Rant
Why do shithead clients think they can walk away without paying us once we deliver the project !!!

So, here goes nothing..
Got an online gig to create a dashboard.
Since i had to deal with a lot of shitheads in the past, I told them my rules were simple, 20% advance, 40% on 50% completion and 40% after i complete and send them proof of completion. Once i receive the payment in full, only then i will hand over the code.
They said it was fine and paid 20%.
I got the next 40% also without any effort but they said they also needed me to deploy the code on their AWS account, and they were ready to pay extra for it, so i agreed.
I complete the whole project and sent them the screenshots, asking for the remaining 40% payment. They rejected the request saying my work was not complete as i had not deployed on AWS yet. After a couple of more such exchanges, i agreed to setup their account before the payment. But i could sense something fishy, so i did everything on their AWS account, except registered the domain from my account and set up everything. Once i inform them that its done and ask for the remaining payment.
The reply i got was LOL.
I tried to login to the AWS account, only to find password had been changed.
Database access revoked.
Even my admin account on the app had been removed. Thinking that they have been successful, they even published ads about thier NEW dashboard to their customers.
I sent them a final mail with warning ending with a middle finger emoji. 24 hours later,
I created a github page with the text " This website has been siezed by the government as the owner is found accused in fraud" and redirected the domain to it. Got an apology mail from them 2 hours later begging me to restore the website. i asked for an extra 10% penalty apart from the remaining payment. After i got paid, set an auto-reply of LOL to thier emails and chilled for a week before restoring the domain back to normal.
Dev : 1
Shithead Client: 0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dev: …

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

Fuck China.

Fuck the U.S. government.

Fuck the UK and Australia and all the other governments for taking advantage of the crisis of the last two years to get more power and money for their elites.

Fuck them all for starting COVID with their unsanctioned and unethical “gain of function” lab experiments and creating so much chaos that nobody really has a chance anymore at living the life they had dreamed of or so carefully planned for.

Fuck them for the out of control spending and money printing and inflation and even messing around with trying to regulate and tax crypto so we don’t have any kind of escape valve to live a normal, happy life.

Because of them, I can’t even enjoy my time off work. Even if I could plan a vacation that wouldn’t have to be canceled due to an outbreak or resultant supply chain issues, I can’t travel without severe restrictions that make it miserable and not worth the trouble.

Fuck them for making everyone into stupid monkeys fighting over opinions about data that is incomplete, misunderstood, misrepresented, or downright fixed toward a specific pharma-fascist authoritarian outcome.

And fuck them especially for being hypocrites and going to parties and generally not following their own rules they made for us when they think we’re not watching, and then persecuting and prosecuting us when we dare do the same.

Fuck ‘em all. I’m so done.

!dev

Fuck Russian government. I have nothing else to say.

taxes. what the actual fuck? I finally graduated and got my first 6 figure job, only to find out the federal government basically takes 1/3 of my pay??? WHAT??? Why are we all okay with this? I feel fucking robbed. I worked so hard to get here, so many sleepless nights, so many all nighters studying, just to get 1/3 of my money stolen from me? what the fuck?????

Government re-employment resume wizard: "Enter your job title for this job experience."

Me: "Development Manager"

Wizard: "Did you mean Biofuels/Biodiesel Technology and Product Development Manager,
Training and Development Manager, or
Wind Energy Development Manager?"

Me: "Web Development Manager"

Wizard: "Website Administrator it is!"

Me: ... bruh ...

Government applications meant to handle private data made in the laziest way using cordova. Hell yea. Bonus points for using the developers account with his first and last name as publishing company to put the app on playstore and not their own official one (not that they have one). Whats not to love. Cant wait to beautify that js to find out that the calls are http and not https.

My company is 8 days late to pay my salary.

The government (uae) recommended a 4.5 work week and my company hinted they wont abide by it

My company promised us bonuses and shares a year ago that we still didnt get

Altho we have been working remotely for 2 years due to covid, they are also trying to enforce going to the office...

Everything about the company is way too toxic

I want to leave ...

but all my applications get ghosted so i feel like a slave, its like i need this company otherwise im jobless. I haye this

GIRLS PRANK
Omg I changed her lipstick with one of a slightly different color I'm so random she'll go CrAaAaAzY

BOYS PRANK
Use Tampermonkey to transform your colleague's pc into a chinese botnet and redirect him to some PCC website on every click forever

Yeah long story short that's how my previous firm blocked access to domains hosted by the Chinese government.

So, update on the ransomware attack on the health ministry in Brazil: wasn't a ransomware.
They just rerouted the DNS.

Apparently they've been trying to issue a vaccination passport, and the federal government has been pissy about it. And now everyone appears as unvaccinated. What a fuckin coincidence huh

Our school had for an open source way of dealing with home schooling and managing the school network and so on.

Now the government forced a "proprietary" system on our school and everyone hates it. The teachers didn't want it the pupils didn't want it but who cares "what we do is the best".

Btw the proprietary system costs a fuck load of money even though they just mixed many open source projects and made it their own proprietary thing.
And this company now get's loads of money for their shitty system that never really worked once since we got it.

They blocked so many ip's that we can't even access google and it's services on the school wifi and the bandwith dropped severely with the new system.

Oh and many random ip's e.g. one of my vps is accessible but the other one not.
Discord is blocked.
Web whatsapp.
And so on...

Now....

