Most embarrassing and lucky moment on the first week of job.

Me and my best friend were selected in the same company as developers. I was having some trouble with my system. So I mailed the description to our support department. Pop up was displayed from our chat client and person on the other end happened to be a lady. She wanted me to share a team viewer link with click access. So I did it and within 2 minutes of efforts she solved it. I thanked her, closed the chat conversation and started installing few packages. Meanwhile, I was curious to see her as she was really nice throughout the conversation. So I opened LinkedIn, searched for her name and found her profile. I zoomed in her photo and she was a pretty chick. I didn't stop and found her on FB too, and quickly saw all her DPs. I just copied her profile URL and sent it to my friend ( the one that got selected with me ) and told him about my conversation with her. Then I asked my friend
"She's hot. Should I send her a friend request or have to find some more troubles in my pc and talk to her few more times ? :P "
He replied "Dude what are you wanting for ? "
Out of no where, a pop up showed up. It was the girl we were talking about. The exact message was

"You can now close your team viewer session, and we can talk over FB :)"

Embarrassing AF!

Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

Me: Hey, my laptop (with stickers on it) is in for repair, can't get any work done.
Friend: Oh, that sucks, we going to be delayed launching our app!
... few days later ...
Friend: Hey, did u get it back yet?
Me: They ended up giving me a brand new one cause they couldn't repair it.
Friend: That's awesome man, you got lucky!
Me: F*@$ that, I LOST MY STICKERS!

I'm very very lucky today! I got 2 down votes on stack overflow, but still got the solution.

This dude is using 4 screens for work. When I asked for another screen at work,
I can't convince my boss for 2, FML

To the dude who got 4 screens, congratulations, and sorry I used your image without permission. BTW
You lucky bastard

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

My birthday is coming up on the 13th so I'll be 17 soon, but it's a shame. I like being 16...

Anyway... I'm going to spend the entire day working on my python script because I know no one will come.

For 5-6 years no one came to my birthday even though they said they would.

It's fine. I stopped caring, besides, I get to spend the day with variables and loops! It'll be a fun day, not to mention I'll be home alone so no one will bother me.

Useless but interesting fact: I got lucky. I was born ONE MINUTE before Valentine's day. At 11:59 I would be so upset if I was born on the 14th.

Spent nearly a day to get this tiny laptop-tablet to work.

I got myself a second hand Asus T100TAF but Linux compatibility was far to be found. Online resources said I'd be very lucky if I'd even get the touchscreen or the WiFi to work.

I've been installing distro's all day and I finally have a working version!

Lubuntu with Budgie as desktop environment. Touchscreen works out of the box and some random person on the Linux mint forum linked to a github thing. Lost all hope already but this made the fucking WiFi work.

Can dock and undock it and it works great.

Thanks to all open source devs for this!

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.

Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]

Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev

Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]

Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].

Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.

The fuse is lit.

Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*

Sizzle.

Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]

Bang.

Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]

Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."

Recruiter: I see you got a good degree, however, what were your high school results (A-levels)?

Me: why would you need them?
(they were average, but I tell the recruiter)

Recruiter: Oh, so you were pretty lucky to get a good degree.

Me: No... I worked really hard for it.

Recruiter: Anyway, my client only deals with people who got high grades in high school.

What the fuckkkkkkk?

#stopthismadness

Last week, someone contacted me, he said he needed me to fix the existing code on a new WordPress website because the developer did a messy job, so I thought to myself, it can't be that bad, requested for the SSH access and got into the server.

Guys.

Guys..

Guys...

I was wrong, some people really know how to fuck shit up.

I don't want to go into details but there were legit more than 50 plugins installed and activated on the website for no good reason and all the pages took about 45 minutes each to render if not more, so you can literally request a new page, start making coffee and use the washing machine and if you are lucky to have spent 45 minutes, return to a fully loaded page.

For a new WordPress website, it seemed really old.

It was almost as if this developer had a line of code that looked like this:

@Import 'all the bad programming practices ever and the ones yet to be invented';

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

It's not motivation that you need, it's dedication.

You see, motivation is temporary thing, that sudden flow of dopamine running through your body that you get after some success or after being admired by someone or simply after good sleep and nice morning shower.

But the problem with motivation is that it's just temporary thing. After a while (hours, days, if you're lucky weeks) it just wears off and you're left pretty much where you started.

But there's one thing that remains and that's persistent. It's called DEDICATION. If you dedicate yourself to something, you are willing to do it no matter what it takes from you. Even if it frustrates you along the way or makes you angry, you wanna be able to say "It's finished. I'm satisfied with it" after you finish it. You are willing to crawl to the finishing line but no matter the obstacle, just knowing that you're getting closer to the finishing line is gonna motivate you. Your dedication is gonna become motivation generator. And that's the key. You need the passion and dedicate yourself to it.

But hey, sound simple but we all know the struggle. Sometimes it's even hard to recognize dedication from motivation. And sometimes you just go "Ok. Fuck it. I'm done" and leave it and that's okay AS LONG AS you get back to it after a while. As long as the inner you, the dedicated you that got you here in the first place, goes "Dude, it's tough. But it's alright, we refreshed a bit and now we're gonna fucking make it" (nope, I don't have schizophrenia) and you listen and get back at it.

Dedication is tough. It's about self control and understanding yourself deeply and balancing your mind. It's nirvana of success. It's the ultimate balance. But you can get there. If you want. Badly.

TL;DR You need dedication, not motivation. Punish yourself and reward yourself. Not too harsh and not too much. Just so that you don't lose track.

But most of all, GOOD LUCK YOU AMAZING FUCKS!

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

The worst tech day if my life... In terms of broken things.

I went to London... For a meeting with a new client.

I missed the train being me I made sure I got the early one so I could get another if I missed it...

1st tech fail, the machine didn't print off my tickets just the receipt which is why I was late

Got to London thought I'd try uber I didn't want to be late...

25 minutes till destination ... Ok

2nd tech fail... Was 45 minutes 😔

Now I'm 10 minutes late!

So I rush out of the uber to try and get to the meeting ....

3rd tech fail 😔 I drop my laptop ... Screen was ok I got lucky .

Went to meeting it was in a coffee shop ! I was alone meeting 5 people in this charity.

This company didn't occur to them I'd need internet to show them websites 😐

4th tech fail no internet

Needless to say I didn't get the job. Sad because I would of done a good job . At least I got to chill in London. For a few hours.

They put me on a hot seat as such all asking me questions

I was 19 terrified stressed. And it's only been a year... I'm doing the same tomorrow!

Fingers crossed

Holy shit balls it works (so far)

-
So I’ve been working on a project... well feature for the past year (yes 12 whole fucking months - anti agile I know)
And today I got to merge that bitch of a pull request into the current working branch and deploy it to UAT - no conflicts 😵I think I need to put the lottery on tonight!
And some how, by some stupid lucky roll of the dice it just works.

I have never felt so afraid and delighted in my life!

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

TL;DR: check polarity before plugging your DIY circuits into others!!!

*goes off to watch some Lucky Star and drink some booze*
*notices phone battery dying after 3rd pint*

But my charging cable that Huawei delivered with this thing is way too short... Well that ain't no problem, I can make one of my own 😎

But I'm tipsy.. sound I really enter the workbench in this state?

*goes off to build a charging cable anyway*
But what was USB-A male connector's polarity again? Oh, there's the fan's USB connector that I've made in the past. Let's check on that one. So, left is positive and right is negative?

*solders the wires on*
Snip, strip, stick, done! Well that was easy. I guess that all those failed soldering attempts and lost pads in the past as a means of training did pay off in the end!

*plugs phone into Raspberry Pi media center through new charging cable*

Strange sounds coming from the speakers.. well that's odd. Reverse polarity or maybe the Pi can't handle a 1A load from my phone?

*plugs phone into the 5V 5A charging hub that I've made earlier*
That oughta do.. current limits should be no more in that thing.

*charging hub makes high-pitch noise similar to the Pi speakers*
Definitely a reverse polarity, isn't it :') let's check on the Gargler...
Oh shit! It is a reverse polarity mistake!!! Should've checked this earlier >_<

*resolders wires properly*
Alright, finally done.. as I'm writing this post, my phone's charging from the Raspberry Pi through my fixed charging cable now...

Lesson learned. Always check on the internet what the pinout is before soldering anything, don't solder while tipsy, and be fucking grateful that this phone has reverse polarity protection in it.

Nexus 6P with all its shortcomings regarding power delivery and battery management, luckily it's got reverse voltage protection features built-in. Otherwise it might've costed me my phone. Always double-check before plugging anything into something else!!!

My parents are real sticklers for who is allowed to be on Netflix. They only let people on when they are present, and they never click 'save password'.

Me being a poor college student and desperate for the Netflix password, created a fake website for one of my parents to sign into.

How did I do this? I created my own localhost server with a backend database for the password to go to. I then copied the Netflix home screen and log in and asked them to log me into their account.

They said I can be on for one hour, and then they were signing me out.

I agreed to these terms.

