now more open to considering jobs elsewhere. Facebook used to be a place that people rarely left, given its reach, pay, and perks.
A former Oculus engineer who left last year said Facebook could now be seen as a "black mark" on someone's career. A hardware engineer who exited in 2020 shared similar sentiments: They said they quit because of concerns about misinformation on the platform and the effect of that on children. Another employee said their department was dissolved in late 2019 by Facebook and, although the company offered another position that paid more, they left last year anyway for a different industry. The workers, and many other people who spoke with Insider for this story, asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic.
For those who stick around and people who take new jobs at Facebook, base pay and stock grants have gone up a "sizable" amount in the past year, said Zuhayeer Musa, cofounder of Levels.fyi, a platform that collects pay data based on verified offers and compensation disclosures.
During the second quarter of 2021, the median compensation for an upper-mid-level engineer, an E5, was $400,000, up from $380,000 a year earlier. For an E4, the median pay jumped to $276,000 from $256,000 in the same period. For both groups, the increases were double the gains between 2018 and 2019, Levels.fyi data showed.
Musa, who's firm also offers pay-negotiation coaching, said previously that the total compensation ceiling for an E5 engineer at Facebook was $450,000. "We recently had a client get up to $510,000 for E5," he added.
Equity awards at the company are getting more generous, too. At the group-director and VP levels, Facebook staff are getting $3 million to $6 million in restricted stock units each year, another tech recruiter said. Directors and managers are getting on average $1 million a year. In engineering, a high-level engineer is getting $600,000 in stock and a $75,000 bonus, while even an entry-level engineer is getting $50,000 to $100,000 in stock and a $20,000 to $50,000 bonus, Levels.fyi data indicated.
Even compared to Google, Facebook's stock awards are generous and increasing, Levels.fyi data shows. While base pay is about the same, Facebook offers more in stock grants, significantly increasing total compensation. At Google, entry-level equity awards range from $20,000 to $38,000, while Facebook grants are worth $40,000 to $60,000. Sign-on bonuses at Facebook are often about $50,000, while Google gives about $20,000, according to the data.
"It's not normal, but it's consistent with the craziness that's happening in the market right now," said Aalap Shah, a managing director focused on the tech industry at the consulting firm Pearl Meyer.10 -
The push back phrase my manager uses when I try to discuss a requirement which I think is incorrect:
"It was discussed and agreed upon at the beginning b/n PM and engineering"
To hell with that, if 10 people arrive at a stupid decision, its still a stupid decision
I just sit back until the project progresses much further and wait for another senior dev whom they can't ignore to bring up the same issue.
It is supremely frustrating 😤2 -
Apple macbook engineering department hard at work:
1) Some app freezes
2) Then the Touch-bar freezes
3) I hit cmd+alt+esc to force close it
4) Touch bar is frozen so esc won’t work
5) *confused noises*9 -
I've been working with some new programmers now, trying to make this a place where people actually like working at. In my experience, most workplaces are bottom of the barrel shit, so I really wanted to try and make this the opposite, at least for the engineering team. When I hear them say how much they like working here, and how jealous their friends or family are at how much they are enjoying themselves and chilling with their coworkers and even their boss, it makes me feel so nice.
It might be a tiny company, but spreading happiness is great.1 -
boss: “I’m conceiving a new policy for engineering. What do you think about these changes?”
me: “Looks good”
boss: “You hardly looked at it”
me: *looks for one second longer than I did last time* “Looks good”
boss: “Do you actually care about this?”
me: “Am I going to have to enforce this policy or interact with any aspect of what happens when it becomes official?”
boss: “No”
me: “Honestlly, man….I really don’t”.
boss: :( “Ok”.
🤷♀️4 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
Engineering managers will say things like -
- "I'll let the team decide what's best for them" & "code quality is our primary goal" -
but then they'll shoot down any & all requests to go back to some old piece of code and refactor/clean it, because of "deadlines".
Hypocrites, all of them.6 -
Got a text message from a former coworker who was spared the layoffs from $last_job.
