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Search - "fired programmer"
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So, there's this big company in Poland with its name starting with C and having CEO famous for saying that every software developer can be replaced with a finite number of college students.
They recently lost a HUGE government contract and so stories of people working there came to light. My two personal favourites:
1. A tester who has been fired for finding too many bugs and mistakes in their product. He was also told that bugs are to be found by clients on production, not in-house.
2. A programmer who was yelled at by his team leader for "wasting time" on code reviews instead of typing the code. He was also told he hadn't been hired to criticise other people code.
God, I'm so grateful I don't work there.20 -
The programmer and the interns part 3.
Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.
I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.
Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.
Without further delay,
Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.
Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.
Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.
Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.
Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.
Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.
Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.24 -
1 - Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
2 - Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
3- Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.
4 - Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.
5 - Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
6 - Users find 137 new bugs.
7 - Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
8 - Entire testing department gets fired.
9 - Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
10 - New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He raises the programming team's salary to redo the program from scratch.
11 - Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
12 - fml9 -
First internship: accepted within two weeks, only got to do Google translating and fired after five weeks for bs reasons.
Grade: bad.
Second internship: accepted right after the interview. Rewrote websites to their newest cms, not that fun sometimes but alright.
Grade: pretty alright.
Third internship: was accepted without asking after a successful pilot program from my study. Designing and developing a huge back end system, done some smart light bulb hacking and get to solve server problems.
Grade: Great! Just one little thingy: they said I should stop doubting myself because "you're a great dude and programmer!"
It's getting better and better!3 -
I work in a company where I'm the only developer, with everyone being designers or marketing or sales. Typically like the scene from Silicon Valley.
Moto was to create a ticket selling website for their products, and make sure they worked as well. It was all fine, until deadlines were discussed. They wanted it done within 2 weeks, the entire backend dashboard, API and front end.
I told them it's almost impossible to do it, but they insisted on it. So, I made a minimal dashboard and told them, I haven't completed a few things, such as if you edit data in one place, it won't reflect in other tables. So, be careful while editing the data.
They nodded their head for everything, yesterday was site launch and 2 hours before that one bastard decided to changed the product names to something "catchy" but failed to change the same in other places.
I had used the name as foreign key, so querying other DBs became a fuck all issue, and eventually API stopped giving any response to front end calls.
I got extremely pissed, and shouted at that dude, for fucking everything up. He said, you're the tech guy and you should've taken all this into account.
I sat and hardcoded all the data into database again, made sure site is live. Once it was live, these guys call a company meeting and fire me saying I was incompetent in handling the stressful situation.
At that moment, I lost my shit and blasted each of those people. The designer started crying since her absurd designs(though great) couldn't be realised in CSS that too within 2 weeks time.
One of the worst experience for working for a company. I could've taken the website down, and told them to buzz off if they'd called, I couldn't get myself to do it, hence ranting here.
I seriously feel, all these tech noob HRs need to get a primer course on how to deal with problems of a programmer before they get to hire one, most of these guys don't know what we're trying to tell in itself.
I find devRant to be the only place where I can get someone to understand the issues that I face, hence ranted.
TL;DR: Coded ticket selling site in 2 weeks. 3 hours to launch, data entry dude fucks up. I clean all the mess, get the site online. Get fired as soon as that happens.
Live long and prosper. Peace.16 -
Got assigned to fix a bug in a validation function that would always return true even if the data is invalid.
I looked at the code from the function and noticed that the only line of code in the function was "return true;"
Apparently, the programmer who wrote this function a few years ago got fired and no one ever finished his work.
Now it amazes me that no one ever has looked at the problem and just assumed it would be a complicated bug.7 -
Two people I know just got fired from their jobs because they were working on a project on their free time. One of them got a 10000$ fine aswell.
Apparently there was a small hidden clause in their contract that stated that any side projects, even on your free time, was strictly forbidden. Because it could be seen as competition.
Now that was, imo, a bit fucked up.20 -
Got fired.
Fuck
3 days on the job...
