"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"

1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.

Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?

So today I receive 23 emails on DMCA takedown notice from last year project (which is a personal project). I asked Github why they think it is violating their policy, they told me they receive tonnes of complaints from a company, they shared the chat and that's the ex-company that fired me.

Even the project is not related to them, they seem to want to "Cancel" me on Github. Bro this is Github, not Twitter! Cancel culture does not work here.

Some of my IoT projects they flag it In Github, which I believe my ex-company they don't do any IOT projects. How the fuck it is violating their so called "code nondisclosure"?

So getting fired if they find my account.

I fucking hate toxic positivity. Every fucking corporation pushes the notion that "lifE iS aWeSomE, wE cArE abOuT pEoPle" and other such bullshit, and when you point it out, they call you a bad, toxic person.

No, you don't care about your community, let alone the whole world. You're just trying to make people believe that spyware, wage slavery and being fired by a neural network is the norm. You're making money off of those who don't have a choice.

If you account all people, not just American white rich 1%, it turns out that for the vast majority of people life is either an uphill battle or straight up nightmare. People are working in shifts and have no time or emotional resource to spend on themselves. Most of the people can't afford a house or a flat. Even those who can still suffer from mental illnesses, to the point where there are more mentally challenged people than mentally healthy ones. The word "neurotypical" meaning "mentally healthy" is wrong.

You want nothing but to sell your stuff and earn more money off of Chinese and Indian factory workers who work 16-hour shifts. Maybe your life is great, but aggressively pushing this notion is a big, wet spit in the face of humanity.

Fuck you. Fuck your space rockets. Fuck your twitter accounts. Fuck your institutionalized exploitation of the weak. Fuck your products. Fuck your "open source". Fuck your "GDPR compliance". Fuck your offshores, your hedge funds and your tax evasion. Fuck your bailouts. Fuck your ships spilling tons of crude oil, fuck your factories, fuck your slave labor, fuck your anti-suicide nets in Chinese dormitories.

One day, because of you, our planet will become unlivable. You will hop into your fancy space rocket to go to that top-1% elite Mars colony. Nice job.

But I will pray for a solar flare to hit you and turn you and your fucking rocket into radioactive ash.

VP: We're going to have HR join the call.
Me: Okay. *Shrug*
(HR Joins)
VP: I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go. I'll need you to return your laptop.
Me: Okay. *Shrug*
VP: ...
HR: ...
HR: Do you want to know why we're letting you go?
Me: Nah. Bye.

After five years of working in terrible conditions for terrible to mediocre people, I accepted losing my job without worry. In a way, I was thankful.

I wanted to quit so many times.

I'm much happier these days.

He started a fight on the dev floor. Got fired on the spot.

Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

Its all relative, I've seen a lot of "worst's". Here's one of many I'll try to post.

A (married) DBA would often come to work drunk, starting fooling around with a couple of devs (which we suspect she had sought adventures outside the IT dept based on rumors), and ultimately got fired because she was caught sleeping at her desk (and she was drunk). One of her conquests told us she came from a very poor childhood and this was her first real high paying job. Abusive husband, being attractive herself, and being surrounded by other attractive, highly intelligent, single bucks (aka horny) that had no morals, equaled bad decisions.

She wasn't the worst, it was the assholes who took advantage of the situation that makes it in my top 10 worst things I've seen.

Well today was a good day, after getting fired from my last job I got awarded in my current one. feels good to be appreciated 🙂

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.

Weirdest co-worker... We'll not to be judgy, but I think our industry is sort of home of the weirdos, but.. there's a few over-the-top weirdees we've had at work.

First one that comes to mind was a guy that walked liked Mr. Burns, hands behind the back & chest out. He microwaved the same thing every single day for breakfast - crackers, sausage and cheese. 😖This guy would get to his tasks very slowly, wouldn't talk to anyone on our team, and would go missing from his desk a lot, sometimes for extended periods (2+ hours). He really struggled to catch on to easy tasks. He quit after a few months, thank god.

