Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.

We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.

I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...

After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.

I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.

Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?

I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.

I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.

So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.

Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...

Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.

Three male programmers were in the bathroom standing at the urinals.

The first programmer finishes, walks over to the sink to wash his hands. He then proceeds to dry his hands very carefully. He uses paper towel after paper towel and ensures that every single spot of water on his hands is dried.

Turning to the other two, he says, "At Windows, we are trained to be extremely thorough."

The second programmer finishes his task at the urinal and he proceeds to wash his hands. He uses a single paper towel and makes sure that he dries his hands using every available portion of the paper towel.

He turns and says, "At Macintosh not only are we trained to be extremely thorough but we are also trained to be extremely efficient."

The third programmer finished and walks straight for the door, shouting over his shoulder.

"At RedHat, we don`t PISS on our hands."

Did this on my first programming exam.

int index = 0
int value = 0
try {
while true {
value += array[index]
index++
}
} catch NullPointerException {
System.out.print("Sum: " + value)
}

The task was to add together all numbers in an array.

I somehow aced the exam, but got called in to teachers office this is not the way to use exceptions.

At my previous job we had the rule to lock your PC when you leave. Makes sense of course.
We were not programmers but application engineers, still, we worked with sensitive data.

One colleague always claimed to be the most intelligent and always demanded the "senior" - title. Which he obviously did not deserve.

multiple times a day forgot to lock his workstation and we had to do it for him.
My last week working there, I've had it. He forgot it again... So I made a screenshot of his current environment. Closed everything. Set his new background with the screen shot and killed explorer (windows). Then finally I locked his PC.

When he came back he panicked that his PC froze. He couldn't do shit anymore. Not knowing what to do... 😂
Which makes him a senior of course.

But seriously, first thing I would do is open the task manager and notice that explorer wasn't running... Thus my background with the taskbar isn't real.... My colleagues must be pranking me!

Nope... The "senior" knew little

You start new job and take over huge codebase without tests and documentation.

It turns out programming language is custom language made by previous developer who was the only one maintaining project.

There is no source version control.

Language runs in vm developed in Fortran.

No one cared to this day cause everything was working.

Project is critical for multi billion dollar corporation that sells medical equipment that keep people alive.

You can’t test your code on real devices only on virtual ones that were made using same custom language but you can’t find source code for it.

Previous developer accidentally died before you were hired.

You signed contract with penalties that will ruin your life.

Your first task is to add “small” feature.

Good luck !

So I was hired about 4 months or so in this companty, we will name it 'Derp & Co.'

The first task they want me to do was to 'clean' an android app that, for what they told me:

- Previous dev fired. said that tasks have been done but totally a lie.
- Took a fully week of 2 fellows coworkers to 'undo' the mess.
- And for the last but not least, zero documentation, like ZERO.

So, I clone the repo, install android studio, blah blah blah, get hands to the pile of code and jesus...

- The whole app was working with a gargantuan json, there was no use of POJOs at all. Objects are for normies.
- A masive copy/paste code, like 'I will need this here, crtl-c... ctrl-v, DONE!'
- Threads are free, isn't it? let's just put a thread whenever I desire to make an HTTP request and not reuse code at all.

So... with this on mind, my first task is to make proper objects:
- Coworker: 'Sorry dev, we don't have documentation for this, you must debug the code to se what the server will send to you'.
- Me: 'Real?'

Shit... ok. So I first try to figure out how the hell is made my gargantuan json. A month was entirely lost to unravel this data and implement Objects, improve their code, reuse code, etc. but at the very end:

- coworker: 'Good job dev, when the POJOs are done, we can focus on the next task, whe have to define a new DATA MODEL because the one we are using now is not good at all'.

*note: the app is on production and working with all the previous 'features' and today it still on use on some enviroments.

- Me: 'Wait... this is a joke, now you want to define new data models? This should have been done in first place!' <WTF face>
- Coworker: 'I don't think so dev, Mr. boss have this list with things to improve on the app an this is the order of do the tasks'.

Mr. boss is on vacations, two days after he came back:

- Mr boss: 'Coworker said that you have been working with POJOs, is that right?'
- Me: 'Yes'
- Mr boss: 'Why? Did not see the need of a new data model?'
- Me: 'I told that to him, but he insist on "the order" of the list.
- Mr. boss <facepalm>

This is one of the few tales i have from 'Derp & Co.'

PS: Sorry if i made a mistake on writing, english is not my first language and maybe I have done some mistakes.

PM in daily: your turn. what have you done yesterday?

me: so i finished my PR for feature x and now i'm only waiting for review feedback there, so i can close this ticket today if no major rework is required-

PM: this is not what i asked, i don't want to know what you did, i want to know what was done.

me: uhh... okay, also i started working on task x
[note: task x, a task per definition involving a large amount of research, was very coarsly defined and it wasn't even clear to the PM what he exactly expects from me, and we agreed that the scope needs to be refined in the process],
so as a first step, i started doing some general investigations to get an overview of the topic and learn about concepts a and b-

PM: again, i don't want to know what you did, i want to know what was done.

me: okay well, i have DONE basic research on topic xy and collected information-

PM: this still does not answer my question, what's the deliverable?

me: ...so uhhh.... i read papers? i researched info online and collected and prepared information and links in a presentation which i'm also planning to present to the team-

PM: okay, can you please split your jira task in subtasks so everyone knows exactly what you're working on? otherwise we have no idea what you're doing.

for fuck's sake, shut up. just shut up

I was having dinner yesterday and I suddenly get a message from someone from another team.

Them: Hi
Me: Hi

(No response for 20 mins)

Them: I'm having some problem with your service. Its not working when I do <task>
Me: Okay, let me look into that.
Them: Also, <task2> is not working
Them: And <task3> has problems
Them: Could you also look into <task4>?
Me: (visibly sweating) Let's discuss this in detail in the morning.

[Next day, morning]
*convinced that the service has a major bug*
Me: Yeah, show me what is causing the problem.

They show me what they tried. Turns out they made an invalid call and got an error, AS THEY SHOULD, and reported that as a bug. And all the other tasks were because the first call didn't work.

:|

I saw a colleague of mine cry when I was undertaking my first internship.
Asked them why they were crying and i found out they were very frustrated at a task she had to do periodically, which required repetitive work.

I wrote a script to automate the task without being requested to, since I had some spare time and when I told them they hugged me and thanked me a lot.

!rant

Guys! I did it! Its possible!

My task was to extension a code in php. I wrote 100 lines of code and then it workes on first try without any errors!

This is a milestone!
Bill Gates is nothing against me!

When given a task, don't start working immediately. Think about it first.

If it is taking too long, don't just persevere, stop and think why.

You are paid to think, not type.

My first dev job. Me and another guy get hired at the same time. He will be the lead dev, and I’ll be the junior dev on a long term project. Project gets delayed (and eventually canceled, but that’s a different story), so the lead dev decides to give me programming challenges to test my skill level. I successfully complete the challenges, but they aren’t up to his standards. Belittles me in front of our manager. Afterwards I ask him to show me how he would have done it. The dude can barely type let alone show me the way it should be done. I say nothing to the manager.

A few weeks pass, it’s clear the project we were hired for is canceled, so we are given other work. They task the lead dev with porting the company website to Wordpress so non-devs can alter content. They chose Wordpress mainly because the lead dev said he is familiar with it. Two weeks later, no progress has been made. They ask me if I can do it, and I do it in 2 days including additional functionality that was requested. Manager asks me why I thought lead dev couldn’t do what I did. I said, “I don’t think lead dev knows what the fuck he is doing. I don’t think he knows how to program.” Manager says, “Huh.”

Several months later lead dev is still there, but has yet to work on any projects with any success. They finally let him go.

Glad to finally get that off my chest.

So we hired a junior engineer. 1 year of experience, this is his second job.

First task: Send some data to a web service using its REST API. Let me know when you've finished.

Two hours later I go to check on him.
- "I'm trying to decode this weird format the server uses"
He was writing a JSON parser in Python from scratch.

:/

So my recommendation will be to cool off first, after any intellectual task like programming — before going to bed.

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

I ended up quitting my first job for many reasons, but this talk still haunts me:

"our workers need to input this data and they tab a lot because [...]"

Me: "ok... Where do they get the data from?

"A standard model compiled via web, sent via mail and then printed for them."

Me: "..."

Them: "..."

Me: "how about we make the import automatic?"

Them: "but then what will our workers do?"

To this day I am still impacted by this dialog... Not much for the stupidity from a business logic point of view (there are many bad companies, and this is not the only one I met in my career), but rather for the implications our job has and for the fact bs jobs are a thing because we are SO used to the capitalism that the bad guys are the ones removing boring tasks, rather than the shitty system which forces you to do a repetitive and automatable task and which reduces you to a shell doing a job a machine could do... And thanks for the wasted paper/ink, global warming ain't gonna get worse on its own!

It goes like this.
I have one final task to solve before starting in a new job at a different company. This guy, which is also a board member in the company in which I'm currently hired, is also an IT consultant and project manager in a fairly large company. This said person is also a key person for me being able to solve this last issue. I send him a complete guide on what he has to do before I can move on and wrap it all up.
First conflict arises because he doesn't follow the guide and tells me something is not working. I kindly inform him why and the response I get is very personal and not kind in any way, telling me and my boss that I am bad at my job and that he will bill us for 1000 USD for the 5 hours he used "debugging" and testing. This should have taken him 30 minutes and I have no idea what he spent those 5 hours doing.
It comes down to that my boss sides with this asshole and tells me that I have to do the task all over and test the system for the 4th time (yes I tested it 3 times beforehand to make sure nothing could go wrong) What my boss and the asshole doesn't know is that my uncle is vice president in the firm the asshole is working for. After kindly reminding this asshat that he has to follow the guide and that I can confirm everything is working, he keeps on attacking me. It's very rare that I fuck up and I have consulted 2 colleagues and got them to test it as well. They found no issues at all. The asshole ignored my request of documentation that something was not working.
I'm so full of being treated as an idiot so I send my uncle the email correspondence with the asshole to confirm that this is not how any of their employees should behave independant of my ability to do my job.
He will speak with this fucker tomorrow at work as first thing in the morning. I'm not proud of the way I went about this, but that was like the last drop, if you know what I mean.
Sorry for the long rant.

HO. LY. SHIT.

So this gig I got myself into, they have a whitelist of IP addresses that are allowed to access their web server. It's work-at-home. We just got a new internet provider, and it looks like I get a different public IP address everytime I disconnect and connect to the WIFI. And since it looks like the way they work on their codebase is that you either edit the files right on the server or you download the files that you need to work on, make the changes, and then re-upload the file back to the server and refresh the website to see the changes, now I can't access the server because I get different IP addresses. And it's highly inconvenient to keep emailing them to add IP addresses to the whitelist.

No source control, just straight-up download/upload from/to the server. Like, srsly. So that also means debugging is extremely hard for me because one, they use ColdFusion and I've never used that shit before and two, how the hell do you debug with this style of work?

I just started this last Tuesday, and I already want to call it quits. This is just a pain in the ass and not worth my time. I'll be glad to just go back to driving Lyft/Uber to make money while I look for a full-time, PROPER job.

By the way, can I do that to a contracting job? Just call it quits when you haven't even finished your first task? How does this work?

I recalled a seemingly simple task I took on.

We were building a booking system, and I had to figure out how to retrieve bookings by a certain date range.

Upfront, the tasked seemed simple until I realised I had to both figure out the logic and the SQL statements needed to retrieve all bookings within a certain date range in one query.

I ended up drawing a model to help me visualise the various date-range criteria to be satisfied. And used unit tests to help me think through each date range criterion and make sure they were accurate. Some were obviously from paranoia, but better to be safe than sorry...

After that, I had wrote down raw SQL directly into Sequel Pro first to make sure my query logic was accurate too, before translating into something the ORM equivalent. This was when I learned how to define and use variables in SQL. The variables were throw-away code; I just didn't want to have to hard-code the test date-ranges over and over again; minimise chances of spelling errors.

Needless to say, felt my problem-solving skills went up one level after this task. Saw my coding style and unit tests improve. And also the thought processes that go into how to maintain code quality...

Day 1:

Me: 'Hi'

Middleware guy: 'Raise a Jira. We have always been so accommodating. Contact your manager.'

*Jeez*

===

Day 2:

Me: 'Could you please start the server in dev environment? I am a new joiner. I don't have access. Here is a jira.'

Middleware guy: 'Deadlines may be for you. It is not for me. Wait until tomorrow.'

*Damn, did he get a divorce recently?*

===

Day 5: *An urgent delivery asap* 'Hi, could you please do the configuration of the new app in staging?'

