My job is so f**king unbelievable.

I'll try to sum it up by first telling you about the folks I work with:

First, there is this supermodel wanna-be chick. Yeah, okay, she is pretty hot, but damn is she completely useless.
The girl is constantly fixing her hair or putting on make-up.
She is extremely self-centred and has never once considered the needs or wants of anyone but herself.
She is as dumb as a box of rocks, and I still find it surprising that she has enough brain power to continue to breathe.

The next chick is completely the opposite. She might even be one of the smartest people on the planet.
Her career opportunities are endless, and yet she is here with us. She is a zero on a scale of 1 to 10.
I'm not sure she even showers, much less shaves her "womanly" parts.
I think she might be a lesbian, because every time we drive by the hardware store she moans like a cat in heat.

But the jewel of the crowd has got to be the fucking stoner. And this guy is more than just your average pothead.
In fact, he is baked before he comes to work, during work, and I'm sure after work.
He probably hasn't been sober any time in the last ten years, and he's only 22.
He dresses like a beatnik throwback from the 1960's, and to make things worse, he brings his big f**king dog to work.
Every f**king day I have to look at this huge Great Dane walk around half-stoned from the second-hand smoke.
Hell, sometimes I even think it's trying to talk with its constant bellowing.
Also, both of them are constantly hungry, requiring multiple stops to McDonald's and Burger King, every single f**king day.

Anyway, I drive these dicks around in my van and we solve mysteries and s**t.

I love listening to music and reading on the train every morning. On my way to the station, I get a text, "DUDE. ***** committed suicide."

He was a good friends of ours from high school. I remember once he got a few of us to go caving on homecoming since none of us had dates. He'd never finish a candy bar; would give half of everything away. He once drove out to California to try to start over; lasted three days and came home, but through a girl he met he was in Hawaii for a year.

He lived a lot of life, and he had a heart of gold.

I didn't get out my ebook on my phone. I didn't even put my headphones in.

I had lost another close friend from University while I was overseas. I remember being in the city art gallery when I got the news. I walked right out to the harbor, fell to my knees and cried. I always thought one day I'd be home and could shoot the shit with my old roommate. Now he was gone, and the only thing I had from him was a text from 10 days before saying, "I haven't been doing too well, but thanks for asking."

I'm back in another software engineering job, on the train to an 8-to-5, shakin it for the money. I couldn't read on the commute. I just looked out that window as the train car descended into the subway, and thought to myself, "What am I even doing anyway?"

I'm in my mid-30s; too young to be losing people like this.

I'm sorry man. I wish we had caught up sooner. I wish you weren't gone, but I know you're at peace.

TL;DR: One of my coworkers is a genius engineer and doesn't get as much recognition as he deserves, whereas another extremely mediocre engineer on the team gets praised for his crappy applications.

We have one engineer on our team (let's call him Hank) who started with me at the company when we were interns, and man is he a freaking genius. I swear, you could give this guy any language/library/framework, and he'll be fluent in it in less than a week. He's singlehandedly written two of our most complex applications by himself, and has a great sense of UX as well. All of his apps look fantastic.

The problem is, I feel like he doesn't get anywhere near as much recognition as he should. I try to talk him up to our manager, and our manager knows that Hank is smart, but he also overlooks him for promotions and praise because he's a little spacey (he's got quite the case of ADD) and doesn't speak up very often. He's got trouble focusing sometimes, but when he's in the zone, he can write an exponentially better and more complex application in 2 days than some of our other engineers can do in 4 months.

For example, we have another engineer on our team (let's call him Phil,) and the entire team has their heads so far up Phil's butt that I'm surprised they haven't suffocated yet. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy. He's great with the more basic aspects of our job, but when it comes to writing an application, he has no idea what he's doing, and he takes months to write something that should have taken him days. Then when he finally releases it, it's riddled with bugs. But everybody praises and bows down to him for it. "Oh Phil, this app is amazing. You're a genius, you deserve to be a Lead." Then we have Hank sitting quietly at his desk, banging out his 3rd big application of the month, and people say "Eh, nobody's going to use those apps anyway. He's wasting time." And I'm standing there thinking, "You asshats, we already have a solution for the app that Phil wrote, and the entire company is already using it. It's exponentially better, why did you let him waste time writing this when there's already an existing solution?!"

Oh well, I hope Hank gets some recognition soon. He certainly deserves it.

My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

When I was in the army I wasn't officially a dev. But one commander needed someone to develop a bunch of stuff and couldn't get a dev officially, so I ended up as his "assistant", which was an awesome job with about 60% time spent on software development.

Except I wasn't an official developer, so I wasn't afforded many of the privileges developers get, like a slightly more powerful machine, a copy of Visual Studio, or an internet connection. In this environment you couldn't even download files and transfer the to your computer without a long process, and I couldn't get development tools past that process anyway.

So I was stuck with whatever dev tools I had pre-installed with Windows. Thankfully, I had the brand new Windows XP, so I had the .Net framework installed, which comes with the command line compiler csc. I got to work with notepad and csc; my first order of business: write an editor that could open multiple files, and press F5 to compile and run my project.

Being a noob at the time, with almost no actual experience, and nobody supervising my work, I had a few brilliant ideas. For example, I one day realized I could map properties of an object to a field in a database table, and thus wrote a rudimentary OR/M. My database, I didn't mention, was Access, because that didn't need installation. I connected to it properly via ADO.NET, at least.

The most surprising thing though, in retrospect, is the stuff I wrote actually worked.

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

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

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

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

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

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

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

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

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

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

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

Javascript developer interview

One of the RH interviewers started asking about myself, personal information, etc..

He : well, let me introduce you our tech lead, he will make you some question about JS

Me : alright

Tech Lead : ummm, do you know javascript?

Me : yes..?

Tech Lead : ok, cool. We will call you.

I got the job..

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!

Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.

What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.

I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.

To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.

tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.

DO NOT let employers demoralize you into staying with the company.

I've been with this one company for about 2 years. Everything was great, despite being underpaid, and having a lot of responsibility (I was the only front-end developer maintaining 4 big eCommerce sites).
One day about 2 months ago, I got a better offer. Better pay, more freedom, and way less stress (Customers screaming in your ear vs. no customers at all).

I talked to my team lead since I wanted my company to have a fair chance to counteroffer - I was fairly comfortable after all, and I felt like it would be a nice gesture.
If my team lead had just said "No, sorry, we can't counter that offer", there's a big chance that I would have stayed with them anyway. Instead, I got a fairly uncomfortable and personal rant thrown back at me.

He basically said that I should be happy with my salary, that he didn't feel like I had much responsibility, and that "I wasn't the type of person companies would hire for that salary".
He ended by saying I might as well stay, as there was no going back if the new place didn't work out - basically trying to tempt me with job security.

I told him that I would think about it. The worst part is that I actually did, since his rant really made me feel somewhat worthless as a developer. Luckily I came to my senses, and sent my resignation the next day.

I talked to an old coworker today, and they are still unable to find a developer who wants to take the job. I see that as justice :)

tl;dr: If a company tries to make you stay by demoralizing you - Run.

I was interviewing this guy who's been a dev for 12 years. Apparently got laid off in his small town company because of covid.

So I asked him to write an algorithm that loops through a list and returns the largest number.

Not only could he not do that after trying for 15 minutes, but he also spent an entire minute ranting about how algorithmic questions were dumb and unnecessary in this day and age and you can google these things without having them memorized anyway.

The point of an algorithmic question in an interview is not to see if you can memorize the fucking thing. It's to see if you're methodical enough to reason through what you don't know and arrive at a decent solution all the same.

What do you guys think? Was I somehow the asshole here? It was a JavaScript job and the product was fairly complex, not just HTML bullshit.

I had a prospective employer be late to every single interview we had scheduled. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they simply didn’t value my time.

I was in the process of moving and a recruiter called me to tell me a job I had been submitted for wanted to do a phone interview that day. Even though I was driving across the country in a box truck, I agreed to the interview. We arranged for the employer to call me at 2 PM. I figured it would give me a break from driving in the middle of the day anyway.

I pulled over at 1:45 and waited. At 2:15 I called the recruiter to verify the time. He said he would get in contact with the employer and call me back. At 2:45 I called the recruiter and told him I needed to get back on the road and we’d have to reschedule.

We rescheduled the call for a few days later at 1 pm. This time I got the phone number of the employer, so at 1:15 I called him. He apologized and said he lost track of time. Whatever, let’s just get this interview going.

He liked me on the phone, so he wanted to meet in person the next day. I was a bit irritated by the situation, but I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I showed up for my in person interview 15 minutes early and checked in with the receptionist. 30 minutes later I asked the receptionist when they were going to be with me as my interview was supposed to start 15 minutes ago. I was finally seen 5 minutes after that.

The interview was supposed to be a several hour affair where they were going to have me sign an NDA and show me some of the issues they were having to see if I could solve them. I had cleared my scheduled meetings for the afternoon so I could attend this lengthy interview.

After about 45 minutes of interviewing, the manager suddenly said that they needed to cut the interview short because he had just realized they needed to get something done that afternoon. He asked me if I would come back the next day to finish the interview.

I shook his hand and left, shaking my head the entire time. When I called my recruiter after I had calmed down, I let him know that I would under no terms be interested in a job with them. If they refused to acknowledge my time was worth something as a candidate, they would never respect it as an employee.

They still offered me the job and couldn’t fathom why I was upset about the situation. I’m very glad I didn’t take that job.

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

Got basically nothing done yesterday because I was absolutely exhausted the entire day. Thanks, doxxing thread. But I couldn’t sleep anyway so whatever.

Told everyone at home that I wanted a really productive day tomorrow (today) because of it.

Guess what happened?
Endless fucking distractions.
Because of course.

• Cooking since apparently it’s my job.
• Extended computer repair and maintenance, since that’s apparently my job even when it’s not my computer.
• Conversations.
• Children following me.
• People paraphrasing politics.
• People summarizing stupid fail videos.
• People relating stupid prank videos.
• More conversations.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• Endless noises from children’s toys, tablets, playing, etc.
• Children following me when I leave.
• Taking half an hour to order food instead of five minutes.
• Cleaning since nobody else ever does.
• Picking up toys since nobody else will and I’M FUCKING TIRED OF STEPPING ON AND TRIPPING OVER THEM.
• More fucking food prep.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• More conversations.

Is it any wonder I’m so fucking pissed off every workday?

I can’t wait to move so I can have a fucking office with a fucking door and a fucking lock. And you know what? I’m going to splurge and install some fucking soundproofing, too.