As a small twist, I had also copied the no internet tab from Chrome for the page to redirect to. Knowing that once they logged in they would be expecting the main UI.

They logged in and then waited for the page to load. I, of course, put in a delay for the page to load and then displayed the no internet tab. They were confused and asked me to refresh, still nothing. I asked them if the router was out, and they went to check.

While they were away I quickly switched back to the real Netflix website and yelled back saying I got it working again. They came back over and saw that it was asking for a password again. They signed in and saw the main homepage and none were the wiser that day.

Once they left I checked inside the DB and found the plaintext password they typed in... The damn password was so simple, I cursed myself for not having figured it out sooner. No matter, I had my parents Netflix password.

So you're probably wondering how they didn't see the URL above and think something was off?

I pressed F11 and fullscreened my entire browser. They did ask, and I simply replied with, I don't like seeing all the crap up above when I'm streaming. No further questions, perhaps I was lucky.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

Fucking shit fuck! Absolute cunty-chops of a Work phone just went off at 3am because our directory has clearly been leaked.

This cunt right here is on 24/7 fallout so I can nae silence the bastard. It’s going inte do not disturb for the evening now but.

About 6 months to a year ago we started getting nuisance calls on the cunts. On floated numbers that seem geographically close.

Work have done fuck all in this time, because considering changing ours is a pain in the dick, and costs.

But tonight at 3am I got another; call, immediate hang up on redial.

This wee iPhone prick is looking at me like “ho! Got ya ye fucker”... it’s lucky it’s not been punted out the winde where it belongs. Little fucking prick.

If I look like shit tomorrow at the office, if any prick decides to mention I look tired, I’m gonnae tear the ballbags a new hole between their baws and their arse.

It’s now 4am, sorry fe the language, my Glaswegian heritage shines through at this time in the morning.

Resumes don't mean jack shit!!

I just got off an interview call with a candidate for a hardware role. On paper this guy is absolute gold, having worked for some of the best robotics companies and research groups(in India at least) It took me an hour to realize that the was just spitting out buzz words. So I started asking him some very fundamental questions, like ohms law and such.. high school stuff. But, phrased in real world terms. And it took me another half an hour to realize that the guy is dumber than a sack of peanuts!

I can't believe how easy it is for people to coast by on paths paved by seniors and teammates. By any objective assessment this guy would be lucky to get a job as an electrician and instead I'm wasting my time interviewing him for a six figure salary (well, the Indian equivalent). Gaaah!!

I started a hobby software project producing TV graphics for eSports racing events.

At first it really only was a hobby without getting paid at all. After a few years we got our first customer for whom we build a fully functional TV graphics package for their broadcasting network for about 350€ for roughly 80-100 hours of work total.

This was the first time I was getting paid for my own software and since it was just a hobby, it was nice at that time.

After a few more years in the business, we are lucky enough that our software is used by the game developers themselves and big car companies for their eSports events and we are able to make a decent profit from our small hobby.

Took only about 5 years. So never give up, I guess. :)

!dev

It’s sooo weird.
I’m generally not feeling happy or good or “okay”, I’m almost always rather shitty but just keep going through my day without complaining too much because that’s what most of us do..

Today, for the first time in at least one (very lonely, cold and boring) year, I went outside for a smoke and felt good. No idea why.
Everything was orangy/yellowish outside because of the clouds after the first sunny day in weeks.
Its raining slightly but not so much that you actually get wet.

I just had this feeling of “yea, that’s good enough” which I haven’t had in probably 4-5 years or so.

Maybe it’s because I got a little bit of sun for once and saw other people walking 2m around me, I don’t know..
But it felt good.

Does that feeling sound familiar to anyone or am I just finally going crazy?

I also apologise for my last 50 rants not being about dev or rant but I’m lucky to not have much to rant about in my current job 😅

How can you defend your ugly unstructured mess of a PR, when every spit-droplet infused spray of words from your mouth is full of syntax errors?

How can you call yourself a developer without being aware of basic logic? I ain't got no tolerance for double negations, not not true is just true, you doltish twat.

WHEN YOU TALK THERE IS A CLOUD OF RED SQUIGGLY LINES IN THE AIR FLOATING AROUND YOUR HEAD.

I mean what the fuck is up with eggcetera? Why are you just swapping out letters? What has the little ligature t in & ever done to you? Do I have to fucking replace & with 🥚 so your word diarrhea makes sense again?

NO. JUST PLEASE... STOP TALKING. YOU'RE RAPING LANGUAGE, AND IT WAS ALREADY BEATEN DEAD.

Unlike me, you have a degree in computer science... but how, how the fuck did you pass? How did neither your tongue nor code get stuck in a linter?

AND YOUR RESPONSE IS STILL: "YOU DON'T NEED TO LEARN WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED WITH SCHOOL" ... "WHAT DOES IT MATTER, IT WORKS, RIGHT?"

NO, IT'S NOT RIGHT.

You're lucky I love refactoring.

I'll start with a medical grade steel scalpel and a long sharp hook. Maybe I can clean up this brain a little. See if the tests turn green if I cut some of this gray matter away... plenty of unreachable statements, so many unnecessary loops...

Might have to start from scratch.

TLDR: Small family owned finance business woes as the “you-do-everything-now” network/sysadmin intern

Friday my boss, who is currently traveling in Vegas (hmmm), sends me an email asking me to punch a hole in our firewall so he can access our locally hosted Jira server that we use for time logging/task management.

Because of our lack of proper documentation I have to refer to my half completed network map and rely on some acrobatic cable tracing to discover that we use a SonicWall physical firewall. I then realize asking around that I don’t have access to the management interface because no one knows the password.

Using some lucky guesses and documentation I discover on a file share from four years ago, I piece together the username and password to log in only to discover that the enterprise support subscription is two years expired. The pretty and useful interface that I’m expecting has been deactivated and instead of a nice overview of firewall access rules the only thing I can access is an arcane table of network rules using abbreviated notation and five year old custom made objects representing our internal network.

An hour and a half later I have a solid understanding of SonicWallOS, its firewall rules, and our particular configuration and I’m able to direct external traffic from the right port to our internal server running Jira. I even configure a HIDS on the Jira server and throw up an iptables firewall quickly since the machine is now connected to the outside world.

After seeing how many access rules our firewall has, as a precaution I decide to run a quick nmap scan to see what our network looks like to an attacker.

The output doesn’t stop scrolling for a minute. Final count we have 38 ports wide open with a GOLDMINE of information from every web, DNS, and public server flooding my terminal. Our local domain controller has ports directly connected to the Internet. Several un-updated Windows Server 2008 machines with confidential business information have IIS 7.0 running connected directly to the internet (versions with confirmed remote code execution vulnerabilities). I’ve got my work cut out for me.

It looks like someone’s idea of allowing remote access to the office at some point was “port forward everything” instead of setting up a VPN. I learn the owners close personal friend did all their IT until 4 years ago, when the professional documentation stops. He retired and they’ve only invested in low cost students (like me!) to fill the gap. Some kid who port forwarded his home router for League at some point was like “let’s do that with production servers!”

At this point my boss emails me to see what I’ve done. I spit him back a link to use our Jira server. He sends me a reply “You haven’t logged any work in Jira, what have you been doing?”

Facepalm.

I had a manager in a fortune 500 company encourage me to install a web cam with live feed in another team members cube as a prank. Being younger, I trusted him and so figured it would fine and just get a good laugh.

Then another member found the setup and reported it. Turns out, this broke so many company regulations, I could have been fired on the spot. They confiscated my laptop and I got the 3rd degree from my senior director, who told me I was lucky to be a contractor at the time or the situation would have been even worse.

Moral of the story for younger folks in large corporations... don't take everything your higher ups say as gospel. Think for yourself and do your own research if something feels iffy.

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

Should I consider myself lucky ?
I got a very nice manager . He really understands us. Genuinely saying.

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.

But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!

So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...

For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.

For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!

43, I was in college with chance for an scholarship. Got instructed to get the best possible grades, and teachers kept telling me to do better. Did 3 tests in a row, and went to hospital in the 4th one. Doctor said that the amount of coffee and meds I had took could've killed me if I was not lucky.

P.S.: After I got my grades and asked about my scholarship I was told that they gave it to another person that was "more stable" and "healthy"...

P.S.: I don't know if this counts as working

Who am I?

Some of you, because of the hyperbolic, outrageous, trollish, and often self-satirical nature of my posts, might doubt me. Thats completely relatable.

Heres the truth:
I was diagnosed in childhood with ADHD, fucking everyone, every male, these days is diagnosed with that. I was diagnosed bipolar. Hell anyone reading my posts could see that from a mile away. I was diagnosed on the borderline personality spectrum. Yeah, I could see that.

I was tested. They said I was in the 98th percentile for clerical ability, not extraordinary but pretty good, mathematical ability a little higher than that. My SAT was 1491. Not yale material, but I coulda been someone.

Over the years I studied a LOT of politics and read a metric fuckton of books. (40+ books over the course of three years).

I predicted every single presidential election since bush juniors second election. Three supreme court picks. Senatorial elections. Congresional elections. More than that.