Middleware guy: 'So, here is the split up...
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5 & 6
Your app will be configured by tomorrow first half hopefully.. Oh and you can escalate if it is too late..
'
*What a b...*

===

Day 8:

Me: *Doing late sit for pushing a task* 'Hi, we have an issue. The server is not starting. Could it be due to..'

MW guy in 'second' shift: 'Oh, we don't extend support on unusual hours'

Me: 'But this is second shift.'

MW guy: 'Yeah, but I have to go home early now...'

====

Day 10:

Team Lead: 'Any innovative solutions?'

Me: 'Let's go SERVERLESS!' :D

Found my most ridiculous function ever, back from when I was first learning.

async Task Delay(int time)
{
await Task.Delay(time)
}

On my first day at work i was given the task to rewrite some code. I pulled the code, started the server and was greeted with a login-page. Instead of asking for credentials i tried good ol' " OR 1=1;#. Instand login, admin account. My boss was baffled, but instead of fixing this he decided other tasks had "higher priority". 3 years later, this still exists. I also heard some client runs the application open on the internet.

Everyone wants security, but some people decide to pull out the bottommost card in the fragile house of cards of security

Ooh this is good.

At my first job, i was hired as a c++ developer. The task seemed easy enough, it was a research and the previous developer died, leaving behind a lot of documentation and some legacy fortran code. Now you might not know, but fortran can be really easily converted to c, and then refactored to c++.

Fine, time to read the docs. The research was on pollen levels, cant really tell more. Mostly advanced maths. I dug through 500+ pages of algebra just to realize, theres no way this would ever work. Okay dont panic, im a data analyst, i can handle this.

Lets take a look at the fortran code, maybe that makes more sense. Turns out it had nothing to do with the task. It looped through some external data i couldnt find anywhere and thats it. Yay.

So i exported everything we had to a csv file, wrote a java program to apply linefit with linear regression and filter out the bad records. After that i spent 2 days in a hot server room, hoping that the old intel xeon wouldnt break down from sending java outputs directly to haskell, but it held on its own.

So we hired an intern and his first task was to change a few things in email layout for our client, which is an investment bank.

I told to one of my developers to make his local database dump and setup the project for an intern. When intern completed the task, my developer thought that title "Dow Jones index crashed" was pretty funny title for a test.

What he didn't thought through enough, is that he forgot to configure fake SMTP server and he had production database dump with real email addresses.

I had really awkward 20 minutes conversation with our client. Fuck my life.

not sure if this counts, but i'm sure it's going to hugely amuse at least a few people.

... sometimes when i get stuck in a coding task (when i'm working at home, of course) i go watch porn for a while, it clears my head nicely.

there was one day i was trying streaming my programming for the first or second time in my life, and... yeah, i got stuck. and yeah, i forgot i was streaming...

luckily, nobody was watching those streams, and i realized what i did as soon as i got back to coding, so i immediately stopped the stream and went and deleted the vod.

i think the next time i mustered enough courage to try streaming again was like two or three months later... XD

It was 1999. I was just starting my first real job as a programmer for a major insurance company. We were working on code that would screen scrape legacy mainframe data output and convert it to a web-based UI. REALLY stupid project approach I had no input on. I happened to find a programmer in Germany who had released his code in the public domain that would help with making a certain conversion task easier. I downloaded his code and put it to work.

During a code review, a programmer who was probably about 60 asked me where I got the code and what it was doing. I didn't even get to the part about what it was doing because he made fun of me so badly, in a fake German accent in front of a room full of non-programmers, for using code that today is no big deal due to the prevalence of open source. I just clammed up in humiliation because he got everyone laughing at me. His philosophy was if we didn't buy it or write it ourselves, we had no business using it.

I guess I was just ahead of my time?

I jump on an existing scala project.

git pull && sbt compile test

Tests are failing.

Me: "Hey team, the tests are failing."

Team member: "That cannot be. They were passing for the the last run."

Me: "Did you run them locally?"

Team member: "No, on Jenkins. It was fine."

I check Jenkins.

Me: "What do you mean it's fine. The last successful deployment was on the end of May."

Team member: "The Pull Request checker always went through successfully."

I check how our Jenkins tasks are configured. It's true that the Pull Request Checker runs successfully yet due to a "minor misconfiguration" (aka "major fuckup") the Pull Request Checker only tests a tiny subset of the entire test suite.

Team members were were fine if their Pull Request got the "Success" notification on bitbucket's pull request page. And reviewers trusted that icon as well.

They never checked the master run of the Jenkins task. Where the tests were also failing for over a month.

I'm also highely confused how they did TDD. You know, writing a test first, making it green. (I hope they were just one specific test at a time assuming the others were green. The cynic in me assumes they outsourced running the tests to the Jenkins.)

Gnarf!

Team member having run the tests locally finally realizes: "The tests are broken. Gonna fix them."

Wow. Please, dear fellow developers: It does not kill you to run the entire test suite locally. Just do it. Treat the external test runners as a safety net. Yet always run the test suite locally first.

New job today, here is my start so far:
coworker: Hi, first you have to set up your lamp project..
me: Good, let's do it.. Please give me the repo git URL
coworker: here is everything, but.... the database is on MySQL.
me: ok, did you have any TeamSQL or something to track this?
coworker: nop.
me: check the database and see the whole file size is 4GB.... Checking the file on plain .txt i see the problem WORDPRESS.

So far to import this file on my LAMP i use Bigdump script and works like a charm.

coworker: Take it easy dude, it's your first day. You can do this task in a few days, don't rush it.

me: :/

"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

I started a new job today (remote) and my first task was to improve product sign-up process, basically the UX is shit and the backend is even worse, never felt so bad looking at terrible software design my entire life and career. My first assignment was to introduce some sanity. (Mr. Supervisor's exact words)

Anyway, I report directly to upper management but need to get onboarded by current technology expert who's highly skilled at writing shitty code and is also stupid, literally.

It took the whole day to get him to grant access to the private repo in order to start working but that's not the story.

So, I'm seated, demoralised about the structure of software I have to work on and here I was refreshing localhost:7878 consistently and was consistently getting the message:
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

So, this same codebase I have is suppose to be the exact same one that's powering the app in production. I was furious and confused. Is stupid calling me a bitch already??? He wants to fuck??? What the hell!!!

I called him and turns out, I was suppose to switch branches. The branch I had was suppose to show that message intentionally (??!???!???) (His words exactly), I couldn't even muster the words "Why" completely before he hung up.

So basically, I got onboarded today. Quite successfully, I must add, because I know exactly the battlesuit I have to wear to my new remote job going forward!

[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"

........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

Fuckity fuck.

It's weekend.

To all you abusive, micromanaging arseholes… Light a magnesium torch up in your arse and make us smile.

To all you motherfucking dumb cunts who can play 8 hours instead of working, but are unable to cope with the simple task of documentation:

Resign and stay away from civilization as far as you can. Alternative: Self castration and removal from the gene pool

To all the narcisstic workaholics who think everyone must be available everytime... Hop into a meat grinder, it's nice and cozy - I've been told.

It's weekend and I've finished everything. First time in half a year that I can return to a normal weekend schedule.

Dobby is free. And Dobby will stuff a sock so far up your arse that you can lick it clean if you disturb dobby.

:) *happy smile*

In my last job they required us to turn on a task timer for every little thing. Remembering to do that, and to turn it off, was a royal pain. First I had to look up which task it is, start the timer, stop the timer, find the next task and repeat, then flip back to the first task. Lots of open browser tabs within tab groups to keep track of it all. And if I came up short or went over on budget, there was a “conversation” with management to account for discrepancies. Then I had to go by memory and try to reconstruct the “missing time” accurately enough to be convincing.

Now that I’m freelancing, I try to keep up the habit because it does have merit for tracking estimates and actuals, but now it’s just me to answer to for discrepancies and I can fudge the numbers as I see fit. The time records did, however, save my bacon in a recent dispute.

When you successfully completed the first task in your unpaid internship.

Modern web frontend is giving me a huge headache...

Gazillion frameworks, css preprocessors, transpilers, task runners, webpack, state management, templating, Rxjs, vector graphics,async,promises, es6,es7,babel,uglifying,minifying,beautifying,modules,dependecy injection....

All this for programming apps that happen to run inside browsers on a protocol which was designed to display simple text pages...

This is insanity. It cannot go on like this for long. I pray for webasm and elm to rescue me from this chaos.

I work now as a fullstack dev as my first job but my next job is definitely going to be backend/native stuff for desktop or mobile. It seems those areas are much less crazy.

Hey y'all!

So uh, I just finished my first week in the new jawb. And thought you guys would appreciate seeing the swagducky's new home!

My first week was awesome, the team is a group of interesting, skilled and clever people.

They started me off on an introductory task... I've been building an iOS game in unity! Different to the say job but damn it's been fun 😂😄

Everything is "critical priority" all the time. Every new project is the most important project in the entire company. Every request that comes in has to be handled immediately. I have a good manager now who fights back against the deluge of critical work, but for my first year in my job I had a different manager who would bend over backwards to appease everybody, over-promising constantly.

I eventually started asking questions like "Which project are we de-prioritizing to accommodate this?" or "Is X more or less important than Y?" and then I would focus entirely on whichever project he identified as being the most important, and not touch anything else until I was done. Basically forcing him to prioritize our work.

I almost quit over a few of these issues, but I stuck it out and eventually our team came under new management, and now our manager is the one asking those questions instead of me. As she should be. Her favorite response when someone says a task is critical is "How critical? How much money will the company lose per day if this is late?"

Most of the time, the answer is somewhere in the range of "nothing" until a couple months after the deadline. So we set a much later deadline and get the work done right.

So a company I'm working at has this internal product. I just got employed and was put into that team.

"First task: refactor some of the code"

Alright, I start refactoring. Oh I may need to write a small class for this one. And then rewrite this a bit. And then rewrite that a bit. And then rewrite everything.

"Why are you rewriting most of my code?"

oh i would not have needed to do so if your code was not COMING OUT OF YOUR ASS and if all the teams had FREAKING PROPER API DOCUMENTATION

As some of you know I start at my new job on friday. I don't have a development or computer related job, so guess what my first task is?

I was at my boss/friends house last friday night and he was like 'I know you're good with computers. So can you install the printer in my bureau?'

Now I can absolutely relate to all the printer rants.

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

Last year, we had to do a big university project in randomly selected groups (5-6 students in every group).Three of the five guys were completely useless, I mean, both the other competent guy and me wrote around 20,000 lines of code each, the other ones wrote around 500 lines of code (combined).
After our first few meetings we quickly knew that we have to give them a small task which was so trivial that not even they can fuck it up. But we were wrong. Oh boy, so wrong.
They simply had to code the excel export of the data, which means they had to use two functions from a library and pass the correct data. But their solution was so bad, I lost faith in humanity and was fascinated by it at the same time.
For example, there was this simple class "Room", which had a few properties like size or number of seats and a few getter/setter etc. That was a core class and written by the other qualified guy. So how did the others fuck up the excel export? They somehow rewrote that class in German (although the other code was completely in English), implemented a function for each property that would write its value to a hardcoded cell in a hardcoded excel file.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Needlessly to say that I had to rewrite the whole export in the night before we had to present the project.

There's this junior I've been training. We gave him a bigger task than we usually do

"How do I link an object in table X with the corresponding object in table Y?"

"How are objects in two tables usually linked? How did you link Y with Z in the first place?"

"Em... Foreign Keys?"

"Yup"

"But there's not foreign key from X to Y."

"Well, create one. You've got full creative freedom over this task."

I sometimes feel like Juniors are either completely careless about past code or overly carefuly with not editing any past code. Frustrating but adorable

not sure if counts as a compliment, but the follwing exchange with my team lead programmer felt pretty good:

"... wait, where did you find this function you're using here?"

"i didn't, it was missing so i wrote it."

"but... oh, i didn't realize you're gonna need it, if i had, i'd have given you a different task... noooo, that's internal framework functionality, i write that stuff for you guys so that you can just use it, cause it's complicated... oh, god, no, where did you put, how did you imple... (right clicks, go to definiton)... oh, it's exactly where it's supposed to be... (skims the code)... and is written exactly as if i had written it.
(looks at me and smiles, then turns to the rest of the team), guys, that component i told you to wait with making because i first need to write that complicated utility function that you'll need to use? you can start working on it now, Midnight wrote that function for me. (turns back to me) Nice, quick learner. But next time, at least let me know first, yeah?"

(that was third day in a new job, corporate-sized system. the rest of the team had been working there on that system for the past 2 years.

