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This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?
Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)
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Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.
So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~
------
Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"
Cue Inigo Montoya.
------
Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?
Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."
------
Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."
I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.
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Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.
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I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?18 -
Actually just 2 hours ago my boss showed me his "hack" which solved a problem he worked on half of the day.
My eyes suddenly began to itch heavily and I felt a strong urge to quit immediately.
The problem was no big thing and we actually spoke about it at noon and I made a proposition how he could solve it.
Turns out he .... aaaaaahhhh I better do not mention it, as it may summon evil spirits... sorry.5 -
So... Some fake accounts on Twitter claimed to be Elon Musk and to give shitloads of Bitcoin to those who sent a little amount first. They stole... Wait for it... 180 grand.
That's basically your everyday 419 scam. Existing since before the internet, done with the names of Gates, Buffet, Bush, Obama...
They say "the big bad evil criminals and the poor little innocent victims" I say natural selection. Sorry, in those lion vs gazelle scenarios I always thought that it was fair, no matter how it went.
Just when did humanity get so brainless? Have we always been, is the internet just a catalyst for stupidity?
Just why the fuck must I be an infosec sheepdog instead of a wolf? Man, I could live the life, drink beer and smoke herb while working... Get up at 12, don't give a shit, no boss, no taxes, no social security payments that I don't see jack shit from, and the pay would be better to.
Damn.13 -
It was not me doing the screaming but one of my colleagues. He is a super programmer and joined our team early this year as my partner on frontend development.
We're a React/React Native dev house and he has always been uncomfortable with how loose it goes here because of dynamic typing. He has been advocating typescript and Angular since he started and I even allowed him to use typescript on one of the projects.
A month back I started to make jokes about how dead angular was (trigger alert) and he almost lost it. We are good friends so he as been taking it in good spirits.
Last week our boss allowed him a chance to propose a Tech stack for a new project. Naturally he started comparing Angular vs React. I chime in to trigger him again with "why would we work with a bloated zombie framework", he picked up his chair and almost threw it at me while screaming " React is just hacky ". I was laughing so hard and in the end we both did some research. We are proposing Jquery to our boss... (Evil laugh)1 -
So I got accepted to M.Sc abroad, and while it is by itself a very uplifting event, it was nothing compared to the satisfaction I derived from telling my boss that I quit.2
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So my colleagues and I are somewhat great friends. (As in my first rant, I'm a practical evil joke guy). Since our boss thinks we are working on the production server (in reality, he commissioned it to be done in 4 months time. We all got it done in a month.), we get our own little room in the building, each time one of us walks in, we greet each other with a nice "go fuck yourself". Not to be mean, but just as a joke.
I decide to leave the room to go get a drink and I said I would be back. Guess who wants to see the dev team to see where they are on production? Not our boss, the fucking CEO. This isn't a big company, but this definitely was not expected.
So, he walks in and greets the team. He gets greeted with "Go fuck yourself".
I come back to see my team outside, and the CEO asking me why they said that. So after 15 minutes of ass ripping, the CEO leaves, our jobs barely intact, and I get to talk with the team about why we have to be nice to our superiors.3 -
My NDA prevents me of revealing a lot but here we go...
Hi,
during a 2 year hiatus after High School I decided to study CS. Coming from a third world country with no prospect of getting a nice job without breaking my back or getting spit on by overconfident CS geeks who now actually make a living wage there, I decided to study abroad.
I immediately realized what I have been missing... the culture, the people, the happenings,... I have been starved of LIFE
Anyways, I got the language pretty much down, uni is pretty hard but doable and I got the unthinkable... A JOB. I am currently a working student for a year at a multimillion dollar global conglomerate, doing what some may think of as scripting/data tinkering. I get payed more than both my parents combined, which is why they don't know anything... 😂 (yet, gotta ease em into it).
Now I have gotten my contract extended, which shows that I am doing a decent job there, the boss is firm but chill, coworkers are helpful and resourceful.
But what really grinds my gears is that I am mashing code together whilst googling my brain out, but I am not gaining any skill...
