"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." - Robert Sewell

Manager: We need to setup the security in the Mexico server

Dev: You mean that 3rd party firewall add on?

Manager: Yes

Dev: And set up the billing on the Mexico account?

Manager: Yes

Dev: lol, sure thing I’ll create the ticket

Manager: What’s so funny?

Dev: Nothing

Ticket: Build wall and get Mexico to pay for it.

Manager: Why aren’t you working?

Dev: I am, I’m just not typing because I’m thinking an issue out.

Manager: Well what is taking so long? You haven’t written any code for like 15 minutes, you’ve just been doodling on your notepad.

Dev: I’m not “doodling”. I’m taking notes and trying to visualize the issue. It’s a complicated issue with application stat—

Manager: Well just simplify it then

Dev: ?

Manager: Instead of making it a complicated issue just simplify it and then it won’t take you so long. You’re likely overthinking it, I never spend more than 30 seconds thinking about any issue before coming up with a solution. That’s what makes me so effective at my job is my ability to be lean like that.

Dev: …this issue is a bit harder than deciding what to have for lunch

Manager: How come the intern does way more tickets than you?

Dev: Because you told me to only give him the easy ones since he either can’t do them otherwise or takes too long on the hard ones

Manager: Well how is he going to learn if we only give him easy ones?

Dev: That’s what I told you when you orig—

Manager: Assign him ALL of the hard tickets on your board immediately!

*Tickets closed per day drops significantly*

Manager: WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG ON THESE TICKETS!!!!!

Dev: …

Relatives: You're a computer guy, right, what are you working on these days?
Me: *should I bother explaining, should I not* Oh, just some stuff.
R: Oh come on, tell us, how difficult can it be?
M: *sigh* I'm working on a custom garbage collector for-
R: !!

They're now under the impression that I'm involved in collecting rubbish from bins. Sigh. My hair doesn't help here, either, lol (I have one of those tangled, unruly mops of hair)

This will take time to explain.

Manager: Why haven’t you shipped any code today? It’s almost lunch.

Dev: Stuck on a bug

Manager: I’ll help you

Dev: Please don—

Manager: Have you tried thinking outside the box?

Dev: …Dear god please end my existence

Manager: You could try stack overflow too, have you ever used that site before?

Dev: 😮 🔫

Manager: Also sometimes bugs are caused by npm modules so rule that out first

Dev: *On knees praying to Zues for forgiveness and/or conveiniently placed lightning strike*

Manager: This button is too dark, you need to lighten it. Have you no sense of design?

Dev: …

Dev: Hows this for an adjustment?

Manager: Wayyyyy too light now, jesus you need glasses if you think that’s good.

Dev: …

Dev: How about now?

Manager: It’s close, make it just a little more dark. God why does this have to take so long, do I have to hold your hand through this entire process!

Dev: …

Dev: There that good?

Manager: Yes that’s perfect! Send me a PR immediately so I can approve, we need to get this out ASAP, it’s critical!!

Dev: I can’t.

Manager: ????

Dev: There’s no diff, you had me gradually adjust the colour back to exactly what it was originally.

Manager: THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE IT LOOKS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. HOW DARE YOU INSULT ME LIKE THIS, I HAVE A MEETING I NEED TO GET OFF TO BUT WE WILL BE HAVING WORDS LATER ABOUT THIS INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR.

Dev: …

Manager: Does anybody having any money saving ideas?

Dev: By switching our supplier from X to Y we could save $10,000/year and they have much better customer service.

Manager: So? I’m looking more for savings opportunities in the +$100k range. That’s a small idea, I’m looking for *BIG* ideas.

Dev: Do you have any big ideas?

Manager: No, but I really really want to save big money like that. I thought you would have something worthwhile.

Dev: $10,000 still a lot of money

Manager: I guess…. Ok we can do it. But don’t bother me with peanuts like this again.

Dev: ??? You asked me buddy

Manager: This code you wrote violates the single responsibility principle!!

Dev: How so?

Manager: You have one function that you call in *MULTIPLE* places. That’s too much responsibility for one function! Functions should only have one responsibility!! Creeping the scope of a function beyond that is a TERRIBLE way to write code!

Dev: But why spin up multiple functions that all perform the same thing?

Manager: Well if a function has a bug in it and you use that function multiple places then that bug exists everywhere you use that function. If a function only has one responsibility then if it has a bug that bug will only exist in the single place it is called! You really should think first before asking questions like that.

Dev: …

Manager: You really shouldn’t be doing that

Dev: It’s in my job description

Manager: Yeah but you still shouldn’t be doing it.

Dev: Who should I hand it off to?

Manager: We don’t have anyone else to hand off that task to.

Dev: Ok, do I stop doing it?

Manager: 😡 Of course not, it needs to get done! I’m just saying you shouldn’t do it.

Dev: ???????????

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

Manager: I can’t believe you use Linux, that is such an outdated operating system. You need to get with the times and move to a more modern one like Windows or Mac. Literally NOBODY uses Linux anymore, do you still go to Blockbuster Video too? Ha!

Dev: …

I’m starting to realize that 80% of my job is resisting the urge to punch this guy in the face. Thanks goodness for remote work.

Recruiter: This is a 100% remote position

Dev: Good! That’s what I’m looking for.

Recruiter: But the company does require you to come into the office “on occasion”

Dev: I live 5 hours away from your office so that would be not a good fit

Recruiter: And once covid is over the ability to work remotely will be getting reconsidered. You’ll likely need to move cities in order to continue your employment with them.

Dev: Yeah I’m looking for 100% remote work

Recruit: This is 100% remote! Just with the need to come into the office sometimes now and potentially more later.

Dev: …

Manager: Hey what was that that you closed on your screen just now?

Dev: That popup? That’s NVIDIA letting me know that a new driver for my GPU is available.

Manager: Isn’t that for video games?

Dev: I mean that’s the reason many people opt into having a GPU but It’s not the on—

Manager: You are NOT allowed to play video games on your work computer!

Dev: This is my personal computer. It’s just an older GPU I popped onto this computer since otherwise it was just sitting in a drawer. My work computer is out of commission.

Manager: Well where is your work computer? How come you are not using it?

Dev: …Because of that blue screen of death issue we talked about yesterday.

Manager: Ok but that doesn’t give you permission to play VIDEO GAMES on your *WORK* computer.

Dev: …

Manager: THE SERVER IS DOWN THE SERVER IS DOWN!!!!

Dev: Ok I’ll look into it

*5 mins later

Dev: Wow these are really strange logs, it’s like config values are being changed all over the place while I’m looking at it

Manager: Well I figured while you were looking into it I’d go i to the server settings and change everything I could find in order to try and get the server back up again. Two sets of hands are better than one, Is it up yet???

Dev: …No.

Manager: I THOUGT YOU SAID YOU’D LOOK INTO THIS. I NEED ANSWERS NOW. WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG?!?!?

Dev: …

User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!

Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?

Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?

User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?

Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.

User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

Manager: Oh my god have you heard of libraries? I don’t even need to hire developers anymore, everything can just be done with code other people have already built for free

Dev: Well you actually cause a bit of technical debt when you use an abstrac—

Manager: EVERY TICKET SHOULD BE DONE USING LIBRARIES GOING FORWARD.

Dev: …This is going to implode…Can we at least fund some of the libraries we end up using?

Manager: WHAT? NO! Open source developers are suckers, what idiot puts code on the internet for free?? I shouldn’t be required to fund their stupidity. Let’s just take their stuff and make money with it.

Dev: *Phone rings 100th time today from recruiter*. One sec I have to take this call……It’s urgent.

Manager: You devs are constantly complaining about context switching, if you were on my level you would be able to multitask and switch from task to task without an— hold on I’m getting a text *tap* *tap* *tap tap* *tap* *send noise*

Manager: Right, what were we talking about again?

Dev: …

Manager: Hurry up and login, I don’t have all day

Dev: One sec I have to lookup my password for the system

Manager: How can you not remember your password? Everything requires it these days

Dev: I use a different password for each service.

Manager: Wow you really like to overcomplicate things. Just use the same one for everything like I do, it’s way more efficient!

Dev: …

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

Manager: How long until the current set of tickets is complete?

Dev: Based on storyboard points it’ll be 1.5 weeks from now

Manager: That’s unacceptable! Let me take a look at the board and see if I can remove some low priority tickets.