(probably not a good form, kinda going over team lead's head, but tbh i didn't realize i'm not supposed to touch that code because "it's complicated", while doing my task i just realized i need a function similar to a family of already implemented ones, so i just followed their convention amd added it.)

tl;dr - best programming compliment is people being surprised/confused that i did something which they thought as a normal thing that they will have to do for me, because it's in their job description to be doing it for people on my position/with my job description)

>be me
>join new firm
>only developer
>Task : Migrate our PHP based website to reactjs
>okay not bad, I can do this
>*Completes in 2 days*
>get inputs from boss and he gives
>go back again to inform we're now SASS integrated
>asks for new wireframes
>wtf lol.exe
>wants new design for the same website like of the parent company which is WordPress template
>*Internally : I'm a developer, I don't do wireframes*
>okay no problem

Seriously, if you wanted a new design in the first place why didn't you said so?

So , at my first day as an intern in the company that would probably be employing me, i heard some great lines that made me gain so much hope in humanity -.-

From HR :

- "your timings will be 10 to 7 , 6 days a week."(even though it takes 4 hours to commute to and fro from that place). "We have a 9 hour a day schedule, and anything between 5-9 hours is considered a half day"

- "we have a 1 paid holiday per month scheme. And that starts after first 3 months, and yes TitanLannister, that also applies to interns. You may take a leave but that won't be considered for payment"(even though the said intern's internship is of 3 months and he already notified that he would be needing a 10 day leave for his exams and a few other college related work leaves )

-"here is an official laptop you could work upon(has average specs but inferior to my laptop). Note that its already loaded with slack, and a browser history tracking software, so you might wanna log out of that if you want to use it for personal use. Also if you want to use your personal laptop, then these tools would still be added into your laptop"

-" all the things mentioned above are connected to this fingerprint card that will automatically upload those details on an hr software and enable history tracker "

-"take your time, but we need this task done by you in next 24 hours. There is no deadline, but we need this work done asap"

In the words on purgatony:
"This is hardly working
This is hardly living
This is my JOB"

Had a panic attack during a coding assignment and now every time I think about that problem I just start spacing. Noice.

Also dear companies: if you wanna ask your interviewees about trying to deduce a theorem out of nowhere, maybe do it in the first test and not in the last one. Cause that’s a shot in the dark to someone who’s not a mathematician and id feel waaay less frustrated if I didn’t give you 6 hours of my life just to end up with an arbitrary task like this.

I got the task to set up an NAS, because "server has too high maintenance costs".
I built two databases for this company and the big boss loved my work. (spoiler:not because my work was outstanding but because I, as a student, am cheap and willing to learn).
And now? Reality hit me for good. I looked for a enterprise worthy NAS solution, sent them the details, they bought it and now it's 00:00 in Germany and I'm sitting in the empty hall, trying to configure the storage to work like they want it. On a friday. Alone. As the only member of the IT-team. With way to much responsibility.

So... Yea, fuck you for good. I hope your backup gets an disk error at the same moment i quit. (but first gimme mah monney)

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

A Visual Studio solution that had 62 (SIXTY TWO) projects for a webpage that was like 8 user forms total was like going to a shop to buy 3 items and receiving 15 tickets for that.
PMs saying no to refactoring due to not having enough time for a months. The first task took me 2 days just by fixing cyclic dependencies among the libraries. Went home and merged all the projects to just 3, building instantly in just two hours. Fuck idiot PMs that do not know how to code, buys shit and don't listen to devs. Fuck all idiots.

I was struggling with a task on a project and decided to call the colleague, who's working on this project as well (he built it, I am just on-boarding) to get some advice.

Literally the first thing he asked me was: "have you seen whom this task is assigned to?"

Fuck! So I spent about 1.5 hours on not finishing a task that I shouldn't have worked on in the first place. Great.

(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!

I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.

Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing

The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.

Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..

I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)

Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.

TL;DR, I do node.js now.

__________________

There's much I was working on the past weeks. First of all some of you may know I don't work in IT and therefore always am learning how to make things easier in my workspace with tech. And my boss once told me how annoyed he is converting stuff to PDF for easier sending via mail.

Then I started to build PDF converter with
PHP and the Laravel framework. My first steps into it succeeded and I could even deploy my Pdf-wizard website, but everything feels like a hustle and making this application bigger don't really seems like a enjoyable task for me.

I tried the same stuff with Node.js then. It was damn good. It was simple, because there are plenty of packages wich do this tasks on NPM. Afterwards I spent some time on doing research and ended up learning Express Framework.

This brought new inspiration to me and I wanted to share this with you guys.

Worst dev experience was when I was asked to "take a look at" a propriatery Windows app built by a now non-existent team at the company.

The code base resembled the quality of legacy code where about every hour I felt like I needed to vomit. But that wasn't even the worst part for me.

This was the first time I had to develop on Windows and was sent a separate dedicated laptop for this. Now I started to have a bad feeling about this because as far as I had known every single dev at the company used company Macs for development (including me for other projects). It turned out the Windows laptop was indeed configured for a non-dev team :)

Having liased with IT admins for a day I finally got my environment set up and hit install on the dependencies and in 10 minutes it got to less than 10%. The laptop was pretty powerful so I couldn't belive wtf was going on, fans were ramping. Checked task manager and the company Anti-Malware was hogging the whole CPU.

I was so mad that I managed to get the IT admins to completely disable it and then it was only the pain of working with shitty code on Windows which would have been more than enough from the start. Thankfully it only lasted a week.

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

I started working for a company something around 1-2 months ago, they said because I don't have any experience with their stack, my salary will be lower than other team members. I said there is no problem and started my work. My first task was refactoring codes that their experienced programmers have wrote. My second task was extracting data layer from views. (They use Laravel and MVC architecture and they get data directly in views, not controllers). So, by end of the month when I talked with my boss I said I should get more money because I was better than your experienced programmers. He refused my request so I said I will not work with your team anymore :)
Anyway, never accept a job if you know you deserve more money than what they say will give you.

P.S: Sorry for my bad English. English is not my native language

Slowly getting better with RegEx problems! Warning, lots of non-computer linguistic geekiness ahead.

Been working on some functions recently to replicate the furigana (Chinese character annotation) functions available over at JP.SE in PHP for a project.

Managed to get the basic cases down fairly quick:

[Chinese character][reading] => <ruby><rb>Chinese Character</rb><rt>Reading</rt></ruby>

However I realized this evening that there are patterns where this repeats twice for one word, such as the following:

[Chinese Character][helper Japanese character(s)][Chinese Character][possibly optional word ending][reading for the whole thing]

Managed to get it working for both cases initially, but then I found out that adding a Japanese character to either of my test strings (see graphic) would cause the annotations to fall grossly out of sync. The next two hours disappeared pretty fast before discovering that the issue was that I was removing the wrong string length from the annotation string, and just happened to luck out with a test case where it worked the first time.

Probably going to do a code review of it with the intern next time he's in. One of the things I've been stressing to him lately is that however easy a task may be for a human, there are all kinds of extra things that need to be tracked in order for a computer to be able to follow your logic.

A delicious Sprint Planning 😋

It was a hard sprint (SCRUM methodology), but finally we were on our next’s sprint planning meeting. We had a lot of tasks to define and estimate. For the first one, we all estimated the task with 5 points, and for the second one we voted for 3 points. We were coordinated XD so, our boss said “let’s do something, if all of you vote, let’s say, 5, and another votes for a different number, he or she’s gonna buy us a six pack of beer”. Challenge accepted.

Two partners and I have to buy beers for this friday after work 😂 I don’t even mad 😋🍻

Just hired an entry level developer in my company. Just graduated. He doesn't know what is code debugging, does not know difference between IDE and text editor like atom.
He doesn't know what is Bootstrap and git.

Gave him a task in AngularJS 1. Gave him 3 weeks and a half time. Read data from webservice, show them in table, filter, sorting and show details per record (which is easy in AngularJS. I got the same task years ago and finished in 2 days after I finished my AngularJS 1 tutorials). He did not finish any of those.

I know I'm judging but come on. What have you done these three years university? Only partying? Have not bothered reading something online? FOR THREE YEARS?

P.S. I have learned everything myself. Coding, debugging, structuring etc. I've had the bad luck that my 2 first bosses and team leader used to tell me "Do not ask anyone for help here in the office. Google is your best friend." And he encourage all developers not to help each other.

Ad I am writing this, I told him to download and install PyCharm and get back to me. It's been one hour and I have not heard anything from him. 1 Hour to download and install something. Imagine how long will it take to do a task.
Even my girlfriend (Yes, I have one), who dislikes computers can do this.

That's why I'm so frustrated.

I am thinking of firing him. Or should I give him more time?
I mean, if he can not do a simple task only by showing data in a table (which he can find them on Google, worst case scenario, how can he do more complex code, structuring it, etc ?)

!rant
So my pm gave me a task and estimated it to 6 days. I was like, well, thats a vacation for me isn't it :). I started it 3 days later and read the description... Get these api into this app..etc..mvp and all... so I worked on the views first. Later I found out that the api were totally incompatible, and no such data was found or COULD BE MADE for the app. that was day 1 :)
I kept publishing apks with empty views, nice empties If I do say so, and just said we have to wait for backend to make tokens and data. Vacation starts, (sorry boss if you're reading this :D)
On day 6, the PMs were just rushing up and down, contacting backend, back to me, then backend, office ping pong, (a lovely sight), til the senior SysAdmin said, its impossible. Of course I knew this, buuuut, who would miss such a lovely opportunity.

PS: to all PMs, keep on dreaming those impossible ideas :)

Fucking first rant here:

So we tried to teach Two new colleagues to typescript and git and testing and stuff and we have a SPOC “which claimed to be very technical”. The SPOC’s task is to keep an eye on the work, and today we have had a review...

After two weeks, the created multiple branches into our git, all with one commit of 400 LOC changed, no merge requestet, issue in Redmine set to “closed”.
Well, by the way they were supposed to write Unit tests for our app.
But I thought, ok, we’ll check their branches.

Their tests all passed (cz) but man, the app didn’t and on compilation there were errors, the app is broken. Damn.

Is it really so far off, that even of They wrote tests, that the app should still work?
AND I THOUGHT IT IS COMMON SENSE. Damn!
Guess how needs to fix it

Fucking hate my job 😡
I joined as nodejs dev at a mnc 3months ago involved in banking software in which i dont have any domain knowledge.. first 10 days I was told to go through fucking udemy nodejs and graphql tutorial (wtf) which i already have experience with before joining.. after that my reporting manager gives me task to resolve fields and gave me shitty jira story link to read.. that shit story link had no explanation about the fields and what the database it is, then she says to use some shitty sdk which is built internally by shiity devloper which had no documentation and have to follow other module which was again written by that sr. Dev... They hav fucked up the graphql and nodejs and entire stack and also till date no one has ever given any explanation about the domain and the fields and database schema.. this manager refuses to share knowledge about the domain now how the fuck i resolve the graphql schema which was again written by non technical b.a.. all they have used is latest technology in a shitty way with no standards to to follow .. no dataloading no caching no batching.. use shitty sdk which does not give access to dbconn and fucking tightly coupling expressjs which when i start consumes crazy 400Mb of memory .. these fucking seniors devs + the fucking b.a having 12+. Yrs exp each have fucked the entire codebase... Each day killing my passion for app development.. fuckkk ... Dunno what to do now

Junior engineer asking managers on Slack about prioritisation..

Junior eng: Hey managers, I have these tasks A & B lined up and some other type of work... Is it ok if I finish A by Weds and B by the end of week or should it be done sooner? Also, is the order fine or should I prio B first?

*silence for hours*

Random dev feeling bad for junior getting no response chips in: Hey, you are doing great, that order makes sense to me and let me know if you need any guidance or have questions!

Junior dev: Thaanks and will do!

*another hour goes by*

Manager: Hi team. I have asked other engineer X to do task B tomorrow.

what the fuck. at least answer the fucking question and say it needs to be done sooner. felt bad for poor junior here. :/

This is the first time I have inherited a project. ever. I have always seen people on devrat ranting about inherited projects. Never had I experienced it.

Now, the design agency that hired me would outsource web projects to developers before hiring me. I was recommended to them.

Now then. Today I was tasked to fix a couple of issues a previous outsourced developer had abandoned. I had a look at the issues and started fixing them one after the other. Its a wordpress project. Coding for wordpress is super fucking easy by the way.

You create a default page by going to the admin dashboard.

You can create a custom page by creating a page-PageName.php file. and place all the bullshit you have for the custom page IN THAT FILE.

So this developer who i assumed claimed to be a professional. PASTED ALL THE FUCKING HTML IN THE WYSIWYG TEXTBOX. WHO THE FUCK EVEN DOES THAT?

THIS WAS A FUCKING SIMPLE TASK. THIS ASSHOLE CREATED A CUSTOM PAGE CALLED HOMEPAGE AND PASTED THE HTML IN THE TEXTBOX. WHY THE FUCK?! ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY DUDE? AND OH MY GOD DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE HTML WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THAT &QUOT CRAP. YOU MY FUCKING FRIEND IS THE FUCKING REASON THIS PLATFORM EXISTS. BE PROUD. YOU MADE A DIFFERENCE. YOU CAUSED A PLATFORM TO BE CREATED.