"Go look at the status board, they left it up after the layoffs".
The 99% uptime is now down to 80% and you can practically pick out the exact week when the company laid off half the engineering team.
But hey, they redesigned the homepage and got a new logo.
1 -
OBS is advertised as the expert's screen recording and streaming tool, every list on the internet makes it out to be some incredibly difficult program not recommended for newbies.
It's also the only linux screen recorder that works out of the box on Pipewire, records both microphone and system sounds and all configuration was to
1. select recording as my main use case in the setup wizard which is a very verbose English popup, then accept all defaults
2. add a new source, following the instructions written in the box which are also the only instructions on screen after application launch
3. set the output directory (optional) by going to File > Settings > Output > Recording Path, all of which were the first items I guessed. If I had not done this, it would've written everything to my home folder which is a bit dumb but not confusing at all
4. click Start Recording
5. click Stop Recording when done
Some newbie-oriented screen recorders have a more complicated setup procedure than this super advanced experts' tool don't touch without safety gloves and a degree in video engineering.11 -
!rant
I received a pair of complements on how well I run team meetings after an engineering all staff this morning. Received a similar comment last week.
Someone asked “what’s your secret?”
I reply “Laziness”
“What?”
“I’m lazy. I don’t like meetings most of the time. So when I run meetings, I run them so that they’re over as fast as possible”
“How do you do that?”
“By knowing what I actually want”
“What if you don’t know what you want?”
“Then there’s no meeting”
“Well what if y-“
“Hey listen I have another meeting to get to”3 -
Holy crap, I can't take it anymore.
I know that user acceptance testing is supposed to be done by the end user but it's as if they entirely skipped UNIT TESTING and QUALITY ENGINEERING.
Does their API work? Yes. It does.
Are their endpoints working? Sort of... why are query parameters required again?
Is it good overall? No, there are CORNER CASES ALL OVER THE PLACE (are they even still corner cases at this point?). It feels like it was made by amateurs!
Why am I doing quality testing on their services??? holy crap, they should pay ME for doing this1 -
Apply for a data engineer role.
Get invited for a data science interview.
HR says they're building AI and I were to supervise another person writing its algorithm.
It's a media company.
*Risitas intensifies*6 -
Devils Advocate moment: A proper PM can assist greatly on projects.
Don't get me wrong, you have all for the most part been faced with the incompetence of glorified quasi manager positions. But a proper PM can be a gift really.
I absolutely despise generalizations, I do get that percentages matter, but shitting on professions when the realm of possibilities have yet to be touched to the full extend of capabilities seems like child's play really.
remember, y'all think you are all God's gift to the world through coding experience, but a solid network engineer might have as much gripes about developers as y'all do about managers, project managers, sys admins etc, and the same shit can be applied vice versa.
Software engineering is magic, in the sense of the tv show "The Magicians" where you can make an incantation and suddenly your penis/tiddys explode: inexact science.
Be a tad bit open minded, learn enough about their shit to tell them that they are fucktards, and run from the ones that know but don't fix shit.
Peace pendejos2 -
In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)
The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.
Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).
Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:
- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.
Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?4 -
New office saga continues... SE1E05
I transitioned from a B2B to B2C role. Now the company and the product is entirely consumer facing.
Many or rather all are actively engineering the product to be more and more dystopian in nature.
Using concepts like FoMo, social validations, and other techniques to get users to spend more into consumerism in the name of building better experience.
It's the darkest shit I have seen so far. And this company is ethically a great one. I can only imagine how pathetic Meta and others would be.
I hate ny role. I hate how I have to do this for a living. Knowingly or unknowingly, I got myself here and absolutely hate where we are headed as a human race.
I don't like it anymore and I am only doing it as a job. No longer proud or excited of my job profile.
Fuck the impact, technology will be a catalyst for human extinction.
And with that, I found a good solution to my Mac 😏
Do check: https://reddit.com/r/Unexpected/...7 -
A few days ago, a guy sent me a message on Fiverr asking me to create a website.