*Later that day*

Manager: Oooo I found a bunch of really exciting tickets in the backlog that I forgot about. I’ve added them to the board.

Dev: Did you remove any?

Manager: Huh? Oh right. No, I looked and it all needs to get done.

Dev: With these new tickets added to the board our new estimate is 4 weeks.

Manager: WHAT?!? BUT I SPENT ALL DAY LOOKING FOR EFFICIENCIES!!

Dev: …

Manager: Why did you clear the data from the database? The client is now specifically requesting it and we don’t have it anymore!

Dev: You told me to.

Manager: Well why did you listen? It’s obvious now that that data was very important and should have been kept!

Dev: Last time you told me to do something that wasn’t a good idea I tried to explain why and told me not to question you ever again and that doing so was “disrespectful” and then threatened to have me fired. So now I just go along with what you say and let you suffer the consequences of not listening.

Manager: Well don’t do that then! It’s obviously not working very well! It’s ok to disagree with me you just have to make sure that what you think is something I agree with!

Dev: …

User: *Clicks on staging environment*

Giant Warning Dialog: YOU ARE CURRENTLY ENTERING THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT

Users: Ok

App: *Completely different colour, I’m talking bright unsightly yellow*

User: Ok

Giant Yellow and Red Flashing Banner at the Top of the Screen: WARNING YOU ARE CURRENTLY USING STAGING, THIS AREA IS FOR TESTING ONLY

User: The production environment sure is acting strange today. It’s a weird colour and I don’t recognize any of the data, it’s all just dummy filler data. I better create a ticket for the dev team to check o—….. no wait I’ll send an email CC everyone including the CEO and sound the alarm production is currently down and filled with giant warning messages.

Manager: OH MY GOD PRODUCTION IS DOWN DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS??? WHAT THE FUCK COULD THESE WARNING MESSAGES BE THAT’S ONLY SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN ON STAGING! THE CEO IS BREATHING DOWN MY NECK YOU NEED TO GET THIS FIXED IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!

Dev: …

Manager: How come I go on vacation for 2 weeks and you are able to start, complete, and ship an entire sprint in that time where as when I'm around, the same amount of work takes months? I even got COMPLIMENTS from *the client* about how smoothly things went while I was gone...THIS IS COMPLETELY EMBARRASSING AND UNACCEPTABLE!

Dev: Well. I cancelled all of the status meetings, created tickets with clear expectations, didn't change those expectations, didn't add every idea that popped into the client's head during those two weeks to the current sprint, didn't pull anyone off their tickets to teach me to code, cut the budget for making degrading comments to zero, and incentivised everyone to work by allowing a half days on fridays to work on personal projects if we stayed on schedule.

Manager: THAT'S NOT YOUR JOB! I'M THE MANAGER AND ALL. OF. THOSE. THINGS. ARE. MY JOB! NOT YOURS!

Dev: ...I know.

Manager: You know you did good this week, take the entire day off tomorrow

Dev: Really?

Manager: Yeah my treat.

Dev: Can you send that to me in an email?

Manager: ….I mean yeah, but I don’t see why that is necessary

*** About halfway through The next day

Manager: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?! YOU HAVEN’T COMPLETED A SINGLE TICKET TODAY OR REVIEWED A SINGLE PR OR EVEN SO MUCH AS ATTENDED THE STANDUP. EXPLAIN YOURSELF!

Dev: You said I could take the day off today?

Manager: YEAH BUT YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO ACTUALLY TAKE IT OFF!! I WAS GIVING YOU THE OPPORTUNITY TO SHOW DEDICATION TO THE COMPANY BY COMING IN ANYWAY BUT NO YOU THOUGHT YOU’D JUST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR GENEROSITY AND HAVE AN ENTIRE DAY TO YOURSELF?! GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS, THERE ARE URGENT TICKETS ON THE BOARD!

Dev: …

In an effort to deal with the number of “top priority” tickets, management has come up with a new priority level, “urgent”, to help differentiate between tickets that are “top priority” and tickets that are actually “top priority”.

So as you can guess all tickets are now codified as “urgent”.

I’ve suggested management downgrade some tickets back to merely “top priority” as we’re clearly right back where we started with it being difficult to determine which order to do tickets in.

They’ve ignored my request as the bletherings of a clearly unenlightened peon, and have instead came up with a new priority, “mission critical” which will be reserved for the most hallowed of emerg— oh no wait everything is now “mission critical” who would have guessed?

So “Top priority” is the now lowest priority a ticket can have…Naturally.

Manager: Feature C doesn’t work

Dev: We never built feature C

Manager: Nonsense, I remember feature C clearly!

Dev: It’s still in the backlog

Manager: But we had many meetings about it

Dev: Never got put on the board

Manager: Feature C is very important!

Dev: It was never assigned to anyone

Manager: What could possibly be more important than Feature C?

Dev: All the other features you placed on the board and assigned up until now

Manager: Well I need Feature C done asap! It should be top priority!

Dev: Ok then next sprint add feature C to the board and assign it to someone

*Next planning session manager leaves feature C in backlog in favour of other tickets*

*2 days later*

Manager: What is the status of feature C?

Dev: You opted to leave it in the backlog

Manager: BUT IT SHOULD BE TOP PRIORITY!

Dev: …

So because of the sheer number of interviews I’ve been doing I’m starting to get a bit brazen with them since I’ve started to really not give a fuck about most of them and I’ve started to notice patterns in common lines of questioning resulting in this unexpected gem today:

Interviewer: So we always start our devs off on the bottom end of our salary band.

Dev: Either give me the top or I’m not interested.

Interviewer: 😡. But if we start you at the top of the salary band we’ll have nothing to give you later. 🥺.

Dev: No need, I’ll take the money up front. Companies don’t give raises these days anyway, it’s just a carrot to dangle in front of the naive.

Interviewer: 😡. Well if all you care about is money so focussed on money you’ll just leave if a better offer comes around!

Dev: All the more reason to give me the highest number possible to defend against that possibility.

Interviewer: 😡. But there are other devs on the team with similar experience that will be making less than you.

Dev: Sounds like they fell for the negging and guilt tripping you are currently attempting on me in order to save a buck. Salary is not based on your skills or experience anymore, it’s based on your ability to negotiate. Here’s mine.

Interviewer: ………………. I’ll pass you along to the hiring manager.

Dev: ???? wtf

HOW THE FUCK DID THAT ACTUALLY WORK ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME I WAS TRYING TO GET THEM TO HANG UP FOR SHITS AND GIGGLES AND NOW I’M LOOKING AT A 20K RAISE ALL BECAUSE I CONTINUALLY TOLD THEM TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES??? THIS IS ACTUALLY WHAT IT TAKES TO BE TREATED PROPERLY BY A COMPANY???

Manager: Have you fixed the problem?

Dev: What’s the problem?

Manager: We’re not here to discuss problems we’re here to discuss solutions!

Dev: …

Dev: *Recieves email from manager with several typos/grammar mistakes asking to open attachment with strange name and click on tinyurl style link*

Dev: *Flags as phishing*

Manager: Hey how come you didn’t action my email?

Dev: That was actually from you?

Manager: Yes.

Dev: …

HR: Everyone must fill out these 100% anonymous surveys about how you feel about our company, it’s leadership, and how likely you are to leave in the next 6 months etc. Please be 100% honest, since again it is 100% anonymous. Reminder! You must use the individual links we sent to you, do NOT use someone else’s link. Oh did we say it’s 100% anonymous?

The Link:

www. surveygen .com/ companysurvey123 ?employeeName=boombodies &employeeId=6969

Dev: …

Was given a fancy looking pen for 3 years of “service” today.

Pen doesn’t work.

Manager: I read an article today

Dev: oh here we go….

Manager: We must pivot to only functional programming, which means only using functions instead of classes

Dev: Actually functional programming is a bit more nuanced tha—

Manager: Any use of classes going forward is not allowed. Everything must use functions! Classes are an outdated way of programming, using classes is why we continue to miss our deadlines. Functional programming is lean, classes are waterfall.

Dev: What about the libraries we use? Many of those use classes

Manager: Wrap them in a function then, that way they are pure which is one of the requirements of functional programming. You would know that if you spent as much personal time as I do keeping up with the times.

Dev: Ok issue fixed, you just need to log out and back in again on your end to receive the fix

User: It’s still not working

Dev: Did you log out and in again?

User: No why would I want to do that?