Another weirdo we had was a girl who just couldn't dress to save her soul. She would wear these ugly ass sneakers that had neon colors reminiscent of bowling shoes (neon orange and green) and would wear turtlenecks and floor length skirts that all the colors just clashed. Her outfits were uglier than your great grandma's. Myself, her and 2 other girls dressed up as the Dr. Seuss things for Halloween, but did h1, h2, etc. tags instead and she put like rope from curtains in her hair with like 10 little pony tails. Just like wtf. She would play her gameboy at lunch and not talk to anyone much. She was really bad at our job, a lot of clients complained. She would literally read a book, braid her bangs or nap at her desk. Needless to say, she was fired.

I worked someplace once that fired a person for lack of quality output. Before that he sued the company over a labor dispute. After they fired him he went and founded his own business. A year later the company decided to recycle his old laptop to another developer and discovered the source code and business prospectus on it. The company took it to court and said it was actually their business because it was created on its own equipment and the time stamps confirm during business hours also. Courts agreed and they got possession of his business and then fired him again.

Best co-worker quitting story?

"T" I've refereed to in previous rants knew he was close to being fired, so he jumped ship. 'T' sent the usual "I'll miss you guys" email to the department, except me (and a few others that didn't fall for his BS and not scared of him). His mistake was he sent the email out a day early (buddy forwarded me the email) and left the stuff (box of pics, books, etc) he planned on taking with him. One item in particular was a new company provided laptop bag, which technically wasn't his to keep (supposed to leave/turn-in any company provided equipment), so I grabbed the bag and hid it.

The next day I heard him slamming drawers (looking for the bag) and a loud cursing. Other devs peeking over the walls asking what's wrong.

Dev1: "Dude, what's up? Whatcha' looking for?"
T: "Nothing...fuck!...damn it...nothing...assholes...fucking assholes!"
Dev2: "Who's the ass? What's wrong?"
Dev3: "Need help looking for something?"
T: "No..no...nothing...I'm fine...making sure I don't forget anything."

'T' never found out who took the bag and I've had that laptop bag underneath my desk ever since.

My CTO prefers to hire very expensive consultants than to trust on staff. It's funny, because he also decided that all technical teams should run on the absolute minimal amount of resources.

You can't imagine how shitty it felt this morning when he sent an email talking about a security consultant that we should hire, just because he thinks the guy could "take our expertise to the next level".
They will charge us 450/hour to run assessments, to find the exact same things my team discovered a year ago.

Story of WTF happened to my job

During my employment in (name censored) was stressful, They claimed I didn't complete my task on time which they constantly remove me from git and documentation(which have to follow their style of returning data), I kept emailing, slack, WhatsApp calls them, mostly and predictably got ghosted and blocked.

So How the fuck am I supposed to push my code or code without the documentation (I can actually, prevent refactoring every time, following the documentation is the good way to go.)

On the sprint review, they will complain about me not committing and pushing the code. (I did commit locally, but can't push, they removed me from the fucking repo) and not done.

Tried reasoning, telling the obvious reasons with them, doesn't work. They come out the second reason of me "NOT COMMUNICATING". Sometimes I can get to git merge from dev to my branch and get tonnes of fucked up code. I reviewed the code, and I can't tolerate it.

Lately, I overheard them mocking and cheering me about to get fired over a zoom meeting (I was in there, they forgot to remove me). Their conversation is about me being a coloniser, a jerk, betraying Chinese ancestors for being not Chinese enough.

I was like: "Why the fuck does their conversation sound like they are tucked in the Qin dynasty?"

Frequently I got labelled as unprofessional.

How is cussing about my ancestors, personal and life a professional behaviour?

Had a stupid sales dude. Lost his driver's license due to reckless driving (and this was a few in a row including drunk driving) for 6 months. As it was his job required to drive around he got instantly fired.
So he had to leave laptop, iPad and phone with us (IT). His next stop was finance for the lease car but he was pissed, left the building and drove off.