Told on the interview I didn't know the machine OS but I could learn in a few days...
Well they want someone with experience on that machines I don't know...
It's like asking a Javascript programmer to work with Java...
Whatever...
There are more companies11 -
At my previous job I was told by "senior" devs that my interest in learning new things and knowing more is not a good thing. And that I should learn to increase my depth in the programming of the product that was being used.
As part of my job I was asked to analyze the product's architecture. I found out that it was needlessly complicated and performed horribly. The senior devs that were on that product for a while had been hiding their mess from the rest of the teams. Needless to say, my report didn't make me very popular with them.
I was asked to help come up with a strategy for testing.
A guy who had just joined our company out of college and me worked really hard for a few weeks and managed to bring testing down from 3 months to around 3weeks. Our reward: he was fired(albeit for different reasons. The company was trying to restructure)
My yearly review was terrible and I was put on 2 months probation. So I quit.
It sucked. And made me question my ability as a programmer for a while. I've floated my own firm and though money is hard sometimes, it so much more rewarding.9 -
Was fired after 3 months. My boss said "how did you even pass engineering school?!"
I'm not a skilled programmer... and never will be!6 -
Today was a day at work that I felt like I made a significant contribution. It was not a lot of code. Actually it was a difference of 3 characters.
I am developing an industrial server so that my employer can provide access to their machines to enterprise industrial systems. You know, the big boys toys. Probably in fucking java...
Anyway, I am putting this server on an embedded system. So naturally you want to see how much serving a server can serve. In this case the device in more processor starved than memory starved. So I bumped up the speed of the serving from 1000mS to 100mS per sample. This caused the processor to jump from 8% of one core (as read from top) to 70%. Okay, 10x more sampling then 10x approx cpu usage. That is good. I know some basic metrics for a certain amount of data for a couple of different sampling rates.
Now, I realized this really was not that much activity for this processor. I mean, it didn't seem to me that it "took much" to see a large increase of processor usage. So I started wondering about another process on the system that was eating 60 to 70 % all the time. I know it updated a screen that showed some not often needed data from its display among controlling things. Most of the time it will be in a cabinet hidden from the world. I started looking at this code and figured out where the display code was being called.
This is where it gets interesting. I didn't write this code. Another really good programmer I work with wrote this. It also seemed to be pretty standard approach. It had a timer that fired an event every 50mS. This is 20 times per second. So 20 fps if you will. I thought, What would happen if I changed this to 250mS? So I did. It dropped the processor usage to 15%! WTF?! I showed another programmer: WTF?! I showed the guy who wrote it: WTF?! I asked what does it do? He said all it does it update the display. He said: Lets take to 1000mS! I was hesitant, but okay. It dropped to 5%!
What is funny is several people all said: This is running kinda hot. It really shouldn't be this hot.
Don't assume, if you have a hunch, play with it if its safe to do so. You might just shave off 55 to 60 % cpu usage on your system.
So the code I ended up changing: "50" to "1000".16 -
Although today Friday,
It was a very sad day for me, I just got relieved of my only remote dev job, now to unemployed, I have a wife and home to take care in a semi bankrupt country, I need help.
Do you know where I can get good remote contracts?18 -
Boss:
Here's an email from a customer who has a report that isn't showing the right data.
It pulls from one application that we've never heard of, and communicates with another application that we've never heard of.
The customer fired their IT team years ago, and can't get in touch with them anymore.
You're a programmer, so we're giving you access to their network so you can fix it.
Please hurry.2 -
So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...
While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".
So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.
It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?
No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.
You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).
To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).
It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.
For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.
That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.
I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.
When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.
He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.
There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.
I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.
My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.
Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...
Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...10 -
So I worked with this guy for 2 years. Lets call him Fred. He came into the company and immediately inserted himself as a programmer lead. I asked him to talk to our boss to determine if he was in fact in charge of the devs now. Our boss said he is not in charge of anything. He continued to act like a lead. I was like fine, "you can play boss for now". He was actually very helpful to bounce ideas off of and knew a lot about programming in general. I enjoyed working with him.