WHY IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!? I’M PAYING FOR YOUR FUCKING EVERYTHING. FUCK THE FUCK OFF!

My first programming job started at a fairly small gamming company. We were pretty close because we were so small and sometimes jokes were a bit too personal. Anyway, during my 3 months probation period, the team lead invited the whole company at his house for a party. Long story short, I got wasted, and when the CEO arrived I went to him and told him something like: Yo dawg, let's drink, don't be a pu**y. The sad part is that I cannot remember doing that and apparently I shouted outloud. I had some pretty interesting meetings the next days. Came too close to being fired 😅.

I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.

But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.

So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.

So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.

So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.

Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)

So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.

I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now

The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?

The hospital's recovery room after my second child.

I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.

Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.

Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.

Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.

But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

Root has a deadline

I've been working on this CCPA ticket for awhile. Admittedly too long, but I'm new to the codebase and it's fucking sprawling. There has also been a lot of back-and-forth on the ticket.

Anyway, I've had a few blockers, such as how mailers work, the legal copy, where to put a admin-facing link to the dashboard, how to build the jira integration (and its creds), etc.

Quite awhile ago I asked Mr. Product, "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" Awesome. Except he didn't. That day came and went without a peep. So, the next day I ask again: "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" And that day comes and goes, too. I ask again, and you guessed it: "I'll get you the answer today." Repeat ad nauseam.

I also asked about the Jira integration and credentials. I got about the same treatment as above, but with a tiwst: they tell me to talk to / continue to bug Mr. H instead. Except Mr. H had been on PTO for weeks. Every time I ask, they keep referring me to him. A little over two weeks later (yesterday), I finally got a response from him. Yay! I was preoccupied with finishing the dashboard (which wasn't in the original ticket for some reason) so I didn't get a chance to look into it yet. After asking his boss three times, Mr. Product also finally (!!!) gave me a response on the link placement today, too! Though not directly: he discussed it with said boss in a group chat that I'm a part of, but never tagged me or told me directly. So, now I know where to put it (I think), but I have no idea how that area of the site is built (it's dynamic based on domain, login, and roles), so adding it will still be difficult.

The best part:

Today during standup, some lady I've only rarely seen before attends the meeting, doesn't say anything until the very end, and then announces that everything must be code-complete by tomorrow for release, and then promptly signs off.

For fuck's sake. I've had blockers on this for weeks, and now I need to finish it by fucking tonight?

I still don't know how to build the mailers (because translations and formats), nor how to actually send emails using them. I don't know how to modify the footer (dynamic, complex), how to add the admin-facing link (dynamic, complex), nor how build a Jira integration (haven't even looked yet). I just got unblocked on two of these fucking today. and it needs to be done and code reviewed by tomorrow?

No bloody way.
Maybe I should go back to my previous job. 😡

I was recuited to do devops work for a client. The project started in late '14. Until mid '15 I was forced to just sit there and do nothing. And I mean nothing. The ops team needed my help but the project lead didn't allow that (endless discussions). Somewhere around the end of '15 I could start to work and quickly learned that I had to report to two leads that couldn't disagree more on what to do and how to do it. I also learned that the companies mentality is "Clean me but don't get me wet". So the ops team demands a lot but is really uncooperative with everything. So I am currently sitting between three grindstones and everything I do is worthless. Because nobody agrees with anybody and I cannot fulfill my job for which I have been hired: Make ops more efficient because they are drowning in manual work. My job is further complicated by the following facts: This company uses no standard whatsoever but their own. Thru this they have created a Rube-Goldberg-Machine. But they think their system is the greatest in the world and the only one that makes sense. Which makes automation pointless because it is not maintainable. They call it diversity and they say that it is the clear reason why automation is not for them even though they schedule meeting after meeting in which they discuss about how to automate things. But in general they do just block everything useful and sabotage my work. And behind my back they make me the reason for the fail. Every real decision is blocked anyway. Also the ops guys think they are the leetest in the world. And everything they invent is above and beyond. If you ask them why they have over 400 VLANs for example (in a company of unter a thousand employees) they stutter and stumble because they cannot explain their complicated shit. They also change their decisions like underwear. Another really "kewl" thing they just did: They hired a devops engineer and everybody loves him. During the interview he said that he has no prior experience with devops whatsoever and it will take him around six month to get started on the basics of devops. I could go on for hours here about the insanity of this company that in my opinion will cease to exist within the next 5 years, if you ask me.
Long story short I am getting out of there by the end of march and will be on sabbatical shortly after because I am burned out. And I mean burned out. Not like "Oh I am burned out". I mean really burned out, with health problems and everything. Another external guy got out here last month because of the same health conditions.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was WAY back in my first job as a programmer where I was working on a custom built CMS that we took over from another dev shop. So a standard feature was of course pagination for a section that had well over 400,000 records. The client would always complain about this section always being very slow to load. My boss at that job would tell me to not look at the problem as it wasn't a part of the scope.

But being a young enthusiastic programmer, I decided to delve into the problem anyway. What I came to discover was that the pagination was simply doing a select all 400,000 records, and then looping through the entire dataset until it got to the slice it needed to display.

So I fixed the pagination and page loads went from around 1 min to only a few seconds. I felt pretty proud about that. But I later got told off by my boss as he now can't bill for that fix. Personally I didn't care since I learned a bit about SQL pagination, and just how terrible some developers can be.

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

My first work was a paid internship.
My first couple weeks on the job I was supposed to be working on the same machine with another dev to get the gist of the process and everything. Kind of pair programming mixed with mentorship. Sounds cool?
Yeah... Problem is my fellow dev was more interested in spending around 80% of her time chatting around with her boyfriend and friends on Microsoft Chat.
Anyway, I soon got bored of having to look to the other side all the time, and went to our boss and asked for some other stuff to do "because I'm better learning by doing than by example".
Almost 20 years later, I'm still in touch with this dev... But she soon left the job and pursued a career as a translator and interpreter. She was always more interested in talking than programming 😃

Post after a long long time...

Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.

Anyway, time for a story.

After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.

Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.

One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.

They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.

Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.

He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.

I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.

Day saved? Not yet.

Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.

My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.

I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.

Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.

And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.

I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.

I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.

I am hysterical right now.

I'm still at my first job, got the job by word of mouth from a friend.

This company wants me to develop both their iOS and Android apps, and being the solo developer it's a long process. I forgot to mention I had to learn objective-c on the job, and being from a java background Android was easy to pick up but it wasn't exactly 100% easy either.

8 months down the line I finished the iOS app and working on the Android app, which is more so copying the features I did with the Android prototype I worked on at the start.

I get paid minimum wage with from the looks of it no sight of a pay raise.

This company doesn't seem to know about how difficult it is to be the only developer for two apps in two different languages.

Anyway aside from this I was wondering if I could get some advice, I want to apply for jobs while I finish up the Android app, but is it a good idea to put the company I work for on my CV? I don't want to risk getting found out for looking for a job, without my boss knowing.

Would it be ideal to just have some sort of more information on request type thing if the jobs I apply for respond?

I guess I could stay until I'm here for one year (student advisor said this) but in saying that I don't think he understands that software development is done in projects rather than time, and after these apps I'll have to start on a new app from scratch, which I'm not looking forward to.

Anyways for any advice you guys give me thanks in advance I really appreciate any input, just wanna get out of this job, the 10 hours of commute I spend a week is killing me :/ along with it being expensive.

So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

First rant (hello everyone), just wanted to share my experience of my recent job search.
I had worked about 2 years for one of the bigger companies in my country when I decided I had enough with their bs (I have some decent rants from that company if someone's interested) and I wanted to move back to my hometown. I applied for a few jobs in smaller companies , one which I personally knew the lead programmer of, and he really wanted me to work there. One other company responded quickly and after a couple of interviews I got an offer from them. By that time I haven't heard anything from the first company, so I called them. The CEO was in a meeting but would call me when he was done about am hour later. Didn't hear from him. So I called them again, this time he answered. He seemed really interested and said they were just working some things out, so I said that I needed an offer soon since I already got an offer from another company. His response (without me telling anything about the other company):
"We're not going to be able to match the salary so if you only care about money you should take that. We want you to work for us because you want to, not because of the money"
Well that doesn't pay the bills, so I simply stated:
"I appreciate your honesty and good luck finding anyone"
I hadn't really understood just how bad that was until I told my wife and she pointed it out. The thing is, the company that gave the offer first was really for a junior role, but they increased the proposed salary when they saw my CV. The shitty company was looking for a senior dev. Yeah, good luck finding a senior dev wanting to work without getting properly paid.
Anyway, took the first offer and haven't been happier!

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

15 years ago I had a job interview as technical leader. They asked me about the trendy framework in those days, Struts. I didn't know much to be honest. I actually started to study java the month before. I was 30 y.o. and I managed to sell myself well.

I got the job. I never saw Struts, the real job was to migrate a z/OS application written on PL/I for DB2 (all things where new to me, I programmed something in VB when I was younger, before studying a career in statistics). Anyway, somebody else already scaffolded Struts, I implemented some business logic here and there, and mostly tried to make sense of the monster-legacy.

Fast forward now.
Two months ago I was interviewed on the last version of Angular and AWS devops, kubernetes etc. I managed not to look completely idiot, but honestly, I never went beyond an Hello World in Angular, and kubernetes, well, I like the name.

I got the job as Technical Architect.

First project I'm assigned to: migrate a 15 years old Struts application to cloud.
Somebody has containerized everything.
Somebody will scaffold a dotNet application.

I'll watch. Maybe I'll write some nice powerpoint presentation. Maybe I'll fill in some business logic in some methods.

I wanted really to be a technical Architect and do things other modern people do.

I actually wanted to learn something.

Anyway.
For 160K$ a year is not bad, I wouldn't complain.

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

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

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

So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...

I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.

My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.

I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.

Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".

I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?

I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Before I became a Computer Engineer, (actually, this job is where I learned I loved programming) our manager would pull us into a team motivational meeting.
Except she was a bit of an airhead, so her idea of motivation was having a sing-song and listing our favorite movie quotes.
It was even funnier because there was lots of drama surrounding "how she became our manager," and one of our teammates felt as though she should have gotten the job.
Anyway, none of those were the most ridiculous meeting.
The most ridiculous meeting was when the VP of marketing came to town from Florida to address the brewing drama.
In this meeting, all of my teammates suddenly had the delusion that we were in a union and thought they were protected from getting fired. They threw our manager under the bus. I was the only one who could see that he was there to see if our department was worth saving. They thought they were going to get rid of our manager by shitting on her, but they were just confirming his suspicion that there was a bunch of bullshit going on all around.
So I approached the VP after the meeting, and long story short, I was the only one who got through layoffs with a job offer in Florida a couple weeks later.
I didn't take it, because by that time I decided I wanted to go to school for Computer Engineering.