PLEASE DO ME A FAVOR AND NEVER FUCKING TOUCH A COMPUTER EVER AGAIN! YOU ARE NOT WORTH IT.

!dev

Ive been looking for a hobby for years but nothing is interesting enough.. i lose interest within a few hours (besides cars but thats expensive so i only work on it very once in a while).

But now everything changed.. I was looking for something that keeps my mind busy but I was soooo bored those last months that I went fishing just to get outside..
turns out my new hobby is the opposite of what i was looking for.. fishing and completely turn off my brain.. its so calming to just be alone in the nature and do a very simple task, thowing out and pulling in with a chamce of catching a nice dinner.. try-catch basically..

assembled my first custom rod today, i kept in mind what i liked about certain rods and then put the best of each of them into my own rod..

if youre stressed and and introvert you should try it..

havent been that calm in years..

Please tell me something wrong with me, and whole world is working like that! It can't be right! Or could it, and I'm just one sad fuck who don't know shit?

So... We've got:
1. Jira reporting (agile style with cards and shit)
2. Task timers (via application integrated to Jira in order to count how much time we spent on a task)
3. End of the day email reporting with description of what we have done today (Jira is not enough?)
4. Daily morning meetings with a team leader to report what we're gonna do today
5. Git merge code reviews for each finished component (that lasts for hours)
6. Weekly status meetings
7. Working hours reporting with a fucking fingerprint

And on top of all of that, the developer is the one who just writes the code - team leader decides how this code is gonna look, what will be written first and what last, what libraries will be used and so on...

The company considers the project manager I work with to be the best. After working with him, I consider him to be everything that is wrong with project management.

This PM injects himself into everything and has a way of completely over-complicating the smallest of things. I will give an example:

We needed to receive around 1000 rows of data from our vendor, process each row, and host an endpoint with the data in json. This was a pretty simple task until the PM got involved and over complicated the shit out of it. He asks me what file format I need to receive the data. I say it doesnt really matter, if the vendor has the data in Excel, I can use that. After an hour long conversation about his concerns using Excel he decides CSV is better. I tell him not a problem for me, CSV works just as good. The PM then has multiple conversations with the Vendor about the specific format he wants it in. Everything seems good. The he calls me and asks how am I going to host the JSON endpoints. I tell him because its static data, I was probably going to simply convert each record into its own file and use `nginx`. He is concerned about how I would process each record into its own file. I then suggest I could use a database that stores the data and have an API endpoint that will retrieve and convert into JSON. He is concerned about the complexities of adding a database and unnecessary overhead of re-processing records every time someone hits the endpoint. No decision is made and two hours are wasted. Next day he tells me he figured out a solution, we should process each record into its own JSON file and host with `nginx`. Literally the first thing I said. I tell him great, I will do that.

Fast forward a few days and its time to receive the payload of 1000 records from the Vendor. I receive the file open it up. While they sent it in CSV format the headers and column order are different. I quietly without telling the PM, adjust my code to fit what I received, ran my unit test to make sure it processed correctly, and outputted each record into its own json file. Job is now done and the project manager gets credit for getting everything to work on the first try.

This is absolutely ridiculous, the PM has an absurd 120 hours to this task! Because of all the meetings, constant interruptions, and changing of his mind, I have 35 hours to this task. In reality the actual time I spent writing code was probably 2-3 hours and all the rest was dealing with this PM's meetings and questions and indecisiveness. From a higher level, he appears to be a great PM because of all the hours he logs but in reality he takes the easiest of tasks and turns them into a nightmare. This project could have easily been worked out between me and vendor in a 30 min conversation but this PM makes it his business to insert himself into everything. And then he has the nerve to complain that he is so overwhelmed with all the stuff going on. It drives me crazy because this inefficacy and unwanted help makes everything he touches turn into a logistical nightmare but yet he is viewed as one of the companies top Project Managers.

First I write a list of all the features that the client wants on their website, then I break down the features into tasks, then I estimate the number of hours required for each task, then I sum all the hours and multiply the final number by 3.

just got paid for my first upwork task. feels really good. some clients are absolutely amazing! ^_^

Been working in Linux server for a while, doing devOps and basic task automation with bash.

Today I have to write some .bat task for backup and moving files in Windows first time against .bat . What the hell was this people thinking when they made the .bat sintax is just awful. I understand is old but why. And tried also powershell still crap.

#10

After I did some work on this nightmare codebase, the client kept switching goals. He Changed the task a few times, so I always told him that he will have to pay for all changes.
After a time he requested another change, so I stated that he has to pay the first invoice I sent him first. He started bitching around, that I didn't complete the work yet and so on. I saw where this was going. He didn't wanted to pay me, so I cancelled the work for this bitch.

😤

Read my revenge in #11

/*
"Not wk135, but blah blah blah"
Please don't misuse wk135 (Sorry)
It's about coding tests
Thank you. */

=>
A company took their technical test on this really weird website. There was a Windows Narrator guy's voice giving instructions while a timer was running. I had to flash my ID to the webcam and then fit my head on an outline on the screen. It was for a web dev position. I had to speak into the microphone to answer the Narrator's questions and then send the video to them. The questions were weird and hypothetical, mostly. I just thought that their process was dumb and unnecessary.

=>
I don't like aptitude and algebraic tests. One company, I remember, had their test on Google Forms. For some multiple choice questions, they put check boxes instead of radio buttons. So, I could just blaze through it selecting all options. Some of the questions had their first option as "All of the above" 🤔. Fortunately, I didn't pass the test.

=>
The company I'm interning with, starting from next month, had a good interview process. They asked me questions on JavaScript, CSS, and a few on algorithms and data structures. I was also given a task where I had to make a css animation of trees. I'm glad they didn't have an algebra entry test.
😊

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

In my school, eleventh grade (so nearly "Abitur", A levels), we got the task to create a program which will be running on every computer here which should replace the Classbook (like a book where homework and lessons and stuff is written down).
Now, the class before mine already did a part of that, a program to share who is ill/not at school, with a mark whether it is excused or not.
So far so good. They all seemed not that bad when they were presenting it to us. Then, the first thing: they didn't know what git is. Well, okay I thought.
Next, there was this password field to access the program. One of them entered the password and clicked enter. That seemed suspiciously fast for an actual secure login. So fast, the password could have been in the Code...
Yesterday I copied that program and put it into a decompiler.
And... I was right.
There were the login credentials in plain text. Also, haven't thought of it but, IP address + username + password + database name were there in plain text, too.
Guess I am going to rewrite this program down to the core

I had my first ever dev interview yesterday, at a local cybersec startup(FullStack Python position)

I think it went smooth, they said if we continue the process they would give me a small dev task to complete to prove my abilities, and asked how much time of notice to give my current employers before leaving.

I can't wait to leave 4 years of sysadmin and finally move on to be a (professional) developer! 🤞

In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼‍♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.

So this happened a while back ..

I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.

Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.

It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.

It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.

By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.

And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.

Those of you who like "The Imitation Game", you probably want to check out "Hidden Figures" (2016). It's on Netflix now.

About a team of female African-American mathematicians who wanted to "break the glass ceiling" in NASA.
- Dorothy : conquered the (recently acquired) IBM frameworks using Fortran and taught her team to program it
- Mary : appealed to court to be allowed to study in a all-white school to get her qualification to be an aerospace engineer
- Katherine : her skills in analytical geometry enabled her to be the first female African-American in the Space Task Group in calculating the momentous capsule launch into orbit

My lazy ass just can't fathom how someone who deals with so much math and pressure can still smile to their family after work. My grumpiness nature will surely turn me into a monster.

And now I know what "human computers" means.

My first script in Python.

It's amazing how it is simple manipulate spreadsheet data.

I'm a PHP developer and the same task would require ton of line codes.

I once had to do instruct some students about doing some project. On the first day, I gave some task and on the next day I checked all of them. Once you write codes for years you can realize what can a newbie write. I asked if he wrote that code by himself. And he was sure of it. But he did not know that that code was taken from my blog.

First task as Python delevoper intern - fix non-essential for business app, written by an intern last year. Apparently that intern didn't even know what an object is. In Python, where everything, including functions, is an object.

I have to fix it piece by piece. It would be faster to throw old code and start from scratch.

Yet I'm glad they gave me this task. I feel like I'm learning a lot working with this shitty code. And they assigned a great person to help me should I have any questions/problems.

I could not be happier.

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

University, first Java practical lesson.

I'm sitting near this guy, clearly hyped up because he managed to install his first linux distro earlier.

After 5 minutes he asks me how to do the task the Professor assigned that morning.

I'm playing dumbass in my head, thinking stuff like "oh big boy installed ubuntu but can't declare a fucking Rectangle class in java lol" (what a dickhead).

I helped him, and then proposed to go out for a quick smoke.

Turns out we're very similar, hyped as hell with linux (like I was at the time), with same CS interests. Still texting sometimes.

So here goes my first rant...

I was looking for a job as a software developer when I saw one nice company hiring.

I apply to them via their form online. Then they invite me to come to their event during which they will explain everything in details.

I go there (despite the time of the event being uncomfortable for me) and listen to them for a while. Basically, they say they will send the test task to all applicants and see how it goes.

Later same day they email me saying they didn't get my CV via their form and they need me to resend it so they can send the test task. Alright, no big deal, done.

Now today they email me saying "sorry, motherfucker, better luck next time".

What the actual fuck? I spend my fucking time to go to some shitty event saying a test task will decide everything to not even get one.

So, naturally, I go and re-check my email: I definitely did send them my CV;
seems like they ignored the email and eliminated me from the application process for not having my CV, fuckers.

If they will ever in the future invite me to an interview/offer me a job there, I won't take for fucking triple pay.

Thanks for reading and helping me vent my anger, have a nice day:)

Rant

I'm tired of this shit!!!

First I receive a task to create a new functionality for the app that I'm working on and some documentation (this is the only good part of all the rant) but no design.

It's been 2 weeks since I got assigned to this and still no design, no assets, no API calls that ACTUALLY WORK.

Today was testing a plist to get a banner link, and for 1 hour that little fucker didn't returned the image I was asking.

Better, I wasn't getting ANY IMAGE. Turns out that the link sends me to a HTML URL that doesn't have any image... go figure!

So I've been working on this from some images inside the PDF with the documentation given.

Oh! Wait! There's more!

The cherry on top is that I'm implementing a chat/voice call/video call into the app and the framework that I will be using is being created now, and it's not even finished!!!!!!

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

Starting to feel like shit about my new job. Every task my boss gives me I return with a "sorry it can't be done" for one reason or another. At first it was because user interface testing is a nightmare, then it was because the API postman tests he wanted is for endpoints we haven't exposed so it can't be done and the automated login on postman and retrieval of cookie information can't be done through postman because it requires rendering the site in a browser. I feel worthless to the company but I also feel he keeps making up tasks for me without checking if they're actually useful to us or even possible first, rather than let me touch any of the real code.. I don't know if I should just quit tbh.

Kinde messed up my first contract.

I am a senior frontend dev who until now worked only on full time gigs. For the first time I picked up a short term gig of 1 week that consisted of 2 packages and I wanted to share my mistake that I made so hopefuly its useful to you.

So last week I started working on this gig. First package went through fine, I delivered in 2 days and collected the first half of the payment.

However I messed up with the second package. Not messed up the implementation per say, but I didnt manage the communication well.

Before implementing it I raised a discussion about a missing backend endpoint that is required to implement the perfect solution. Client got cold feet, had a discussion with his manager and now decided to postpone the second package and even got mad at me that I already did and pushed half of the work of the second package without waiting for his decision from his manager. So now obviously Im not getting paid for half of the work of the second package (I dont mind, I should have waited for clients response), anyways it took me like 20min to implement so thats fine.

My takeaways:

1. As a short term contractor you are hired to solve a concrete problem. Scope out what you can, agree on a task list and stick to it. Anything out of scope will cost the client extra.

2. Your priority is to get paid. Not to deliver the perfect solution that confuses the client and potentially can impact your delivery. If he wants something and you see its only a half of what he really needs, deliver it anyways. Keep that idea of improvement for the future. More work for future = more invoices = more money. I know its not ethical but your priority should be to get paid and in order to do that you need to deliver. Dont shoot yourself in the foot with unnecesseraly overcomplicating things.

well fuck me, just spent the whole weekend (about 33 hrs) not being able to solve a task from uni with a java program we had to write🙄😪

the problem was a given set of movies with a weekday, the begin time, the duration, the title, and a "score"
the movies take place in one week (random days, random amount of movies) and every movie can be shown multiple times
our task was to find a sequence of non-overlapping (all unique) movies with a score of at least a given number
all in text form

i tried dynamic programming but the more i tried, the more it got complicated, so i ended up using "earliest finishing time first"
my code is just 3 points under the goal and i don't know what to change anymore😒, also some friends did the exact same and succeeded somehow
copying (and obfuscating) won't work, as the codes will be compared by a very good "copy checker"
let's hope i'll still have a chance for an exam😐

I never knew that I was a good mentor at SQL , specially at PL/SQL.