I need to learn for tests next week and need to access that stuff on the portal but...

Now they decided to switch the LDAP server to the new system and since a few hours i can't access this fucking thing.

It seems like the platform now contacts the new server which isn't even up and running....

Never change a fucking running system....

Oh and we got smart boards and it runs on android and they didn't block adb. Now i installed clash of clans on one of those things. Haha whoops.
These boards cost 7000€ and have security patches from 2 years ago....and Android 8

Apple is like.. government. Bureaucracy all aover, burgeoise

Brazilian health ministry got a ransomware attack this night.

Why? Not because every city is demanding you to show you're vaccinated in order to go somewhere. Because you have to show it using a 20+ year old system.

Don't get me wrong the UI is nice.
But the servers...

Well, at least I have a document where my shots are registered.

And good luck to us living in this country, where we're known for gorgeous cities (people too) but also for a government that earns 200k+ while working 2 days a week and can employee 40+ people for sitting there and do no fucking shit.

No wonder if you get bad news from here every now and then, it's all true.
The ministries are dumb.
The president is dumb.

And worst. People too.

People don't care. Because they don't know they are part of 94% of more than 200 MILLION that earns minimum wage and strive to live bc the country BUYS things that we ALREADY PRODUCE and have to put a tax to every product to compensate them paying 5x times more to buy in dollars.

Well,
At least I'm not depending on this sucker of government, never cared about it.
You guys deserve to collapse and become poor again

For all you chuckleheads that think the government will save us with a UBI and other free shit, consider that when I went to apply for unemployment, I got this message: "This website is designed to work with Internet Explorer version 8 and 9, Apple Safari version 4 and 5 or Mozilla Firefox version 16 and 17." Also, the website is mysteriously unable to allow you to apply for unemployment on any day other than Monday through Friday and at any time other than 8 am-5 pm. Those computers the government has have better time off constraints than I do!

!dev

God I’m having the hardest time focusing on my task, it just seems so inconsequential compared to the shit going on in the world.

Here in my own country we’ve got issues with the government and their desperate grabs at power, citizens rights being trampled all over as if they mean nothing.

Of course the conflict in Ukraine I can’t peel my eyes away from the Reddit world news feed.

The explosive inflation worrying about the cost of food fuel and rent.
Diesels not cheap, and the electric company wants to spike up the price of already over priced electricity by 10%.

I’ve got a trip coming up which I’m thankful for but it’s expensive and money isn’t getting any easier to come by.

I’m genuinely worried about what the WEF is attempting to accomplish and the amount of power they hold over the western world.

And with all that in my mind…. The work in front of me of updating this stupid game to modern standard and refactoring it to actually make sense and be maintainable… just seems so fucking pointless.

Android 12, stop telling me every other day which app has permission to access my location in the background. I know, I gave permission, and I want to keep the setting "Allow all the time". Where's the "don't ask again" option?
And why does this happen for an app released by the German federal government (about once a week) but never, ever for your shitty Google Maps that always seems to know where I've been (at least if don't leave my phone at home, which is hard to do in times when you have to show your digital proof of vaccination everywhere yo go). Fucking Android, fuck the Android 12 clunkiness (inspired by Apple's iOS?) and fuck the fucking notifications. This is my phone, I paid for it, I own it, I want to turn off this bullshit. Wait, Google, once I find time to get back to LineageOS/Cyanogenmod you will never see a trace of my digital existence again. Oh, and fuck your "digital wellbeing" as well! At least you let me turn that off. Yes, I know, I am not grateful, but that's what devrant is for, isn't it? Fuck you, Google!

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

Well, now our problem with salaries and legal benefits is a governmental issue. ✊🏾

memo to myself: do never take government contracts again

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

I have decided that massive natural selection events are a thing with humans. When resources appear to be getting low a group of people will prepare and wipe out a large portion of consumers. The most straight forward way is to create a crisis and then offer the "only" solution. Make that solution a weapon and you are done. The masses gladly accept the solution. At all times appear benevolent. Silence dissenting voices swiftly. Make the dissenters look like nutters and publicly humiliate them and apply labels to them. Labels are effective because it creates pariahs. People like to not be singled out and called names.

What do you end up with? People who distrust government and the institutions. I don't know how this benefits the orchestrators (how to spell) of the genocide. Perhaps if the numbers are small enough they can just be rounded up and killed by force rather than coercion.

I get the feeling this approach has been used in the past. Like it has been at least tested on smaller scales. Maybe even on past civilizations. Did we learn to do this from space visitors? I wonder.

2021 has certainly been an interesting year. I used to think people were just stupid. This year has confirmed that for me. But I am not sure stupid is the right word. They are certainly book smart. Maybe naive is a better word. I pray and hope 2022 turns out better for people. Maybe they start seeing signs they have been lied to by people they trust. Maybe not. When you are in the matrix it is hard to see through the facade. The matrix feels very real, until it doesn't.

Dev Goal?: To not be murdered by the matrix.

In Africa,
To get a private company job, you need skills, not books.

To get a government job, you Connections to big people, not books or skills .

To get a scholarship for higher studies, you need books.

With bitcoin/binance still allowing russia to move money about, is anybody abandoning it? I don't feel comfortable using it, but also if it becomes their only way to fund themselves, the government will push through new tax laws on it and throttle it anyway. Or just outright ban people from using it.

Funding a war is one of the occassions where decentralised financing becomes a major problem.