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

Has anyone had to hack into a server so they can set up their work,

Literally have a client asking me to do this change to their site and they are asking the dev who is controlling it but they just not letting me access ..

Long night ahead 🙄 got to add a ftp account ... All I need to do is add small lines of code for tracking, but this guy doesn't want to let me on it cause I'm slowly taking over his work... if he did his job right it's not like it would be happening anyway

For the passed couple of years I've struggled with depression. This passed year has been so much better. I found a career path I enjoy, I learned a lot about myself, and I got a full time job.

I live with my grandparents and God bless their souls but I really want to move out. This realization really came last week when they left for a vacation and left me home alone. I've already lived away from home, volunteer work, internships. But now that I'm back home I'm bored, I have no responsibilities. I should also mention that I can't be myself around them, partly because I no longer believe in their God and partly because there never really was any transition between child and adult.

I talked it over with some older friends and they agreed that I should move out and offered some regally good advice.

I'm gonna wait until they get back and attempt to talk about it with them. I mean it's more of me telling them I'm moving out they can't really stop me at this point.

Anyway just wanted to get this off my chest. Hope you have a wonderful day.

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

One of those days when i feel like complete shit and wish i hadn’t woken up.
I heard back from an interview i did last week (one of the faang type) and the recruiter started with “You didn’t impress any of your interviewers”. Man that hurt. I can’t unhear that. He went ahead to say they all recommended a mid-level role for me (they apparently said i had potential and could easily grow into a senior eng) instead of the senior lead i applied for. This is also subject to getting approval to hire mid-level engineers because the team needs more people but they only got approval to hire senior engineers. This cunt also added “dont worry about it. Just go about your usual business and i’ll call you next week if we have gotten the approval”. Ass! All i can do is worry because that is what i do best.
I think i am more sad and disappointed in myself because i thought the interviews went well. Wrote decent code and came up with good solutions on time. Had a good conversation with interviewers. Apparently for a senior, you cannot make mistakes which i did but once the interviewer gave me a clue, i got back on track.
Anyway, i slept with this anxiety, then woke up with tummy ache. On the drive out this morning to go to the bank, i drove my car into a pole and broke off my side mirror. Then my fucking power generator stopped working. And on my way to go and get my fixed mirror from the mechanic, my exhaust pipe broke in half due to a possible pothole i drove into.

Those fucking days where all that could go wrong goes wrong. My head is fucking pounding i can barely move my head without wincing. I am running out of money fast (i support my entire family) and i am worried about not getting a job. This blow to my confidence makes me feel worthless like i am not good for anything. Recruiter suggested i do another senior engineer interview for a different team which i passed the test for but i know the outcome would most likely be the same and i wanted the first team really bad. I just want to lie in bed and cry all day but this fucking headache won’t let me.

about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").

also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".

also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.

Many years ago I had a job as web developer at a small promotions company. The owners loved micromanaging their 7 employees, down to the minute. Work started at 9am, if you were even 1 minute late, you were deducted 1 point. (Even if the weather was bad) Once you were at 10 points, you were disciplined by being given an unpaid vacation day. (Thanks for the day off!). At 12 points, you were fired.

It only took me about 8 months before getting my day off. Somehow I was able to time it perfectly to a job interview at a large company.

Luckily I got the job, and purposely was late the next two days so when they told me I was fired I could tell them I already got a new job (thanks to their 10 pt rule) and I'm out anyway.

At the new job, I'd often drive home and nap on my lunch hour. No one would notice if I came back an hour and a half later.

The owners of the 1st company divorced a few years ago. The husband and I have actually kept in contact over the years. He's a cool guy when you don't work for him. He invited me to a Green Day concert over the summer. Probably makes the above story a little less cool, but at the moment, I was burning bridges!

I applied for a frontend dev position.
The HR sent me a mail with details for MERN developer position (Full-stack) and asked me do an assignment with frontend and backend 🤔
I requested to clarify if I'm supposed to do only frontend as that's the position I applied for.
No response on that. They got back and requested me to schedule an interview.
I have worked with NodeJS before but I primarily work on the frontend, still I went along with it anyway.
I aced the first two rounds, but for the final round they emphasized on the backend and then it went downhill. At the end they said I was really good on the frontend but for that position they needed someone particularly with expertise on the backend. 🤷‍♂️
Well, I didn't intend to work Full-stack anyway.
They wanted me do everything and also lead the team and mentor juniors and take ownership of multiple projects.
I mean, why would I want to work the job of two people (or more) and not get paid that much 🤨

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

I just installed Opera Mini on my PSP. That alone isn't very exciting on its own, although I am stoked that my website does in fact render on a device from 2009. With the helpful guidance of a laptop from 2004 that's doing the hotspot duties for this thing.

No, what really got me stoked is that Opera still supports these old platforms, and how small they managed to make it. The .jar file for Opera Mini 4.5 is ~800kB large. There's a .jad file as well but it's negligible in size and seems to be a signature of sorts.

Let that sink in for a moment. This entire web browser is 800kB. Firefox meanwhile consistently consumes 800 MEGABYTES.. in MEMORY. So then, I went to think for a moment, how on earth did they manage to cram an entire functioning web browser in 800kB? Hell, what makes up a web browser anyway?

The answer to that question I got to is as follows. You need an engine to render the web page you receive. You need a UI to make the browser look nice. And finally you need a certificate store to know which TLS certificates to trust. And while probably difficult to make, I think it should be possible to do in 800k. Seriously, think about it. How would you go *make* a web browser? Because I've already done that in the past.

Earlier I heard that you need graphics, audio, wasm, yada yada backends too.. no. Give your head a shake. Graphics are the responsibility of the graphics driver. A web browser shouldn't dabble with those at all. Audio, you connect to PulseAudio (in Linux at least) and you're done. Hell I don't even care about ALSA or OSS here. You just connect to the stuff that does that job for you. And WebAssembly.. God I could rant about that shit all day. How about making it a native application? Not like actual Assembly is used for BIOS and low-level drivers. And that we already have a better language for the more portable stuff called C.

Seriously, think about it. Opera - a reputable browser vendor - managed to do it in 800kB on a 12 year old device. Don't go full wank on your framework shit on the comments. And don't you fucking dare to tell me that there's more to it. They did it for crying out loud. Now you take a look at your shitpile for JS code and refactor that shit already. Thank you.

Oldie but goldie.. after my studies, I was looking for my first job and did interviews. In one of the companies, they asked me whether I knew C. Well yes, I had been programming in C. Ah no, that wasn't enough - they asked whether I was really good in C. I got suspicious and argued that there was the project documentation anyway, right? Turned out, no. The code was the documentation, as I had suspected.
Then my question - as freshman, mind you: "Do you have any plans to get to a more professional way of developing?"
The interview was pretty much over at that point, the boss got actually angry. Well, interviews work both ways, and he had failed. I surely dodged a bullet.

This guy, in a different department to me, was bad mouthing me to his boss for about 2 months, slagging off my Dev abilities as well as me as a person. Really snide two faced little fucker.

Anyway, when I finally met his boss on a company outing we got on so well he opted to stay out late with me drinking, which was when told me about what this 2-faced cunt had been saying and pretty much offered me his job on the grounds that we'd work better together.

I've since left the company but I've heard from others that no-one wants to work with him.

A little over a year into my job at my current company back in January, I have a yearly meeting with my manager to discuss the progress I’ve made and to talk about what’s next. This is the meeting where we are supposed to discuss a potential pay raise but it’s the last topic of a predefined agenda.
So we spend a couple hours talking about how work has been for me. I started there as a junior developer with very little experience in the field but was quickly able to jump into a project with a fairly large codebase to help out the only other developer working on the project. Before long they’re so happy with me that they actually put me in charge of the application, which means my responsibilities evolve toward a whole lot more communication with the client and everything else that comes along with being in charge, including a lot of stress. I also salvaged another application initially developed by another company but that was so bugged it should’ve just been sent to the pits and rewritten from scratch. I was also asked to develop a couple POCs that were satisfactorily delivered.

Anyway, after almost two hours of going over my accomplishments and getting praises from my manager, we finally get to the part where we’re supposed to discuss a pay raise. He immediately cuts me off by saying the subject is not on the table due to the current crisis and our company struggling to make ends meet. I tell him I understand how hard it must be for them but also explain that I know for a fact other companies in the field are still making financial efforts to reward employees they’re happy with. He responds by saying that he’s aware of that, but he also “knows” that those same companies are laying off people that don’t deserve to be laid off despite the fact that they’re receiving government aid to stay afloat.
In the weeks following that meeting, I find out our company is doing the exact same thing my manager was condemning (laying off good people, taking massive advantage of government aid) and all the while not giving anybody a raise.
In any case, I really felt like that meeting was huge waste of time. What’s the point of going over everything I’ve done, congratulating me for my great work and even promising to give me even more responsibility if you don’t want to reward me for any of it? Do you honestly think I’m working hard so I can get a pat on the back or brownie points from you? I’ve got a family to take care of and I am trying to make their lives a little better each day by putting in hard work. But if hard work and climbing the latter of responsibility does not help me achieve that, what’s the point??

So, first time ranting, sorry if I mess anything up.
When I first started my current job and got introduced to the system we were coding in, something seemed a little fishy to me. Didn't like the system anyway, but at least the language is a compiler language, so it runs quite quickly, right?
In theory, yeah. If the lead dev liked the IDE that came with it. But he has to REALLY fucking hate it, because rather than using it, he codes in plaintext. No syntax highlighting, no auto-indent, nothing. And he's built the entire damn system around doing that. Sadly the compiler is only integrated into the IDE, so what do we do there? Copy the code from the plaintext file to the IDE to compile it there? No no, why would you. The language has a function you can use to compile some code at runtime.
And so he does. Every. Single. Fucking. Script. There's a single main script that runs and finds the correct textfile to then runtime-compile and execute. So we effectively made a compiler language into a massively unoptimized interpreter lang.
I even mentioned that this might be a problem, but I was completely dismissed, so at that point it's not my problem anymore and I have then switched to a different system anyway.
Couple weeks later I heard the same guy complaining that the scripts were running almost the whole night so we'd probably need some better hardware or something.
Well if only there was a really obvious solution that would improve the performance by probably about a factor of 20 or so...

I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.

At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!

It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.

One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!

Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!

Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.

Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.

Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.

Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.

Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?

DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!

Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?

Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.

After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.

Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)

I got cut from a contracting job yesterday I have 3 weeks left in the contract. They said I worked well with the team, had a great work ethic but didn't think I had strong enough tech skills. In the past this would have hurt my feelings and it does a little but I think my tech skills are fairly high. There were three devs working on 66 apps with no tests, some source control but most of the code in source control was older than code deployed in prod, no automatic builds, people would wait a week before checking in code, others would check in code that would not build. Today the boss asked if I had messed with app pools on the prod iIs server because something was wrong. I said no because never remote into the server. Anyway it is the end of the world and I feel fine.

I didn't leave, I just got busy working 60 hour weeks in between studying.

I found a new method called matrix decomposition (not the known method of the same name).

Premise is that you break a semiprime down into its component numbers and magnitudes, lets say 697 for example. It becomes 600, 90, and 7.

Then you break each of those down into their prime factorizations (with exponents).
So you get something like

>>> decon(697)
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

And it turns out that in larger numbers there are distinct patterns that act as maps at each offset (or magnitude) of the product, mapping to the respective magnitudes and digits of the factors.

For example I can pretty reliably predict from a product, where the '8's are in its factors.

Apparently theres a whole host of rules like this.
So what I've done is gone an started writing an interpreter with some pseudo-assembly I defined. This has been ongoing for maybe a month, and I've had very little time to work on it in between at my job (which I'm about to be late for here if I don't start getting ready, lol).

Anyway, long and the short of it, the plan is to generate a large data set of primes and their products, and then write a rules engine to generate sets of my custom assembly language, and then fitness test and validate them, winnowing what doesn't work.

The end product should be a function that lets me map from the digits of a product to all the digits of its factors.

It technically already works, like I've printed out a ton of products and eyeballed patterns to derive custom rules, its just not the complete set yet. And instead of spending months or years doing that I'm just gonna finish the system to automatically derive them for me. The rules I found so far have tested out successfully every time, and whether or not the engine finds those will be the test case for if the broader system is viable, but everything looks legit.

I wouldn't have persued this except when I realized the production of semiprimes *must* be non-eularian (long story), it occured to me that there must be rich internal representations mapping products to factors, that we were simply missing.

I'll go into more details in a later post, maybe not today, because I'm working till close tonight (won't be back till 3 am), but after 4 1/2 years the work is bearing fruit.

Also, its good to see you all again. I fucking missed you guys.

!rant

I promised myself I wouldnt cry but ... nah I wont.

So I got the job and today was my first day of work, well not precisely work but introduction to the cultuure of the place, signing tons of paper, I probably sold my soul but who cares?, and I met my team, so far everything seems cool, except tthat I will be using windows and wont be able to use any streaming websites or services (yt, spotify, deezer, etc) yes I know, there are ways around it, but come on guys I dont wanna start screwing my first week of work, anyway everything is cool, even the food is tasty there iis only one thing left, my workspace Im an extremely bad decorator so I need ur help, (and yes I know i have to have a duck and a devrant stressball) but apart from that guys and gals, any ideas? So far ive thought about a debugging body, a lava lamp and an extra monitor.

This might seem like a dumb rant to have but I just started a new job, and I asked my boss about the Work From Home policy and basically, there is no work from home, at all. I'm bummed out because I got into a really good WFH rhythm at my last job and now I have to go into the office every day, even though I am stationed in a different city than the main company office anyway. I'm already remote! Why do I have to pay to come into work remotely anyway!? Argh.

Not at all dev related but I don’t have a social life so I share with you guys:)

I’ve been fat for all my life. You might say it’s my own fault blah blah but I quit sugar over 10 years ago, I don’t snack and eat 1-2 meals a day, not much more than others do.

The first time I was in good shape was when I was 16. I was growing, I started boxing and I was happy-ish with my body for the first time. I got down from 110kgs to ~87kgs, which is a good weight for me, I have heavy bones and wide shoulders I guess.
I insured my shoulder and couldn’t do boxing anymore but my weight was still pretty much stable. After working in the office for a few months I started gaining weight again, I think mainly due to the stress and lack of sleep.
In 2017 for the first time I hit a new high with 120kgs. I quit my terrible, stressful 24/7 job and relocated and got down to ~115 which I maintained for quite a while (still going to the gym and stuff).

And then the lockdown started..
I went up to >120 in no time.
(Sounds really bad but as mentioned, I’m heavy anyway so I’m not THAT obese, just fat.

Seeing my weight was really scary to me so I started a keto diet again, which I did before but with limited success.

Warning: Controversial topic coming up..

I took it a bit further and tried 0-carb (carnivore diet) instead of low carb and I lost 6kg within a month. Then the next plateau at 114, then at 112 etc.
Went more strict and removed seasoning and stuff and started eating more nutritious meat, liver, heart, tongue etc and my weight started dripping again.

Yesterday for the first time in ~a decade I got down to 105kg.
My end goal is 90, so I made it half way through.

Just really happy to have achieved this. The 1 good thing about lockdown I guess, I had so much time to be on my own.

Before you say eating no greens is bad, keep in mind that most not old people die because of obesity, not because of a lack of fiber.

It’s a big achievement for me and I hope that I can get to 90kg in another 3 months..

Story over

Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.

Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.

Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.

I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.

Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.

Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.

One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.

I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.

Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?

Received feedback on a task I made for a job interview (I didn't get a technical interview).

The task was easy with nothing special about it that made me think if that's what the job is like, I don't want to work there. It was a simple web page with search functionality. I did the task anyway.

The feedback I got was useless. It said that I made a complex and an over-engineered solution.
What I made, mind you, was a one endpoint API and a single Vue.js component instead of using jQuery to update the results. That's it. OVER-ENGINEERED!

Complete waste of time.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

So, I am a couple of more months in working in my new role. Learning the trade and boy do people have a lot of fucking things to say! It’s incredible the AMOUNT OF BULLSHIT these people get away with…

Background, I’ve been a software consultant for a number of companies working in different sectors in different development roles for +16 years. I built everything from RS232, iOS to BI. Shifted to permanent developer for large global corporation where I got promoted to clown.

Anyway, anyhow.

FUCK, these FUCKING people!!!

Meeting after meeting after endless pointless discussions and even more pointless fucking powerpoint presentation which if you stack them on top of each other will reach the FUCKING top floor where there are even more morons. FUCK!

There is absolutely NO cohesion, there is NO plan, short-term or long-term, no vision that can be practically implemented. There are different organizations of equal power and the result is a FUCKING MAZE.

But people travel the FUCKING GLOBE. You know, THE FUCKING PLANET EARTH, for pointless workshops and alignments (plural). FUCK!

And it’s getting worse. We’ve got consultants hiring consultants now whose job is to hire consultants. True story! And it’s not that high up the org chart either!

It’s a beast! A retarded beast.

We are NOT helping.

I got to get out of this fucking corporation. So, I am starting to design my exit strategy. The master plan.

Me: *Chilling a little during a stressful day*

*Receive an email, because thankfully I am logged in and checking emails continuously as I am on job hunt*

*Click open*

Recruiter: I am over running a meeting, will join our connect in 10 minutes.

Me: *Trying to recall when did she schedule the call*

*Quickly check and figure that I shared my availability but never got a confirmation or a meeting invite*

Me: Apologies, but I never received any confirmation. I was waiting for your invite.

Recruiter: What? When did you reschedule?

Me: I never did. I never got a confirmation. Anyway, I am free so can hop on a call.

Recruiter: Oh! Sometimes the confirmation goes into the spam box. Here's the link, please join..

I join and she grills me with difficult questions that I am evidently not prepared.

I try to answer and be honest with everything.

But what the actual fuck! She lied to me and grilled me unnecessarily when she knew I wasn't even prepared.

And this is one of top global companies. Definitely not a great experience.

Stop lying and finding a reason to blame me for failing me because you are an incompetent fuck.

Just need to vent, so here goes:

Fuck doing cutting edge projects for great glory, low budgets and tight deadlines. I'm tired, burnt out and just don't give a shit anymore.

I got promoted to lead dev and thought my fortune was made but what it really meant was just: Here solve all these bullshit bugs that the rest of the team can't figure out and oh we are also taking this single app you guys made and scaling it globally. You have half a year to figure that out. You handle the devops.... sigh

Fuck that noise.

Honestly i just feel like quitting and finding a nice specialist place, with a cap of at max Senõr developer, no more being the one making the big decisions for me, rather just diving into certain areas and coding the fuck out of that. Maybe some teaching too, i like that.

Anyway, won't happen right now, i need the salary. My wife just graduated and can't find a job what with a certain flu fucking over the economy, so I am stuck here for now.

So I met this person via a social platform.

They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.

Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.

I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.

I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.

Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.

The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.

I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.

And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.

Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.

Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.

At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.

So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.

I fuck them off.

And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.

And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.

Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.

Wooo hoo! I got suspended from reddit!

Never happened before to me (not site wide at least). Apparently for 'report abuse' from some report I must have made like a month ago?

Some user posting in a sub apparently had a theory that a bunch of other subs and other users were in on some conspiracy against them, supposedly sending death threats and 'spreading lies'.... kinda hard to imagine that some subs with thousands (some with millions) of users are all in on this wonky conspiracy against them....

So anyway I report his nasty little post to the local moderators of that sub because it usually is a chill sub and his post is full of insults and so on.

Turns out... that guy is also a mod of the sub I reported him to.

A month later I get suspended from reddit for 'report abuse'... of course I can't see the 'report abuse' (can't see reports...) so how do you even speak intelligently / appeal?

Moderation at scale is hard, but kinda crazy to think someone employed at reddit decided "yeah this crazy guy is right" and does their bidding ...

I used to moderate a busy gaming forum, and sniffing out the crazy folks was part of the job when accepting new moderators. Wasn't that hard...

Granted no big loss here, just a few days.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.

Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.

The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.

We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.

Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster.

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

Still looking for my first full-time dev role. After being endlessly rejected from every dev job I've applied for, it starts to eat away at your confidence. Makes me wonder if I'm not as competent as I believe I am. :/

Fortunately, I landed a coding interview with Google! It is my dream job to work at Google, so the fact that they even acknowledged me & my skillset makes me so happy and reaffirms my belief in my capabilities. :D

It's pretty odd, that after applying to 20+ open Google positions relevant to my skill level & location and often with references included, then having been rejected from all of them, that I finally got a chance with them when one of their recruiters found me on LinkedIn and liked what she saw. I cleared the screening call, and made it to the first coding interview.

Of course, even with all the interview prep I've done, it was all practically for naught since they caught me off guard with a crazy conceptual problem anyway. (Well, actually, was I 'caught off guard' if I was already expecting to be caught off guard? o.0) I struggled heavily in the first half of the interview, but found my footing towards the end. So I knew I screwed up and that it was highly unlikely for me to get the job.