I gave a task to a new member of my team, to fill 5 tables with data from other 15 tables.

I informed him well about data table info and structure. He spended about 3 days to create 25 different queries in order to fill 5 tables.

After I saw the 25 queries, I told him, that he could do it with 1 main query and 5 insert statements.

So I spended 1 hour of training, in order to build,run and explain how to create the best sql statements for this task.

(First 5 minutes)
It was looking so simple at the beginning from starting with 1 simple join, after some steps he lost my actions.

(Rest 55 minutes)
I was explained the sql statements I 've created and how Oracle works.

Now , every time he meets me, he feels so thankful for learning him all those Oracle sql tips in 1 hour.

Now he is working only with big data and he loves the sql.

Dockers JSON output is garbage.

First, you'll get no JSON per se.

You get a JSON string per image, Like this:

{...} LF
{...} LF
{...} LF

Then I tried to parse the labels.

It looked easy: <Key>=<Value> , delimited by comma.

Lil oneliner... Boom.

Turns out that Docker allows comma in the value line and doesn't escape it.

Great.

One liner turns into char by char parser to properly tokenize the Labels based on the last known delimiter.

I thought that this was a 5 min task.

Guess what, Docker sucks and this has turned into try and error...

For fucks sake, I hated Docker before, but this makes me more angry than anything else. Properly returning an parseable API isn't that hard :@

The presumption of incompetence:

Has this ever happened to you?

Starting a task and chatting with a fellow dev-- my first time implementing analytics in this particular app. I mentioned to them that I've been doing analytics implementation on various apps at our company for years, but our current apps' analytics setup is the most intense and this will be a good learning experience for me to dig into.

They responded by sending me code snippets of existing analytics implementations to help me. Not hidden or lesser-known classes, very obvious ones I already had open and was working off of. With advice like "just search the codebase for 'analytics' and 'trackPage''" lol.

I like this person a lot, but this definitely caught me off guard. It felt like something her obtuse manager would do, but not her. This would probably not be a big deal to most but I'm so used to being given unsolicited/unhelpful/irrelevant advice from male devs, and having to be pleasant and thank them, this one was tough to witness.

How do you respond to unsolicited "help"? Does it bruise your ego the way it bruises mine? lol

In cour company we need an online dashboard that monitors logfiles from various interface processes.

My collage and me, the newest company members (for almost 2 years) get the task to build this and get it presented as some intern project where we can try out some more recent technologies/frameworks.
Now in the first meeting our senior team leader told us we shoeldn't use the noew hot buzzword js frameworks.
Reason? They are not proven and wil probably lose popularity next year and we don't want to migrate everything every half year. Plus he had negeative experiences with Angular in some project he had to work on, probably just because his limited JS skils.
So he wants us to use jQuery to build a modern web application.

I get it you don't want to migrate to TheNewHotThing(tm) every year. Guess what? You fucking don't have to. If I build sonting in Vue.js now, it won't stop working when a new framework comes along.
Look at our own fucking ASP.NET Web Forms prooject, that stil works. Just don't deny the usability of modern frameworks.

My first task in my current company, a few years ago.

I had to add features to a 10 year old microcontroller-based device written in C.

There was a struct named "global", which held hundreds of other structs that held variables or even more structs.
If one would have printed the structure of this mess it would haven needed several pages.

This "global"-struct was used in every single sourcefile to store and pass data around. Obviously there was no documentation and often useless comments.

Additionally there were a few protocol stacks involved, mainly similar, only differing in one or two protocol layers.
The implementation of the protocol stack was by setting flags in the "global"-struct in every protocol layer and having the application data in a buffer.
The complete telegram with all layer specific data (header, checksums, etc.) was then build at one single point right before sending it, based on the flags and the data buffer.

As there was no chance to reuse protocol layers with this implemenation. Three protocol implementations with special telegram builder existed in parallel, although they were nearly identical.

I needed a fourth variant of the protocol stack, so I had no chance but to make another copy with some minor changes.

But there was a benefit from this task.
As I had to do the software for the successor of this device from scratch I learned for many things how not to do them :-)

After reading some rants abut stupid project managers I remembered this situation that happened to me a decade ago.
One of the tasks was to move some html component to different place on the page. The whole page was a mix trs and tds and to achieve that I had to rewrite the whole page structure. I estimated around half a day to complete that task. It was my first job and I was not great back then, but still it was reasonable amount for this task.

Now lets introduce my PM : the guy was a complete tool. He was a former hardware store manager ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and had no idea what we were doing.
He started ranting how on earth such simple task can takes so much time. I started explaining myself, but he wasn't listening. Instead he started sharing his screen, he made a screenshot of the page, pasted it to the ms paint, cut the component, and moved it to desired place. Then he said : It took me like 10 sec to complete the task and I have no experience, maybe I will replace you?
I was speechless. I had no words and I just kept silence.
Then he said he would reassign this task to X, because he is competent.
X spend more then 4 hours and I heard no apologies.

So i have been working as a graduate developer in this company i joined 5 months ago with some other graduates. I was on probation and it was supposed to end in near future but it got extended because " i was not being punctual". The feedback i got was " you are technically brilliant and have done all the tasks you have been asked to do but aren't being punctual and coming late to the office sometimes ".
I am indeed at fault that i sometimes enter the office late like 5-10 mins from the mentioned range. But whenever that has happened i always made it up while working late at work, this is my first job and even though i was being funny with the manager when we were discussing this i am not so happy right now, is it a big enough reason for extension ? Do you think if it can become a reason for termination ? Some other graduates have their probation extended cause of other reasons like late task completion.

Just need to understand how badly am i fucked.

Pretty much a sort of research work. The first assignment was: "look, we have this CAD viewer, but we would want to eventually optimize the structure of the mesh, so here's this method of minimizing the memory footprint. Try implementing it and integrating it with our application."

PS: the method is using triangle strips, where the next triangle uses two vertexes of the previous one, theoretically reducing the memory footprint of the mesh by 2/3 if the mesh is fully optimized. In the end, due to memory and performance constraints (this had to run on the first gen iPad), and overall application architecture, on the fly striping was unfeasible and gained no benefit, because striping an arbitrary mesh is a fucking hard task.

Another one was an implementation of smooth shading by recalculating vertex normals in runtime.

Best way to avoid procrastination : We tend to avoid commitments or to do large tasks as even visualizing them seems tiring and the longer it takes, the vulnerable we are to distractions

So I use this simple trick
I break my task into numerous sub tasks. For example if I need to finish a feature before day end, I would first list down all the cases I can think of in order and write them down using actual pen and paper.
I then start implementing them step by step.
I mark them checked once done.
It gives me a sense of achievement as I see those checks besides the sub tasks and I can also take breaks between steps.

So all it takes is just first five minutes of planning.
I had to do the above procedure, for this post as well.
Hope it helps fellow developers
:)

Started a job as a full stack developer. My first task was shocking! Do these small edits on this backend script that collects stuff from one database and edits the entries in another... piece of cake so far!

Here is the project on the TFS...
HOLD ON! IS THIS VISUAL BASIC?!!
I came here to do .Net framework development and .Net Standard... I wasn’t told that there will be VB, I have never used vb.net before.

Now... that I’m going to maintain this script in the future, I decided to rewrite it in C#, few things I learned on my journey of doing this:
1- There is an access modifier in VB called Friend
2- There is a data structure/type called Collection, it’s a value,key pair! Not key value pair... Value first, then key!!
3- Do you know how null is null everywhere?!! In VB they call it Nothing! Yes, as in...
if(myVar == nothing)
{
//stuff
}
Asking the guy responsible for that choice... he thinks VB is easier to read than C#
I DONT WANT YOU TO READ IT, I WANT IT TO MAKE SENSE AND WORK WITH THE REST OF THE C# CODE WE HAVE!!

In the past: "Alright, have the day off, so can do some serious work (work on my game project). Let me just check my mail first... And a cpl of sub-reddits... And see if there are any updates for Unit3D, or any interesting forum posts, or new assets on asset store that look nice... And check some online newspapers just to see if anything is going on... And check if anything new has been posted on slashdot since I last checked 5 minutes ago (nope)... And maybe see if there's any updates to Sublime Text or new useful packages that can help improve workflow... Ooh came across article on how to improve workflow... Hm someone mentioned a new task-management system in comments, gotta check that out... I'll just sign up for a demo-account and... Hm but what if there are any better ones? Better google for comparisons. Wait, isn't there a new episode of Silicon Valley today? Gotta see that first, no time tmr. Hmm also new episode of Archer, and American Gods. Better get watching these out of the way first, or I can't concentrate... Ah, wait, it's dinner time, no point starting anything until after that."

Now: All of the above, plus "I'll just check devRant real quick before I... hmm... interesting rant... *scrolls and reads rants and comments for 3 hours*"

How am I supposed to get any work done? :_(

Three male programmers were in the bathroom standing at the urinals.

 The first programmer finishes, walks over to the sink to wash his  hands. He then proceeds to dry his hands very carefully. He uses paper  towel after paper towel and ensures that every single spot of water on  his hands is dried.

 Turning to the other two, he says, "At Windows, we are trained to be extremely thorough."

 The second programmer finishes his task at the urinal and he proceeds to wash his  hands. He uses a single paper towel and makes sure that he dries his  hands using every available portion of the paper towel.

 He  turns and says, "At Macintosh not only are we trained to be extremely  thorough but we are also trained to be extremely efficient."

 The third programmer finished and walks straight for the door, shouting over his shoulder.

 "At RedHat, we don`t PISS on our hands."

Moral of the story: sometimes you've got to take a hit to be better off in the end.

A client asked me to design flyers for him, at first I was hesitant since this would be a stand alone design task instead of one incorporated with development.

He kept asking since he liked what I designed for my other clients (logos, etc..) So I finally said yes and we agreed to a final preview before he would pay me. I had asked him for color schemes, certain pictures, info, etc. but he told me it was completely up to me.

I finished the design, sent him the preview and he told me it was shit compared to my other work and that he didn't want it anymore 😅. I used to get mad as fuck every time this happened but now I don't even bother .

I know many people are going to say "You should have had him sign a contract, bla bla". I know, I know, but you can't let people sign a contract for every small thing, it completely depend on the situation and I prefer to know which of my lesser known clients are assholes so I can quit accepting tasks from them. This saves me much more time in the end.

Got my first task today while still being under training (large worldwide corporation - OMS department) and I'm practically drowning! Oh you wonderful devs give me strength!

New experience.
Went to bank at an unknown location all alone for first time and completed tons of pending work with the bank. In all, was worth 4 hours of struggling.
Being a Dev, I really feel bad how much the employee struggle to cope up with banking softwares and consider it as a gigantic task which for us is like the easiest task. Using mostly clicks and number pads and rarely any software updates.
I wonder why there isn't a proper training provided that would make them realise how simple it is to use banking proprietary softwares.
Or are we lagging behind to provide even better UX to banking employees.

Client : you are hired as a developer.

Me : we need more developers as there's more work and less time.

Client : Ok, here's another dev

(Meanwhile me doing my work...)

ON THE DAY OF DEMO :

Me : Here's the demo.

Client: it's incomplete, where's more work?

Me: that's the part of 2nd dev you hired before

Client : I don't care, I fucking need a work!

Me inside: (Why the fuck would the first dev becomes a task/team manager just because is the first one to join the project! Arrrgh!!! Hire a fucking scrum master to manage your fucking tasks/team, am just a fucking dev! )

This happened at the beginning of my first job:

Me: I want to clarify some things that wasn't specified in my task. I want to see if I need to do them and how I should solve it.
Senior dev: Don't worry about it. If testers pass the task back to you, then you do it. Just do as it is.
Me: 😓

!Rant

A couple hours ago I had an "interview".
It was like that:
- Show me your SQL skills, select from 2 tables, aliases, groups
-- Passed
- Ok, Now you have to learn Visual Basic .NET for getting this job, your first task is to create a simple calculator

My mind just exploded. Visual Basic?!? Noooo.... Really? I don't want to learn that Microsoft shit.... But it's good paid work so I'm trying it right now.

To be honest? I'm suprised, it's not that bad and I think that problems are not in languages, it's about cooperation, flexibility and enthusiasm to solve problems.

So don't judge programming languages and solve problems with them.

Still hate pascal and my English🤔

P.S.: Boss is amazing, smart....