I have a better analysis track record than some of the multidecade analysts sitting in the fucking NSA.

No I am not shitting you. No I am not exaggerating.

It's about the only claim to fame I get to legitimately make.

People ask me, "then why aren't you famous?"

How do you know I'm not.

Look I'm gonna tell you my actual name.
My real name is Lawrence B. Lindsey

Okay, I'm bullshitting for fun. But words I have written on alt twitter accounts have legitimately come out of presidential hopeful's mouths. No, this I am *not* bullshitting you about.

Imagine that. A guy who lived in his parents attic for five years, writing words that came out of presidential candidates mouths.

At one time I was about as popular and influential as that fuckboy catturd.

yes, really. No I am not fucking joking.

Under normal conditions I wouldn't talk about this or reveal it, because who the fuck cares? I'm just some dude on the internet, drunk, both on alcohol, and the pseudo-anonymous equivalent of bragging rights.

You know how many women I turned down because I could? You know how fucking drunk I am? They say a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts. Well, I'm not usually honest like this because the internet is full of false braggarts, and you tell people the truth and they don't fucking believe you.

I swear, it seems like I made some faustian bargain at some time, and can achieve no fame or lasting wealth in my life--to save my life.

Shit, I was talking to a chinese women who ran a bank in china (yes, really), who advised me to buy into bitcoin early on. Didn't have the money to. Woulda been a fucking millionaire if I did.
*Non-obvious* Ideas that major corporations are now persuing? Yeah those were sitting in my card index since the early 2000s.

I helped two people build and sell businesses. One for me tens of thousands. Another for millions. Yes, really. Got zero, and I mean, *zero* credit for it.

Point is, doesn't matter how famous you are, or coulda been, Doesn't matter the ideas you have, or had.

The world doesn't promote runners-up, or hasbeens, or wannabes, or could-bes.

What matters is execution.

If you're wandering through life, wondering when you're lucky break will be, stop. You have to realize, you make your own luck. Recognize the difference between what you can control, and what you can, and work on promoting your own ideas or business or values, instead of other people's dreams.

And for those wondering, yes I am drunk, and no, I ain't fucking kidding you in anything I wrote here.

The most important lesson I learned is this:
First work on your own success, before you work on the success of others.

p.s.

I give surprisingly good advice for someone who doesn't benchmark well on traditional measures of success. I know, even I was shocked when I looked at the statistics.

Got a gift from my friend. It was from an Indiegogo project. It worked fantastically until it has broken recently.
Although 1 year warranty was promised according to the site, the fact that it's from Indiegogo means that's non existence (I'd say if you actually receive the thing, you're very lucky). So I disassembled it and had a look.
Now I'm thinking maybe I just need to hack my way in to find out what that blown chip is and if I can replace it.
I am also disgusted by the Chinese printed on the IC...

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

!rant

Today is a happy day.

I just got a job to finance my last year of studies as a frontend dev for two months this summer.

I'll be working as an intern and won't get paid much, but it's still tremendously more than I would've ever made with any other shitty student job.

Best thing is that my best friend works at the same company and we'll be seated next to each other (he also convinced the HR to invite me to the interview, woul've been rejected right away without him).

So basically I am a lucky bastard and they even told me that if I'm doing well they wouldn't hesitate to hire me after my studies if I'd still be interested in a year ❤️

What I'm missing most as a student is to work in front of a computer 8 hours a day. This will be a welcome change and a nice addition to my CV.

Wish me luck! Starting right after my final exams on the 16th 😎

I played a terrible game tonight... I'm secondary on call when we've been getting 2+ calls regularly. I went out with friends and just hoped I didn't get a call.

I have seen in a lot of forums (here, Imgur, reddit, LinkedIn etc) that there are a lot of developers without a job.

And most of them live in USA. I have not seen a person who is struggling to find a job in EU or some other place.

Why is this the case? In USA where the demand for developers is very high.

I read a post on LinkedIn: "40 INTERVIEWS and no one HIRED! Yet another friend telling me she can not find good talent. My thinking - If you interviewed 40 people and did not hire someone, then it's time to look in the mirror. The problem is recruiters and hiring managers are looking for the 'PERFECT" candidate. NEWSFLASH! There is no 'perfect' candidate. If you have someone with the right attitude and skill set, and they fit in with the team, why not HIRE them? There are so many qualified individuals still job searching. Yet I see the same jobs re-posted, over and over again, being left vacant for months. Who took a chance on you? Maybe it's time you a took chance on someone."

I don't think it is the "competition" because I see everywhere. I have seen entry-level or JR. open positions that are not filled for months.

It took me 1 month, sending nearly 20 applications every day to find a job in USA.
And the second one I got lucky. I applied in Europe and after some month I got transferred in offices in USA.

I do not know how true this is, but seriously, what's wrong with companies in USA that require the PERFECT candidate. Or is it something else?

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

Just got the Oreo 8.0 update for my OnePlus 5T. Yay!

But it broke something, so now I can't debug my app with Xamarin... 😐

Luckily there's already a bugreport on their bugzilla! It seems like it's been fixed. Just need to update Visual Studio. Guess I'm lucky after all. 😁

...

The problem is still there... 😡
Don't know what to do now... 😕

Anyone else have trouble with real life common sense?

Story time:
Yesterday Evening a dog chased my best mate's cat up a tree. Being the genius I am, I decided to climb after the adorable bugger. Fell from about 8-10ft onto concrete slabs on my back.

Main thing first: I got lucky, CTs and X-rays showed no lasting damage. I'm back home and safe now.

What got me was going through the hospital having to hear the story of how I fell out of a tree onto my back and head like an idiot... from medical person to medical person.

I was lying in the bed, thinking "I swear I'm competent!? Why do people trust me!?"

Does anyone else have any weird skill black spots, or common sense break downs?

Thanks to McDonald's for such a wonderful morning... And this may explain why a busy store is now empty...

-Order mobile deal at home
-Walk 15mins to the restaurant
-Opens app, get message "your account has been deleted"

*WTF!!!!!*

-Tried to sign up with Google, error
-Sign up with Facebook, OK!!

(btw I got a privacy message from Google this morning... Haven't got one from FB yet... hmm...)

-tried to redeem again. All coupons are like "not available at this location"

Well since I'm here anyway...

-Walks to machines and enters the codes, it works!!!!

FFS MCD JUST TELL PPL THESE COUPONS CAN BE REDEEMED IN STORE ONLY!!!! AND DON'T RANDOMLY DELETE ACCOUNT BC YOU CAN'T SUPPORT GPDR OR UR SYSTEM CRASHES FROM AN INTERNAL BUG

Lucky I redeemed my free coffee last week...

Question from a CTO/co-founder in an interview:
"So you've changed jobs every year or so and you were laid off a bunch of times. Do you think maybe it was because of your performance or the company choices you made?". You fucking privileged city dwelling gen-Xer. You got lucky with your startup until now. You sell recruiting software and that worked for a while when the market was booming but now that companies aren't hiring anymore you want to pivot and also make employee management and HR solutions. Guess what? Everybody else is also doing that.

Me: *asks boss for the id of his test store so I can apply experimental schema changes to test out a new dashboard app*

Boss: *gives me production store id and doesn't say anything*

Fate: … "You got lucky this time."

This is the CEO of the company btw. Startups. *sigh*

Had annual appraisal meeting today. Been in this company for 2yrs now, after being hired outta college. It happens first after 2 years, then yearly.

I have long since known that my boss is a scumbag. My lucky college mates got assigned to great managers, leaders I must say, while I got the typical, know it all boss.

Now this racist, motherfucker, for reasons unknown to me, has mostly disliked me. But hey, the feelings mutual but I don't ever go busting his ass.

Previous employees eventually transferred locations or departments. But I stuck coz I respected some colleagues and learnt a lot from them.

Now this nutjob gave me a 2/5 rating. Says I need to improve my communication. I need to talk more. WTF you goatfucking cunt! I decide how much I wanna talk. I don't waste my time, and even if I did, I don't have any right to waste someone elses time. And talking about communication skills - BITCH! Everytime you speak something, I need like 2 mins to compile your jumbled fucking words in my mind to be able to comprehend what it is you wanted to convey. And you cunt! YOU are going to tell me I need to improve my communication. Dumbfuck I ain't no Shakespeare, but I can convey my message through.

Fucking peasant!

Hmm. The lemon tea sure is good today.

Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.

We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?