Nonetheless, Google had the decency to reject me not via an automated email, but through an actual direct phone call with my recruiter. (The cruelty of the automated application rejection system in our society is a whole rant of its own, for another time.) My recruiter told me that they felt I wasn't ready but they liked what they saw, so they will be revisiting me in exactly a year to reconsider me.

To know that I wasn't fully rejected, and that my dream company Google sees real potential in me, is highly reassuring. It means I'm not a lost cause; I simply need to keep looking. Google will want me more strongly once I have the experience that comes from a fresh grad's first full-time job.

Entering Week4 post-layoff. Week2 of pretty much nothing but playing with my kids, doing house chores, exercising and job searching.

I spent like 3 hours in the gym last Friday. Instructor there turned to me and said "tough divorce?". To what I answered "very happily married, got laid off from work". He said that it would be his second guess.

Even before this whole crap I had enough cash flow-yielding investments to just about make rent. My wife makes enough to make sure we will want for nothing, our old folks have our kids' tuition fees covered, and we have some savings anyway.
But the anxiety-laden period between "send a dozen messages and resumė's" and having the same "greetings, fellow millenial!" meetings with different sets of tech-illiterate boomers and toddlers is becoming a boring nuisance, one that "having a side project to keep my mind warm" could solve.

Maybe I will fix the Stardew Valley Mods API for Android. I haven't done the C#/.NET thing since uni, and my frontend Java game is weak (at best) but how much could have it changed this last decade or so? /s

Maybe I will write a MongoDB Runner for Apache Beam. But I'm afraid that won't yeld enough street cred to be worth it Does anyone knows what it means?

Maybe I will finally be done consolidating a lifetime of cloud storage into a big-kid glacier-level LTS solution.

Dunno, bored here. Need some 20h/week project I can quit as soon as some job appears to be lining up. Ideas?

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

So I got a telephone interview for a job that a recruiter found for me. Call went well, comes to the development test. Small application in ruby on rails, haven't used it in about 2-3 years so a tad rusty. Completed the test under two days (was given until Friday) not too bad if I say so myself. It's for a junior position anyway so I'll assume they wouldn't mind giving me a refresher to help jog my memory.

!rant

I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.

The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.

These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.

Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?

What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?

I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.

My first interview was the interview where I cheated and got the job, it was an on campus job interview. I did not have a good gpa, (to be honest it was really bad i was below the 25th percentile)

Anyway this was the only (developer) job interview I knew I could qualify for, I was pretty sure that if I couldn't nail this one then I could kiss my dream of programming professionally good bye.

We were about 25 kids sitting in a class room with a pencil and couple of sheets of paper and the the interview panel walked between the seats looking at what we wrote.

So, when I couldn't write an algorithm for the problem of square rooting a number n. I panicked (was literally shivering with tears rolling down my cheeks, thankfully nobody saw me as i was on the last bench) I gave up, wiped my tears and stared at the board, a panel member saw me and told me to leave after looking at my paper. This was the moment my mind decided (not me but someone else inside me) that I have to do whatever it took, so just when I was stepping out and grabbed my bag i quickly opened the browser of my phone inside the bag typed square root algorithm opened the first result and read the words arrive at the answer by binary search, ass soon as I read that my mind worked at a pace that it has never managed ever since that time, and i knew the solution in a matter of seconds, i dropped my bag when to one of the more sympathetic panel members and explained the whole thing to him on the spot, he was impressed, and he asked me how this algorithm can be extended for the nth root(which is really simple once you have the algorithm for square root) and i blurted it out instantly which impressed him even more and offered me the job on the spot and told me to attend the next 2 rounds as a formality.

Thus i saved myself for a world of hurt and now I am a developer who thinks back to that day every time I need a boost of morale

I made my passion my job, programming servers & web dev. Although it has been productive economically it has sucked the fun out of programming servers for me...so as a way to rediscover my passion I'm giving game dev a try. After a couple of weekends playing with a game engine this is what I've got, a monkey dev with a suit that jumps from project cabinet to project cabinet avoiding hazards, drinking coffee and trying to make some money (someone told me I should express myself and I took that personally).

I'm pretty much done but the hazard placeholders (a box and an arrow) don't convince me so I wanted to see if my fellow disenfranchised developers had some ideas of what my developer should be avoiding/being hit by, preferably something I could draw easily since as you can see I'm not much of an artist although I've also though of just words falling like "deadline" or something.

Anyway any feedback is welcome, take it ez I've never drawn anything more than a stickman and this is my first attempt at something playable. Small Rant plus question. Happy Monday.

My first software.. Okay. So first time I ever attempted was with my father, i was around 8 or so, i remember very little from it, but in nutshell, i somehow ended up at his job having day off school or something, no idea.

Apparently he was bored, so he decided yo show me... Basic. Yep, thats right. Frking basic. Anyway, he shown me some really basic stuff in basic, and pushed the envelope really hard, just trying to force into me more and more in these 8hrs. I started with filling screen with "o" characters. Most of times he was telling me what to write with elaborate explanation why. At the end of the day, we finished with simple maze game where player was "o" and maze walls was #. Without any goal, or anything.

Next day i was at point 0, understood nothing from it except how to handle keystrokes (and belive me, that for me was huge mindblow, and even bigger mindblow that it actually made prefect sense).

I dont remember much, but later i started with father-assisted c++ and some pascal. I immidietly loved c++ but dropped learning it for (NullPointer) reason.

Thats not really project imho, so now time for my actual first project.

It was about time when ARK survival evolved was a fresh thing, i was playing it a lot. Server admin became buddy. We all complained about max level cap, but to change it in config you needed to input whole new xp curve.

At that time i had great familiarity with google and computers, some thought i was some kind of PC god (seriously I heard someone saying so about me lol) just becouse I could ressurect most cases of broken windows. And I had next to zero programming expirience. It was about to change. I made first c++ actual program, that was making xp curve for you. It took me just bearly 2 days and was series of cin, cout, one file open, some maths in loop, and done. Maths was very bad. But i pushed it into steam forums, and one guy responded how.bad my math was, so we colabed on making 2 iteration. Took around week. Than half a year passed and we wanted go big. Go gui. I had no freaking idea how making gui looks like. Community liked my cli tool, we had quite a lot of downloads, why not go GUI. And thats when I discovered QT framework. And we had few features in mind... It took us half a year to make it. From 60 lines of code i jumped into 1k lines of code. We pushed it and immidietly started working on 4th version with much greater customizability etc.

Than i finished 18 and found a job. Job in php. I got it becouse I made this project.

Now project is abandon. This project also gave me a lesson that donations will not feed you.

Edit: and before you think about my father that he was nice person to show me code, trust me, i dont know bigger dick than him.

A client decided to give a refresh to his website. So he said he wanted me to take care of it. Curious because he has an IT guy full-time just for the website.

When I offered the hosting service too the IT guy got crazy, he started making a lot of questions like why should I take full control of the website. I replied that's optional, I can just deploy the website in the current server.

The client said, yes I want you to take care of everything.

IT guy again making questions about what database I'm planning to use, what framework, what version, bla bla bla.

At this point I said to my self: Well, maybe this guy made an awesome job. Probably he used a framework that I don't know. The database must be neat and tidy.

So, I go an check the current website... WordPress... Are you freaking kidding me? The IT guy getting crazy for a premium WP template? Why is he full-time anyway? Why is the client looking for someone else?

It was the last year of high school.

We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).

Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)

The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)

Part 1/2:

Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.

I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.

No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.

48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.

Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).

I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.

Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.

Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.

NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)

The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.

So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.

Part 2/2:

The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.

My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:

Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456

Me: … that won't work, got a real email?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: I implemented an email verification system.

Him: … ok … just show me the website.

Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…

Him: Good job.

He stood up and moved on.

YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.

AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT

I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.

Well, I posted this rant a few days ago where I was expressing my desires to get a job as a Software Developer... Here I am again re-posting.

________________________________

FFS! Can I get a remote job as soft-dev?? I know a little bit of java, I mean I have a GitHub repo for a project if anyone wants to see what I'm doing.

If anyone knows or feel that can help me, please lend me a hand, I need to start working (to get real experience) and earn a little (prevent from starving in this fucking shithole country).

I'm not asking for money, I'm asking for a freaking job, a task, anything.

Little brief of my situation... I'm from Venezuela... Done!

Now for real, I'm a freelancer IT technician for almost 8 yrs, now I'm studying software engineering (8th Semester), I'm 31 years old, have a family (7 yrs old daughter, newborn baby boy), work is not flowing since the hourly price got high due to the economic crisis and clients are hiring people instead of outsourcing.

I'm not expecting to earn the minimum wage of UUSS, 150$/month can do the job! This due to the black market price of the USD (10X.000BsF so far), where 1$ represents the 1/8 part of the minimum wage here, to put it in perspective, toothpaste cost 200.000Bsf, 1/4 of the minimum wage.

Perhaps you will be asking yourself "Damn! so how do you do to survive!?" well, at least once a week a client calls and that saves the entire week, this isn't life my people, this is surviving... And if you don't believe me, I can show a receipt from the supermarket, and show you the average salary or my incomings.

Anyway enough drama and whining for today, I'm not doing this again in my life, I'm a person who achieves goals and earns what deserve (even this situation, I know that I deserve it for not thinking properly in the past, but we can't be victims of our past or do we?)

First day at my job and once I got home I immediately crashed into my bed and woke up at 3 AM.

For some reason I still feel physically tired. Even though I woke up by myself (no distractions from my environment).

+ I feel like having worked out even though I did not. I can feel the muscles aching everywhere in my body.

Anyway back to how it went...
I got there (company) and met a young people like me who are also working in this company for the first time.

Once I saw them + the chief and the leaders, my anxiety kicked in, but I made sure not to show it.

We took photos and saw the cubes (data center cubes) and it felt like I was in a hacking scene from Mr Robot or Watch Dogs lol. It was so cool.

After that we were assigned to our temporary work places and mine was at a place where you get packages from the delivery trucks, cut them, sort them, put etiquettes on them and register them in the system.

Another boy (let's call him Daniel) and me were assigned to this place. He is going to be a sys admin.

The people at this workplace were very chill, cool and mature.
You can joke with them and they will not get offended (looking at you, Twitter) lol.

Daniel however is the opposite.
He is so god damn extroverted that he literally won't stop talking.
At some point he asked me if I was even listening and I admitted that the unconcious side of the brain of mine built a filter over the years that only let's valuable information flow through. When there is no valuable information, I do not process them in my conciousness.