Now comes my grievance, the bane of my existence, the evil Morty to my Morty,... GitHub.
In this professional surrounding, where I got handed a $2,5k notebook and a overly huge paycheck, I never use Git (because we have a proprietary, internal, and very transparent alternative (transparent for the higher ups 😬 ))
I always wanted to contribute on GitHub, but I get very intimidated by the projects there and their scopes, people are waaay too knowledgeable in comparison to me and I will most certainly screw something up and embarrass myself. Since I am very self-conscious and awkward I would most probably just delete my profile there and lurk in the shadows again.
I need help, not only for my mental health, but also to expand my skillset and improve myself, since skill is the only thing I can still acquire.
Does anyone know where I should start as a overglorified python script-kiddy who still thinks 1337 is cool and mr Robot is a decent show?
Thanks,
@rn11 -
I just had to quit a part time programming job because I couldn't do it. I'm not really sure how I feel, there were alot of factors.
I took an internship about a year back to do some embedded C. I kicked ass and developed a system that really solved alot of problems for the company and so people started giving me "the hard back shelf problems". Like those problems that are really valuable if someone can get it working but not so important that it blocks anything day to day. Totally fair work for an intern, that is both complex and interesting.
When school started I took a part time remote role working on one of these problems. Fast forward to now (few months of remote work at school); i can't handle the stress. If I devote more time to work I fail a test. If I ace a test my work duties go neglected. On top of that my boss misses scheduled calls with me left and right, I even reminded him everyday 3 days before hand once!!!
Naturally I started feeling like I should quit. I was no longer interested in the work from a pure academic view, and emotionally hated doing it. However, since I was a good performer this place offered to interview my little brother!! Fuck, so do I choose my happiness or my brothers. It feels evil to choose myself over my brother. My brother, he's just a freshman so I know his odds are very low of getting an internship this year are low. And the place I worked at had some weight in the name so I could seriously jump start my little bros career. I do know however that if I don't quit that I will fail school, and do it while being miserable.
And so I quite my first remote job, from my first internship. I feel happy about, but also like I let someone down (them?, Me?, BROTHER?).1 -
When I was an apprentice in a small company, ...
my boss told me that his company would never ship release builds, because the "evil optimization option" is responsible for breaking his code.
My first thought was that it wouldn't make any sense at all. The default option for code optimization is always set to zero.
After investigating his code, I found out that he didn't care to properly initialize his variables. The default compiler option for debug builds did implicitly initialize all variables to zero. After that I've confronted him with the fact that implicit null initialization does not conform to the standard of C and C++. He didn't believe me what I was saying and he was questioning my knowledge about C and C++. He refused to fix his code to this day, so he keeps building his libraries and applications always in debug mode.
Bonus fact: He would never build 64-bit applications, because his serialization functions do get incompatible with exisiting file formats. -
Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.
** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...
Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *
Me: Hello Ma
G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)
Me: It's really nice to he...
G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.
Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...
G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.
Me: Excuse me Ma, but...
G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!
** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**
CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?
Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.
Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**
G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**
CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*
Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!
But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.
While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.
CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?
Me: *Explained the situation to CC*
CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.
Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!
Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.
GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)
Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello
GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?
Me: ... 😲
CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...
G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?
CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.
Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **
G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.
Me: All good ma'am
CC: ** Hangs up **1 -
The feeling of evil satisfaction when your boss asks you to build a killswitch into a client's project.
Just call me Zero Cool.4 -
Game-devs I have a question:
What's is a regular or recommend workflow when developing a game that has a good/elaborated background story.
Let's say you are developing a game like Metal Gear or Resident Evil.
Where does the writing of the story get in? At the beginning? Your write the whole story or at list the majority of it before putting the game together?
And what's the writing style for a videogame story? You write it like a book? Or is more specific for a game?
I mean, your character Jason meets a boss and fights it: do you write: "Jasons finds evil genius hideout and meets him" or instead "the player gets to the boss and the fight starts"?
Sorry for the long question.6
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