Fast forward 2 years after he was hired. I come into work and notice he isn't at work. I figure he was taking a longer vacation. It was around thanksgiving. A week goes by. I ask another coworker where Fred is. Coworker, "Oh, he was let go." Apparently there was a conflict with our boss with Fred. The boss had to work the weekend to write a bunch of code Fred was supposed to write.
So I got paranoid and wondering if I was going to get fired. I didn't understand the specifics of why and nobody was explaining this. I had planned on working on some extra code for another coworker, but decided against this due to the recent events. I just kept working the task I was assigned, but I kind of got depressed about this. This hurt my productivity for a month or two.
A few months go by. I talk to the coworker about Fred. The coworker explains that Fred never actually generated any code that was usable. Some of the code this coworker had to fix. So the sum total of code was actually a negative amount of lines written while working here.
How the fuck do you stay employed without writing code as a developer? The guy was smart, and understood math way better than I understand it. How can Fred seem like he knows what he is doing, but not produce anything? This would embarrass me to be this unproductive. I don't think the guy was incompetent. He always contributed guidance and helped keep projects on task. My coworker thinks Fred was trying to be a manager instead of a developer. Why not balance that and be both? I get sick of coding at times and would love to just talk to people.
I am very confused how Fred fucked up a pretty laid back dev job.4 -
- be any programmer hired to a job
- do some cool thing that helps the business
- gets labeled as a smart programmer and a helpful team member
- get questions and cries of help from everyone at the office
- get burnt out and refuse to help some people
- get labeled as lazy, bad at my job, and having a bad attitude
- gets shadow fired
- cycle repeats
It’s time to burn down the houses of every rich person - and I hope we actually fully commit this time :)8 -
It wasn't exactly a meeting, just boss' boss coming into our office to ask about a feature. Went something like this (BB - boss' boss (or Big Bitch, whichever you prefer, Me, SP - second programmer) :
BB: Hey guys, I've got a question.
Me (without turning around since I was focused on whatever I was doing at the time) : Sure, go ahead.
BB: Could we do a country map where you would be able to click a region and get to a page with posts for that region?
Me (without pausing what I was doing) : Sure, easy. Html imagemap, or embedded flash if it's supposed to be fancy and animated.
BB: ...how would we do it?
Me (in exactly the same tone of voice, trying to mimic the same sound sample being played again) : Html imagemap, or embedded flash if it's supposed to be fancy and animated... Links leading to the same address as the filtering form for regions already goes. All that's needed is the map graphic.
BB: ...but how would we link to the correct results? Would we need to make new page for those?
Me: *sigh*
At this point SP stops doing whatever he was doing, proceeds to sit next to her by the whiteboard, and they proceed to talk about this for about 45 minutes, which to this day, I have no idea how they managed. I had no idea how they managed to stretch it for this long even as I was listening to them talking and drawing stuff on the whiteboard about it.
Afterwards, I've been reprimanded for not paying proper attention when important stuff was being solved, and a month later when I was being fired, I had been reprimanded for it once again.
Fuck that company. Fuck those people.
I have no idea how they managed to still not go bankrupt.15 -
Childish thing really, and slightly related to my current job
Was working on a small pet project (it was a website really) back in college, and collaborating with another friend on it who lived in a different city. Had to show him my progress but he wasn't a programmer, just had to show him how much front end part is done and the functionalities till that time. Of course hosting it online was the best solution, but I was a student and broke.
So I got this python script caller pagekite which would make my laptop into a server for the duration I run the script. It ran but I couldn't manage to show him the site for days since I didn't know where it was connecting to. (No one had any docs on it back then)
Did some tinkering and saw that it connects to localhost, so I fired up my xampp server and it worked as I wanted it to :')
Since that day, I decided that I want to be a developer and learn and implement more of such things.