Poor guy got a bit sad, but me whatever. Not my problem. He gave me an headache by talking nonstop nonsense.

Today, when my shift begins, I will learn to do drive a forklift and I'm excited about this.

I do not even need a license for it which you normally need in other companies :D

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

So Igot that Samsung DeX thing a while ago. So far, it was just a nice gadget to have at hand, but I didn't get to use it properly since my laptop was always the better option sort of.
Now.
My power adapter for the laptop died last friday. I have a second one at home, but of course, I pack the wrong one for work.
Ended up working the entire day on the DeX. Thankfully, I just needed to do some web and office based stuff, and all the necessary documents are online anyway.
So that thing just saved my butt today, which is nice. Took a while to get used to, but it does it's job quite nicely.

To be honest: Iam suprised it works the way it does. Oh what a time to be alive...

Now the question is...
Can I get Ubuntu on here somehow? I did find a Tmux? shell and was able to download some ubuntu onto it, but it had gpg issues.
Anyone got more references? Ubuntu on Android 8.

Alright, I'll try writing about my recent experience without getting too emotional.

A few months ago, I started a tech job in London and immigrated here for that job. I was glad this company wanted to sponsor a visa, as that was a requirement for me to live here.

Unfortunately, after only a few months in, I learned that the company I joined wasn't quite as nice as I thought it would be. Bullying seemed to be part of the culture. On occasion, I saw coworkers crying. One of my close coworkers was dangerously close to burnout and then "left with mutual agreement". The environment felt like a high school cafeteria. People were drinking heavily early in the afternoon and people were leaving almost at the speed of a revolving door.

I recognized very early on that this was not a healthy environment for me, but as I just signed a rental agreement for a year, and spent a large amount to move here, I was kind of trapped.

Very early on, I was told that the two people before me in the same role were let go right before their probation ended. That scared me off, for reaching out to management or HR. I didn't have the financial needs to lose my job, and due to visa restrictions, therefore would have to leave the country.

When my probation was about to end, and I learned that my performance was good, I decided to provide feedback to my manager. I only mentioned a few things, but still enough. The manager seemed receptive, but it did not seem like he was actually willing to approach the problem itself.

Sometime later, I spoke to HR, explaining some of the issues, and explained my intent to resign. The rep pretended to care, but it did not seem sincere. At the same time, I reached an agreement with my landlord, so I believed I had enough money to safely move out of the country.

A few days after I resigned, the HR rep told me that I owed the company a large amount of money. A part of it was in the contract, which I accounted for. Another part, she was claiming, but was not properly defined in the contract. It said something, but it was confusing. I got a checked later with a legal advisor, and from what I understood, the company would never be able to make me pay that extra amount. This simply because of the contract being so vague.

I told the rep multiple times in the initial meeting about the flaws in the contract, but she ignored everything I said. I then made a counteroffer trying to get her to back off. She then put that in writing, but manipulated my words and kept out all the arguments I made about contract flaws, and my departure being the company's fault.

I didn't receive a reply to my counteroffer for days. It was stressing me out as this could mean I would run out of money soon. Only a few days passed before I got a medical emergency at work just because of the stress all of this caused me.

I saw a doctor and immediately got 2 weeks of sick leave. When I contacted the company again, I was able to terminate my contract, without returning to the office. However, they still didn't want to waive the extra amount of money.

The HR rep pointed out in written communication to my lawyer, something in the trend of "if something wasn't clear in the contract, he should've just asked for details". In that same correspondence, it also stated that they were offering 'as a favor to me' to reduce the extra amount to only a third of it.

Since I never actually wanted to go to court anyway, I decided to settle with that. Now I'm packing to move out of the country, without a job and soon to be completely broke. If I would've stayed where I were and never moved to London, and never worked a day for the past 7 months, I would've had more money on my savings account than I have at this point in time.

I hope I at least learned something from this. I don't think I will move somewhere with a company-sponsored visa again anywhere soon...

Thanks for listening. Ranting does make you feel better :)

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

So... I was working in a dead end job where nobody cared about programmers, they were happy everything looked ok.. no standards, no interest in whatsoever about programming.... I was just about to start searching for another job, a better one. I started updating my linkedin and other profiles (ejobs, bestjoba, and so on...) and a few days later, even without applying I got a call for some company asking me for an interview...so I go there...and I was really confused, at the address was just a house, a regular house...anyway,I called them and someone gets out and invites me in, gave me a test with like 50 questions and problems to solve. Did the test and they made me wait for like an hour or so... then two guys in black suits comes to me and start asking me al kind of trick question (like why php 6.1 is better than 5.6) I answered them and then they are like "we want you here, but you have to start tomorrow... and by the way, the contract you will sign... you will can not tell anyone where you will actually work, and can not tell anyone anything about our project and after you will quit or you'll be fired you won't be able to work in programming for the next 2 years or we will sue you... but this is just as a precaution so you won't steal our ideas, code or anything else"... and now is about an year from when I started here, and I have to admit... I get it now, i get why they have all those clause and stuff in the contract...

Sorry for my english, I know it is not really good... and sorry for the long post

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.

Me vs Myself

I lack of consistency in my life.

Except job, I work on single project for more then four years now.

Besides that I struggle so much to finish things I started or do one thing everyday or even every week for more then one month.

Trying to improve myself but it’s so hard and I don’t know when and how I lost this whole consistency I had that made me good self thought developer. Some people said best they’ve seen but I think I have a lot to learn.

It’s not that I don’t want to continue doing things I started previous day but my narrative self is harassing me so much that I don’t have vital power left.

Whenever I try to fight back it makes me weak and I can’t get up from bed so I lay and wait.

Sometimes I lay whole day and just wait.

When I do nothing my narrative inner voice find me instantly 100 other interesting things to do that make me excited, like:

- let’s check mail - oh new <picks technology> framework let’s try it,
- let’s check news
- let’s see how much <picks something> cost because you want it, buy this thing or you’re gonna die
- go out with this <picks a girl> or you’re gonna die alone
- hey <picks something> is cool let’s see how it works
- hey this <picks some problem> is cooler then the one you’re working on,
- how about to call <picks someone>
- how about go out it’s nice outside
- let’s cook this thing today you need to go to grocery

I don’t know how I figured out I need do nothing and wait to fight myself and do what I started not what my narrative voice want me but I see whole slightly improving now and doing nothing helps a lot.

It makes me focus on things I really want to do not things that are just waste of time.

Anyway thanks if anyone got to the end of this stupid story.

Have a nice day. Keep dreaming.
Peace ✌🏽

I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...

I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.

The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.

The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.

My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.

While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.

If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.

I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.

Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.

I failed at university, spent too long there without ever graduating. I learned a lot through self-study, though. The only company I worked at was an arrangement with a friend whose company needed people, so I stepped in, but eventually I deserted the job after the company went out of money and I went two months straight working without getting paid. Now I feel apprehensive of putting that job experience in my resume because I didn't come out of it in good terms with the company. I have many unfinished projects but keep them private on GitHub because I feel like the code is too bad to show off. How do I even get a job, now? Should I just quit the industry altogether? Aaaaaaaaaaaaa

Right now I'm just self-studying some things I had wanted to do since college (namely computer graphics and trying to build a game engine) but never actually got to study formally because I kept failing at the prerequisite courses because I always kept distracting myself from my studies and just not putting enough effort. Anyway, I'm willing to listen to your advice and your judgment alike. I feel somewhat confident that I can actually do a good job, but I also don't feel confident enough to apply for jobs since I always feel like my skills are lacking. I know about impostor syndrome, but at the core of it is the matter: is this impostor's syndrome, or am I in fact *actually* consistently bad and incompetent? Rationally speaking I tend to feel like the latter, yet I know the only thing I can do is to try and be better. I guess.

Anyway, completely unstructured thing, just me venting off my frustration and desperation in a place where at least people will read it and possibly offer some advice. Thank you for reading this far.

TL:DR linux newbie, looking for advice/links (skip to bottom for questions)

!rant
After i had been looking for a job for quite some time, a couple of months ago i got hired by "smaller" company doing web stuff. So far it have been a great place, good colleagues, and overall just having a great time!.
They seem to value me alot, so that's great!.

Anyway, yesterday i got called into a meeting - and got told they wanted me to start learning "Server stuff (linux)". That got me quite excited, because it always was something i wanted to learn - but never really got around to doing.

But i never touched a linux installation before, so i'm really on ground zero - but im not afraid, i'm a quick learner and quite efficient at googling :)

I figured i would ask here, since other people here always seems to be happy to help other people out.

So far i have manage to setup a server, install various stuff (php, mysql and so on) and done setup a couple of domains/subdomains on my server. Also got a vestacpinstallation working - so overall im quite happy so far.

I figured maybe somebody had some good links/advice for a linux newbie :).

* Performance/Security, will obviously be a big focus - anything i should look at? - any must look at?
* Monitoring tools, how do i monitor various websites running on my server? Here i'm thinking bandwitch, cpu/ram usage and so on pr site basis.
* Any other stuff i should be looking at?

Little about what the server will/should be running :)

* Centos
* vestacp
* WordPress installations only (e-commerce mainly)
* PHP 7 / MySQL / phpmyadmin

New Year's day 10am I got a text message from the product owner.

To wish me a happy new year one would guess. But no! She was telling me that the cron job that I developed 2 years ago failed and I need to apply the change on the configuration manually.

What really irritated me was that was no matter of life and death, this could wait for us to get back at the office. Or even worse, she could have done the change herself, after all she was checking emails anyway.

What a b.

!rant

I'm having an awkward episode of excitement-fear-shock, so I don't know why I'm exactly writing this; I just needed to tell this to someone.

Few hours ago, I found out that, in a hardly believable turn of events, I have been accepted in a PhD program in the exact field I wanted, computability theory, in one of the top universities in my country. I would say this is a dream, to have the chance to study what I like most in this world, now I see I just got the opportunity to make this dream come true.

With an absurd feeling of joy and sadness, it also means that I have to let go of programming, at least as a career. I really don't know if I will have to crave for the job I have right now ever again, but I know that I won't regret this decision; this is what I want.

But anyway, I enjoy to code, and I will enjoy it any time.
dev4Life

Fucking windows updates...

Went to do a job on a tank in 18 deg F Weather with snow on the ground. One guy brought an ice fishing tent (very nice). This is next to petroleum tank. We got guys on top of tank waiting for me to get data using a Windows 10 lappy.

Lappy comes up and tries to get into bios to do a firmware update. WTF! I reboot and it does it again! Go to look for power adapter as it wont do update without power. Not in bag. It has to have power to do update.