Apparently rules are super shitty for the theft of a lease by the registered employee. So we could not really mark it as stolen. We alerted the police anyway and he was caught next week for driving without a license. So he went to jail and we got the car back

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

These were all the same person.

Filled a glove up with milk.
Got hold of a spray bottle cap, put it in a soda bottle, and was spraying other people.
Dropped a golf ball down some stairs.

He quit before he was fired.

Don’t get fired.

Manager : you are fired

Me: *pausing Netflix*
Me : why?

Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...

So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together

So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.

Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?

After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.

Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.

The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.

Lockdown started.

There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.

A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.

Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!

It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.

The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.

Suddenly my manager is fired.

Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.

The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.

Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.

...
...

Fuck

"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.

...

It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.

I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.

But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.

It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.

So yeah, sorry for the rambling.

I recently started working on a 3 months old project, that was outsourced to two Indians genius. One of them left just before I arrived.

I had the chance to discover those guys were not using any version control system, just exchanging a zip file. I don’t even talk about the codebase, never seen such a mess …

Even better the project managers, were not using any IT program to follow the project advancement, but just Excel!!!

After a few days I realised that the remaining dev was not committing anything, the guy was always lying, (so many people died around him + some emergencies)

So, the guy got fired, but don’t worry management found new genius to save the project 🙂

Can someone tell me if outsourcing is really working?

I’ve got the cold from hell and my last years performance review to write.
These things are fucking terrible and every time I read a cheesy corporate competency that I have to prove, I feel slightly sick.
Just got to find a way of saying ‘I spent the last year doing just enough not to get fired’ and make it sound like I’ve reinvented the wheel.
Think I might be looking for a new job soon.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

all the fun people at my workplace have either been fired or they have left. my workplace is bone dry now

Well, just got laid off. My 2 cents: Dont open recruitment sites at work, even an email in your personal inbox.
The worst part is they took the first blow before I quit, and it fucking hurts.

Thoughts on forced emergency support?

I am with a company I generally like a lot but there are some things I generally despise about it. Like forced emergency support.

I am not good at it, I don't claim to be.. I generally struggle with anxiety, stress and depression, I specifically avoid roles that require on-call service .. I'm a senior level software engineer.

I find it very frustrating to be expected to be on-call from 7-7 in support of infrastructure I did not architect, did not code and basically know nothing about. They provided me with a ten minute discussion about ops genie and where to find internal support articles for my training and that's about it.

Last night I received an ops genie alarm and acked it as I was instructed to do, I went around the system looking for the alarm cause and basically had no idea what to do except watch our metrics graphing praying there wouldn't be an outage. Fortunately the alarm was for our load balancer scaling operation, it was taking a bit longer than usual ... Sigh of relief. Stay up til 6am and fall asleep..

Wake up to a few messages from various people asking why I didn't do this and that and it took me every inkling of my being to remain cordial and polite but I really just wanted to scream and say a bunch of shit that would probably get me fired.

What the actual fuck?

Why expect someone that has no god damn clue what they are doing to do something like this? Fuckin shit training and no leadership to mentor me and help me get better at this role, no shadowing, no regiment ..

#confused and #annoyed

Thoughts? Am I a bitch? Is it unreasonable for me to expect my job duties stay in line with what I'm actually good at!?

Thanks.

I'm getting tired of coding. Not really the coding part, the dealing with people who tell me what to code and why part. Sort of considering making a move into a scrum master or PM role just so I can get fired when I say "No, we're not changing everything they've been working on in the middle of the sprint" or maybe "Yeah, no we're not going to put in a bunch of tickets to change the UI/UX without first talking to the designers, because that's what they do. Yes, I realize we aren't Facebook, but do you realize we "compete" with them because a huge number of people will compare our usability to theirs? (even if just subconsciously)"

The amount of energy spent to just write ‘Hi’ and click a send button is so big that we should consider banning of sending hi messages.

Instead of just saying “Hi!” we are now using analog to digital preprocessors that convert it to bunch of 0 and 1 to send it over communication layer and deliver it to other human being that will convert it from digital to analog by reading it but that is simple.