Moral: the smallest, insignificant things can sometimes give you the most happiness. -
True story:
A guy worked at a company as a very important programmer.
No matter the assignment, he would get it done.
It turns out he played Internet games all day and had outsourced his work to a Chinese company for 10% of his pay.
And he had signed up at a second company and did the same thing there.
He was fired, but made a lot of money.4 -
Elon musk has shown himself to be a terrible person, a worse manager and someone who hasn't a clue of what a code review is. A summarily fires so many people that he can't find someone to open the doors for his big in person meeting or the vet the badges. He offers 3 months termination pay or you can work 12 hours a day 7 days a week hardcore. But none of the payroll people are around anymore either. Critical subsystems have not a single engineer left to work on them. He's paranoid that employees will sabotage the software. But I think he's doing such a good job it would be impossible to tell that anyone else was helping him.
An engineer wrote a prescient seven page report listing problems ahead including user verification. So Elon twit-fired him.
Also entirely predictable is the stress that the world cup will put on the system beginning today, I believe. He doesn't "like" microservices.
I work for the psychiatrist once who barely needed to sleep. Maybe Elon can function with 12-hour days week in week out. But it's cool to think you're going to squeeze substantially more work out of people by doubling their hours. More likely you will more than double their errors and what will that do to you budget? 50 years ago IBM determined that the best way to improve programmer productivity was to give each one their own office.
I can't believe he's whining over spending 13 million dollars a year on food. That is so far from being a strategic item. Soapbox out.28 -
Inspired by @shahriyer 's rant about floating point math:
I had a bug related to this in JavaScript recently. I have an infinite scrolling table that I load data into once the user has scrolled to the bottom. For this I use scrollHeight, scrollTop, and clientHeight. I subtract scrollTop from scrollHeight and check to see if the result is equal to clientHeight. If it is, the user has hit the bottom of the scrolling area and I can load new data. Simple, right?
Well, one day about a week and a half ago, it stopped working for one of our product managers. He'd scroll and nothing would happen. It was so strange. I noticed everything looked a bit small on his screen in Chrome, so I had him hit Ctrl+0 to reset his zoom level and try again.
It. Fucking. Worked.
So we log what I dubbed The Dumbest Bug Ever™ and put it in the next sprint.
Middle of this week, I started looking into the code that handled the scrolling check. I logged to the console every variable associated with it every time a scroll event was fired. Then I zoomed out and did it.
Turns out, when you zoom, you're no longer 100% guaranteed to be working with integers. scrollTop was now a float, but clientHeight was still an integer, so the comparison was always false and no loading of new data ever occurred. I tried round, floor, and ceil on the result of scrollHeight - scrollTop, but it was still inconsistent.
The solution I used was to round the difference of scrollHeight - scrollTop _and_ clientHeight to the lowest 10 before comparing them, to ensure an accurate comparison.
Inspired by this rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1356488/...2 -
Fucking cant solve productivity problem. Since I was working as programmer, about 8-9 years experience, constant complaints about my productivity and some jobs even fired me for this. Only one job did not complain and I worked in it longest time but still I was worrying very often about my productivity. It is fucking annoying. Why others are productive and I am not. How the fuck to find biggest bottlenecks to know which to work on.
I know I am not knowing technology perfectly, and from time to time I get stuck and so I ask other people help, or somehow manage to find solution myself but it takes more time. But dont know if that is the biggest issue. Should I intecify my learning? I am regularly studying, and working with symfony about 2 years, so I think I should know enough to be productive even with those strugles from time to time. But maybe they are too often?
I have listened book "deep work" and basic thing I think from this is - to minimize disctractions and learn to focus very well. But to minimize like in this book, I should work alone in my room. And even then I would like each hour for few minutes to read some new or smth, which this book says is bad, but a lot of people do that and they somehow get away with it. Plus if I work alone in my room, my social skills might get worse, and we all need social skills, even programmers.