Fuck Unity.
Every single time I try to use Unity to develop my well-along-in-development video game, it finds some way of fucking itself up.
Be it from somehow failing to compile a DLL - which is something completely out of my control, the inspector failing to update itself when I select a new object every five minutes, to the engine managing to fail to load its UI layout because it somehow managed to lose a file responsible for containing the layout, the Inspector forgetting to include a scrollbar and as such trying to cram a bunch of components into one area, crashing in a certain area because I tried using reflections, crashing because I tried running the game in a place that always works, all the way to the whole thing closing instantaneously when I try selecting a new layout.
My experience with using this god-forsaken configuration of code and imagery has been one of endless torment; I've spent hours lamenting about the pain this piece of utter horseshit has caused me to those who'd listen.
I don't know what I did to this thing to deserve to be shown the absolute worst of this engine for the year I've been working on my game for. I can't even take a look at its source code to see if I can piece together things I'll pick up from alien code to fix obnoxious bugs myself because you cunts have it under lock-and-key for some dumbass reason.
Even updating my install of this engine is a gamble; I remember clear-as-day updating my project from 2019.3.14 to whichever one was most recent at the time, and everything breaking. This time, I got lucky and managed to update to 2020.1.4 with no issue on the surface, except I inadvertently let in a host of other issues that somehow made the editor worse than the older one.
There's little point in even bothering to report a bug because this shit happens so randomly that I could be just working on auto-pilot and the next thing I know Unity's stupid "crash handler" rears its ugly head yet again, or you people are probably too busy adding support for platforms no sane person uses like fucking Chromebooks.
There've been times where it's crashed upwards of three times in the span of 40 minutes of light use.
How is one expected to cough up hundreds of dollars a year to use a "pro" version of this horrid editor when every session of use yields a 50/50 chance that it'll either work like it's supposed to, or break in one way or another?
It's a miracle I even managed to type all of this out in one go, I expected the website to just stop responding entirely once I got past four lines.
Do what you will with my post, I don't care.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? So many things. Here is another...

A developer purposely forged international shipping documents by 'hard-coding' data to get around international shipping restrictions (ex. we can't sell 'Widgets' to Germany...so under the category he would replace the value with 'light bulb'). He was 'under pressure' to make keep the money rolling in no matter what.

We were eventually 'caught', fined over $300,000 (which was better than the $10,000 per offense and we had thousands of offenses).

For this major frack-up, 'Rob' was promoted to manager of the International department, got to travel (including his wife) to several European countries, and eventually obtained a company-paid MBA degree.

'Rob' liked to joke about how he would sometimes have to pinch himself how lucky he was by working for such stupid people (yes, he used the word 'stupid') and how gullible government investigators were.
"All I had to do was say 'its a bug in Windows' or some other kind of nonsense and they believed me."

'Rob' quit 3 months after receiving his MBA degree (again, 100% company paid) and the international department closed due to some potential illegal activity.

!dev

i am so lucky to have a good memory. i am not the best problem solver, but i remember lots of previous solution. being a dev has really help my thought processes though.

tldr; i told my gf i'd get an ass tattoo of her choice if i got a 1500+ on the sat and now i'm nervous because after looking online i can't find a single math question i got wrong.

"Your next computer is not a computer" says Apple. Have you tried connecting your iPad to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor? If you're lucky enough to only use apps that natively support this setup, then more power to you. If not, I encourage you to try it. I made it 30 minutes before I got frustrated and moved back to my laptop.

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

Warning: This is gonna come across as a little cringe/self-pitying, but whatever

Jesus Christ I'm so fucking lonely it literally hurts. I know I should be grateful I have a hobby in coding, also recently I got my first job as a developer (even if I'm overworked and paid shit all with poor job security), but I swear what will eventually kill me will be my own hand cos this empty feeling is unbearable at times.

Also, I'll try to ask this in the most politically correct way possible: how do you single guys in your 20s/30s cope with the lack of females in the industry? I absolutely do not mean this in a "making-unwarranted-advances" sort of way; I just mean that we're biologically wired to desire some form of interaction with the opposite sex (unless you're queer), and this happens naturally in most professions but obviously not engineering/software dev. It's especially difficult when you don't have a big social circle so your job basically becomes your life.

So... For those of you who can relate, what do you do? Do you make an effort to socialize outside work? Or maybe you're lucky enough to work somewhere with a diverse mix of people? Should I blame Zuckerberg for damaging my adolescent brain and turning me into a needy piece of crap?

Just graduated university and got a high paying internship (well, high paying to someone whos never been paid) in my field of chemical engineering, feeling quite lucky

Cant wait to upgrade my PC, it was a beast when I built it in 2012 but nowadays running chrome and android studio is enough to make it commit suicide

Goals for 2019:
Publish my first android app
Learn web development
Become an AWS guru
Not spend all my income on PC parts

Ive watched a bunch of web development crashcourses/trends and (comming from desktop appplication development) omfg what a nightmare mess of confusing stuff but alas i shall prevail or die trying

Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?

I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.

He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.

Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.

So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.

Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!

The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.

The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?

Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.

Everyone has a great story about writing their first line of code when they were under 15 years old, except for me. I got my first computer at a young age, around 11, thanks to my dad's friend who brought the computer along with some CD-ROMs of Tom and Jerry and GTA Vice City. (By the way, I had to wait ages for the game to load, and I was very happy when it finally did.) I spent my childhood playing games. You guys are lucky to have found someone who encouraged you to learn to code. I didn't have internet at that time

Embarrassing screenshare story? Yeah, I've got couple of those.

- Showing one client a VSCode workspace of another client's. I was lucky they didn't escalate or anything.

- YouTube open in PIP mode and accidentally showing that to the higher-ups in company. What made it more embarrassing is that they informed me about it, I thought I was sharing a window not Entire screen.

- WhatsApp open in one window and I accidentally shared it on screen, thinking I wasn't sharing my screen, but I was, and everyone saw my texts with a girl I was "dating" at the time.

- Presenting my entire screen to a client and out of nowhere Epic Games pop up with a notification saying ""Your buddy sent you a message - Ready to start playing?". But that was 11pm so I got off easy.

- Opening sentry to show one thing to the client but they notice many new bugs and I got slammed by my boss for it.

Passed out college this year...
Got a job too (lucky 😀)
Now all juniors are asking me how to prepare for placements... N keeps asking my resume..
And m saying everyone same stuff.. DS and algo is must.. n chk my LinkedIn for resume..
Soon, seems like m gonna tell them join devRant first and then I will say further..
Note: Placement starts in few weeks and they care now on how to prepare for it.. Folks say it's better to start late than never.. but still.. I wud love to help them but asking same questions repeatedly not gonna help them..

I just found out my parents have less than $30 in the bank by the end of each month after all expenses...

We are not living. We are barely surviving....

Every day in my house it is dark and the lights are off. They turn all lights off in order to avoid getting a high electricity bill. I have to use my phone's flashlight as the main source of light in my own house, as if i live in abandoned cottage in the middle of a forest.....

Both my parents are jobless (have been their entire lives). They just borrow money from their family members and grandparents to pay these bills every month. They depended on luck their whole lives. A luck in context of "maybe if i dont work anything at all then a huge pile of money will fall down from the sky!".

So now I, as their son, have to grow up in extreme poverty and fight my way up, because of DUMB, STUPID people. They are good people, but what does being a good person bring if you are fucking stupid and valueless?

I knew i was poor but today i found out i was THIS poor. I had no idea we were THIS much poor. Because today my 4g internet got cut off due to not paying bills. The bill is $30. My dad cant pay it cause he doesnt have $30 in the bank. I was in shock. So i had to pay it

My $8.125 usd an hour backend software engineer + DevOps engineer (2 jobs in 1), is considered as LUXURIOUS SALARY, in the most corrupted country of Europe -- SERBIA 🇷🇸

When i tell the world i make $8 an hour with a computer science degree working as a software engineer, they laugh at me. People mock me "bro even a mcdonalds worker earns $17/hour what are you doing" im doing what i was born into -- born into poverty of a third world shithole country.

With my $8 an hour salary, i am in TOP 3% of the HIGHEST earners in serbia. Can you fucking imagine how miserable lives do people live if this is not even an average salary, but among the ELITE salary? Because the average salary in Serbia, is $3.75 usd an hour, sometimes even less than that.

When people say "its not about luck its about hard work", please, GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.

Go and be born in a shithole third world country. Now on top of that be born in poverty due to poor decisions of your parents. Go ahead and try it. Lets see how hard you fucking have to work to get to the same level compared to someone who was born into for example America, where you get paid 6 figures immediately after graduating computer science. Or on top of that, you're born in a wealthy family in america. Did you work hard to be born in the 1st class freak show or were you LUCKY to be gifted such life?

My whole life i have been fighting to get money and escape this misery due to poor decisions of my parents.

Very ironically, my parents have lived extremely luxurious lives in the 90s. They had 5 cars. 1 huge house with a backyard garage private office private jacuzzi private gym. This house was worth at least 500k in the 90s. Today this house would cost at least 1.5 or 2 million. They went to luxurious travels. Hotels of $5000 per night per person. Literally wasted 45k in 3 days just for hotel. They even GAVE AWAY FOR FREE money to our relatives and cousins, taking them on luxurious vacations for free etc. None of those people appreciated them, none of them came to help them in tough times, everyone forgot about them and abandoned us.

Like i said, my parents are good people, but what does it profit being a good person if you are FUCKING STUPID.

They were extremely LUCKY but their STUPIDNESS has made them broke. I couldn't be THIS much fucking stupid even if i tried hard.