By sending message using phone we also:
- save it to local phone
- convert it to couple protocols
- transmit it over air so make connection to internet provider services that would generate logs on this provider as well as whole routing table before it gets to the target person
- save it on messaging provider disk
- probably be processed by filters by provider, sometimes be reviewed or listened by third parties and also processed in bulk by artificial intelligence algorithms
- finally delivered to target phone and saved there where that person would just change this text to their inner voice and save it
- sometimes encrypted and decrypted
- sometimes saved on provider
- sometimes saved on phone manufacturer cloud backup
- don’t get me started on people involved to keep this infrastructure in place for you just to say hi

There are also some indirect infinite possibilities of actions for example:
- emit sound and light that can lead to walking from one room to other
- the floor in your house is destroyed cause of it so you need to renovate your floor
- sound can expose your position and kill you if you’re hiding from attacker
- sound can wake you up so you wake up in different hours
- it can stop you from having sex or even lead to divorce as a result simple hi can destroy your life
- can get you fired
- can prevent from suicide and as a result you can make technology to destroy humans

and I can write about sound and light all day but that’s not the point, the point is that every invention makes life more complicated, maybe it saves time but does it really matter ?

I can say that every invention we made didn’t make world simpler. The world is growing with complexity instead.

It’s just because most of those inventions lead to computer that didn’t make our world simpler but made it more complicated.

Have you ever had to fire someone? or get someone fired?

I’m thinking about a time when I should have made sure a guy was fired.
He had no business leading a project, and I knew this early on when he suggested connecting a public frontend straight to a clients’ ERP.
I wasn’t on his project but I ended up cleaning up his mess when shit hit the fan.

5 years of leetcode with no progress. I'm giving up.

First some background, I have an undergraduate degree in computer science and one and a half years of professional coding experience which ended when I got fired for performance issues. I have worked diligently at Leetcode for those 5 years (exceptions occurred when I got ill). I have been personally coached by a google software engineer for months. I have done and given 100s of mock interviews and paid for some to be done by professionals. I have spent 100s if not thousands of hours on Leetcoding and algorithms trying to improve in any way I can imagine. I'm still not good enough.
This all came to a head yesterday when someone on Leetcode made a post about being able to solve every single Leetcode problem in a year within a year while managing a post doc degree and having almost no programming background (link at bottom of post). It made it clear that Leetcode is a game of talent not hard work. The difference between someone like her and someone like me must be noted by the programming community. The majority of people would not ever be able to accomplish that. I dedicated myself for 5 years to Leetcoding almost exclusively and still am no where near what that person has accomplished. I have put in much more work than that person and have gotten much less from it.

I believe the programming community can learn from this contrast. The culture of always trying harder and thinking success stories apply to everyone that is pervasive in programming circles is toxic. The is reality not everyone is lucky enough to be intellectually gifted to succeed and not all hard work pays off. I am proof of that and this is the type of story that needs to be shared and heard too.

I am quitting programming out of humility and recognition of my limitations. It’s ok to give up and wise to do so when you aren't good enough for something.

I was in a company (if you can call it that) for 3 months but I didn't exactly have a good selection process and I was even afraid to get paid for the first month. They made me install Hubstaff (or new slavery), I was in a project that mixed too many technologies, we were not clear who was making the decisions and finally they fired me this week, you don't know how happy I am.

Maybe I am just sensitive.. but sometimes I feel that my new manager is being a little harsh on me.

Again, he might behave the same with everyone and I am assuming that it's just me.

1.5 months in the new job and not a single good comment/feedback I recieved from him. It's not that he criticises me or my work, or calls me a dumbass.

But whenever I submit anything for review, I get a ton of feedback where he expects everything to extreme precision.

He guides me, explains me post my failure, and has specific pointers of what he wants/how he wants things.

But all I am given is a set of documents to read initially with an expectation that I have to figure things out. When I am not upto the mark, he then guides me.

Why I worry?