Dev: It’ll reset your locally saved login information which is causing the issue

User: I thought you said the issue was fixed?

Dev: On our end yes, we just need you to reset your end in order to receive the fixed version

User: Look I have been dealing with this issue for 6 months. Fixing bugs are your responsibility. I have too much to do, you have to get this fixed. *click*.

Dev: Yeah you submitted the bug ticket yesterday night though

Email from users manager later that day: <User> is saying you are refusing to fix this bug. This is unacceptable. Fix it or else I will escalate this. Also there are other bugs we noticed today too, fixing them is absolutely critical!

Dev: …

Dev: What other bugs did you notice?

*no response for 2 weeks and then:

User: Hey you can close this ticket, the issue seems to have resolved itself.

Dev: ….muppet.

Dev: Hey our current server is starting to chug a bit. Can I get approved for $1200 additional spend to double the speed?

Manager: *Sharp inhale*. We need this project to cost as little as possible, we really can’t justify spending any additional money for any reason right now.

*2 days later*

Manager: YOU ARE APPROVED FOR $100,000 TO IMMEDIATELY IMPLEMENT SOMETHING RELATED TO NFTs IN ANY OF OUR APPS. THE BUSINESS NEEDS TO EXPAND INTO THE METAVERSE ASAP IMMEDIATELY. I NEED AN ETA BY EOD AS TO WHEN THIS CAN BE ROLLED OUT.

Dev: …

Manager: So great news, we will also be building a new app this year!!

Dev: We only have 2 devs and we already struggling to maintain/build our current portfolio of applications. I don’t think we have the resources to support another.

Manager: Nonsense, this is a very small project management app that was requested by the CEO himself!

Dev: …We already have MS project, why can’t they just use that?

Manager: The executive team isn’t interested in learning MS Project, it’s way too complicated. They want us to build an internal version of MS Project one feature at a time so they can pick it up over time instead of getting overwhelmed with learning MS Project all at once. It also needs to have loads of customizable automation features so leadership doesn’t ever have to get “in the weeds” having to work with it. It needs to basically run itself!

Dev: …What about this is small?

Manager: Well that is the requirement.

Dev: …

Corporate IT: Here at Company A we are very proactive about CyberSecurity!

Dev: What is our cybersecurity plan?

Corporate IT: If any breaches happen we will terminate those involved and discontinue use of the offending product

Dev: That sounds reactive to me

Corporate IT: 😡 It’s proactive actually as we put together that plan of action BEFORE anything happened!

Dev: …

Manager: *taps dev on shoulder* We need to do B

Dev: I know, you created a ticket for it yesterday

Manager: Yeah but it hasn’t been done yet. It needs to get done.

Dev: I’m currently working on A which is higher priority

Manager: Ok but B needs to be done too

Dev: I know, it’s next on my board

Manager: I’m just making sure you are aware of it

Dev: I am aware of it, it’s next on the board

Manager: Ok but make sure you do it after A

Dev: Yup it’s next up

Manager: Ok, don’t let anyone distract you

Dev: …

Interviewer: So are you familiar with our company and what we do?

Dev: I looked at your website, looks like you build tools for managing restaurants.

Interviewer: No. That’s not even close.

Dev: ?

Interviewer: What we do is create an ecosystem of integrated data centres all orchestrated for immediate stakeholder utilization.

Dev: But the product itself…. it’s a user interface for tracking inventory. Of like…. burgers…. and bottles of wine.

Interviewer: It’s not a product! It’s a data……habitat!!

Dev: …

Dev: So does that make your users animals?

Interviewer: 😡. Unfortunately it looks like you do not see our vision and would not be a good fit for this role.

Dev: Agreed.

Things I wish I could tell my 18 year old self.

1) Accept you will make mistakes.
2) Truly learn the language you are using.
3) Write idiomatic code for the language you are using.
4) Be upfront about not knowing something.
5) Don't let not knowing something stop you from learning it.
6) None of us knew X until we learned it.
7) Understand your strengths and weaknesses as a developer, play to them.
8) Be willing to try new things.
9) X language isn't ALWAYS the best choice, X paradigm isn't ALWAYS the best choice. Choose wisely.
10) You won't know everything, but you might know more than others.
11) Your ideas and ego don't matter more than ensuring the product works.
12) "Perfection is the enemy of the good [enough]" - Voltaire
13) "Perfection is not achieved when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to remove." - Einstein.
14) Conflicts happen, deal with it.
15) Develop a toolset and really learn them.
16) Try new tools, they may prove better than what you were using.
17) Don't manage your own memory unless you absolutely have to, you are probably not smarter than the collective intelligence of the team that built the various garbage collection methods.
18) People can be dicks, especially online.
19) If you are new and people are being dicks to you, did you skip past the irc message about etiquette? If you did, you're the dick in this situation.
20) It can be tough, but it is fun, so have fun!

Interviewer: For this next code challenge you will not be allowed to use the internet, or an IDE.

Dev: …

Interviewer: OR a keyboard OR a mouse. I will be verbalizing the code to you and you need to memorize it and tell me where the bugs are.

Dev: …

Interviewer: We must do this exercise to know how you are as a dev without any performance enhancing “aid”. This way we can understand where you are truly at skill-wise, and what you are truly worth from a compensation perspective.

Dev: …

Dev: If I get a job with you will I be allowed to use the internet and an IDE and a keyboard/mouse?

Interview: Of course you would! Getting anything done without those is just about impossible. We just need to evaluate you without them to see how good you REALLY are.

Dev: …

Mon: Ticket A is now low priority, Ticket B is top priority

Tues: Ticket B is now low priority, Ticket C is top priority

Wed: Ticket C is now low priority, Ticket D is top priority

Thurs: Ticket D is now low priority, Ticket E is top priority

Manager (Fri): You haven’t completed a ticket all week! What gives??

Manager (Following Mon): Tickets A, B, C, D AND E ARE TOP PRIORITY!!!!!

Dev: …

Dev: Why did you suddenly start adding random whitespace to the end of all of the files in your PRs?

Manager: IT’S NOT RANDOM!

Dev: ?

Manager: That’s a way I came up with for tracking my contributions. Every time I edit a file I add a line of whitespace at the bottom so it’s clear to everyone how much and how often I’ve contributed to the team. Although I haven’t been doing it this entire time so I had to make up for this by adding more to files that I *know* I’ve touched a bunch before. Just think! Especially with how big my PRs are compared to everyone else the tally of my contributions is going to get huge!

Dev: …

Dev: I think we should send Dev2 for some training and certification

Manager: We do not train people or have them certified. When you train people and especially if you have them certified they always leave the company for better offers so we no longer do that.

Dev: So the plan is to have a the company operated by a bunch of untrained uncertified people?

Manager: 😡 You are being disrespectful again

Dev: I’m taking a vacation next week

Manager: Good you need a break! I’ve put together a list of tickets for you to action during vacation since you’ll mostly be free during that time

Dev: Do you know what vacation means?

Manager: Well I work during *my* vacation

Dev: You write non-answers to emails and interrupt devs with status questions that are easily answered by a single glance at the kanban board. Also, you’ve just assigned a month’s worth of storyboard points to me on my week long vacation. We’d get more work done if you didn’t “work” during your vacation.

Manager: Well it all needs to get done! It’s the only way we can catch up and get ahead of schedule.

Dev: Why do you exist again?

Corporate IT: YOU MUST COME INTO THE OFFICE. WE JUST RECEIVED AN URGENT NOTIFICATION FROM APPLE OF A SECURITY VULNERABILITY IN iOS DEVICES. YOU HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED AS HAVING A MAC ASSET. COME INTO THE OFFICE IMMEDIATELY AND UPDATE IT.

Dev: I don’t use that mac, it sits in my office desk drawer unplugged. I’ll update it if I ever need it for anything. Which I won’t, we don’t do iOS dev anymore.

Corporate IT: NOOOOO!!! YOU MUST UPDATE IT NOW!!!

Dev: I’m not wasting time driving into the office this week. We have an important deadline we’re working on, I can’t afford to lose 2 hours to this. Plus it can’t be turned on right now, It’s been unplugged for 2 years.

Corporate IT: THAT WOULDN’T STOP A HACKER!!

Dev: …

Dev submitting PR: “Testing instructions: Self explanatory”

Dev reviewing PR: You need to be a bit more verbose than that.