Nobody is coming to save us. No one cares. Its all up to me now. All the pressure and stress and poverty is passed and inherited onto my life now. its up to me to either get rich or end my STUPID bloodline

I am living a very difficult life and no one seems to understand this...

Do anybody remember when i wrote a rant about the IT teacher in my high school?

Few months ago we got the results from final exams! (we have precentage based grades)

Another thing to remember:
You can pick basic or extended version of the every test you take.
Everybody has to get at least 30% on basic exams (they are nessesary for everybody) to graduate from the school. The extended exams give you more points at university and they are not mandatory.
In addition to that extended ones dont have the lower limit

The IT exam has only the extended version (because its not mandator, you pick it yourself). It is pretty easy: just basic algorithms, basic C++ programs and general PC things.

I didnt take the IT class because i thougt i can learn much more at home. My friend took it. He is very good. He uses linux he wants to become a pen tester. I know he is worth getting 100% on that extended IT exam. (We did a lot of projects thogether)

Well... NOBODY GOT MORE THAN 20% on that exam! WTF!

That POS teacher should die in that win xp IT class with all ethernet cables stuck in his ass!

He didnt teach anything useful about algorithms to anybody! And that was the easiest and the most important part on the exam!

In addition to that people had to do few tasks on pc as well! And one of those tasks could been a picture in gimp BUT THE GIMP DIDNT EVEN WORK ON THOSE PC'S!

Algorithms are easy! That son of a twat didnt even understand it himself! That is why im telling everybody in my town to NOT go to that hight school for IT exam!
I dont want anybody to waste their life trying to learn something useful when that fucking bitch dosent understand anything!

That teacher is lucky. My friend got rejected from studing CS on university (due to the shit score) but he at least got accepted to study math.

I hope he will be able to continiue his dev dream.

!dev (maybe slightly)

I went to a CV Workshop organized by my first school. The presenter was the slightly-arrogant/know-it-all/cool type of guy who's a recruiter and also has his own company he runs. The presentation was OK, even though it took longer than announced. However, there were some things that bugged me. He expects everyone somehow to be extraordinary. Granted he works as a recruiter and his clients would like only the cream of the top, but some of the examples he gave from his personal experience, he seemed to give more gravity on other traits of the candidates than their achievements and qualifications (e.g. rejecting a candidate because she had posted a photo of her clubbing on Facebook). Also, somehow he judges candidates based on their parents profession. Lucky me that I fall into the category he dislikes. Now the fun part (sorry for the long post):

Next week there's a career day. I sent my CV as soon as I got the mail and then I also phoned the person in charge (as per the instructions). Yesterday on the workshop it was said we should resend our CVs by tomorrow on another mail? No problem you may think, but that said recruiter will take a look on them and that means I will have to rework mine just to make sure it is to his liking. I'm no fan of writing mission statements, nor trying to guess what my qualities (aka soft skills) are because what I think I am doesn't mean I actually am.

So now, I'm in a dilemma. Just send the CV as is or get a mental breakdown just so to please that person?
Thanks everyone for your patience and time, I just wanted to pump some steam out me...

After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.

During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.

After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.

After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...

Stackoverflow(ed)!!

Lucky to see this today.
Must say, the very next page refresh the site was up.

Don't know if it was really a maintenance or just an alternative message in some cases.

Had this been continued for some more time then many tasks' dev completion dates would have got affected. 😬

Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.

But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.

But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?

I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....

There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code

Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....

But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)

I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....

Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.

Just..... Ffs.

Also, sorry for the typos.

Got 8 tickets today and 7 of them we already done in production. Are all PMs lazy or am I just lucky??

I just had such a forfilling moment.

Normally, i often (force myself) go to bed at night, after i worked on a project of mine, with these thought saying "oh man i wanted to get that feature done today" or "i want to finish this and that part of my code".I am sure everyone of you knows the feeling, when your brain communicates that you are just not done for today.

Today it was different. I got a project of mine working in it's first state, where i put much heart, love and time in.Just a few minutes before i finished for today i got my server responding the expected numbers(some kind of pin-code). It's a very easy system: Someone(at the time only me and my debug mode :3) on a android phone request a verification which is checked and processed by the server. The server creates a random six-digit number, returns it encoded to the client and sends an email to the user, which currently sends it in plain text(shame on me).
Yeah, the user enters the number and voilà
And of course, all the Pincodes can only be used once.
I got to bed with this feeling of luck and succes.

I hope tomorrow is going to be a productive day!

I am so lucky right now.

Have a good day everyone!

Anyone else have a background in something unrelated to their current job? I have an MA in religion and public life, got a job as a test analyst and slowly ended up maintaining assets for our apps. Some days I feel very inspired and lucky I got into this industry, and some days I feel totally out of place. I don't know if I should just throw myself into it, study more on my own and make myself comfortable here or just move on and go back to grad school or something.

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

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

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

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

Is it OK to punch a game dev who codes stupid numeric bugs?

So my wife got into Stardew Valley, that admittedly awesome comfort game farming simulator.
She went pretty far in the game, and found some item that was supposed to highly increase the damage she could inflict onto cute little monster thingies.
It didn't work as intended.
Since equipping the piece of shit all her hits did 0 damage. She tossed the item away but the problem persisted. And on and on...
She took to the googles to try and find some explanation, and apparently that is a fairly common bug for mobile devs.
Then she called in the big guns (that is how I'm calling myself in this case, you will see why).

Apparently there is some buggy piece of shitcode somewhere in the game with a numerical insecure routine that overflows the attack modifier. I.e. if it was supposed to increase from 1.990 to 2.010, it actually went all the way down to -0.4.
She was lucky her attacks weren't increasing the monsters' HP.

We found a forum post where some dude said that he managed to edit the game save file and reset the negative-value attack increase modifier variable. Seems easy enough at first, but my wife uses iOS. Nothing is ever so straightforward with apple stuff.

We did get to the save file, she emailed it to me (the file has no extension and no line breaks in it, so we facepalm'd on a couple attempts at editing it directly).
I finally manage to get it into my personal 11-yo laptop... that won't open a single line file that big.

Cue the python terminal. Easy enough to read the file into a string var and search for the buggy XML tag. Edit the value and overwrite into a new file. Send it back to her by email. Figure out how to overwrite the file in iOS.

Some tense moments while the game reloads... and it works!!!! Got some serious hubby goodwill points here.
Srsly, this troubleshoot process is not for technophobes. It is out of reach to pretty much every non-techy user.

And now back to the original question: If I ever manage to find the kid who coded a game-breaking numerically unsafe routine and shipped it as if every test in the planet had waved it bye-bye, can I punch them? Or maybe buy them a beer, let's see how I get to cash that hubby goodwill tonight :)

I'm extremely lucky that I had parents who encouraged it. My mother was a programmer herself, working with punch tape.

They brought the family home a BBC and let me fiddle with it. When we had a PC they let me get Visual Basic (ew) which got me really interested in programming.

This is not a happy rant...

Got a new well paying job. Moving up in life. But my wife is not in the same place... She had quite a few career struggles and just lost her current job... It wasn't even a job she went to school for, just whatever she could find...

Now she's getting quite depressed. Luckily she's not envious at me, but does keep saying how lucky she is to have me.

I really want to help her somehow, but this is really a thing I just don't know how... And it just looks like she's not handling it too well. Joking about suicide and crying about being useless... She also keeps saying that all she can do now is be a housewife. We did seek out help for her. But still... I really want to give her better support. I feel useless here.

So... Here we go again.
For the ones who doesn't know I'm a cnc worker / future .nc programmer ...
Today because my machine broke I finaly whent to the (cam) programmers den to learn, even was lucky because my usual programmer was starting a new piece from scratch...
But my fuking boss must really not like me... I'm the most promising programmer between the noobs but everyone else is already programming (talking about the ones that learned in the last months)
Today because I was learning, got fucked again, was expelled and ordered to do the work of a rookie while he (who has half of my company time) would program the work for me...

So... I always do overtime because others don't (and someone /me must stay till the last coworker lives)
Cant learn how to program... Because shit. while others are taking time from the old ones, while I can learn only by watching...
Have a burn out (it's getting worst) because of the time I only slept 3 /4 hours to do overtime while I was finishing my course...
Oh and flunked two times because I had to chose between overwork or getting fired (my boss didn't want me to finish the course, don't know why)

Didn't make a complaint because I would get lots of people fired (basicly there are legal and security violations behing committed, if I made a complaint most of the tools we use, chains, magnets to lift cargo and such would have to be thrown away... Plus lots of other tools that don't obay regulation... And there would be a heavy fine for every worker that does overtime... That means that half the staff would have to be fired because the company would stop for months)

So... I'm stuck... Must wait till I burn out, fire myself or call the authorities and fuck such a good company...
Only because two bosses have problems with me... (my dad works in the company and there is lots of envy towards him, probably because he came after and got a place they would never get ...)

Many of you commented on my previous rant regarding my first ever freelance gig that I would definitely be back with even more to rant... here I am.