1. I am on probation and this place is a start-up, don't want to get fired.

2. They got me as a Sr PM (which was also my previous role where I excelled), so I fear that expectations would be high from me. Failing to deliver those might get me in trouble.

3. He isn't a micro manager and quite supportive, but his communication style isn't working for me (so far).

Somehow, as always, I am getting along well with everyone in the org and everyone is talking good about me.

But with my immediate boss, the imposter syndrome kicks in real hard and I am super insecure. Every time I have to interact with him, I get super stressed and anxious.

I know things take time, but given that I am a Sr PM (and my boss expects me to be a lead PM, a position higher than current), I feel if the expectations are not delivered then I might get fucked.

My last night :
- Had nothing much to work on
- Opened an anime site to spend sometime.
- Clicked on some really good shows.
- Realized full screen isn't working on that page.
- Fired up JS Console , spent next 30 minutes trying to get the video part full screen. Failed!!
- Opened up Google & navigated through stackoverflow looking for the fix. Still couldn't do it.
- Cursed the website for having a bad design.
- Left the site.

Finally, I finally got my dream job, but three weeks after starting, I will say I am going into depression.

First, I have to learn a new language (the lang is less than 7 years old) on the job. The language is so different from the paradigm I am used to-from OOP to functional programming, it has very little confusing documentation and a small but growing community.

Though I have been able to show some work, goddamit, it's taking me blood and sand to adjust and be productive.

My onboarding tasks are fixing bugs and implementing a feature, and it has been like walking in a dark tunnel.

I have to face my problem alone as all the devs in the team have swapped.

I rarely sleep, and I recently started to have an existential crisis!

Also, I work part-time on another project, and my output is so poor due to the fact that I am trying to adjust to the new job. Just this evening, I got a call from the manager who was passively aggressive, complaining and asking me to rethink (a passive way of saying "you are fired, if you do not...").

I am feeling anxious. It is taking so much time daily to adjust to the new job.

Will the depression pass?

I was terminated last year from BigTech. Will I ever get another job in another BigTech company?

Not a layoff. Terminated for moonlighting. Lack of judgment on my part. Trying to move past this but the events still haunt me till this day.

Not looking for sympathy. Rather, advice on how to approach job search and background checks in the future. I have big ambitions and don’t want to be an IC forever. I’m hoping this doesn’t prevent me from becoming a manager —> Director in the future.

I am a junior developer, two weeks ago I got a job for the first time in my life as a fullstack web developer, I have felt bad for the times that "I should have read the code better before coding", I think I am distracted and impatient. I make mistakes because I don't know how the system works in some parts and I write repeated or unnecessary code, my boss has corrected me, but I feel very stupid and I'm afraid of being fired. Is it normal to feel like this?

What is the hardest company to get fired from?

Why do companies waste serious cash in office parties? I'm talking about those hundred-thousand-dollar extravaganzas that major tech companies seem to be addicted to.

Poll after poll finds that most employees would rather have the cash, so "kissing the collective asses of tech staff so that they won't leave" is not an explanation that holds up.

The "Roman Triumph" explanation also does not make any sense. If rich assholes want to flex their immeasurable riches, why would they invite mere mortals that do not put a lot of effort in being famous or pretty? Couldn't they invite the entire Victoria's Secret catalogue of models and the NE Patriots? Surely it would make for much more impressive photos of decadence.

The "Michael Scott" explanation also falls short. Companies spend serious cash on consultants and professional party planners, that are sure to know a lot of people. Money can and often does buy personality, so no rich asshole is ever a party dud.

Why else do they force most of their own staff into what they perceive as a "do not relax or you may get fired" loud and poorly lit meeting that takes hours to dress up for? What am I missing?

Microsoft Windows can burn.

I have this feature where I configure a remote API via some endpoints and the API pushes data back to some webhooks in my API.

Yesterday I set everything up for the final test; fired up my own API with some test data, added some configuration and started trace logging to ensure that everything works as expected when the remote site tries to send me data.