So I drive back to shop (with guys waiting on top of tank) which is 5 miles away. I am pissed. Its snowing and I have to drive slow. I find that adapter. I get back to the tank and plug it in. The AC source (battery based) starts alarming as the lappy takes too much power. Fuck! But somehow it boots Windows without doing firmware update. Fuck you Windows!

I get my job done, but don't fucking trust windows at all. Had this been a field tech he would be pissing his pants. Useless shitty software you have zero control over. Now considering changing their OS to Linux for field work. I am rewriting their software anyway with something can run Windows or Linux.

Fun fact: Busses in our town... or is it a city now? Haven't checked the population count in a while... anyway, they've got some... what would you call it... double-sided weird thing with monitors inside hanging from the ceiling and they are supposed to be used to play ads but only thing that airs there are videos from RedBull TV and an occasional "ad" reminding everyone who's paying for some fancy new buildings in the city(the EU), now that would be fine... But why the heck does the PC that runs them reboot every time the bus hits a bump or a pothole in the road and most of all why does it run a full-blown Ubuntu 10.04?!! I mean it's still better than running Windows but just why... why are they even using PCs... A Raspberry Pi would be more than enough for the job...

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.

An interviewer recently asked me "how many 'valid' combinations can you do with N parenthesis, either closing or opening?"

It sounds easy enough, yet I didn't manage to find the solution, apparently I was close enough using dynamic programming. Can you solve it ? :)

Best:
Seeing ALL the members of my team finally coming into their own. One person tackled our entire not-at-all-simple CI/CD setup from scratch knowing nothing about any of it and, while not without bumps in the road, did an excellent job overall (and then did the same for some other projects since he found himself being the SME). Two of my more junior people took on some difficult tasks that required them to design and build some tricky features from the ground-up, rather than me giving them a ton of guidance, design and even a start on the basic code early on (I just gave them some general descriptions of what I was looking for and then let them run with it). Again, not without some hiccups, but they ultimately delivered and learned a lot in the process and, I think, gained a new sense of self-confidence, which to me is the real win. And my other person handled some tricky high-level stuff that got him deep in the weeds of all the corporate procedures I'd normally shield them all from and did very well with it (and like the other person, wound up being an SME and doing it for some other projects after that). It took a while to get here, but I finally feel like I don't need to do all the really difficult stuff myself, I can count on them now, and they, I think, no longer feel like they're in over their heads if I throw something difficult at them.

Worst:
A few critical bugs slipped into production this year, with a few requiring some after-hours heroics to deal with (and, unfortunately, due to the timing, it all fell on me). Of course, that just tells us that next year we really need to focus on more robust automated testing (though, in reality, at least one of the issues almost certainly would not - COULD NOT - have been caught before-hand anyway, and that's probably true for more than just one of them). We had avoided major issues the previous three years we've been live, so this was unusual. Then again, it's in a way a symptom of success because with more users and more usage, both of which exploded this year, typically does come more issues discovered, so I guess it tempers the bad just a little bit.

TLDR: I didn't & still not sure if it is..

I love bug hunting & fixing & figuring out how stuff works, but many will argue this is not even real programming..

Long version how I ended up programming:
Back in highschool, I was deciding between english and mathematics & computer science.. I filled in the form for the latter. Got a change of hearts but I already gave the extra/backup empty form to schoolmate..

Figured it's for the better because it's a hell to get a job as an english teacher/prof anyways + I dislike comunications with people + documentation (if any) is in english etc..

At the end of first year, I didn't even apply for all the exams because you had to have both programming 1&2 to pass or even be eligible to take the year again.. I figured I'd fail them, so once I actually passed both (& actually not with bad grades), I was fucked.. had to retake the year, which means I lost time + still had to pay the rent etc.. decided to drop out and return home and do the IT engineer course instead to at least have some formal education to help me find a job. Finished that without problems, I 'specialised' in network administration.
I got a job straight out of school as a web developer.. the irony.. got some conflicts with the boss and was terminated (material for another rant).

Later I sought out admin jobs, but got declined because I was overqualified and had programming experince. FML, right?

Ended up sending out mandatory job applications for IT administration & programming to not lose the bonuses & got called up to a meeting in the company I work for since then.

No qualifications for .net & MS technologies, but they liked my CV so the ended up setting up the interview anyway. I didn't know half of the technologies and concepts by proper name, but they figured I understand enough of the content to give me a try. A few years later, I got the most fucked up project they have because of my love for new thigs and trying to understand everything. It's aaaalmost bearable now.. still needs a lot of work, but I'm happy where I am. Saddly, I'm still second guessing if I'm doing a proper job as a dev, but they seem to be very ok with my work. (:

>where is the code that is in charge of that?
>that's the infrastructure dependencies job
>oh cool. So what if I want to do X Y Z?
>the infra doesn't do that
> well who is on charge of infra?
>oh that was {guy that left 2 weeks ago} and anyway that code existed for AGES

So now I'm drowning in foreign spaghetti because people didn't want to disturb the holy infra and just made workaround in the services themselves. Good thing I got my nylon overalls for maximum shit protection

So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.

UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.

A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.

After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.

A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.

I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?

I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..

Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.

Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.

Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.

Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.

We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.

I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.

Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.

I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.

So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people.

I'm in the process of searching for a new job. I've got two interviews in person that were very promising. Both are in the process of talking to other candidates this week. I'll call them Firm A and Firm B.

The recruiter working for Firm A is constantly calling me, almost every other day, and asking about the other interviews I have. I told them I would probably hear back at the end of next week. They are pressuring me to just accept their client's offer of course (despite not having one at the moment).

I won't get an offer from Firm A until I do one more interview with executive staff anyway, sometime during the week of Thanksgiving. Firm B will have their decision to me by end of Thanksgiving week. Am I being unreasonable in wanting to wait for both offers to come up?

Both positions hold their pros/cons in terms of commute, pay, and benefits. I honestly felt a little angry when the recruiter told me "Oh, you don't sound very interested in this position" when I mentioned waiting. I'm the one deciding on my career path here and you have the gall to tell me what my interests are?

That one time a recruiter called me for a job and I had 2 meetings and was asked to ballpark a figure and the recruiter got angry and threatend to sue me but the company hired me anyway and we cut out the recruiter. Sadly, the job sucked and I quit after 3 months. So many life lessons tho...

Actually, it was probably my whole first two weeks in my first dev job. I got hired while still attending community college for my associates, and was woefully under-qualified (I didn't embellish, they hired me anyway), and my boss went on a three week vacation three days after I started. I had no idea what to do, didn't get much help from others on the team either. First couple of weeks were rough.

My video card just died this saturday (a Geforce GTS 250, did an awesome job over these years ). After removing the card from the pci-e slot i wouldn't get scrambled screen output anymore, but Linux Mint did not boot ( it would restart after the grub menu). Now i got managed to install the driver for the radeon onboard card , but Cinnamon still crashes.
GOD FUCKING DAMNIT !!!
But not enough this morning i also trapped a nerv in my back this morning and we got fuckin 33 degrees C in germany.

Anyway , does someone know a good video card in the middle price segment ?

So i got this advice from a acquaintance that's the head of some big company that deals with opensource.
"Stay away from .NET, it's the devil's doings"
Didn't quite know what to make of that, took my college degree in CS using java, got my first job with a java codetest and interview.. however I was so nervous I forgot to ask the tech questions about the job.
Anyway, just learnt that I'm now hired as a .NET developer (it's a trainee program so gets to learn it at work).

So, .net.. am I fucked or should I put my prejudices aside and embrace it as something good?

When I bought something second hand, I had a small chat with them and got to know that they need a new website for their small business. They told me they paid 800€ to an agency that didn't deliver anything - I suppose there's some misunderstanding but I don't wanna get involved in that).

I told them I could do it, but it's not really my field and I'm not sure if I want the trouble. I made clear I'd expect to be paid, I'd need to think about the amount..

Requirements should simple enough, static website can do. Nothing fancy really. They might even be able to DIY with a shitty website builder.. Needs to be hosted and working email. One red flag is the current situation regarding domain ownership because the former maintainer died...

Anyway I suppose this could be a nice side gig for beer money, with the initial setup paid decently plus a yearly fee for maintenance/hosting.

I don't wanna rip them off but also I don't wanna work a second job for pennies.. idk something like 500€ once + 150€/year would probably be ok? (incl. costs for domain/hosting/email)

I had a colleague, who built a bunch of smaller systems for the company I'm working in. He didn't want to waste his time building a "perfect" system (which I generally agree with, the question is just where to draw the line).

But because it took him so long to build the prototype, usually it went into production without being hardened (like basic input validations were missing. It wouldn't allow anything malicious, but instead of a validatiom error it'd just 500).

When he left, literally less then a week later, one of his systems, which was a prototype and nobody except him could maintain, because it was done in a fancy new technology, which wasn't even v1 at that time and their documentation said, it's production ready when we release v1. Anyway, that one system started crashing just few days after him leaving. Another Dev and me tried to fix it, but every time we touched it, it just got worse.

At some point, we gave up and just configured a cron job to reboot it every 12h. He could have probably fixed it, but to us it was just black magic.

Anyhow, this rent isn't about him, AFAIK all the systems still working, as long as you provide the correct input. Nor is it about the management decisions, which lead to this Frankenstein service on live support, which we had to increase, to be restarted every 8 hours, 6h, 4h, 3h, .....

It's about the service itself, which I'm looking forward to every day, when the rewrite will be done and I can nuke the whole git repository.

I was even thinking about moving all the related files onto a USB stick and putting that on 🔥, once we're done rewriting it....

Maybe next month or in 2. Hopefully before we'll have to configure the cron job to restart the service every couple minutes....

Wise people of devrant, I need career advice:
I got offered a contract by a french consulting company for my first job, but they also told me that they probably won't have a project for me untill April (because they have enough juniors for now and new positions probably won't open untill they get a new batch of projects.)

Needless to say I'm angry at myself for being such a noob but they are right :/

What would you do? I am still looking for other possibilities atm, but nothing too concrete has popped up yet besides these french guys: I got an offer for an unpaid intership that is waiting for a geen light, and a couple of other job interviews lined up for the next few weeks.

Also I currently live in denmark, so I would need to relocate to france come April.

I would be inclined to sign the contract anyway and return their kindness, as they could have just told me to fuck off and come back in 6 months, (at least they like me) but I don't know what is best in this situation...

Should I stick with them and wait, perhaps training myself in the mean time? Or do you think it would be better to pursue other options?