What was supposedly a 1 to 1.5 month long project became one that is stretching beyond 3, if lucky, else 4 months long. Requirements and scope evolving more complex and with variations more intense than pokemon evolutions.

I fucked up. I signed a contract that nobody would have. I didn't plan or protect my ass enough to prevent such shit from happening. I severely underestimated and hence under quoted. This is one of the nightmare situations a freelancer could be in (in my opinion). I mean it could only get better... Right? I'm preparing myself for one hell of a payment at the end of the project. Brace yourself, payment is hopefully coming as fast as the number of seasons it took for winter to come in GoT.

On the bright side, I'm currently working on a new project with a client that is indeed much much better than this first. I mean he is a nice person and communications thus far has been nothing short of great.

I guess it's good to start with your expectations rock bottom, that way nothing else can be worse, I hope.

The worst technology i had to deal with was probably a piece of hardware. It was a mini-pc combined with sensors and digital IOs and thus, it should have been able to do process control all by itself.

At that time, there was hardware that did that, but this one had an intel cpu, windows embedded and some powerful libraries pre-installed.

Sounds good, didn't work. The thing was so unstable and buggy and crashed on everything. The sensor part had lots of parameters and the right order was trial and error, documentation didn't match behavior, fixes promised but never delivered.

Lucky for us: it was just a demokit, no real project.

I still remember it with a smile. We got in contact to that company at a trade fair and they had most impressive booth. I also remember their companies image movie from their homepage with developers in dark labs with holographic monitors and the boss in his shiny bright office as he looked out of the window and quoted a famous german author.

Hilarious and sad. :-)

!dev
I was so tired of work last week and weather was so good I ended up in a bar.
People were so nice there so I got there second day in a row.
I met new nice people and cute female bartender who laughed from my jokes.
Was to drunk and tried so much to make her laugh that l forgot to get her number.
Got there next day asked bartender for her shifts, turned out it was last day of her work, she moved out from city for at least a year. So I got drunk again, and so on 5 days in a row.
Well that’s my life. Lucky me... again.
Karma is so funny I can’t laugh for some time anymore.

Just got an email from HR asking everyone to put in leave for Christmas by TODAY.
Christmas is like a month away...
Before this email, there is no similar announcement whatsoever informing we have to put in leave by certain date.
It's lucky I checked my email (because I basically ignore it unless someone comes and tells me he's gonna send me something through it). It's luckier I got my Christmas plan sorted.
But... What if I'm still figuring out what to do for Christmas? Is this reasonable?

So my office tends to have seating rearrangements every few months due to the amount of people increasing in the company. In the 1 year that we moved to this office, I have been lucky to not have moved seats drastically.

Today though my team got moved to a new area. The previous area was already pretty small, the new area is even smaller where dual monitors JUST fit on the desk. With more people being hired by the month, there's going to be no more room again. I really wish the company would look at just hiring actual talented staff rather than hiring just to meet demands. Again, it's all about quality, not quantity!!

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

i accidentally ran the migrations and got lucky it failed. lost the blog table but client had the backups. could have lost the whole database.

got a new laptop today. corporate, so hey, there's your Win11.
i still recall how i could not believe what crap they released when i saw Vista for the first time. the tranisiton from 7 to 10 wasn't pleasant but ok.
but the switch from 10 to 11? WTF. half a setting is gone and i can only be lucky it's 2 years past release so some stuff that was missing is re-implemented back. some stuff can be fixed with 3rd party tools but hey - it can also be loaded with malware so no-go in work environment.

can't wait for what pile of horseshit is the 12 going to be with their "Ai bUilT iNTo OpERaTIng sYSem"

How do you find motivation to learn new things? I am not saying regarding new technologies or frameworks.
Other stuffs.

I am 26 and I am starting to continue University but I need to learn for TOEFL and SAT. (Long story short, I dropped out because I had to move to USA, and it was choosing USA or University.)

I am working as Software Developer here in USA, but I am preparing to study in University. IT is kinda difficult to find a job here without a degree and I got lucky that I have one.

I start learning for TOEFL, easy stuffs. Just learning how to prepare for it. After 30 minutes or less I zone out. Start thinking about other stuffs that are not related to anything. Daydreaming.....

I am thinking I might have ADHD, but still it is just a though and I do not want to go to doctor and get diagnosed.
Or I am just lazy and kinda depressed that I do not have motivation for anything.

So, I am asking you dear devranters, how do you find motivation for university?

The default font was different between development and production. The default font was never selected for the application. It has been this way for years. I found and fixed this. Now a huge amount of UI issues are just gone. People are like "Why was this never set?" Internally I am saying "Because they got lucky and never thought about it in the past."

Other people's code...

Finally looked at the client who overbuilt his WordPress site that I'd gladly build him a new dedicated custom site for $150k and 12 months.

Even if he says he'll take the offer I have no intention of helping this person. Every time I say edits will be done in two days, he spends the next two days sending me emails with more edits to do on top. Today alone I received 78 emails from the client, 46 from the PM which were forwards of other edits. The entire project was handled wrong from the start and no one has the balls to tell him he needs a better solution than WordPress or what our agency can provide. We have a few hundred clients, he's lucky to get one week turn around time on anything more than copy changes. He wants form functionality changes weekly because he's always got a new idea, the current form has over 30 fields for users to fill out, all required, and he's always asking for more.

Built a Svelte app year ago and it's broken today.

This is not the case with Windows. You can still run a app built on 1999 today.

Opened an issue on their repo requesting that they should add backwards compatibility.

No later than 5 seconds. It got closed and locked with this comment,

"Welcome to development when you don't write your entire stack yourself by hand.

Please open helpful bug reports or don't open any at all."

This is what every FOSS project got as defense. They think since they work for free, they can do what the fuck they want.

The defense is false because they put their OSS project on their resume and in return they get hired for full time work or consulting.

I fucking sue you Svelte if I had money to hire expensive lawyers. This time you are just lucky.

Just a short story of me and how things can go right after so many years.

This was my first job. Only two other programmers in the company of like 10 employers.
First one is some one who stopped learning like 10 years ago. Winforms Ftw huh..
The other one was my boss who was really a pro but died not too long ago.
Because of this I got the responsibility for all his projects and the future ones. Beside that I'm also employed for our customer support. So pretty much to do here. Even new stuff I never heard of I have to learn asap now. Of course I have learned pretty much here. But I have reached the point where I have reached the maximum. I can't really learn much more. The salary is a joke.
But my other boss does not really care. Emotionally he has the feelings of a stick. No joke. This is going on even before the dead.
Many coworkers just gave up or got even sick of here.

But now I'm taking my consequences. I was looking for a new job now.
I was really lucky there.
Wrote 3 job application and even got invited 3 times. 2 were declined (luckily). The third one was a dream. For the people, the bonuses etc.
Now I'm waiting to sign the contract and the cancelation of my current one. The salary is a joke. Not chance of increasing.

I am just beating around the bush since I started this project, hoping that one day I got lucky and found the shiny solution.

/*sigh*/

I got very lucky to catch this bug before pushing to prod. SO answer code

not sure if a rant
In march i was an intern in company, in june i got hired, then everyone else was fired and today i became project lead and im tasked with hiring new people... Don't know if extremly lucky or just PM is fucked up xD

I worked at my previous job about 8 years (hired out of school) and wasn't actively looking for a new one; I had a lot of freedom and liked my boss and colleagues, but the pay was mediocre and I was under a lot of pressure because I was the sole architect, engineer, and programmer for a good number of important applications.

Anyway, my brother-in-law told me that his employer was looking for a developer and that previous candidates fell through, and that the pay was a lot more and they're good about raises (which was like pulling teeth at my then-current job) so I applied and went for an interview.

They basically gave me an offer on the spot and wanted me to start in 2 weeks. I told them that it would be hard since I'd basically be cutting my boss's Achilles by leaving so soon and suddenly (just hiring someone would take at least a month, not counting getting applicants), but they were adamant, as the position had been vacant for a few months at that point. I got them to agree to 3 weeks and pulled the trigger, but offered to help out in my old position for a few months cause we had a big project in progress I was leading.

So the new job is great: it's a much younger office and I'm having more fun and there's a lot less pressure. Meanwhile, at the old job, the project I was leading got scrapped and the asked me to do other odds and ends until, after screwing something up I basically told them I'm done. They got a new guy quickly due to a lucky turn of events, but he couldn't pick up where I left off on a lot of projects: they're going to rewrite one because of it. My one colleague still likes to point out that I left without them having knowledge of my code (besides that I always said I'd answer questions, plus it's been 6 months now and my code is all on a TFS instance they all have access to).

I still feel a bit guilty even though I have no reason to.

My best CS teacher experience? Well, I've only taken one computer science college class(dual enrolled while in high school) but I think that I got the best possible teacher for that class. He wasn't a full time teacher, he was just part time from another company and was teaching Java.

It was great to have a teacher who was not a teacher by profession and actually knew the industry. Again, this was my only CS class, but I think that, from stories I've heard, I got lucky.

Bruh, tbh, this is kind of going to be a sad rant.

tl;dr: LEETCODE THE FUCK UP AND GET INTO FANG.