Dev submitting PR: “Testing instruction: Feature should work as expected”

Dev reviewing PR: *sigh*… Feature doesn’t work as expected

Dev submitting PR: WHAT IS NOT WORKING AS EXPECTED??? I NEED MORE DETAIL THAN THAT!!

Dev reviewing PR: …….So do I you muppet

Interviewer: Do you know what Kubernetes is?

Dev: Yeah, that’s the greek god of spending money in the cloud.

Interviewer: Actually Kubernetes is an orchestration tool. Have you not been on a project that uses it yet?

Dev: …

Dev: Sam’s a little nervous about taking his paid leave. I guess it’s not common in Nigeria. He needs to hear from the company that taking time off like that is acceptable.

HR: THAT’S SO INAPPROPRIATE! YOU CAN’T ASSUME HE’S FRON NIGERIA JUST BECAUSE HE’S BLACK. BLACK PEOPLE HAVE A VERY RICH AND DIVERSE CULTURE, THEY ARE NOT ALL FROM NIGERIA!!!

Dev: Sam is from Nigeria. He told me so. He tells me a lot of stories from there.

HR: …

Dev: Can you tell me something about Sam besides his skin colour?

HR: …

Dev: …

Dev: So we’ve been working on X for about 2 weeks now, it’s about halfway do—

Manager: Btw what is the status of X?

Dev: I was just telling you

Manager: Oh, I wasn’t listening.

Dev: …

Dev: So as I was saying, we’re ab—

Manager: Oh and where are we at with Y?

Dev: …

Just got this little stinker added to my board this morning….

Ticket Title: Weird shit going on in app

Ticket Description: (blank)

Attachment: <Screenshot of app logo>

Manager: Well what do you think is causing it?

Dev: Causing what?? This ticket doesn’t describe anything at all

Manager: Well it’s a bunch of different things! The ticket is just a high level summary. Now how long do you think it’ll take to fix?

Dev: …

Manager: Everyone will be required to switch to Mac in the next couple of months.

Dev: Um, why?

Manager: Macs are more professional and developer focused than windows machines, I read it in an article. Plus they look way nicer.

Dev: Half of the applications we use don’t have a version that works on iOS.

Manager: What? How do you know?

Dev: I have a Mac for occasionally doing some work on the iOS app we support. I ran into that when I was setting it up as a development environment.

Manager: You have a Mac?

Dev: Yes

Manager: Why? How come you don’t use it for development?

Dev: …

User: There’s a bug in the app

Dev: How do I reproduce it?

User: I don’t want it reproduced, I want it fixed!

Dev: …

*While I was working from home this occurred*

New Accountant: How come Dev gets the nicest chair in the office?

IT: He brings his own chair because he doesn’t like the ones we have here.

New Accountant: How come I don’t get a nice chair?

IT: If you want a nicer chair either ask your department manager to buy one or if that doesn’t work you’re welcome to bring in your own

New Accountant: I shouldn’t have to bring in my chair from home! I want a nice chair like Dev has but I don’t want to spend the money to buy one as nice as his and my department manager said we don’t have the budget to buy one either!

IT: He buys them from a used office warehouse for pretty cheap actually, cheaper than what the company pays annually to rent these chairs from what I’ve heard. He has 3 more at home. You should ask him where he gets them from.

New Accountant: He should give me his chair! He mostly works remote anyway!

*This resulted in my being asked to come into the office to remove my chair because it was “upsetting people” in the office*

Management: This project isn’t moving along fast enough, you know what we need?

Dev: An additional dev?

Management: No! An additional manager! We’ll have a meeting about it later today.

Dev: …

Manager (via phone): You need to setup the CEO with access to the app IMMEDIATELY

Dev: Ok…What’s the occasion?

Manager: There is a big important meeting right now where we go over our achievements for the year and my plan was to have him log in and play around.

Dev: Likely would have been worth mentioning at this mornings standup.

Manager: Don’t be a smart ass. In fact, if you were actually smart you would have given him an account in the first place! So you’re just an ass then, what kind of idiot doesn’t give the CEO an account to an app like this?

Dev: Actually you specifically asked for him to be removed when I added him. “Unnecessary Optics” you said.

Manager: THAT’S BULLSHIT, I NEVER SAID THAT!!

Dev: It’s in our meeting minutes from 2 years ago.

Manager: STOP WRITING THE THINGS I SAY DOWN IT’S COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.

Dev: I’ll make a note of that request

Manager: YOU ABSOL—ok looks like he’s waving me back in the room now the account must be working now bye. *click*.

Dev: Moron.

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

Manager: I’m so sick and tired of you devs whining about technical debt and how it’s slowing down our progress, so here’s the deal. You have until the end of this week to eliminate all technical debt in the codebase. After that I NEVER WANT TO HEAR YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT TECHNICAL DEBT EVER AGAIN!!!

Dev: …

Interviewer: Hello I’m calling for your phone interview now

Dev: You’re about an hour early calling but I can accommodate

Interviewer: Well it’s more convenient for me to do it now

Dev: …Alrighty then.

Interviewer: So I am from HR 😇*pause for effect*

Dev: …

Interviewer: Um, typically candidates start the interview by thanking me for consideration for this role.

Dev: Your job description was very vague so I don’t really know what I would be thanking you for.

Interviewer: 😡. It’s me that’ll be determining whether or not to pass you on to The Management.

Dev: …The Management?

Interviewer: Yes 🤗.

Dev: I’m no longer interested *click*.

Dev: What do you think of the new version of the app?

Client: It’s great! We just have a couple notes of feedback we are working on compiling. We should have those to you by next week.

*Next week*

Client: We need another week to compile all of this feed back we are generating

*Another week goes by*

Client: Still working on it, it’s going to be a really thorough review when you get it though. No stone will be left unturned!

*2 weeks later*

Client: Here it is!

Attached: A word document with a single line of text “can’t nobody log in” next to a picture of the login screen with a red circle drawn around the login button

Client: Can you hurry up and action our feedback? We want to go live next week

Dev: …

Manager: We do not identify as a tech company so don’t expect tech company salary increases this year

Dev: Well don’t expect me to bring a tech work ethic then

Manager: !!

Manager: Hey how come you left so many comments on my PR?

Dev: Well you’ve just recently learned how to code so there’s going to be a lot of things to learn beyond what you’ve picked up in your online coding tutorials. Don’t worry it’s only minor things like you put everything all in one function, left outdated comments in the code, have if statements 4 levels deep, have a console.log after every line of code some of which log .env variables, skipped error handling, cast to “any” a bunch instead of using more specific types, didn’t write any tests and some unrelated tests are now failing due to a circular dependancy.

Manager: THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL!!APPROVE MY PR IMMEDIATELY. IT WASN’T EVEN EASY FOR ME TO CREATE THE PR, NOW I HAVE TO MAKE AN UPDATE!? YOU’RE THE DEV, YOU SHOULD FIX IT NOT ME!! NEVER COMMENT ON ANY OF MY PRS AGAIN.

Manager: What’s taking so long on that PR?? It’s just some small styling adjustments

Dev: No it’s not you added an entire new calendar module that doesn’t work

Manager: Ok but besides that it’s just a small couple of css edits

Dev: You made styling changes in 50 files, half of which break our mobile responsiveness

Manager: Well then STOP talking to me and FIX IT if you’re so smart.

Dev: You also added a series of filters on a table in this same PR that cause th—

Manager: OK SO I GOT A BIT DISTRACTED THE FACT IS IT ALL NEEDS TO GET DONE SO IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT’S ALL ON ONE PR SPLITTING THINGS UP INTO SMALL UPDATES IS JUST UNNECESSARY BUREAUCRACY AND IF YOU LIKE THAT THEN GO. WORK. FOR. THE GOVERNMENT!!!

Dev: …

Client: We need to add a field to the model that serves as a unique identifier

Dev: You already have one, it’s the _id property

Client: We want another! This one is for a task number so we can make a connection between the database record and our ERP.

Dev: Ah I see. I can add that for you. Is this truly a unique identifier or will you be using the same ERP identifier for multiple database records?

Client: I already said it’s a unique identifier. One ERP record to one database record, end of story! To do otherwise would be absolutely ridiculous! You should think for yourself before you ask silly questions.

Dev: My apologies I just want to make sure to clarify exactly what the requirements are.

**6 months later**

Client: HOW COME I CAN’T ASSIGN THE SAME UNIQUE IDENTIFIER TO MULTIPLE DATABASE RECORDS??? CAN’T PROGRAMMERS GET ANYTHING RIGHT EVER??