My new colegue at work was tasked with getting familiar with some Java code that had security vulnerability. He complained about slow build time for the first hour and then I stopped paying attention. At the end of day I checked on him and was like wtf how are you still trying to build this.
Turns out he ran Gradle task bootRun and watched logs of working app for 8 hours because he thought that's build xD

Today a task was assigned to a coworker, he is a good guy, but one of those that never complain, never say anything, get there early, go to lunch at the exact same hour everyday, doesnt talk to anybody and gets off at exactly 6pm.

So, the task was submitted by QA, according to them, a disabled input could be enabled by going into the dev tools and enabling it...

So i went over the pm and told her (cos she is a cunt) that the ticket was just bullshit and that first of all, we had no control of it, but if that is the case, we can go over and add event listeners to all the inputs in the platform to avoid people changing them...like wtf?

Since she is a dumb cunt, she 'escalated' the task to the senior dev... he is also a total fucktard who doesnt know a shit. The dude said that the task was ok and we had to do it or not but it was better to do it, justifying the ticket in the most stupid and incoherent way... like wtf is to do with it? Tell the user to not go over the devtools and enable it? The fuckkkk

I felt like i was about to shit my kidney, seriously, but what can i do? It is not the first time things like that happen. The stupid fuck also let one of his friends add several migrations to change several tables columns just because of 'good practices' which in first place left the databas all fucked up and with fucked relations.

I'm just so tired of these fucks, incompetent motherfuckers... I told a friend about it and he said that that was nothing, it is worse when you have to work for banks and that the only thing i could do was to let it go and learn from it, to not do the same mistakes. Im thinking in quitting... what should i do?

ideal sprint fallacy.
total days 10 , total hours(excluding breaks ) 8 hrs per day= 80 hrs per dev

code freeze day = day 8, testing+ fixing days : 8,9,10. release day : day 10
so ideal dev time = 7days/56 hr
meetings= - 1hr per day => 49 hrs per dev

- 1 day for planning i.e d1 . so dev time left . 6 days 42 hrs.
-----------
all good planning. now here comes the messups

1. last release took some time. so planning could not happen on d1. all devs are waiting. . devtime = 5 days 35 hrs.

2. during planning:
mgr: hey devx what's the status on task 1?
d: i integrated mock apis. if server has made the apis, i will test them .
mgr : server says the apis are done. whats your guestimate for the task completion?
d : max 1-2 hrs?
m : cool. i assign you 4 hrs for this. now what about task 2?
d : task told to me is done and working . however sub mgr mentioned that a new screen will be added. so that will take time
m : no we probably won't be taking the screen. what's your giestimate?
d : a few more testing on existing features. maybe 1-2 hrs ?
m: cool
another 4 hrs for u. what about task 3?
d : <same story>
m : cool. another 4 hrs for u. so a total of 12 hrs out of 35 hrs? you must be relaxed this sprint.
d : yeah i guess.
m cool.
-------
timelines.
d1: wasted i previous sprint
d2 : sprint planning
d3 : 3+ hrs of meetings, apis for task 1 weren't available sub manager randomly decided that yes we can add another screen but didn't discussed. updates on all 3 tasks : no change in status
d4 : same story. dev apis starts failing so testing comes to halt.
d5 : apis for task1 available . task 3 got additional improvement points from mgr out of random. some prod issue happens which takes 4+ hrs. update on tasks : some more work done on task 3, task 1 and 2 remains same.
d6 : task1 apis are different from mocks. additionally 2 apis start breaking and its come to know thatgrs did not explain the task properly. finally after another 3+ hrs of discussion , we come to some conclusions and resolutions
d7 : prod issue again comes. 4+ hrs goes into it . task 2 and 3 are discussed for new screen additiona that can easily take 2+ days to be created . we agree tot ake 1 and drop 2nd task's changes i finish task 2 new screens in 6 hrs , hoping that finally everything will be fine.

d8 : prod issue again comes, and changes are requested in task 2 and 3

day 9 build finally goes to tester
day 10 first few bugs come with approval for some tasks
day 11(day 1 of new sprint) final build with fixes is shared. new bugs (unrelated to tasks. basically new features disguised as bugs) are raised . we reject and release the build.

day 2 sprint planning
mgr : hey dev x, u had only 12 hrs of work in your plate. why did the build got delayed?

🥲🫡

A post today made me think about this interview I had about a year ago... I shall tell you all about it.

Went to a hiring event for this company everyone was cool but this one guy (who would have been my boss) was a total arrogant, douchey, know it all.

So anyways cue interviewing with him a week later. He says if I give you task A, B, C and they need to be done by the end of the week in which order do you do them. (Note: he literally said abc not actual tasks)

Me: I don't really know how to answer that question without more information.

Him: Well I like to see how people answer it... So think about it for a second.

Me: Ok I guess if doing one task would help me do the next task faster I would do it in that order. Like I can use code or concepts from C to do B faster.

Him: What if A would take 2 days and B and C would take 1 day.

Me: I don't see how that would influence the order I do them in.

Him: Would you complete one task after another or switch between them or do see simultaneously.

Me: It would depend on my previous answer and what would be the fastest way to get them done but without more info I literally cannot give you an answer of like I would do B, C, A.

Him: Would you do the longest task first or the shorter tasks.

Me: I don't know I guess it depends on if it would help you or somebody else move forward with something if I got a particular task or the shorter tasks done first.

So cue more of this kind of back and forth about arbitrary details about undefined theoretical tasks for like 10 minutes.

Suffice is to say I didn't get the job and I'm glad.

Fed up with f@_#-$&@_ Microsoft bullshit, computer refused to install IIS without a reboot first. Rebooted, got bluescreen with some error like APC_Index mismatch since it was hooked up to an external monitor (this has happened before, but only when booting into Windows, not Ubuntu), god knows why now since it was hooked up to same monitor before reboot and worked just fine. All this because some stupid school related task requires Visual Studio and a web project-solution that takes ages to run/debug which I would rather build and devug through attaching remote debugger to the running IIS-process. Instead I get into a boot-loop when the screen is connected, and when I connect the screen after a normal boot it restarts itself. Why is it always like this? Most of the time is spent just to setup the environment or making Windows work. F#&#_ this and the assignment, goodnight.

The first job I had, asked me to build a simple CRUD functionality in CodeIgniter (It was popular in 2017).

I wasn't able to understand the framework and its ins and outs.
(I only knew Core PHP at that point).

It took me 3 days to finish the task and I got yelled at by the team leader because of it and I almost broke down crying. At that point I was convinced that web development career isn't for me.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

So, I have a coding task that takes several days to complete. How can I pick up the next day where I left off the night before? I find it difficult to get straight back into the flow because I first have to find my way around the previous day's code. Any tips?

Just had an interview. First few minutes felt good then they gave me a simple coding task.

It WAS SOOOO SIMPLE, but my brain just blocked and stopped working. It was litterly just a console application and you had to print some symbols dynamically.

Im so mad at myself.

A few years ago, i had a task to implement a webservice of an insurance-company into our .NET Development.

The security requirements of this insurance-company webservice were top notch.
As a client you had to build a request that used a negotiated certificate, canonical header structures, security timestamp, a secret token in header, ...

To configure all this stuff via web.config WCF was pure pain in the ass.

After many phonecalls and emails, i finally managed to meet all security requirements to send a valid request.

First, i didn't recognized my breakthrough, because my client still had thrown exceptions while calling the insurance-webservice.

Why was that?

The exception told me on the most possible gentle way, that .Net isn't able to process an unsecured response, when there was a secured request before.

So there was top notch security for requesting, but dumbass unsecured responding with all the precious customer information.

*epicfacepalmnuclearexplosionfollowing*

I even had to raise the. Net Version of our. Net client, because i wasn't able to configure that it is allowed to process an unsecured response after using a secured request.

Whyyyyyyy?!!?!!1el even!?!

Need Advice + Rant

I am an Android Developer, pursuing an Internship, which i thought would be good for my career. But I am being assigned the task to build search feature for the App using Elastic Search. I intially was halpy to work on Search since it had to be Algolia. I am hating the work now because I am getting so stuck with Elastic and there have been other factors which also have decreased my productivity, but I am being quite inefficient. Now the deadlines are coming closer and if I dont give output I will be laid off. I am thinking about quitting myself because now I feel extremely demoralized and demotivated to work because we first decided to work on Algolia and it was all ready before we thought of shifting to heroku and now on AWS. What do the experienced once suggest? It's not that its impossible to do, now i just have to write queries in Java, again I am stuck and not really looking forward to since I was given the deadline today, for 2 days later.

The only issue is, I may have to return the new phone (OnePlus 3T) which I bought planning to later return the money to someone through my stipend.

Two of em.
The first one was making a project following mvc patterns for my last job in which the structure was so easy to follow that my buddy has been able to move allong with it and do more projects out of it. He had a hard time with web development and the boss would have him do it and learn on the job.
To this day that application remains as a "framework" of sorts.
It was made in an unholy comb of js for the front end and classic asp for the backend with restful endpoints and all that shit. I was drunk when I coded most of it.

The other one was during my time in the u.s army. I was a mechanic, a really shitty one mind you. But i knew how to read manuals. All and every task was accomplished to the point in which they had me basically rebuild a vehicle that was beyond salvation. Got it done in 2 months and command was so impressed they set me up as the brigade commander's personal driver and mechanic. I was also drunk for the most part, but then again so where the rest of my brothers.

When you start an informatics course and your first task is to create a virtual machine. With Ubuntu.

Created a simple bot for an online game using puppeteer.

After an evening (and night) of dev and debugging (quite some rejected promise errors), it worked fine and was ready for a 10-minutely cron job.

Fixed a couple bugs in the first three hours. Then started playing minecraft, which lagged like hell.

Opened task manager and saw a list of about 25 headless chrome processes. They had not been closed because of unhandled errors before the close method call 😵

Now added some basic error handling ☺

I love working doing tasks like moving boxes.
Move 10 boxes from point A to point B. Simple, you know what to do. and you know when you are finished.

I Hate tasks such as: Change this Icon to other icon. (C++) Because it takes me 3 fucking hours to find in code where the fuck this happens! And every time my first instinct when I don't know something is go to the internet and search for it. But in this case I CaN't!.

Wife: asking why I'm browsing the internet looking at memes.

Because I Don't Know where the fuck I need to be to finish my task! And I am stuck in this repeating loop of searching in code, looking at memes and being ashamed of myself that I did not this fucking simple task in like 10 minutes.

And after 3 hours of doing basically NOTHING. I don't dare to ask a colleague about everything.

Please send help....

Not entirely dev related, but definitely shameless. In high-school we had to study CS, but it was more about knowing to use Office. We had class tests, which mean that we all had the same task and we had to finish it until the end of the class. Obviously no one wanted to do it, so whoever finished first would email it to everyone. Most people, however, were stupid enough to leave the meta data untouched, so it was obvious who was the original author. To not appear suspicious, I removed the original metadata and put my own in, and deliberately made errors in the sheet and corrected others that I noticed. I never got caught, because my work would always have "unique" mistakes.

Pretty late for week 86, but I just remembered my first paid freelancing web dev work.

While not my worst experience, it was a pretty horrible task given to me...

I was helping someone implement a new design on a pretty outdated (visually and technically) PHP site.

I was getting paid crap. The guy wouldn’t even let me look at the HTML, let alone touch it, so definitely no PHP work, either...

Literally the only code I was allowed to write was CSS. So, I’m supposed to be restyling, but I can’t change the structure at all, or even ADD CSS SELECTORS.

Fine, I’ll just make your site fragile as fuck by using nested relative selectors.

#main:nth-child(3) > div > div > div > button

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there were some pages...I shit you not...that had A DOZEN LEVELS OF NESTED TABLES.

WHY. DEAR GOD WHY.

For a simple checkout page.

So, on some pages I was literally trying to access elements through relative selectors, nested within levels and levels of tables. FFS

Needless to say, I did not work for him for long. Even if I wanted to deal with that crap, my time is much more valuable than what I was being paid.

The guy who leads the Objective Programming classes/labs told us that we have to make a game or an app to pass this semester.

I was so hyped, I've instantly started reading up on creating a 2D engine in C++ (which I don't like as much as C# but that was his conditions).

..as soon as I've created base for the engine, he said that the first version has to be console based.. so I'm like - okay, how do I show my 2D _graphical_ engine in a console?
So I came up with showing basic vector maths like movement towards a bearing angle and whatnot.

..now I've been pointed out that we are supposed to make a documentation, except it's supposed to contain info on ALL libraries and ALL classes our project will have.. which is insane, how can one predict what he'll need to accomplish the task? You can only know the half of the things you'll need, unless the project is way too simple.