I was ready to collect ! Enter this morning: Windows have forcibly rebooted to install an update and shut everything down.

inb4 install Linux; No, I can not. Windows is company policy and I am required to use shit that is only designed for Windows.

Best: Getting fired from a shitty company that regularly lied to middle-management after standing up for my team.

Worst: Losing a team of fantastic direct-reports that went to bat for each other, helped each other out, and help me be a better engineer.

(Spoiler alert: same job)

Building a development department from the ground up is exhausting AF i mean all the research, trying to find best industrial standards to us, best practices, main tech stack to use, working on projects and trying not to get fired

If you get fired, will that show up on background checks?

thoughts on term insurance/life insurence/ health insurence/ other insurances of this sort?

I am new to adult life but i personally find them very sketchy and screaming of a scam?
- Like if I die right now, do i expect some 3rd party to whom i just started paying a few dollars per month to give my family 100x that amount immediately?

- firstly, how can i ensure this , i have just died and my family would be in shatters(I guess) , they won't be having some worldclass lawyers or mental/financial power to fight over a dead guy

- secondly am guessing they are all about specific ways of dying, current salary, whether the family can survive on their own without that insured guy gone, etc etc. so basically everything they could make to not shed some money. So why bother? I am currently in a situation where the family is working on 60-80% of my income. but even with me gone, they can survive if they want. its human nature of survival, that's what made us come out at the top of food chain. so doesn't that make the whole point of insurances moot?
- thirdly how can someone guarantee a fixed income 'after death' when my current income itself is not 'guaranteed' , when 'alive'? here comes another pandemic, or some recession, and behold, am fired from my job. the. how come those companies guarantee an income in such crisis? Last time i checked, it was just an ugly civil war between insurance companies and common people when covid suddenly hit fatally to a lot of families. these guys were coming up with new rules and legalities to get away from paying to the families of deceased.

health insurance does somewhat sound okay, but at the same time feels like even bigger scams. in a nutshell, every health policy is like : "we will cover 50-100% of any major operation/doctoral procedure that costs x amount and is prescribed by a doctor if you keep paying us 0.1x amount every month for your whole life"
I see 3 problems in this:
- PRESCRIBED BY DOCTOR? obviously a doctor is a godly person that can prescribe a genuine operation based on a person's situation, but this whole payment based on word of mouth screams of shadiness. if someone said that "hi you are a technical expert. we won't pay you directly but whenever you are going to work on something for someone, we will cover your fees and your tools's cost that you tell to that person" . nice, am now recommending aws's most expensive ec2 instance to every mf that comes to me for an frontend issue.
- why do we need to have such procedures that will cost so much? where is the concept of subsidiary? What is the point of having an awesome technology like CT scan or MRI when no person could afford it? I know even water comes at both Rs 20 and Rs 250 bottle, but the rs250 bottle is a luxary, not a necessity . if a few people want rs 250 bottle then they can have it, hell they can have it in a gold platted bottle and pay 2500. but the underlying material is available to all for affordable price(if not free), right?

-------
Well that's all my little rant. I am intrigued by the business models of these fear mongering devil insurance companies. so would like to know your opinion on instances where these companies are correct and its beneficial to take an insurance

the red haired girl and the blue haired girl.

there was this story about a programmer who spent years studying computer science before finally getting a job.

the dev studied only computer science and was put on blue team after a few days.

a few hours into one of the constant coding sessions, the boss told the devs that red team members and blue team members would be working in pairs.

the person from red team transferred the devs work to their data base without the dev knowing, then locked down the devs computer. the dev could not do anything. later, the dev got fired for not doing any work. after that, the company got millions of dollars, and the dev did not see any of it.

both the dev and the managers made a note not to hire any programmer who cannot secure their work.

it is not ethical to teach people programming without also teaching them cyber security.

computer networking, programming and security should all be the same major.

it is a bad idea to teach people how to build anything without telling them how to secure it.

the story above was just a scenario, but it probably happens way more often than people think.

Schools should teach both things in the same major.