Dev: …

Dev: Hey I found a bug in your PR

Manager: YOU BROKE IT ON PURPOSE!

Dev: … yes?

*In teams meeting with client*

Manager: Yes we can do all of that and it will be actioned very quickly. We will make all of these feature requests top priority. We will set aside everything we are currently working on in order to get this done!

Dev: ...Are you writing any of this down?

Manager: I don't need to, I always remember everything!

Dev: Just so you are aware, I'm not writing anything down. You're going to need to create a ticket with requirements spelled out for each one of these promises you're making otherwise they won't get actioned by the team.

Manager: I know that!

Dev: ...

*Later that day*

Ticket Title: Action client feature requests TOP PRIORITY!!!

Ticket Description: *empty*

Dev: ...

Job Ad: You will report to leadership stakeholders on key progress initiatives and collaborate on business value add action objectives.

Translation: Have boss. Do task.

Dev: Why do you have an identical if statement right below this one?

Manager: Because I want the code to double check, obviously.

Dev: …

My employer is now under investigation by the government for illegal business practices. #blessed

Manager: You can’t define an async function without using await.

Dev: Yes you can.

Manager: Well you shouldn’t, there’s no point!

Dev: Yes there is. It can turn blocking synchronous logic into work performed concurrently. In this case the perform—

Manager: It’s called async *await*. Async *AWAIT*! Did you hear the two parts to that? You shouldn’t ever have one without the other. THEY GO TOGETHER. Worrying about concurrency is for people who use callbacks which just goes to show how out of date your skills are. I’m reading a book on javascript and there are so many advanced techniques out there that I haven’t even seen you use ONCE!

Dev: …

*I looked at the book he’s reading, it’s from the < ES6 era… no wonder he doesn’t see me using any of those archaic patterns/hacks/workarounds…*

Recruiter: So you’re in Canada?

Dev: One sec let me check

*Points webcam out window at ongoing blizzard*

Dev: Yup, that looks like Canada to me

Recruiter: Ok I am just confirming

Dev: Me too

> 3 hour long mandatory online cybersecurity training
> Preaches that the company is very secure and the only risk of being “hacked” is if employees post company data on social media
> oksure.tar.gz
> Bored out of my mine
> Open dev console
> JSON continually getting sent to backend
> Simple structure and human readable fields including {complete: false}
> Open postman
> {complete: true}
> Send
> 200 response
> Refresh page
> Course complete
> :’ )

Muppets.

Manager: How come the push to prod didn’t happen?

Dev: We told you at the scrum yesterday. To reiterate, our dev environment was crashing so it’s not safe to push to prod until that is fixed.

Manager: Ok well lets set a goal to fix that and push to prod happens today so that it guaranteed happens.

Dev: That was our goal yesterday and it definitely didn’t happen.

Manager: I AM AWARE OF THAT. The corrective action is that this time compliance with the goal is 100% ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY!!

Dev: We’ll do our best, can’t guarantee anything until we figure out what the nature of what is occurring on dev though.

Manager: NO. I AM THE BOSS. YOU WILL 100% ABSOLUTELY COMPLY WITH THIS. THAT IS AN ORDER. YOU WILL SUCCESSFULLY GET THIS UPDATE OUT TO PROD TODAY. ANYTHING LESS THAN THAT SHALL BE CONSIDERED INSUBORDINATION. I WANT STATUS UPDATES EVERY 15 MINUTES ON WHERE WE ARE AT WITH THIS.

Dev: …

Dev: Can I get you to send me that request in an email?

*Manager leaves the meeting*

// *****************************

Job search is ticking along. It’s tough going though because I currently make ~120k and the best offers I’ve received so far are all ~70k because “You only have 2 years experience so you couldn’t possibly have the skills to be worth 120k. You are are junior level developer and 70K is already overpaying for you. We can pay you more later™. No we will not give you that in writing”. Ah well, the hunt continues.

Senior Manager: I have to use your app today, how do I do that?

Dev: Well first you log in, and then you clic—

Senior Manager: That’s way too low level, I only deal with things on high level! Explain it to me from a high level.

Dev: Use the app to orchestrate the visibility of action items to stakeholders and pivot the leverage towards buy-in.

Senior Manager: Hmmmm….

Dev: Agile.

Senior Manager: Aha! I understand how to use the app perfectly now!

Senior Manager’s Account: Last Login - Never.

Dev: I'm going to a engineering and robotics seminar this weekend

Manager: Stupid. Waste of time.

Dev: I also got invited to go to a 2 day tech and innovation conference

Manager: Another a stupid waste of time.

Dev: The CEO's son invited me and is paying for it, he said he thought it would be interesting to me.

Manager: ...Well as long as it's not on company time

Dev: It is on company time, I won't have time for tickets

Manager: WHAT!? YOU HAVE TO SAY NO, WE ARE BUSY!! WE CAN'T NOT HAVE YOU FOR 2 DAYS.

Dev: Duely noted you said that and you think the whole idea is stupid. Take it up with him I already RSVP'd yes.

Manager: 😡😡😡😡😡😡

Dev: * In the middle of pushing to prod *

Manager: Hey btw I forgot to mention the client asked for these 5 features awhile back as a part of this update and they just reminded me about them, I haven’t created tickets yet or told anyone about this. Will these features be included in the update that’s going out today?

Dev: …

Every 2 months without fail:

Manager: I don’t understand what the point of writing tests is. They only ever pass and when they fail we just fix them so they pass again! It’s completely redundant!!! An exercise in absolute futility!

Dev: …

Interviewer: I don't understand. With a resume and portfolio like yours you shouldn't be applying to companies like us. You should be setting your sights on companies like Google/Meta. You'd be bored here after everything you've done so far. I know we're offering more money than your current position but you're worth more believe me. I'm going to keep looking, and so should you. But you need to aim higher.

Dev: ...

Well fuck me I guess?

The next person that says “top priority” gets their fucking tongue cut out

Medium Article Title: How to Optimize Your Use of the Terminal

Dev: Oh goody.

Article Content: The terminal is a cli that devs use in order to work at their jobs. It is a very important tool in which… (continued)

Dev: …

WHO IS THIS ARTICLE FOR?? PEOPLE WHO WANT TO GET BETTER AT THE TERMINAL BUT HAVE NO IDEA WTF A TERMINAL IS?

This isn’t high school english class, you can skip the circle jerk introduction.

Manager: As you all know I called this meeting to discuss what we will do with all of the extra resources if we are done early. I was thinking a start a new ap—

Dev: We are not going to be done early. There are two weeks left and we are way behind schedule.

Manager: Don’t be so pessimistic! You never know when or how fast tickets will be completed.

Dev: Yes I do…I’m the one doing them

HR: Hey you really need to be more sensitive with what you say

Dev: What makes you bring this up?

HR: Well we had a concerned employee overhear you telling one of the interns that the Russian word for “approved” is “blyat”.

Dev: Ah.

Manager: You use linux? Why?? I’ve only ever used windows and it’s the best of all the computers in my experience. It contains everything anyone needs: email, meetings and the internet.

> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

Manager: I’m getting a strange error now….it says CORS? Any idea what that means?

Dev: Ezpz, just a matter of how many goats to sacrifice and incantations to recite

Manager: Are you serio—

Dev: Bring me my debugging pentagram

Manager: IT and I have decided that you will not be doing any rewriting of the legacy code. We paid a lot of money for it and throwing it away would be impossible. Instead you will create a “config file” that will customize the legacy code behaviour to whatever spec we need. IT said this would be possible and would be a very simple way of operating everything going forward. That way no future code needs to be written or maintained, it’s just a matter of changing this “config file” to match our needs.

Dev: Nobody in IT codes though.

Manager: Yes but they work with config files all the time. If you need to be shown how they work just ask them.

Dev: I know how they work it ju—

Manager: Good!! So that should speed things up quite a bit. See this is why developers need managers.

QA: Rapidly toggling between light and dark mode causes screen to flash unpleasantly

Dev: …

**at daily standup

Dev: and along with a push to production that is what I’ll be doing today

Manager: Good good, alright, nice….. ok who else hasn’t gone yet? Dev how about you go next

Dev: …I literally just went

Manager: What? Well what did you say then? Hey when is that push to prod happening? I feel like there should be one happening sometime soon.