I'm just plain annoyed, because this whole 'wow, I can showoff my mad skills' turned into 'wow, I have to do shit the tedious way and I'm already crying that I've picked a 2D engine and not a simpleton game like crosses and circles.

In our department, we've to send some reports at different times in the same month, for example, three the first day, one the fifteenth, three the last day...

This was a task assigned to my coworker, but it consumed a lot of time to modify and execute the required querys and write the reports in Excek with the results, so O was assignes to create a program that created the reports automatically.

I asked my coworker for the querys, a lot of times since he "forgot it", and once my program was fully completed him, I asked him to test it and tell me if he saw any errors, if the reports were done correctly, etc... And, twenty days later, when I asked him again, told me that everything was okay, so the whole months of July and August, the reports were done automatically.

Today we've receives a ton of emails about how the reports were not correct, how the information was incomplete and such.

Guess who gave me only half the querys requested. Now I've to do every single of them manually. While my manager rants.

Note to future self: Never trust that guy again, and always re-check everything he checks. This better be a lesson for the future.

I AM IN RAGE !!! MY MANAGER IS A FUCKIN SNAKE ASSHOLE!

FUCKER RATED ME 3/5 !
i feel like destroying my laptop and putting my papers right away. this is absolute shit hole of a company where corporste bullshit and multi level hierarchy runs the system, ass licking is the norm and still me, a lowly sde dev 1 was giving my 200% covering their bullshit to deliver outputs on time.

let me tell you some stats.

- our app has grown by 2x installs and 5x mau.

- only 3 devs worked on the app. the other 2 can vouch for my competence.

- we were handled an app with ugliest possible code full of duplication, random bugs and sudden ANRs. we improved the app to a good level of working

- my manager/tl is such a crappy person that if asked about a feature out of random, he will reply "huh?" and will need 2 mins to tell anything about it.

- there is so much dependency with other teams and they want us to talk to them personally. like hell i care why backend is giving wrong responses. but i cared, i gpt so good handling all these shit that people would directly contact me instead of himal and i would contact them. all work was getting done coz 1 stupid fellow was spending 90% of his time in coordinations

- i don't even know how to work with incompetence. my focus is : to do my task, fix anything that is broken that will relate to my task in any way and gather all the stuff needed to complete my task

i am done. i cannot change this company because its name is good and i am already feeling guilty about switching my previous jobs in 1 year but this is painful.

in my first company i happily took a 10% hike coz i was out of college and still learning.
in my 2nd company, i left due to change in policies ( they went from wfh to wfo and they were in a different state) , but even while leaving they gave a nice 30% hike
in my current company idk wjat the no. 3 equates to , but its extremely frustrating knowing a QA who was so incompetent, he nearly costed us a DDOS got the same rating as me

------
PS : GIVE ME TIPS ON HOW TO BE INCOMPETENT WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT

So I began at my first programming job as an intern and it was as bad as it gets but I kept going, thinking that this was normal. After my internship I continued to work full-time at the same company and was working on new functionality on their legacy product build in ASP Classic and their shitty inhouse front-end framework (which btw used eval to evaluate strings in so called queues). So I was assigned a task to create a module which needed some available data in the database. I was discussing my ideas with my supervisor and she didn't let me finish and began speaking on how I should get the data needed. My approach was much more clean and used only one request and hers used two. So I heard what she had to say and I wanted to finish what I was about to say before she interrupted me but she did it again. I go nervous but let her finish once again. After that she left me to work on my task and I did it the way thought was right (and it was). After she saw my approach she was furious because I didn't talk it over with her and she said that she don't think that we can work together if I continue to work like this. I felt how my head filled with blood but I kept calm. If I had opened my mouth I would surely get fired. But I didn't open my mouth and quit after one or two months. She was a real bitch that day...

Started a new job as junior developer. One of my first task was to sent a simple notification on an event in out product. Write the code, test that it works, push to devops.

Code compiles, tests pass, it’s deployed to internal test env. Check that my notification works in the test env. No problem.

It’s deployed to the customers test environment. It works and customer accepts it for prod.

We release to prod and of course it fails. Seems to be a simple string.Format that fails for god knows why. After 3h of debugging on prod without success we decide to roll it back.

Today we decided to try it on a backup of the prod db since one of the strings was taken from the db. Still working. No matter what data I input when trying it locally it still wont reproduce the issue we saw on prod.

Fuck this

devRantron AutoStart on boot, is pure evil......

me (almost) everyday:
Today i want to complete <insert a task here>
9 AM:
*me typing password in sddm (KDE Login)*
*ENTER* the first thing i see is devRantron's window already open and active.

*Ok, let me check recent rants for 2 minutes*

*me watching the clock in the corner* -- it's 10AM oh shit!

"It's very unfortunate that someone has to sit 10 hours a day on a computer screen but that's what we are paying for."
Working with an EU client.
Task is in stages beginning from assessment of an 9 year old Salesforce instance, cleanup and then transition to lightning.
The deliverabale in the first stage is excel sheet - objects(2400+), fields, apps, packages, profiles(110k), users, perm sets, apex classes, triggers, pages, s-controls and insert each and everything that a Salesforce instance could have.
Each and every data needs to be, analyzed and documented with our recommendations before being sent over. (Finding duplicates in 110k profiles??)
Oh, did I tell you, this was to be done four weeks? Weekend goes to hell.
That's when this beautiful motivational line comes up from the bridge, "It's very unfortunate that someone has to sit 10 hours a day on a computer screen but that's what we are paying for."
Fortunately(un?), that part of project is done and over with.

Now comes the clean up, identify packages not being used, remove them, qa and then push for deployment.
Mind you, this project is to be 2 weeks long. Its Friday of the first week today. And I am still working weekends.
Can I say, FML?

It was around for a while but I didn’t realize it was it for a long time. I was fixing computers for cash and spending in on booze while in primary school. Making websites for cash and for fun while in high school. Some guys wanted to buy my databases at the time and sending me emails that my websites rocks. I didn’t cared cause I party a lot and I didn’t need money.
Sex drugs and rock and roll was my life not a fucking computer.
Since I never had problems with math I passed exams and got myself to university and dropped out cause of those 3 funny things above. Turned out to pass exams after second year when math and physics disappeared you need to study more then 1 day before exam and party was more important for me.

I failed tremendously. My girlfriend left me I was out of money I got back to my hometown with my laptop and I somehow between depression, drugs, alcohol and killing myself reminded I was getting money from websites and I can try to follow that movie.

At that time I didn’t read single book in english in my life. I know some basic english so I decided to try to read some actionscript2 pdf. Why actionscript ? I liked those simple games. Those were fun and there was nothing better. I was reading first book at least 10 times with vocabulary that took about a month until I remembered whole book and second book was faster like 1 week third was 1 day and from then thing moved a little faster. I discovered flex just before adobe acquired macromedia and started writing in it. Started answering to some questions on forum and build some portfolio website with fancy 3d animations and stuff and finally applied for 2 jobs.
They both were amazed by my website and one of them sent me some task to do and I did it overnight and sent them back. They wanted to hire me and I need to respond to them.
Second job they invited me for talking and asking about math, if I’m ok with 3d and stuff and they offered me job closer to my home town so I picked them. The code was amazing, 3d equations, quaternions, complicated stuff bit very well written by some company that dropped project before launch and my first task was add some small feature.
I remember first day in elevator with my former boss who told me to not to get scary and take it slowly I was trying to do my task as fast as I can worried I will be fired if I don’t do it and nobody else will hire me and I won’t manage to recover from second failure. It was even more fighting with myself that I will fail again then with this task lol.
I’ve done the feature third day and when they said it’s cool and I can commit my changes it appeared to me that It might be this shit that will get me out of trouble.
I was never again wrong about programming and so wrong about trouble but that’s a different story...

A little example of how recriutment in IT works.

Mechanic gets a live mechanic skill test to get a job, as he really wants this job because of lack of money he asks recriuter couple of questions.
Mechanic: do I need to bring my own tools ?
HR: no everything will be provided in place
Mechanic: what would I do during this test ?
HR: everything will be explained just before the test I’m not an engineer so engineer will explain everything to you

The test day, mechainc goes to the test place and the recriuter says:
Recruiter: Your first task is really simple, please tighten those screws, you have 10 minutes
Mechanic: But I don't see the screw driver

Recriuter: I can't say to you how to do it, you figure something out
Mechanic somehow manages to tighten those screws using his belt

Recriuter: Ok so now tell me what force is needed to unscrew them and tell me if you did good if I’d say you need to tighten 1 million screws
Mechanic: I just want to do my job

Recruiter: Hey we are looking for people with broad experience for this position, of course you wont be asked to do that task but we want to know if you’re capable to do the job if we ask you.
Mechanic: answers the question that he will use tools and what devices he will use to measure the force

Recriuter: Can you write this as a mathematical equation ?
Mechanic: don’t know that
Recruiter: Well we can’t hire you we are looking for someone with more knowledge about the topic

Mechanic: But you keep asking me about the fucking screws
Recruiter: Watch your mouth sir because for me you are junior mechanics, you don’t know how to use proper tools and you barely manage to do the first task in time I would use: started elaborating about tools to tighten many screws at a time in a distributed fashion

Mechanic: but to run those tools I would need more than 10 minutes and besides that those are not here
Recruiter: yes they are, we open those doors to get them before our work you suppose to know that and we use those all the time, it was in job description, besides that it is recommended by company xyz to keep those tools behind blue doors, there is nothing here besides blue doors and room with tools and you didn’t know what blue doors are for, you need to learn the basics first

Mechanic resigns. 90% luck 10% skill
Every fucking time.

Shopping still keeps being an annoying task in the web age. The research for what i actually want is fine.

But it is a so damn timewasting and boring experience to sift through all that search results filtering out the non-results and overprized hippster shops first, then trying to find the best matching product on each remaining shop...
They all let you sort by price but not even one offers sorting by price per kilo and only a few offer some sort of product detail filter (which often omit relevant products because of insufficient tagging)...

The last part is rather easy though: compare properties of best matching offers and use the shop with the best offer.

P.S.:
I am fully aware of the fact, that part of the problem is my obsession in buying the correct thing combined with a cheapskate mentality.
So don't comment about just picking the first sorta-matching offer as that certainly would be way too easy (and cheaper because time is somehow money too).

Hardest thing for me as Team leader is to teach people in my team, that task is done, when unit tests are written, pull request is created, approved and merged.

Not when their code compiles for a first time.

First time me ranting about PHP.

First time. I still really like the language.

But what the fuck.
I am debugging, I narrowed down bug to my validator.
I played with php console and debugger and narrowed down to that one offending line.

Narrowing down to smaller and smaller examples when it dosent work, confusion and tension grows in me.

And then it hit me.
Confusion got to apogeum.

Anyone, if you know the anwser, please tell me.
WHAT THE FUCK?

maybe thats task for stack overflow? Hrm...
No, I dont have time to explicitly tell what I tried to google and spend 4 hours to have all checkmarks ticked before asking lol

The first time I was able to create a solution to a problem I had.

It wasn't some super-difficult problem, but the code worked, and I got my first jolt of satisfaction in a long, long time. And more importantly, I wrote it with my own two hands.

It was a Slack slash command and it takes a task number, sends it my server that creates a query for our Redmine, formats the returned data and posts it back to Slack. It only took a few hours to implement (mostly because I was unfamiliar with Slack's API), and while only a few people uses it frequently, I still get a small amount of satisfaction whenever someone mentions it.

I got pranked. I got pranked good.
My prof at my uni had given us an asigment to do in java for a class.
Easy peasy for me, it was only a formality...
First task was normal but...
The second one included making a random number csv gen with the lenght of at least 10 digits, a class for checking which numbers are a prime or not and a class that will check numbers from that cvs and create a new cvs with only primes in it. I have created the code and only when my fans have taken off like a jet i realised... I fucked up...
In that moment i realised that prime checking might... take a while..

There was a third task but i didnt do it for obvious reasons. He wanted us to download a test set of few text files and make a csv with freq of every word in that test set. The problem was... The test set was a set of 200 literature books...

So I'm studying at a university where everyone who studies electronics has to do the same "internship" where we have to program some microcontroller.
For most of us it is the first time programming with pointers and working with the register (C++). But the institute who does this shitty internship manages to FUCK up the class description and even the classes and methods they give you.

In the class description there are methods missing so you have no idea what they want you to do with that method and then they write stuff in the class description that aren't in the class and you don't need. For fucks sake how can you fuck up such a simple task.

And then their shitty template is wrong. If you expect your students to do well please for fucks sake make sure you give your students the correct classes and descriptions. Many students won't fucking know what is wrong because the never programmed in C++. The best part is that they are doing this "internship" for more than 5 years.