I so envy to others who know how to be productive. I would hate if the only thing to be more productive is to reduce quality of the code, make more bugs. THats fucking cheating system.20 -
Had a really slow Android programmer at my last job.
It took him over two weeks to add a slider to a screen, the boss comes over and asks why he isn't finished. The coder responded: I'm sorry! I'm bad at using the keyboard!
He got fired a while after and later we found out that he had only been copy+pasting code from websites.1 -
Where can I get me some of this? Minus the firing and forgetting how to code.
"Programmer Automates His Job For 6 Years, Finally Gets Fired, In The Meantime Forgets How To Code"
http://techworm.net/2016/06/...3 -
Tldr: I think I made a company fire some dev a year ago.
I was working for this company remotely, alone, on a very big and old legacy php project where they still used echo '<code><code/>'; and i was a very junior junior front end developer, needed to make the website work somehow (whole new design). They brought in a random guy to work with me, and we started working.. I was using bitbucket to version my changes, and I asked him to do the same. He tried pushing his changes once and then practically never again because he started working in files that i was working on and there were git conflicts, and he gave up, even though i asked him to do that... he then statted using general classes to style the page (like .color) with absolute positioning and it broke everything everywhere. He then proceeded to minify half of the php files 'because of performance', I remember talking to other few people in the company and he disappeared a few more days later. I never finished the project because they stopped it randomly and i think i got him fired even though he could've continued working in the company -
So... Here we go again.
For the ones who doesn't know I'm a cnc worker / future .nc programmer ...
Today because my machine broke I finaly whent to the (cam) programmers den to learn, even was lucky because my usual programmer was starting a new piece from scratch...
But my fuking boss must really not like me... I'm the most promising programmer between the noobs but everyone else is already programming (talking about the ones that learned in the last months)
Today because I was learning, got fucked again, was expelled and ordered to do the work of a rookie while he (who has half of my company time) would program the work for me...
So... I always do overtime because others don't (and someone /me must stay till the last coworker lives)
Cant learn how to program... Because shit. while others are taking time from the old ones, while I can learn only by watching...
Have a burn out (it's getting worst) because of the time I only slept 3 /4 hours to do overtime while I was finishing my course...
Oh and flunked two times because I had to chose between overwork or getting fired (my boss didn't want me to finish the course, don't know why)
Didn't make a complaint because I would get lots of people fired (basicly there are legal and security violations behing committed, if I made a complaint most of the tools we use, chains, magnets to lift cargo and such would have to be thrown away... Plus lots of other tools that don't obay regulation... And there would be a heavy fine for every worker that does overtime... That means that half the staff would have to be fired because the company would stop for months)
So... I'm stuck... Must wait till I burn out, fire myself or call the authorities and fuck such a good company...
Only because two bosses have problems with me... (my dad works in the company and there is lots of envy towards him, probably because he came after and got a place they would never get ...)7 -
Storytime.....
So I have a friend who was part of a QA team in a large multinational company a few years back in, let's call it city X. There was this absolutely useless guy on the same team as him, didn't have a clue what was going on, gave everybody headaches, wrote sloppy buggy code, constantly fucking things up. You know the type, eventually he ended up getting fured/let go, whatever way you want to put it due to poor performance. All was well again.
My friend moved on to bigger and better things and moved cities, a few years after he was back in city X, out having a few drinks with friends, he just so happened to bump into the guy from his old company that got fired and started talking to him, as he was a nice guy, just a useless programmer/coworker. After a bit of small talk my friend asked where he was working now. He response: "oh I work with an air traffic control systems manufacturer as a developer"5 -
Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.
During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).
Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.
I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.
30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.
I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.
Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :) -
For me, biggest influence have been my bosses.
One of them mailed me that my work was shit and he was cutting my pay while I was far off with my father post surgery and battling a terminal illness.
The other one gave me an offer while I fired my previous boss from the job of being my boss. He also knew the exact reason for my switch. That taught me a lot on what kind of person/programmer I want to be. -
I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?
Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?10 -
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.5