Dev: …

Oh boy, the startup managers are writing a roadmap today. Can't wait.

5 mIlLiOn DaIlY aCtIvE uSeRs By EnD oF Q1! (2022!!!)

1 MiLlIoN dAiLy ReVeNuE bY tOmOrRoW!

zErO bUgS aNd KnOwN iSsUeS iN sYsTeM bY 5Pm ToDaY!

tHoUsAnDs Of NeW cUsToMeRs WiThIn ThE nExT hOuR!

Manager: Absolutely everything must be done with libraries, vanilla JS solutions are absolutely prohibited!

Manager: Why is our app so slow to load? Is there a library we can install to speed the loading up?

Manager: In ALL cases if someone uses vanilla javascript to do something instead of a library then that is a sign they are an ABSOLUTE BEGINNER!!!

Dev: …

Manager: In order to increase business resiliency we will be doing cross training this week.

Dev: What does that involve?

Manager: Everyone will do everyone else’s job for one day each. After this you will all be considered trained so that if anyone can easily fill in for anyone else.

Dev: …

Dev: Hey that internal audit you asked me to perform didn’t go so well

Manager: It has too! I’ll get in a lot of trouble if it doesn’t pass.

Dev: Ok well it’s a lot of work to get it to a passing state, we have to dedicate a lot of resources to fix all these findings.

Manager: We don’t have any spare resources, they are all working on new projects! Why did you have to find things??

Dev: ….It’s a lot of hard to miss stuff, like missing signatures on security clearance forms

Manager: Ok can’t you just say that everything is all good? They’ll probably not double check.

Dev: I’m not really comfortable with that…Look all of these findings are all just from one member of the team consistently not doing their job, can’t you just address that with him and I can make a note on the audit that issues were found but corrective action was made? That’s the whole point of audits.

Manager: You don’t get it, if anything is found on the audit I’ll look bad. We have to cover this up. Plus that’s a really good friend of mine! I can’t do that to him. Ok you know what? You are obviously not the right person for this task, I’ll get someone else to do it. Go back to your regular work, I’m never assigning you audits again.

HR: At company A where we are all about hiring top talent!

Dev: What does this position pay?

HR: Well we’ve done a market assessment of local wages and an happy to announce the VERY competitive offer of (insert 30% less than the median wage here).

Dev: …

HR: I assure you this is a very competitive. What we don’t offer in pay we more than make up for in culture. We are a family here!!

Dev: …

Interviewer: Hello my name is Alyssa from Sheeple and my pronouns are she/her

Dev: Oh yeah I saw that in your email

Interviewer: Ok well I am just letting you know they are still the same

Dev: Thanks for that.

Interviewer: What are your pronouns?

Dev: div/span

Interviewer: Sorry?

Dev: he/him

Interviewer: Oh…ok. Let me know if that changes.

Dev: I promise you it won’t

Interviewer: Well you never know!

Dev: …

Let's take bets on the root cause of the S3 outage!

I'm guessing a bad deploy of a sever-side Java application with a garbage collection problem.

Interviewer: We keep having devs take off for other opportunities after a short period of time. We need someone loyal who will be sticking around for the long haul. Oh wait, you only have one dev company you’ve worked for on your resume? Yeah that’s not good, we only hire devs who have worked for lots and lots of companies.

Dev: …

Manager: I NEVER SAID THAT!!

Dev: *Brings up email where he said exactly that*

Manager: I DON’T REMEMBER ASSIGNING YOU A TICKET TO LOOK THAT UP. GET BACK TO WORK!!

Dev: …

Me and my girlfriend's pillow talk about memory leaks

Me: **... So garbage collection is a means to stopping a memory leak from occuring
Gf: what 's a memory leak ?
Me: a memory leak is like when you want a pizza, and the guy gives you pizza. But you don't eat the pizza and you ask for another pizza. You keep doing this repeatedly. Until the pizza guy realizes what you're doing and decides to kill you. He then takes back all his pizzas
Gf: why would you do that though?
Me: Lazy ass programmers who don't clean up after themselves.

Manager: I don’t care if it has bugs, if we don’t ship it this Friday I’ll have to redraw my Gantt chart AND I’M RUNNING LOW ON CRAYONS!!!

Manager: I like nested ifs

Dev: They can be difficult to maintain

Manager: No they aren’t I write them all the time!

Dev: Have you ever maintained one?

Manager: No, I don’t do code maintenance. I don’t have time for it.

Dev: We need a better name than “Data” for this class. It’s used for displaying a set of tiles with certain coordinates so maybe TileMap would be a bit more declarative?

Manager: No I don’t like that. Data is perfectly fine, this class is for managing data so it’s perfectly declarative you just need to get better at reading code. If you have to change it then DataObject or DataObjectClass might be a bit more specific.

Dev: …

HR: Here at company A we have a great culture. It truly is the best place ever to work!

Dev: How many companies have you worked for?

HR: Besides babysitting as a teenager this is the only company I’ve ever worked for.

Dev: I thought so.

Dev: Your PR only addresses a quarter of the ticket

Dev2: *limps a commit so that now 1/2 of the ticket is addressed and creates a new PR for a separate ticket*

Dev: Your original PR only addresses half of the ticket

Dev2: *limps a commit so that now 3/4 of the ticket is addressed and creates a new PR for ANOTHER new ticket*

Dev: Your original PR only addresses 3/4 of the ticket

Dev2: *limps a commit so that now all of the ticket is addressed but two new bugs are introduced and creates a new PR for ANOTHER new ticket*

Dev: Your original PR introduces 2 new bugs

Dev2: *limps a commit addressing one of the two new bugs and creates a new PR for ANOTHER new ticket*

Dev: Your original PR still has one bu—

Manager: WOW GOOD JOB DEV2 THAT’S 5 PRs TODAY AMAZING! Dev you need to pickup the pace, you only have 2 PRs so far today. And get these PRs from Dev2 QA’d fast. He’s a rockstar!

Dev: …

*The 4 other PRs turned out to be equally dogshit*

Manager: Hey hurry up with QA, you’re holding Dev2 back!

Dev: …

Manager: We are now using libraries for everything. I estimate based on nothing that this will increase productivity x20.

*Project grinds to a halt while devs scramble to learn/implement new library*

General Manager: Where was the productivity increase?

Manager: Our devs are not willing to learn new things quickly

Manager: I just created a new ticket! The website flashes when you reload it!

Dev: Yes, that's typically what happens when you reload a website.

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

Manager: Hey Dev I need to do QA on this PR.

Dev: That PR is not finished yet

Manager: Well do QA now anyway, that way when it is finished it can be merged in right away since QA has already been done on it. It’s a project management technique called “fast-tracking” and it improves efficiency.

Dev: …

My soft skills are so soft they don’t even exist

Manager: How’s the progress coming along?

Dev: The section of code I’m working with is one of the more difficult ones so it’s a little slow

Manager: Ok well I didn’t write that section of the code

Dev: I’m not saying you did I’m just giving you the status update that you asked for

Manager: Ok well I can’t really do anything about that so how about you tell me something I can do something about instead of just complaining about code THAT I DIDN’T EVEN WRITE!! *Marks self as offline*

Dev: …

“Competitive pay”

Translation: We are so embarrassed about how fucking little we are offering we can’t even bare to say it out loud. Maybe after 7 rounds of interviews when we feel a little more like friends we’ll be willing to let you know but only if you promise not to tell anyone.

—-

I’ve noticed literally every company with *actually* competitive pay will tell you RIGHT OFF THE BAT what that range is because they are PROUD OF IT.

Anyone who doesn’t? Well you fill in the blanks.

Client: We are tired of having to go only to specific users to get things actioned, we need everyone to be given admin access so that we can get work done efficiently

Dev: Highly do not recommend that *outlines the likely consequences*.

Client: We don’t care, we DEMAND you do this. We’ll make sure everyone is careful.

Dev: Ok but I warned you. Please submit this request in writing.

Client: Ok, not sure why you would need that. I told you everything would be fine.

*Not even two days later*

Client: HELP!!! OUR DATA IS NOW COMPLETELY MESSED UP. WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WOULD HAVE CAUSED THIS IT’S AS IF EVERYONE IS RANDOMLY DOING WHATEVER THEY WANT HOWEVER THEY WANT IN ORDER TO SUITE THEIR OWN NEEDS. IT MAKES NO SENSE HOW THIS HAS OCCURRED. I TOLD EVERYONE SPECIFICALLY TO NOT CAUSE ISSUES!!! WE NEED THIS FIXED A.S.A.P!!!!!!