Junior dev here. Finishing a boot camp, actively going through a few job application processes.
One of the companies has given me a tech assignment (for a Graduate Junior position, mind you) that was titled Full Stack Mid Level Challenge. It took me a week to build an app they asked and do analitycs and refactoring of the second part of the task (I only had late evenings free to dedicate to that), it was my first time doing back-end in Node (my boot camp teaches PHP) so I basically learned to do it while doing this challenge.
They asked testing and clean architecture.
I submitted the assignment (I thought I would die while doing it, exhausted, I think I was brain dead for a short perio of time, but I submitted it on time).
They got back to me and we had already have a tech interview with the Leads that had live coding at the end. Don't have feedback yet, really won't be surprised for whatever comes, it was literarly my first interview, treating it like a valuable learning experience.

But. This rant is not about this. Thsi is just to put you in my mood.

This is the !rant:

My classmate from the bootcamp is probably already hired, or will be one of these days. As a tech challenge she was asked to do FizzBuzz kata. I repeat, FizzBuzz bloody kata!
Now, I am very happy for this person, the situation is complicated and this job is extremely needed.

But, please, explain to me, HOW??? How is it possible that selection criterias vary that much?

End of rant. Thank you very much.

So I got a job and on the first day I was giving a task to fix a bug which they said it was urgent that the software is been used by the financial department, so if I don't get it fixed soonest they would be loosing money.

I completely don't know how the software works, so I thought they would give me some time to get familiar with the code base but fu*k I gat to fix this if not they would See me as a person who does not know his stuff.

Some minute later, the CTO messaged me asking me how I introduced the bug in the first place, I was like I have not even cloned the repo, I have not pushed any code lol. At that point I know I'm gonna be so f**ked in this job .

So after sometime I fixed it but I had to get permission from the lady that manages the database because I was not given access and I need to update a field name in a table for everything to work well. I asked the lady to help update the field since she is the only one that has access to it and its urgent and every body is waiting for me. She told me to wait for 1hr and remind her that she's busy right now, after some hrs I reminded her but she kept telling me she will update it later.

Nobody wants to hear that I was not the one delaying the fix, so since I can push some code to the report and it's get deployed, I wrote a script to update the field and I removed the code later. With that done the fix was live and everybody was happy!

The next day, the lady came to me and was like I tried to update the field when I went home but it has already been update but I don't know why. I told her I don't know too :p😃

At a "guided internship".

Task: Develop a complete web application form

Was assigned to a team of 7 where all are "Frontend Developers" who have never heard terms like "bootstrap" or "mobile-first web pages".
That aside, all are seniors in age and qualifications, hence me telling them something to do is "ordering them around". And if I tell them to leave things to me, they be like "No, we wanna contribute and do the Frontend, as these things don't matter, inline css just works fine". 🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️

Why Lord? Just why?

This literally happened in my current team, and I'm not even an experienced dev yet.
Incident happened like this :
Our team is working on a RCP based on eclipse plugins, which has a headless mode and a GUI mode. Now, in the GUI mode, my manager cum architect thought there are no need of user log files (long story) because the user can see the info on screen, whereas in the headless mode, she wanted me to print the logs onto the console and a log file as well.
Now it just so happened that our team had got a recent addition as a replacement to our lead developer (she left the company) who claimed she had 3 years of expertise and a masters degree, and she was assigned a task. The task was to format a custom file we were generating out of the product (basically dumping info in a file) in a human-readable format. Miss new-addition-masters-degree decided it would be a very good idea to redirect the standard java output stream to a file output stream ( which she used for generating the formatted file ) but somehow never realized that she needed to reset the output stream back to standard output.
Consequences were devastating. I wrote the logic for the logger ( yes, apparently any available logging mechanism won't do it, again, long story ) and had it printing to a file in tmp directory. The logs seemed to be working fine initially but after a few logs, specifically from the point where the formatter started working, all the logs got printed in the formatted file. And this file was supposed to be used by our clients to develop something on top of it. Naturally, I got the heat of it and then naturally, worried and nervous and curious and in a frenzied state of mind, I started debugging.
When I got to the actual fault, I seriously could not decide whether to cry or laugh or call up miss masters and scream at her. I decided to ask her about what the hell she had written and her answer was most of it was written by the developer she replaced, so she didn't know it would cause this much problem. Anyway, I fixed the leak after that and averted the catastrophe.
And that, fellow devs, is the story of how I solved a crisis in my first year at corporate.

Task: Deploy MinIO in k8s cluster
Me: deploys the first docker image found on google: bitnami/minio
MinIO: starts

Me: log in
MinIO: Fuck you! There's a cryptic error: Expected element type <Error> but have <HTML>

Me: spends half a day trying out different vendors, different versions, different environments (works on local BTW)

Me: got tired, restored the manifest to what it was at the beginning. Gave it the last try before signing off

MinIO: works 100%

wtf... So switching it back and forth fixed the problem, whatever it was. Oh well, yet another day.

Stayed up coding all night to make sure things worked nicely. An hour before I left work yesterday, received 5 other never spoken off tasks.

none of the communication went directly by me, I just had to hear out the nonsense, but did a complete integration half a year ago

managed to do 3,8 of those task after working out and finishing the first set. became 5am.
might be because I went mental and have synced up 2repo's with idem dito codebase to be up to date to eachother (don't ask me why this is setup this way, I don't get half of their logic, hence why it doesn't work until I silently patch stuff out)

overslept by an hour.. yay me.

inb4 being fired
(no time for a capitalisation and spellcheck on this rant either, 9.30am now, tired af)

a friend of mine has applied at a company who have sent them this task* to complete before the job interview.
They gave about 10 days to complete this.
*I rewrote it

Personally I think this is super overblown and way too much to complete as a test before the first interview.
They expect the applicant to configure an SQL database, a backend with a custom API and a UI.
It's like a fullstack prototype software, not a task.
Im not in web development and I wouldn't feel confident learning these technologies in my free time in just a few days.

I said that this felt like some HR manager writing up the test or that they want the applicant to create a prototype for free.
Am I being too extreme here? To me it feels overkill, what do you all think? Is this common?

Oh and I should mention, this is for an internship position for a bachelors student.

When you're working on a project and and face a task you solved like 1000 times before so you decide to bring some fresh wind and implement a fancy design pattern... and it works with the first compile!! *badass meme* ( someone send me one I dont have)

Way back in high school there was a school wide competition to see who would represent the school at the bigger competition (I dunno, regional or something). Halfway during the test I was on the third out of four tasks while pretty much everyone else was on the first one. The teacher saw this, looked at what I did and said to everyone "He is already on task 3, does everyone agree he represents the school?"
Everybody said yes immediately.
:) The dev equivalent of a K.O. win, felt pretty badass :D

This was more than 15 years ago. We migrated a bunch if data (home to a new server and repurposed the old one, the same night. This was not the first task on that allweekender, so it was around 3am on Sunday, with very little sleep, when I had to copy the data. I did that by logging in as admin and copying with Total Commander. Obviously, even admin did not have the permissions to some folders, so a lot of financial data were lost, as the users found out on Monday morning. We had no backup. Old server was not only reformatted, but the disks were used to build a different raid set. Luckily, one of the users who had access to this data kept a backup on a flash drive. (If you're wondering, I should've used robocopy with backup mode)

The mobile application my company is developing is beginning to fail in a prod environment because the third party tool we purchased to sync our 3 databases in the background isn't working as expected, so I have been assigned the task of rewriting the entire application. I chose to do it in react-native/redux which I have never heard of until two weeks ago, and I have never enjoyed programming so much in my life. Shit just clicks and works the first time more often than not. Android Studio had me banging my head against my desk daily. Kudos to these technologies 👌

Any other IT company is like:

* Task -> Designer -> Markup coder -> Backend -> Finish

Our IT company:

Act I: "Art of setting up contact with idiots".
------
Items:
*Cave scripts (aka "typical task")

Designer: -- "DAFUQ?"
Customer: *gives another interpretation*
Designer: -- "Erm... really? White text on white background?"
Customer: -- "Make a decision by yourself. I was expecting much more independence from you. You are an expert after all."
Designer: -- "Well. I'm making decision by myself. The text will be placed *here* and will be gray-colored, because *bla-bla-bla*"
Customer: -- "I disagree."
Designer: *1 hour of silence later* -- "Well...k."

Act II: "Design meets ar(u)tist"
----

Items:
*Something, that was drawn by dumb kid while smashing his own head against desk. (PSD layout)
* Salt (to pour it on open wounds)

Designer: -- "I'm seeing this task *this way*"
Markup: -- "And how do u think i should get this done? Have you even seen what you made?? This is bullshit!"
Designer: -- "It's not bullshit! It's a sci-fi themed layout!"
Markup: -- "With gameplay elements and graphics from Alien Shooter??"
Designer: -- "Well, I don't care." *brings new edits and changes*
Markup: -- "????"
Designer: *smug face* -- "!!!"

Act III (7 days later, 9 hours till deadline): "Short story about boy, who was trying to hang himself, but instead fell out from window."
----

Items:
*Markup, smelling like it went through hell and back (x1)
* Markup coder with fried butt (x1)

Backend: -- "What. Is. THAT?"
Markup: -- "It's a work we should complete in 9 hours."
Backend: -- "WE?? I know u mean me, but that's a nightmare. What the f*ck were you doing all this time?"
Markup: -- "Well..." *finds out that he was only watching films and sleeping* "I was making this thing up..."
Backend: -- "You mean "f*cking" *this* thing "up"?"
Markup: -- "Not without it"

(*3 hours of edits and changes of color from white to white later*)
Backend: -- "Well, let's do this."
*Picks PHP and tries to bundle it up with MongoDB. After some time tries to rewrite everything to JS and starts shouting something like "F***CK" and looking for window to walk through. Figures out that he is on first floor. And that he is too lazy to go upstairs*

Act IV (3 days after deadline): "Pain and misery":
-----

Items:
*Something covered with insul(t)ating tape. (Final product)

Customer: -- "Really?"
Team: -- "Kinda."
Customer: -- "Well, thanks for your work anyway. It feels like it's going to disassemble right in my hands but it just works. Oh, also, you didnt made this in time, so your payment will be over9000 times lower. That's all"
Backend, on fluids: -- "Well...yeah..."
Markup: -- "Don't look at me like that. I really was doing my job."
Designer, with twitching eye: -- "Huh, I see. You worked so hard that we have nothing to eat now. Thanks for that."
Backend: ...

Whatever the task needs.

New paradigm? Probably a book first approach.
Library/API: their own suggested tutorials and references cause that shit moves quick.

If I have to read a cave painting to understand an ancient card punch language I’ll happily do it.

I’ve found, when I don’t know something yet I get the “brick wall” feeling, that this is all going to be too difficult... I’ve learned to love that feeling.

If all else fails: RTFM.

Fucking hate people who can't appreciate what you've worked on. And just find the fuckin faults in your task. Would it kill them to just shut the fuck up and not start the conversation with ooohh I've found a bug, just fuckin try to make something first of your own and then be an asshole to others.🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕

Apart of the fact that WordPress itself is one big hack, my most creative hacky solution was making it (dev) environment friendly.

First, I created a DB pull and push tool in NodeJS (on TypeScript). Then, because WP is so clever and stores internal URLs in full length in the DB, I had to create a DB migrator (find & replace) and attached it to the DB pull task.
After this, of course WP still has its config in one file, so I used composer to install phpdotenv and filled the config with environment variables.
Bundled with some good ol' Gitlab CI/CD magic, the website is now 10% sanely developable.

It feels like having to shovel piles of shit, but with a golden shovel. Everything stinks as hell but at least there is a tiny bling to it, temporarily.

But in all seriousness: WordPress is a god damn fucking pile of tumors!

my longest coding session was from 10am to 2am, so 16hrs
was in first semester of uni and we had to build the game "breakout" using a predefined guideline.
i had to program the collision detection of a ball against some blocks that had to be destroyed
took a long time for me to do the task, as i'm not the fastest coder (and often neither the smartest😅) and had to fight a bunch of bugs too.
in the end it kind of worked but the performance was horrible at best

Someone : this is not critical, if you have more important task or deadlines, prioritize it first.

Me : doing my more important task/deadlines

Someone, chatting me every hour : Is it ready? I need to submit it ASAP!!!!

What a pain in the ass!!!!

I had a conversation that almost became an argument with a someone I manage the other day. It revolved around how we should do just the basic parts first as that's what the business needs quickly and the code base is in a bad state right now so I didn't want to build new features on a poor foundation, particularly as those new features might not be forwards compatible and might have no way of fixing.

Once basic is in, refactor and cleanup, add secondary features. Their point was to just do it all at once in a big bang. It devolved into them getting angry and telling me to leave them out of all future discussions because now we "aren't ever doing the secondary features", just give them the task and leave them alone.

I let this go, but now I've found out they went to another high up person on the team and presumably lied to them about what was said.

What to do?