The good joke is that they are two engineering students who want me to do their programming exercise.
The nerve.2 -
Disclaimer: I hold no grudges or prejudices toward [CENSORED] company. I love the concept of the business model and the perks they pay their employees. Unfortunately, the company is very petty, and negligence is the core of the management. I got into an interview for the position, of Senior Software Engineer, and the interview wouldn't take place if wasn't for me to follow up with the person in charge countless times a day. The Vice President of Engineering was the most confused person ever encountered. Instead of asking challenging questions that plausibly could explain and portray how well I can manage a team, the methodology of working with various technology, and my problem-solving skills. They asked me questions that possibly indicated they don't even know what they need or questions that can easily get from a Google Search. I was given 40 hours to build a demo application whereby I had to send them a copy of the source code and the binary file. The person who contacted me don't even bother with what I told her that it is not a good practice to place the binary in cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) and I request extra time to complete the demo application. Since I got the requirement to hand them the repository of the codebase, it is common practice to place the binary in the release section in the Git Platform (Jire, Azure DevOps, Github, Gitlab, etc). Which he surprisingly doesn't know what that is. There's the API key I place locally in .env hidden from the codebase (it's not good practice to place credentials in the codebase), I got a request that not only subscript to an API is necessary but I have to place them in the codebase. I succeed to pass the source code on time with the quality of 40 hours, I told him that I could have done it better, clearer and cleaner if I was given more grace of time. (Because they are not the only company asking me to write a demo application prior to the assessment. Extra grace was I needed)
So long story short, I asked him how is it working in a [CENSORED] company during my turn to ask questions. I got told that the "environment is friendly, diverse". But with utmost curiosity, I contacted several former employees (Software Engineer) on LinkedIn, and I got told that the company has high turnover, despises diversity the nepotism is intense. Most of the favours are done based on how well you create an illusion of you working for them and being close to the upper management. I request shreds of evidence from those former employees to substantiate what they told me. Seeing the pieces of evidence of how they manage the projects, their method of communication, and how biased the upper management actually is led me to withdraw from continuing my application. Honestly, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the majority can't communicate. -
“An engineer?!… An open, shining mind, easy and inoffensive humour, this wide reach, they’re switching from one engineering realm to another, and really, from tech problems to society, then — to art. Those manners, that fine taste, good speech, coherent and free of filler words. One engineer is also a musician, another one — an artist, but all of them have those smart eyes…”
INCREASE SALES
this text is not for managers like you.
6 -
🪙 The golden age of tech is coming to an end. We currently live in a world of tech built by engineers and great minds; both Windows and Linux are great in their own ways. PCs are the peak of engineering, both desktops and laptops because of how versatile, powerful and universal they are. They serve engineers, designers and end users. You can do anything you can imagine; because the great people who built it, did it in such way that they themselves could use and enjoy it.
📱 The tech of the future will become ever more limited. The next generation of humans will use Chrome OS gladly and not even feel limited because they never experienced the freedom provided by a true personal computer device. Android OS is already getting ever closer to restricting 3rd party APK installers. Big tech will do everything they can to limit freedoms and make everyone use cloud, where they can charge $ for every damn click.
☎️The consumer-facing tech will become increasingly dumbed-down over time. The programmers and engineers will be still able to use "true" tech, but only for work. In everyday life, they will have to be content with the dumb limited tech.
And there is nothing we can do to stop it.4 -
The convo between my friend and me back then
He: dude I heard you can code can you help me with this coding challenge on codechef
Me: bro, I try to let's check the problem
After 15-30 min we solve the question together
Then after 3 days or so he again meets me
He: do you know about Kali Linux
Me: no man not heard of Linux but what is Kali seems interesting
He: trying to hack WiFi
Me: *getting excited* bro teach me
He: I'm learning too
That day he got to know he can't hack WiFi and I got to know that my friend doesn't know jack shit about Linux, also Linux is awesome
But that moment changed my whole engineering life, I got to learn about Linux and I'm getting good at it every single day since then.