Not the best way a co worker has quit and not dev related. From a job I had for only a month the summer before I got my first position with the company I'm currently with. It was factory work, pretty crappy, no air conditioning, this guy started just after me hardly ever did his job and was just generally annoying as hell. One day I'm brought into HR and asked if I fucking shower. :| I do and did every day. Deoderent and all. I explained it's a hot work environment. They said I should just shower more. I've never heard such a dumb complaint filed against anyone. Of course I wasn't going to smell like daisies, it was hot as fuck in there. Anyway a week later got offered a new job, I didn't give any notice just walked to HR at the end of the day the day before I started my new job, said I'm out. They asked if they could get 2 weeks notice, with out hesitating I stated no, I start my new job tomorrow, here's my badge, bye. And walked out. :| This wasn't the only thing that made me quit but it was kind of a tipping point. Like ok don't like sweat smell? Then don't be on top of me or find a job with air conditioning.

I was originally employed as a Full Stack Python Developer. But this year so far, I only did operations. Now I also got a project to host the legacy Python 2.7 Plone/Zope applications of another company entirely on our infrastructure. This means, that I'll do hardly anything else from now on, i.e. no programming. It was already decided that we'll do the project, and it landed on my desk when everything was fixed.

So I'll quit my job to build my own company with some friends, but I can only leave after a two month notice period. So I have to do the project anyway, for which I feel absolutely zero motivation.

I wanted to become a good programmer, but in my last two jobs I just was a mediocre Ops guy. This is because most other programmers would make even worse Ops guys then me.

Is there any language or framework I am guaranteed to get a job in if I learn right now?

I know this is a shot in the dark cuz if such did exist, every job seeking entrant would simply flock to it; but I don't know how developers switch between stacks. Off the top of my head, recommendation but what if such social capital is missing?

Some background: I built and published a php framework called Suphle (angry-cray-9c191b.netlify.app), which surprisingly neither got any users after a year nor impressed any php employer to hire me despite hundreds of applications sent out

Rather than throwing in the towel, I wish to switch to some other software stack but I don't know where to start, If with all my proven php experience, I'm unable to land any php roles. I have tried searching for nestjs and spring boot internships or junior but nothing comes up. I have run out of time to study a language I will never profit from

I have a flutter app on playstore, built together with a product designer who worked on the ui cuz my front end chops aren't strong. I will preferably continue in a back end environment but if I can solicit immediate employment, I don't mind brushing up on any available tech, be it devops or what have you. I've also worked with spring in a professional capacity, although a very turbulent one where the team we had issues ranging ranging from absence of adequate docs for something as basic as authentication, to using nosql (totally unnecessary), trying to separate codebase into different projects to mirror the real life department (this was my idea). I don't know if it's Conway's law but I decided project should be split into admin, user and common modules/repos since they were being worked on by different devs and had little in common. Unfortunately, there is no doc for importing/sharing local projects so we had more days chucked off

Anyway, I Built a react native app a lifetime ago. Been around the block a bit and pretty confident I won't take much time to get up to speed with a tech. Where do I go or how do I start? I stay in Nigeria so may be limited from on-site roles as well

I've been busting my ass all evening, trying to land a job before anyone catches wind that I lost mine. I mean, I've got a wife and two kids to support!! Anyway, my daughter storms in after being out from dawn till dusk and starts going at it with me, I'm so stressed I feel like I'm trying to debug a complex program with a thousand errors popping up every minute . Now she's giving me the silent treatment, just another thing to add to the stress pile... sigh. Guess I'll keep pounding the pavement. If anyone has any helpful tips, please share. :-(

[opinions welcome]
I'm just furious right now!!!

So I'm on this project where we have to make a whole *very old* website look like it's brand new.

Thing is, the whole point of the project is to make exactly the same pages as on the existing website smh. No UX or UI suggestions.
Just put the navbar in a component that looks like a tab bar, who cares anyway!?

Btw, I'm in charge of the UI.

My colleagues and I (mostly my colleagues) made a react components library and we use it for this project.
Fucking inputs get thrown into tables and all that, but hey, that's what the client asked for.

So here I am with my shiny new page, and I just hand it over to the front-end dev who just arrived.
She's supposed to feed in the data.
I don't give a fuck you use flow or redux or whatever fancy tooling.
Just call your back-end, get the data, format it and feed my damn table with it. That's it.

So today, after 5 weeks she's in, she calls a meeting where she's screening a presentation to the team complaining about how long it took her to understand what I did and change it completely.
Pieces of code on screen, saying it's crap and it shouldn't be like that.

I'm not responsible for inputs in fucking table, the client is!
Of course I have nested components with data passed through all the way: it's a series of fucking radio buttons within a table within a form!

During 5 weeks, yoy didn't even come to me once saying it's not what you expected or you're having trouble with my work!
And there we blaming my job like I'm the bad guy?!

Tonight, everyone's going home thinking I'm no good at what I do and completely lost, all because of her.

If you got this far, I'd like to hear from you on how I should act with her and how to tell her what she did is awfully wrong?

Hypothetically, your parents partly own a company. They ask you to do some technical stuff for this company (They think its easy, but technically speaking its not. IT isnt magic), but you've got a graduate school, an unfinished research proposal, and a day job with deadlines to deal with. You still do it anyway. Do you have a right for some sort of compensation? Do you have the right to reject?

Need some advise from all you clever devs out there.

When I finished uni I worked for a year at a good company but ultimately I was bored by the topic.

I got a new job at a place that was run by a Hitler wannabee that didn't want to do anything properly including writing tests and any time I improved an area or wrote a test would take me aside to have a go so I quit after 3 months.

Getti g a new job was not that hard but being at companies for short stints was a big issue.

My new job I've been here 3 months again but the code base is a shit hole, no standardisation, no one knows anything about industry standards, no tests again, pull requests that are in name only as clearly broken areas that you comment on get ignored so you might as well not bother, fake agile where all user stories are not user stories and we just lie every sprint about what we finished, no estimates and so forth, and a code base that is such a piece of shit that to add a new feature you have to hack every time. The project only started a few months back.

For instance we were implementing permissions and roles. My team lead does the table design. I spent 4 hours trying to convince him it was not fit for purpose and now we have spent a month on this area and we can't even enforce the permissions on the backend so basically they don't exist. This is the tip of the iceberg as this shit happens constantly and the worst thing is even though I say there is a problem we just ignore it so the app will always be insecure.

None of the team knows angular or wants to learn but all our apps use angular..

These are just examples, there is a lot more problems right from agile being run by people that don't understand agile to sending database entities instead of view models to client apps, but not all as some use view models so we just duplicate all the api controllers.

Our angular apps are a huge mess now because I have to keep hacking them since the backend is wrong.

We have a huge architectural problem that will set us back 1 month as we won't be able to actually access functionality and we need to release in 3 months, their solution even understanding my point fully is to ignore it. Legit.

The worst thing is that although my team is not dumb, if you try to explain this stuff to them they either just don't understand what you are saying or don't care.

With all that said I don't think they are even aware of these issues somehow so I dont think it's on purpose, and I do like the people and company, but I have reached the point that I don't give a shit anymore if something is wrong as its just so much easier to stay silent and makes no difference anyway.

I get paid very well, it's close to home and I actually learn a lot since their skill level is so low I have to pick up the slack and do all kinds of things I've never done much of like release management or database optimisation and I like that.

Would you leave and get a new job?

Upgrading my tech skills.. Once again I feel my personal my personal dev environment and told are much more up-to-date than what I use at work.... Though the book Kim reading is on TDD and was written 3 years ago.

Maybe I should read another on in cloud services and ML... but don't have any motivation for these topics.

I need TDD for work because now we're emphasizing unit test coverage...

I usually only use manual functional tests to verify the final outputs as either the testing framework is broken (JS) or I don't have time to relearn the frameworks for the particular language...

Anyway got off topic... So questions after:

1. Do you ever feel your technologically always more ahead than what you do at work and essentially you bring skills to the job but you don't learn much out of it?

2. How do you test? I actually got into a bit of a argument/discussion with my colleagues about how to implement unit tests. Apparently there are 2 ways to test? Black box vs WhiteBox. She said she tests only Public methods using mock inputs, dependencies. She read online and seems there is an opinion that should only test public functions and if you can't then your app is designed incorrectly, not separated enough.

For me I test the private functions individually (WhiteBox/Java reflection) because the public one is like generateReport and as a whole is like a Pachinko machine, too many unique paths that would need a test case for.

So thoughts? Yes sorry for turning it into a remake I guess...

Dear Thieves.
So I was looking at some guy who's job I designed today.
He was sitting there with the new laptop I bought during one visit here.
It was an hp with a silver keyboard and handrest because supposedly normal people stopped owning laptops when you all decided to embrace schizophrenia and create inane rather stupid meanings that are associated with literally everything but sense or sophistication.

comparing oneself to an animal for example doesn't focus on positive or spiritual values, its something perverse.

ordering food is not about enjoying new things or savoring flavors, its about something perverse.

going to school is not to learn things, its to crash and burn later because the powers that be refuse to update the system from the 1970s.

living, is not living at all, but working to pay bills and get old bitter and fat.

well.

shit.

retards.

anyway. doesn't explain people like myself who made things when we could and were enthusiastic about our jobs at points.

oh. and supposedly the guy who stole the job was 'I".... and it was a job that would become 'outmoded'......
i believe that was the word often used. let;s check. yup, close enough.

then all these people talking about 'new' jobs because noone could trust the group of monsters they made with too much spare time. since you know. they thought it was funny to steal human beings lives since they were not human. subhuman.

anyway.

where suddenly everything meant something else and a whole new world of retarded people emerged from the shadows because the trash children of a former generation got sick of being lectured about morality when they were in fact just bad people who should have been shot.

i don't care how else the whiney bastards explain themselves. i really don't.

you can say that in desperate fucked situations involving psychological torture, rape, etc that a decent person *raises their hand* might do TERRIBLE things to their captors in order to escape, but THEY caused that while whining that someone from the 1940s or earlier made them evil and they had no choice but to steal jobs, money, retirement funds, public institutions, the morals of a generation, i'll bite: toddlers, spread their legs like psycho whores to get pregnant, so steal people's unborn children, turn every fund available that could have gone towards people that needed things to money laundering and in general gleefully fucked our whole country up with the lack of foresight that psychopaths commonly display.

great job.
was it worth dying ?

how about going crazy and letting another group of evil people make an excuse to drive everyone into an endless idiotic loop ?

but hey no, keep lying. works so well.
well at least fedora 37 is released again.

give the stolen photos back.
just want to know what i looked like, and don't want to talk like a retard to get people who understand english to pretend they finally comprehend.

fucking bastards.