For all the people out there, just stop fucking around with small companies/startups early in your career. Leetcode up and get into FANG. Once you have that validation, these startups will be much easier to get into.
I have gone through this first hand.

After amazing on-sites with multiple startups, where everyone said that I'm the kind of person they're looking for (background wise: CS grad, startup experience, 2+ YOE as a fullstack Dev using Java, py, js and all the famous frameworks you could name), they rejected me.

Heck, a company flew me out to SF from Seattle where I think I had had my best on-site ever. They rejected me today. The sad part is that I actually for once really believed in the mission of the company.

At this point, I have wasted so much time reading about the xyz startup that's about to disrupt pqr industry (to prepare for behavioral/cultural interview), practiced for such shitty interviews like pair programming etc., worked on numerous take home projects (completing all those "bonus" parts) and deploying it and spending money out of my own pocket for that.

I'M JUST FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.

I have given mock interviews with ex bosses and friends and they told me that I'm good. Heck, I even solved a LC medium in 20 minutes (optimal solution) but still got rejected.

I'm kind of writing this for myself and people who are on the same boat as I am:
Get into FANG and then think about other shit. STOP looking for smaller companies and being scared of getting your ass kicked by a Leetcode interview. Any company who would not take LC interviews will prefer someone from FANG unless you're lucky as fuck. You don't want your career to be based on luck, man. That shit's not gonna take you anywhere.

So I had got a company called me a week ago and scheduled an interview via Google Meet which was supposed to happen yesterday in the afternoon. I checked multiple times and was convinced that they didn't send me any invitation or any sort of URL to me as they told me they will send me on the day I will be interviewed.

Yesterday I didn't get any URL, I request the URL and asked them whether the interview is cancelled. They saw the messages I sent them but never reply. Until this noon, I receive a long message that they suggesting to put the blame on me for 'being Gen-z bad attitude worker who didn't show up in the interview and not responsible '. I was confused. Why would they make such a statement as yesterday hours before the interview I was sending them messages and emailing them continuously asking for the URL to the interview session in Google meet. I can't join the interview without the URL obviously.

In my defence, I did follow up with them just to get the link to the interview and get ghosted or silent treatments. As strange as this sound, magically their colour was revealed to me after they put the blame on me for their negligence.

Lastly, it is not a heavy chore to admit mistakes. Lucky enough for me that they revealed every plausible red flag to me before joining their team. I definitely do not want to work for a company that put the blame on me whenever they commit a mistake.

Have any developer here ever gone on strike?

I've been at my company for two years, and know engineers that have been here for 3 years that have never got a single salary raise. A lot of the engineers are afraid to step up to management because of their visas literally being in the company's hands (lucky I'm not one of them).

I'm sick of it. I'm sick of my company playing ring around the rosy with raises and treating engineers like we're not human. Treating us just as cash cows. Yes, it's a business, but if sales, data science, and PMs can be treated with respect, we should as well.

Incoming rant.

I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?

I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.

I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.

Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.

I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.

I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.

I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.

I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.

This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.

I have nothing to complain, but have something to say to people who got a job: you are lucky ... Do whatever it takes to make your work done

Had to fight demons to unclog this fucking toilet 🚽🪠🪠🪠

Shit so Huge the toilet got stuck. Water couldnt flush from my Extremely Big Fat Shit. I could also see the big shit i shitted. It was so huge and fat like its a Python🐍

While plunging it stank SO bad. I suffocated from the 6-hour decomposed shit that was stuck there. God it was bad. U guys are lucky to not have seen this monster💩

But i succeeded. I flushed it. Now its as clean as the bumholes of corporate people and hiring managers

My manager had someone else manage me for my whole time at the company so far. Nearly two years now. Anything I’d come to him with, he’d direct me to this other person.

Fair enough, dude’s really good and I learn a lot from him. I see why they trust him with so much. I think he’s a genius. I’ll never be that good. Embarrassed I’m only a few years his junior. Wonder why he’s okay with being a manager for employee pay. Don’t think about it much, normal corporate BS.

Well it got way more “normal” when his ass got laid off without notice. Feel terrible. Him and 70% of my branch’s full timers. Wonder how I got so lucky. Everyone’s gone. We barely have enough people to do a standup. They all had 5+ years on their belts minimum. Only the contractors are left.

Manager emergency meets with me. Tells me all his best staff are gone and I am now the only front end guy on the team. He tells me he is not confident in the fact I am responsible for all of the old guys work and he is worried. He thinks I can’t do it cause he thinks I suck. Fuck me man.

My manager is pissing himself realizing he has lost the only people keeping HIS job for him. He has no clue my skill level. He sees my PR’s take a bit longer to merge, yet doesn’t realize I asked that friend of mine who was managing me to critique my code a bit harder, mentorship if you will, so we’d often chat about how to make the code better or different ways of approaching problems from his brain, which I appreciated. He has seen non-blocking errors come through in our build pipelines, like a quota being reached for our kube cluster (some server BS idfk, all I know is I message this Chinese man on slack when I get this error and he refreshes the pods for me) which means we can only run a build 8x in one day before we are capped. Of all people, he should be aware of this error message and what is involved with fixing it but he sees it and nope, he reaches out to me (after the other guy had logged out already, of course) stating my merged code changes broke the build and reverts it before EOD. Next day, build works fine. He has the other guy review my PR and approve, goes on assuming he helped me fix my broken code.

Additionally, he’s been off the editor for so long this fool wouldn’t even pass an intro to JavaScript course if he tried. He doesn’t know what I’m doing because HE just doesn’t know what I’m doing. Fuck me twice man.

I feel awful.

The dude who got fired has been called in for pointless meetings TO REVIEW MY CODE still. Like a few a week since he was laid off. When I ask my manager to approve my proposals, or check to verify the sanity of something (lots of new stuff, considering I’m the new manager *coughs*) he tells me he will check with him and get back to me (doesn’t) or he tells me to literally email him myself, but not to make any changes until he signs off on them.

It’s crazy cause he still gets on me about the speed of stuff. Bro we got NOTHING coming from top down because we just fired the whole damn corp and you have me emailing an ex-employee to verify PATCH LEVEL CHANGES TO OUR FUCKING CODE.

GET ME OUT

Got this software engineering job set up once I graduate, honestly I think I was lucky, but on to the rant. I'm realizing that I didn't study core CS knowledge 1/2 as much as I should have (c++based). I need this core knowledge for my job, so how can I best prepare with the remaining months? Friends said to just code something, but I have no idea what I would make.

I don't want to be the new guy that just had a nice resume and good extracurriculars, I want to get interested in code! I want to love this field, but have no clue where to start or get the motivation. I want to swap my video game hours with useful ones. Thanks fellow devs.

My intern broke the dev and test environment, now I got to fix them... Lucky me

Got kind of lucky. Previously worked in the company I am at now as an analyst. I then left to freelance/ try starting my own business. After a while I then decided to go back working full time as I got tired of always being broke. Applied for a position and interviewed, then told I was just waiting on the approval to start from the execs as every position as 3 rounds of approvals all the way to the VP’s of this massive organization(which is why they struggle to find decent talent as well since no one wants to wait 3 months to hear back). Well after 2 months of still freelancing the hiring manager calls me and says the position fell through due to a company wide hiring freeze.

Fast forward 6 months of still freelancing, the hiring manager calls for a different more senior position to ask if I was still interested in working for the company. Gave me an offer which I accepted and took 3 weeks to get started.

I've started to get more into the TOR idea over the last couple of weeks.

I know I'm way to "non protective" of my privacy but changing would mean I'd have to break many habits and stop using things I'm used to.

A couple years back (I guess it was in like 8th grade or so) I had a presentation in German (my first language) for an extra mark. It was about tor. In the process of researching all of it I learned quite a lot about it. All of this knowledge has stuck to me the whole time, unused.

Fast forward to today, I've finally decided to use the couple of bitcoins I have (like 15€ or so) from my home mining experiment to rent a vps for a tor relay. First, I was lucky enough to find a service provider that accepts bitcoin for a 3€. They advertised "Fair use Traffic", later found out, after committing for three months since I was like "yeah... will be fine", in the customer panel there is a graph that shows me that I have used x% of 1.5 TB... I guess the customer support will get an email from me asking what "Fair use" exactly means... But that's fine... Oh... And ipv6 wasn't a thing to be found...

To wrap it up... I've now got a 2 weeks old little tor relay <3

(I didn't wanted to put it on my main vps where I have 200mbit guaranteed at unlimited for 5€ a month since that's where I have my mail server running and a hidden service for my next cloud)

#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails

Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end

While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)

Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request

While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!

I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests

For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me

Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements

While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8

My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working

I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

I had an interesting experience looking for a job.. took me two months and the last days were the busiest.
After almost a month and 3 meetings with one company I was made an offer but that same day I got called from another company for a first interview.
I was already happy with the proposal I had so I directly told the other company that I am about to accept in company X and I have a week to decide.. so they arranged an interview with me in 2 days. On the day of the interview I did all 3 standard interviews with them one after the other and at the last one we were already talking salary.
As I already had something to compare to, I could negotiate.. and I did. I ended up working for the second company even though they offered me a less money.. they just seemed a lot nicer to work for.