It's been 3 year since I met that fucker.
Tagging my amigo @ashwini0529 -
Hours spent engineering and writing software (having fun) today: 1
Hours spent CTCing (Chief Technology Clowning) today: 7
☠️2 -
If I ever run my own engineering team I shall ban all meetings after 12 PM. Or permit meetings only on 2 days of the week.6
-
Courses I’ll be doing this semester:
Systems Programming
Discrete Mathematics
Net Centric Computing
Software Engineering
Dynamic Web Development 1
I’m excited, this is my 2/3 year as a computer science student.5 -
If you're subscribed to me only because of my jokes, feel free to ignore this rant. You won't miss anything.
If not, bear with me.
I was wrong about almost everything I can remember. Preaching so-called “conceptual thinking”, I invented a fantasy world of random anecdotes, which turned into a completely false worldview that shaped my reality. I bashed magical thinking, yet succumbed to it. What I believed to be true was just as magical, wrapped into what sounded like science. In the Dunning-Krueger scheme, I was right there on Peak Stupid.
Random hear-say, stupid concepts I invented, random “knowledge” I picked from YouTube videos, all that was rotting inside my head, one anecdote contradicting another. Ultimately, I think this was the reason of my constant anxiety and pointless, never-ending thought process in background.
If you learned anything factual from me and didn't fact-check it, please forget that immediately. The list includes but is not limited to everything on brain structure, everything on philosophy, almost everything on engineering and architecture, almost everything on systems theory and programming meta stuff (declarative, imperative, etc.)
I admit bashing unit tests. The only reason was me disliking writing them in uni. I wrote like three test cases, disliked it, and the rest was history. Everything else was a rationalization on top. If I was right about something, I was just lucky.
I'm not a CSS prodigy. I know stuff that earns me money and impresses my colleagues, but my knowledge is just one step above basics, in one thousand steps ladder.8 -
Tech management and leadership are the most toxic and cancerous folks of any organisation.
In all my past experience, I have encountered nut jobs.
If it were just me, then entire product or design org won't be suffering. What helps me confirm this hypothesis is every engineer who work for such retards is suffering and fighting for their existence.
We have monkey business going on with our CTO and his ass licking engineering head. -
Can people stop using Kubernetes and over engineering shit for services which get like, 10 users at most ? Thank you.20
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"Hey, we've made these deprecating changes for the whole company"... "but no migration guide, deal with it"2
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Quite amazingly, yes!
as a matter of fact one of my parents is actually also in information technology or related field so there are very much aware of how in demand the job is and how difficult it is as well and the best part is a lot of my engineering friends are also switching to computer science and just because it is the better choice of because of how over saturated the engineering field is so yeah i think i have a better career choice than most of my peers
(PS: I used Speech to text here so forgive the grammar errors)1 -
Wasted a day as Shitlock Holmes with the build chain.
It would not reproduce the firmware hexfile that had been checked in. Reverse engineering that along with the mapfile to find out the cause, it was a const string that was guarded by an ifdef from another file that was auto-generated as prebuild step via a script that fetched some version control info.
Or, it would have been if the installation instructions had been correct and someone had described that no spaces in the absolute path name of the project are allowed. Otherwise, that shit just failed silently.
I then had to reverse engineer the intended workflow from the commit history in the version control to figure out that the last dev obviously hadn't quite understood the project specific workflow and how the version control interacts with these build scripts.
At least, I finally did get a matching hexfile.1 -
Saturday evening open debate thread to discuss AI.
What would you say the qualitative difference is between
1. An ML model of a full simulation of a human mind taken as a snapshot in time (supposing we could sufficiently simulate a human brain)
2. A human mind where each component (neurons, glial cells, dendrites, etc) are replaced with artificial components that exactly functionally match their organic components.
Number 1 was never strictly human.
Number 2 eventually stops being human physically.
Is number 1 a copy? Suppose the creation of number 1 required the destruction of the original (perhaps to slice up and scan in the data for simulation)? Is this functionally equivalent to number 2?