Dev: …

Manager: I don’t understand! How come you take twice as long to do tickets as anyone else but your PRs are stuck in QA for half the time as anyone else??

Dev: …

Interviewer: Here is the interview challenge. Tell me what the expected output is. You have 5 minutes.

** 100 line class with 4 async methods that contain if/thens nested 4 layers deep that call each other and log things to the console

Dev: Ok wow this is a bit of a maze to work through but I’ll try my best.

** 1 minute later of reading through the code

Interviewer: One minute has elapsed. There is now 4 minutes remaining.

Dev: Actually could you please not interject with time updates like that while I’m reading code? It makes the challenge harder than necessary. Just letting me know when the time is up would be fine.

Interviewer: Ok.

** ~2 minutes later trying to comb through this spaghetti mess

Interviewer: What do you think are you getting close to figuring it out?

Dev: …

Company: We were able to save a couple of dollars by purchasing an entire fleet of ipads instead of iphones through our supplier!

Dev: Our users walk around an industrial facility carrying things all day, how will they carry these devices now that they no longer fit in their pockets.

Company: We can get them backpacks!

Dev: …

Dev: did you at least buy protective cases for them?

Company: We have to save money! Don’t worry we told the users not to drop them. Plus none of the old iphones were ever broken so this is a non-issue.

Dev: The iPhones are in cases, they drop them quite a bit.

Company: Oh, well they shouldn’t be doing that!

** They proceeded to buy the cheapest knockoff cases I’ve ever seen. At least one ipad is smashed a week now, backpacks aren’t used because of lack on convenience. All this in the name of seeming to shave off a couple bucks for a one time purchase that didn’t even need to be made, iphones were working perfectly fine. Meanwhile there are glaring issues at the company getting ignored because they get themselves continually distracted by unhelpful pet projects that address things that are not broken and often make them worse.

Company: We have a fast paced and exciting environment!

Translation: Management doesn’t plan at all and changes their mind constantly so everything is done in a rushed last minute fashion. The excitement stems from a constant need to look over your shoulder in anticipation of the knife in your back after you are blamed for some issue inevitably arising out of the panicked fashion in which the business constantly operates.

If I flag a bug on your PR don’t fucking do this:

if (bugOccurs()) handleBug()

Fix what is causing the bug, don’t bandaid it.

Manager: wElL yOu NeEd To ExPlAiN tO tHeM eXaCtLy HoW tO fIx It, hOw ArE tHeY sUpPoSeD tO kNoW?!

Dev: …

Manager: We will be building a new app. THIS TIME EVERYTHING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, ANYTHING LESS THAN TOP QUALITY WORK WILL BE REJECTED!!

*Not even 2 days into the new project*

Manager: Ok that’s good enough, we can fix it later. Can you go quicker on the next feature? Just sacrifice a bit of quality so we get these tickets closed as fast as possible. I said we can fix it later. Getting tickets closed asap is top priority.

Dev: …

Manager: We should do X with the database

Dev: That will cause issue Y

Manager: But I read an article that said that issue Y wasn’t a problem

Dev: It did?

Manager: Well it didn’t mention issue Y

Dev: …

Just got pitched another one of those “billion dollar” app ideas at work....

An app that stores app ideas

You don’t need an app for that, you can write your app ideas on a napkin and store them in the trash where they belong.

Dev: This is the first version of this new app, we’re still experimenting with how it’s going to work but initial headway is looking promising. It cost very little to make, came together very quickly and is already resulting in productivity increases for users. We’re just doing a bit of code cleanup now and we’ll make a move on the next iteration.

Corporate IT: This project is being completely mishandled! In order to successfully build an app you have to determine every single requirement beforehand! It takes millions upon millions of dollars due to the complex system of governance and approval that needs to exist. Massive numbers of stakeholders need to be involved and coordinated to even make so much as a login screen! I bet your project doesn’t even have a documented list of core values.

Dev: Has you ever successfully built an app using that methodology?

Corporate IT: 😡 That’s a loaded question. I went to school to study project management and have over 25 years of experience in the field. If you had the training and experience I do you would know that tech projects are naturally very volatile and there’s nothing you can do about that!

Dev: …

Chuck Norris can write Java without wearing glasses. He can C#.

Chuck Norris can compile C++ with just a word editor and K&R.

Chuck Norris can read the comment you almost put in on line 63 (it would have been very helpful.)

Chuck Norris can optimize programs in binary.

Chuck Norris does garbage collection with his mind.

HR: Hey we heard about all of the apps you are building and we were wondering if you could build one for us too

Dev: Well I’d have to run it by my manager first, what kind of app were you looking to build?

HR: Ok basically it’s a button that when you press it it completes the list of daily tasks that normally take us all day everyday like payroll and attendance reporting.

Dev: You…. want me to…automate your entire job away?

HR: No! We would be the ones to push the button😡.

Dev: I….. I’ll…. I will pass that along.

Reddit: Every developer eventually either goes insane or becomes a farmer.

Dev: …I hope I become a farmer

Manager: That last dev you hired is working out well. Where did you get him from?

Dev: *Looking at new hire’s resume which only contains a single bootcamp and nothing else*

Dev: He’s a rescue.

Manager: "We can't have new releases breaking older versions of the mobile app!!!!! We'll lose all our customers!!!!"

fullStackChris: "That's fine, we can do API versioning, but it will take some time to implement, I'll have to be quite careful and write some tests to implement it. Probably 2-3 weeks..."

Manager: "NO WAY, THAT TIME ESTIMATE IS WAY TOO LONG, WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT!!!"

fullStackChris: "So how do you wanna support multiple versions of the app without doing any sort of versioning?"

Manager: "...we'll think of something!"

Dev: "..."

And with 99% certainty, I expect to hear this in a week or two:

Manager: "fullStackChris, we'd like to introduce you to the highly technical concept, API versioning. It's a way to version the API so we can support multiple versions of the application our customers use! It's amazing! Please implement this immediately so we can support multiple versions of the application!"

Sigh... each day managers learn a bit more how physical reality works... you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Interviewer: Time limit for this exercise was an hour and you took 2 hours so you fail. Best of luck next time

Dev: Look I really don’t think your assessment has a very fair time limit. The only way you could do this in an hour is by knowing what the problem was beforehand and having all these niche utilities written ahead of time.

Interview: Oh yeah we had one guy that did that, he did the entire thing in only 45 minutes! We hired him immediately!

Dev: …

Talent Acquisition/HR: 🤪

Dev: 🤪

Technical Interviewer: 🧐

Dev: 🧐

Hiring Manager: 🤡

Dev: 🤡

This strategy has yielded some dishearteningly successful job application results this week.

Manager: I don’t understand what is so complicated about this feature. Under a certain set of conditions do one thing, under a separate set of conditions do another. It’s just an if else statement! Those take seconds to write!

Dev: The problem is the memory required to calculate the conditions is quite cumbersome

Manager: Well then find a faster way! It’s just an if else!

Dev: …

A Microsoft Surface is not a computer it’s Windows installed on a crêpe

Isn’t it amazing how every company is ranked one of the best places to work? Amazing.

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
What do you code, anyway?

Pvt. Cowboy:
SIR, JAVA, SIR!

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
JAVA? Holy dogshit! Only steers and queers code in Java!! And you don't much look like a steer to me so that kind of narrows it down. Do you suck dick?

Pvt. Cowboy:
SIR, NO, SIR!

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
I BET YOU'RE THE KIND OF GUY WHO'D WRITE LEGACY CODE AND NOT HAVE THE COMMON COURTESY TO WRITE ANY COMMENTS.

Manager: *taps dev on shoulder* Hey I noticed a minor bug I think

Dev: Sigh…. So then create a ticket for it

Manager: Can’t you just fix it right now?

Dev: I can but I’m currently working on that other issue you told everyone was “top priority” at the morning status meeting. Should I switch to actioning this minor bug instead?

Manager: Don’t switch just multitask and work faster!

Dev: …

If java had real garbage collection then most programs would delete themself immediately upon running.

Manager: The way you built this doesn’t accommodate any of my future plans!

Dev: What future plans?

Manager: I have a bunch of different ideas, I haven’t decided which ones to go with yet or how it will all work but you’re making it so we’re running out of room in the UI. It’s too busy, you need to clean it up so we can add more stuff!