My question is: did it help me that I told them about my offer from company X (it's a big company too)?
And can I advise others to follow that example? As in.. get one offer and then get more using the first as leverage to get a better deal?

Or was I just lucky?

Where have i been?
school > home > school > home > school > home
every day for 7 days a week.
Learning the Java Android API just finished learning about checkboxes and switches
my first school i started in when i was little got hit with rona (covid)
my sister's school 4th grade class got hit with rona (the whole class tested positive except for my sister's friend which tested negative Lucky by a strand of hair. if he wasn't in the morning annoucements then he would be sick)
didn't shut down the school to at least clean or did contact tracing just resumed normal work stuff
wearing a mask everyday to get a face breakout
the bathrooms and schools itself are getting damaged by devious licks which includes stealing and or damaging school property even taking bathroom toilets and soap / towel dispensers and selling or using them hmmm anyone else have anything thats worse than mine?

Hi devRant. Wanna rant with some shit about my company. First some good parts. I work in company with 600+ employees. It's one of the best companies in my region. They provide you with any kind of sweets(cookies, coffee, tea, etc), any hardware you need for your work (additional monitor, more ram, SSDs, processor, graphics card, whatever), just about everything you need to make your work faster/comfortable. Then, we have regular reviews (every 6 months), which rise salary from $0.75 to $1.5 per hour. (I live in poor country, where $15 per hour makes your more solvent then 70% of people, so having 100-200 bucks increase every half year is quite good rise).
The resulting increase of review depends on how team leader and project manager are satisfied with my work. And here starts the interesting (e.g. the shit comes in).
1) Seniority level in our company applies depending on the salary you have. That't right. It does not depend on your skill. Except the case when you're applying to vacancy. So if you tell that you're senior dev and prove it during interview, you'll have senior's salary. This is fine if you're just want money. But not if you love programming (as me) because of reasons bellow.
2) You don't need to have lots of programming experience to be a team leader. You can even be a junior team leader (but thanks god, on research projects only). You start from leading research projects and than move to billable if the director of research department is satisfied with your leading skills.
As a consequence our seniors are dumb AF. This pieces me off the most. Not all of them. A would say half of them are real pro guys, but the rest suck at programming (as for a senior). They are around junior/middle level.
I can understand if guy has $15 rate but still remains junior dev. That's fine. But hell no, he is treated as a middle, because his rate is $10+ now! And his mind has priority over middles and juniors. Not that junior have lof of good tougths but sometimes they do.
I'm lucky to work yet on small project so I'm the only dev, and so to speak TL for myself. But my colleague has this kind of senior team leader who is dumb AF. They work on ASP.NET Core project, the senior does not even know how to properly write generic constraints in C#. Seriously.
Just look at this shit. Instead of

MyClass<T> where T: class {}

he does this:

abstract class EnsureClass {}
MyClass<T> where T: EnsureClass {}

He writes empty abstract class, forces other classes to inherit it (thus, wasting the ability to inherit some useful class) just to ensure that generic T is a class. What thA FUCK is wrong with you dude?! You're a senior dev and you don't even know the language you're codding in.
And this shit is all over the company. Every monkey that had enough skill just to not be fired and enough patience to work 4-5 years becomes a senior! No-fucking-body cares and reviews your skill increase. The whole review is about department director asking TL and PM question like "how is this guy doing? is he OK or we should fire him?" That's the whole review. If TL does not like you, he can leave bad review and the company will set you on trial. If you confront TL during this period, pack your suitcase. Two cases of such shit I know personally. A good skilled guy could not just find common language with his TL and got fired. And the cherry on top of the case is that thay don't care about the fired dev's mind. They will only listen to reviewer. This is just absurd and just boils me down.
That's all i wanted to say. Thanks for your attention.

The worse bugs ain't those that show up on your terminal<If you got those kinda bugs-you're lucky>. But are those that don't show up at your terminal, but still give you the worse version of production.

Game developers:
Don't you always have dreamed with making a game like Flappy Bird that is so simple but gets so popular and you become millionaire?
2nd question: why do you think that this game was the lucky one that got so much fame? Because there are thousands of other games like it.

Just got assigned a ticket from a client, who described their issue with a very informative note that says:
[site name] keeps timing out

This is actually probably related to another issue I'm trying to fix (though I'm sure client doesn't know that), so if I'm lucky I'll be able to figure this out. But it seriously peeves me when clients give us a four word generic problem and expect us to just wave our magic wand to fix it

I'm curious about where have you learned coding? I had learned Java most of my life, in a university course since the age of 15. It was a special programming course for high school students and out of 6000 students who applied I was one of the lucky 50 that got in after 3 huge tests in logical thinking and math. This was the path I took to have this job now as a full time software engineer. I'm interested to know how all of you guys learned programming and when have you started. Feel free to tell about apps or programs you use as I'd like to further increase my knowledge in other languages too ☺

So few days ago I've installed Mojave from clean setup (Hackintohsh) and works smooth as butter, and today I woke up in the morning and sat down to work, my pc was running on windows so I restarted it, there was some updates to be installed but what a heal will install them later, so the pc started booting in Mojave, usually takes few seconds but this time it got stuck on the loading screen, so rebooted again and this time added -v boot parameter to clover to see whats going on, got some errors about IGPU (had to use intel's gpu.. thanks Nvidia .!.), did few googling some suggested using -disablegfxfirmware but that didn't work, so rebooted again.. hoping I would get more info, guess what? windows 10 was in hibernation (possibly because there were updates to be installed on boot) and that somehow prevented mojave from using the ssd i guess? not sure exactly, so In the end I got very lucky cause if I didn't read the message I would have reinstalled the mojave and loose a day at work... politely f*** you windows updates!

So I'm receiving messages from recruiters weekly (no flex intended), half of which are not even close to what my profile describes. And I got really sick of it so sometimes it takes at least a week for me to respond if I decide you're actually worth a reply (looking at you, automated half-assed messages that didn't even notice I know nothing about Javascript).
The thing is that some of the more useful messages are actually quite interesting and match my ambitions and desires quite well. But I like my current job and love the project I'm working on... Am I the only one who wants to stay "loyal" to their employer and their project, at least for as long as the contract is valid?? I really want to be there when delivering the final product and test it myself but it sometimes means declining very interesting job offers.

How do people decide its the right moment you have to leave for a new job if you're satisfied with what you have currently? I'm graciously rejecting interesting offers in the hope that they respect my "loyalty" towards my current project and stay reachable to me when I need them later on (I've already had some that would hit me up after a year asking me how it went and if everything was still okay). Is this something that happens often or am I just lucky with those specific recruiters??

Like yes, I can surely use the money I'd receive from a better job. But I am still learning a lot on my current job and I am positive this kind of job offers will keep coming over the years (and hopefully even more so because I keep getting more experienced). I'm also not the top candidate for some of these offers if I may say so myself, so is it important to take what you can get or is it better to stick to what you're comfortable with?

I think for this one i had higher expectations which let to me being disappointed. Was a fun experience nonetheless.

So i am junior dev in a bigish company and i am pretty comfortable where i am, its challenging enough and fun enough. Pay is fine nothing out of ordinary but perks are nice.

But this job is the one i got out of college and it did feel that i got really lucky as i was preparing for leetcode and what not but the interviewer was pretty linient and asked me technical questions out of my cv. The questions were mostly about what i used and all felt quite easy and i was offered a role with a decent salary. Since then i have been working and learning and thing been pretty stable.

Recently i was hinted at a promotion by my manager so i have been working towards that. I have in the past got a lot of messages on LinkedIn from different recruiters but never tried because i was satisfied with my job and my visa condition made it a little tricky to hope jobs ( i work in eu as a non eu citizen). But i did fantasize that if i could just get an interview with a decent company and clear the technical round without much preparing and get offered a decent package just to inflate my ego and maybe use that to increase my current package.

So i got another message on LinkedIn and a startup was looking for a developer and i gave it a go. I asked the recruiter what is the expected compensation and he instead asked me. I said i want a big enough increase tk even consider leaving my comfortable spot, so i am looking for more than 35-40% increase If they can then i am willing to try. The recruiter said that their range is between 25-35 but can try 40 if the interviews goes well.

I went ahead with it and gave the interview, the first one was simple and the next one was supposed to be technical and was told its not leetcode but i will have to implement a feature into a project live on the video call. Which i did with some success, i was quite clumsy but i was able to do it with tests passing sl i guess that was fine.

I was really happy that i didnt prepare much and still passed a tech interview. I was recently told about the offer, its around 40% more than my current but there are no yearly bonus or even health insurance. If i consider the bonus and health insurance then the offer becomes like 20% increase. Considering i am already expecting a promotion and some salary increase this offer seems really lack luster.

Just wanted to talk about all this, can you get a really big jump generally or is it only 15-25 ?