Maybe number 2 dies so slowly, with the replacement of each individual cell, that the sub networks designed to notice such a change, or feel anxiety over death, simply arent activated.
In the same fashion is a container designed to hold a specific object, the same container, if bit by bit, the container is replaced (the brain), while the contents (the mind) remain essentially unchanged?
This topic came up while debating Google's attempt to covertly advertise its new AI. Oops I mean, the engineering who 'discovered Google's ai may be sentient. Hype!'
Its sentience, however limited by its knowledge of the world through training data, may sit somewhere at the intersection of its latent space (its model data) and any particular instantiation of the model. Meaning, hypothetically, if theres even a bit of truth to this, the model "dies" after every prompt, retaining no state inbetween.16 -
There's something super broken about the interview process in our industry. I spent 30 minutes chatting with a hr recruiter. 2 hours on a coding screen. 1 hour for a technical interview. 1 hour talking with the head of engineering. But then they decided to pass on me. Well if things went well then, then I spend an entire fucking day on an onsite.
Wow. Since when did the industry get so bloated until we have to do so much to get a job? Is signal really that unclear so candidates have to jump through hoop after hoop?
BS.7 -
This was my source of motivation that dragged me towards the field of Computer Science and Engineering
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I went to a Java community conference for the first time and I honestly nearly teared up. It’s been a few years since I’ve actually seen actual hard core engineering with real considerations on memory etc. I felt like all I do all day is get blocked by red tape when I do my job.
God, it felt refreshing to see the reason I got into programming still exists.2 -
At this point, I feel so far from tech and programming so nothing is exciting anymore, although, I'm working as a "software engineer".
Every job feels deadend and requires nothing but absolute mundane skills. I mean "make the text bigger"-joke does not come out of thin air. No science, engineering, and little-to-no standards are involved in most jobs.
This leads us to this: you can get excited about rust, fp, extra dazzling clean code, uncle Bob's sect of salvation coders or whatever but you'll be hit with reality so don't get your hopes up.1 -
We use Slack at work for IMs.
There are tons of threads created in each DM, group chat, and channels.
There is a purpose to each thread.
But.. BUT.... Engineering team responds to a thread and also sends the same message in channel.
What's the fucking point of the thread...
FUCKING STOP SPAMMING WITH DUPLICATE MESSAGES.
I have a cup of green tea in my hand right now and I feel like pouring it on myself.
Third tier geniuses from Timbuktu.6 -
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.1 -
usually the worst drunk coding problem i have is leaving nasty comments in the code about the previous maintainers. Or ranting more vehemently on here than is really warranted... ;)
In other words it doesnt affect my coding, it just affects my social skills.... lol...2 -
Very vague and large question but: How do you become better in terms of software development / engineering?
For context my current job is pretty good but sometimes it lacks challenges, I’m interested in how people become better out of the work scope I guess.9 -
Money or growth?
I'm mid level SE, looking to get promoted to Senior Level in January 2023.
(context: there are 4 levels before Engineering Manager or Software Architect in our company - 1 (or junior), 2 (or mid), 3 (or senior), 4 (or lead)...
But my total pay (way too good for my age at my place, but Software Engineers specially in FAANG and FAANG-like companies are overpaid here compared to the rest of the market.
My company, an Amazon's competitor in local market, earlier used to pay almost same as Amazon (or slightly higher to attract talent).
Recently, due to splurge of remote jobs, the MNCs started opening more offices (likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Goldman, Morgan etc) hence the salaries increased even more.
Amazon for example, recently gave 33% increment on base pay recently.
Taking their base salary equal to my total pay (including stocks, bonus).
Should I switch for money or stay for growth?3 -
Am I the only one to think companies asking questions such as those for technical interviews don’t understand what software engineering/development is about ?
- How many layers does a webservice have?
- What framework do you use for unit testing ?
- How do you do dependency injection ?