Dev: …

Manager logic: Adding "somehow" to the front of the JIRA title for the JIRA description is super clear and helpful.

Example:

Title: Chat screen doesn't work
Description: Somehow chat screen doesn't work

Manager: You know you really shouldn’t pay off your mortgage faster than you absolutely have to. It’s the cheapest money you’ll ever get!

Dev: I’d rather work towards being debt free. Besides my RRSP (401k) is already maxed out

Manager: RRSPs are a scam! TFSAs (Roth IRAs) are way better

Dev: My TFSA is maxed out too

Manager: 😡 You still shouldn’t pay off your mortgage!

Dev: …

Put this in your build script for compile-time garbage collection:

find / -name "*.java" -type f -delete

Merging my slaves into “main” just isn’t the same.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
/s

HR: I’m sure you know what this meeting is about

Dev: My script that converts the name of our 3rd party IT provider in any email thread I reply to with “PooPoo Inc.”?

HR: No, that is a separate meeting

Dev: Ah.

Dev: (Watches user print out screenshot of maintenance app to do list, walk across facility to printer. walk across facility to equipment and check things off on paper, then walk across facility back to their terminal and copy the findings over.)

Dev: We made the app responsive so they could do that on a mobile device. Why are they printing?

Manager: Printers are cheaper than getting more tablets.

Dev: …

Dev: Can we at least get a printer at each terminal so they don’t waste so much time walking across the facility?

Manager: That’s too many printers to maintain. It’s easier to just have one.

Dev: …

User: The app is crashing! Fix this immediately. We can’t do our jobs without it!!

Dev: Patch applied, can you confirm it is now working on your end?

User: EXCUSE ME?! THAT IS NOT OUR RESPONSIBILITY! WE ARE WAY TOO BUSY, ASK SOME OTHER DEPARTMENT TO DO THAT OR DO IT YOURSELF!

Dev: …

???: Salesforce is simply the best. You can do anything you can dream of with it. It can solve all of your pro—

Dev: Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Ah the day before launch of a new app. And right on schedule the businesses is attempting to completely alter their requirements including a COMPLETE OVERHAUL OF THE DATABASE MODEL TO ADDRESS AN ISSUE THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN FIXED. I wish they would share the drugs they are clearly on so I could also live in this dreamland delusion where you can turn something completely on its head right on the finish line and expect everything to go well.

Manager: Hey I think I have a solution to that performance we talked about last week

Dev: I already fixed it, it only takes 1 second instead of 30 now.

Manager: Ok but I’ve also figured out a solution. If we completely change the entire database model that one query could potentially be even faster according to my understanding of how databases operate.

Dev: I fixed it without the need for that, actually it was just a matter of better conc—

Manager: I think we should go with MY solution. Drop everything and restructure the database immediately! Be quick, as you know we launch this application tomorrow! Have an extra coffee today and just crush it out, don’t overthink this either just do it.

Dev: …

Recruiter: Hello I’m recruiting for an exciting opportunity at a rapidly growing company with loads of potential

Dev: *Looks up company on google*

Dev: Their stock has been declining for the past 2 years. 3 months ago their valuation just dropped by 80%…. How are they growing?

Recruiter: Oh that happened to every company at the end of 2021.

Dev: …I guarantee you it did not.

Recruiter: …

Dev: …

Dev: What are the requirements?

Client: I want to make my boss happy so that I get lots of money and promotions.

Dev: What does your boss want?

Client: He wants to be happy

Dev: …

Client: Also I don’t want to expend any effort or resources to achieve this

Dev: …

Microsoft hates this one trick to improving computer performance:

‘’’pkill teams’’’

Dev: There’s a file in your PR with over 1000 lines of code, I think it should be broken apart into a couple smaller pieces to be a little more in line with the single responsibility principle

Muppet Dev: That file only has one responsibility! It can’t be broken apart!

Dev: How’s that?

Muppets: It’s single responsibility is managing that group of functionality

Dev: …

Meeting with CEO went well I heard. Only thing he didn’t like that there was no permission level “worthy of leadership” (GUI options are view-only/worker/admin/super).

Keeping the existence of the the secret “god” permission to myself I proceeded to create the “executive authority” permission, which is an alias…

…for view-only. 🖕😘🖕

Job ad: Must have large amount of experience working in a completely unstructured environment, be hyper innovative and be willing to work HARD and have a PRODUCT MINDSET!

Translation: Management doesn’t know what they want and even if they did they are completely incompetent at communicating what that is. You will be accountable for reading their minds and coming up with something that makes them look good. This task is impossible so you are expected to sacrifice every spare second of your life in vain pretending it is possible. If you do somehow achieve it you will not be given any credit due to your “product mindset”.

Manager: Dev, you will submit to my leadership and surrender all common sense to agree with what I say or face consequences.

Dev: Manager, Fuck you!

Dev: I need you to do X

IT: Ok we will do Y

Dev: I don’t want Y I want X

IT: Well you’ll need to go through the change request process then since you have just modified your requirements.

Dev: …

An old one, but still pretty funny 😂

If Java had true Garbage Collection, it would delete itself.

Dev: You’ll want to store money values such as $2001.01 as 200121 when using javascript.

Manager: Why? That’s stupid.

Dev: Javascript doesn’t behave with decimals the way you think. It’ll show up as $2001.01000001 when you least expect it

Manager: Well I’ve never had that issue before! Besides that’s only a fraction of a cent off, that won’t even matter!

Dev: … literally the plot of office space but ok

Manager: We have a new equity survey from HR that is ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY. Anyone who doesn’t fill it out will be severely reprimanded for being against diversity in the workplace. We need this data in order to ensure we have the ABSOLUTELY EXACT ratio of EVERY minority so that we can show the people that we do not discriminate against ANYBODY for ANYTHING. One of the problems with hiring new people is that most people we want to hire turn out to be white and we are absolutely not allowed to hire any more white people because we are over the quota for white people. Now there’s a loophole to this, if that white person belongs to some sub-minority like they are muslim or gay or something like that it’s totally cool and we can show people we don’t discriminate on these things when making employment decisions!

Dev: That’s…not wh—

Mandatory Survey: Please select your sexual preferences and/or religion from the dropdown below.

Dev: jesus christ.

My brain wanted to type 'async' and 'await' at the same time

I typed awync

Dev: Ok refactor this following block of code to make it more readable/maintainable while still ensuring the tests pass

*** Block is an absolute mess of nested ternaries, poorly named functions, single letter variables and outdated comments. An underhand pitch if there ever was one ***

Interview Candidate: Why would you refactor code if the tests are already passing?

Dev: …… NEXT.

Most business apps end up being overcomplicated and convoluted because that’s what most businesses are:

Overcomplicated and convoluted.

Building an app to operate systems like that will always be an exercise in garbage in garbage out. Fix your process before saying wE nEeD An aPp To Do ThIs. You don’t need an app. You need a smack upside the head.

Holy fuck I did it. I convinced my non tech manager not to do code QA after he brought the whole system down approving things without testing them and getting devs to make changes that caused bugs. Don’t get me wrong he threatened to fire me twice during the conversation but I dunno…I think I’m just about ready for my second dev job anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

*During a walk around to check on the users*

Dev: *Watching worker laboriously dragging pallet jack with one wobbly wheel and another wheel practically seized*

Dev: Hey that looks broken, can’t you swap it out in the maintenance building?

Worker: If you do that management will give you one that’s worse.

Dev: …This fucking company

** Worker later threw out his back, company’s corrective action was to send out notice reminding employees to stretch before doing physical tasks

Dev2: Do you get 49 errors in the console when you try to compile?

Dev1: (Getting 52 errors) No. Must be an issue with your machine.

Don't talk to me I'm a programmer!

First, I'll kill you
make you leave all your children
Then I'll chop off your HEAD
now you're a zombie
I'll thread all your limbs back together
you can never REST
because I'm a master of all slaves
this is a test
And if I'm finally done with you
I'll leave you for garbage collection
Hello World!
Don't talk to me

Alright, that's it. I've had it with these fucking clowns.

Manager: This dropdown is hard to use on mobile

Dev: I thought building this for mobile wasn’t in the scope?

Manager: I changed my mind. It’s a lot easier for me to test on mobile so just rework it so it works on mobile. But only for testing.

Dev: How about I make the dropdown a rotary dial instead?

Manager: Good idea!

Dev: …