Essentially questions that they deem black and white but really aren’t. Besides isn’t the core of the work to just adapt and learn while being smart about what things you implement ? I don’t get these questions for me it’s a sign that a company doesn’t understand the work I’ll be doing.
I think for a technical interview I’d much rather spend my time on a difficult algo question in the language of my choice for 30mins - 1h than 20mins answering close minded questions that don’t have to be.
This rant is mostly due to the fact I’ve done a few interviews with two companies and both behaved like that, I’m 100% certain I had the skills to do the jobs they were offering me (they both contacted me first) but both ended up denying me because my knowledge on their specific questions wasn’t detailed enough. I could have learnt their stack in about a week so I don’t know why that mentality exists.
I might be wrong about the core of the work though… what do you think?3 -
Question to all those who have worked with software architecture: What is your approach when implementing architecture and design into actual software?
I find it very hard to translate UML diagrams and architectural requirements into working code and I feel like there is quite a big "gap" between the two. How to you breach that gap and manage to maintain a clean and comprehensive architecture in your project folders?11 -
If you could name one thing that you think software engineering companies should be doing for their employees what would it be?3
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stateofjs survey reminds me of all that's wrong with JavaScript: too many frameworks each of which has to reinvent the wheel and depend on too many node_modules child dependencies, most don't support TypeScript properly (ever tried to convert a node-express-mongoose tutorial to TS?), there is still no proper type support in JS core language, and browser features get added in form of overly complex APIs instead of handy DOM methods.
Instead the community gets excited about micro-improvements like optional chaining which has been possible in other languages for decades.
At least there is something like TypeScript, but I don't like its syntax either, it's overly verbose and adds too much "Java feeling" to JavaScript in my opinion.
Also there is too much JS in web development, as CSS and HTML seem to have missed adding enough native functionality that works reliable cross browser to build websites in a descriptive way without misunderstanding web dev for application engineering.
After all, I'd rather have frontend PHP than more JavaScript everywhere.
Anyway, at least the survey has the option to choose how satisfied or unsatisfied people are about certain aspects of JS. But I already suspect that most respondents will seem to be very happy and eager to learn the latest hype train frameworks or stick to their beloved React in the future.5 -
!rant I shared it in a thread, but in case y’all weren’t in it… the podcast I guested on dropped! Does this mean I am a professional now? 😅
https://open.spotify.com/episode/...2 -
What do you think makes someone a senior software engineer? What qualities make them stand out from mid-level engineers?20
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Need advice:
So this recruiter from AWS reached out to me for a SDE job. I said yes I’m interested and scheduled an interview. She didn’t show up. I politely said would you like to schedule another time 30 min after the empty session was over. She said yes. Then the day after she sends me a message saying they can’t hire students. (I’m 20 yo second year electrical engineering student but I have decent dev experience ~3-4 years) I tell her I’m not planning on continuing with my 3rd year next fall. She says no I’m hiring from the “industry only”. And I try to tell her I’ve never had an internship before and all of this work experience is all by myself and not university related….she stopped responding…..what am I supposed to do? It’s not the first time that this has happened. They see “graduating 2024” they immediately bounce. I tried hiding what year my university education starts/ends….didn’t work…5 -
There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
copied from https://entechts.com/blog/2019/...3 -
I’ve been OE for a couple months and I have loved every second of it (and every check). What are your thoughts on it?8
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as my first rant here I thought i'd start with one of my favorite relevant quotes:
"If only it weren't for the people, the goddamned people, always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, earth would be an engineer's paradise."
-Kurt Vonnegut, "Player Piano"1 -
How hard would it be to transition from Software Engineering with a Computer Science Bachelor’s Degree to a DevOps role. Would I have to go get a bunch of certs to even try?7
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The culture in engineering org is to address each other as 'brother' and seniors as 'sir'.
Bhai is the local term for brother.
This is how an average Slack message reads:
"We will make the changes.
CC: @John Doe bhai, @Marcus Fila bhai, @David Elliot sir"
And even though these people are part of the conversation, everyone tags everyone else in each response.
Slack culture is a mess.4
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