I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

I was writing tests at work and rather enjoying myself.

Boss insisted we all go home early because "holiday halfsies," so I semi-unhappily pack up and go home. At home, I write tests for a personal project instead.

Dev life.

Coworker: "Hey I have the final logo for your software"

Me: "Awesome, only a few bugfixes after my holiday and we are good to go on production. 2 more hours to go until I am free for a week."

Coworker: "After your holiday? Boss said it goes on production tomorrow!"

Me: "You are kidding me, aren't you? There is no way I can do all the work today and push to production!"

Coworker: "Boss promised the client..."

How about boss can go an f himself? He knows I have some other project to finish today and that I am leaving. This is in our team cal for over a month now! Ahhh. My coworker now has to deal with it-.-

Finally finished all the current issues and tasks I had set out to accomplish before the holiday began.

Boss comes by - "you're doing some good work, do you have anything you're working on right now?"

"No, I actually just fin-"

"Good, I think now would be a good time for you to redesign our entire intranet."

"Haha. Yes."

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

I was a midweight dev acting as a lead dev on the frontend development of a project. I had already built most of it, it was all vanilla JavaScript, had no jQuery, the code was simple, fast, and small. Then I went on holiday and the company put a senior lead on the project to carry out remaining work while I was away.

When I came back, there was a bug in the age gate page and I started to investigate. I then noticed that the asshole added jQuery to the code just to select the country and date of birth input fields. That idiot, a senior lead dev earning more than twice what I earned, didn’t know how to select some elements on a page! I nearly lost my temper when I saw the added bloat.

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

The coolest project I was ever involved on, was when we signed a client in Namibia (we were a South African based company). So I was flown to Namibia for 2 weeks to train the clients etc. I spent about 4 days training the client and I had no more work to do. So the client took me out around town and we drank so much on his tab! He even gave me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, because he doesnt drink Whiskey! The best part of it, apart from exploring their awesome country and pubs, was Mad Max 4 was being filmed in my town, and my client took me to see the yard where all the vehicles and props were situated, because he owned that property! So all in all, it was more of a paid holiday than anything else!

!rant

It's a non-working holiday at the office so I'm at home doing nothing. I asked my boyfriend what to do for the whole day then he said "Spend your day to something you really enjoy".

Ah yes!

So I'm building a new project. What an exciting day!

Just deployed version 0.0.1 of my holiday project to production.

It's a pie "attached" to some speakers, mounted below the kitchen cubord. So far it only runs a spotify connect on it and you're able to play music there while cooking/cleaning.

I'd actually like it to also be able to just play regular music, either from a smartphone or a computer in the network. (It's connected by wifi to our lan). Any advice on what software I could install on it to achive that? i'd prefere to enable it for devices on the lan and have bluetouth dissabled, but I'm actually not sure if that is even possible. So yeah any advice to that? Or any other things you'd install on it?

I know, that I need to do some "cable management" back there :P

Starting to get really pissed off with the hierarchy in my department that my manager keeps insisting ‘doesn’t exist’ but it clearly does when the other team manager is her best friend, to the point where they go on holiday together, go to each others family parties, etc.

Manager goes on holiday for two weeks and other TL gets on her high fucking horse lording over my team and uninviting me from meetings that she thinks I ‘don’t need to be in’ when the majority of the project is mine..

But my manager hasn’t appointed a deputy.....

"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.

Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.

During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.

I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.

It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.

I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.

After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.

We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.

I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.

I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.

I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.

I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.

I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.

This is what burnout looks like.

With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.

YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

Office Ninja!

Today, my PM dropped by in the morning and mentioned she had some customer feedback on some item in a project where I'm the holiday replacement for someone else. I already had work to do, so that kind of interruption wasn't welcome.

"Well yeah, just forward it to me, I'll see what I can do", I told her. She agreed. Half an hour later, still no email from her. Hey, that looked promising!

For the rest of the day, I didn't talk to her, avoided speaking at all when she was near and even sneaked by her room (open doors) in silent mode lest I drew her attention and she might have remembered the email.

Until afternoon when I went home, still no email. Success! :-)

Here we go, classes are starting again tommorow, tried to do most of the things on holiday, delegated school project stuff to the project members and made a planning with them...
and still nothing happend on their part in a timespan of 2 weeks and the deadline is in 5 days and A FUCK LOAD OF STUFF STILL HAS TO BE DONE AKA I guess I have to do their part too in 5 days..
*going into caffeine induced rage insane mode for 5 days*

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

After spending my entire holiday vacation fucking around with the one language that really digs with my state of mind (Ruby) when developing and having to do some quick troubleshooting on 2 of our applications (Java and PHP respectively) I can honestly say: I legit don't want to go back to that ever again.

But money means more to me than my own personal biases. I have delved in some of the most HATED platforms that developers could normally ask for in terms of work. And have only done some very basic (fucking obnoxiously basic) consulting in terms of Rails, to the point that it might not be even worth putting on a cv. But fuck me man, if I could just fuck around building rails solutions for a living, from the frontend to the backend, I think I would for once be happy with the things that I work with with things more than monetary pleasure.

Y'all know your boy, I ain't no neckbeard, but I fuck with things that a lot of others don't, to me Lisp dialects and Smalltalk are gifts from dev heaven, and I have thrown out Clojure in production (my app is still chugging along just fine at work thank you very mucho) but in terms of pure web development, I have never been happier than when I generate a rails project and start tinkering around.

Sigh.......here is to hoping that maybe I will eventually open my own rails shop.

The OneNote saga continues.

The Project Manager woman is back from holiday and lo and behold I get a DM telling me to update my notes. I have done so already, but OneNote didn't sync it. I open it again only to see half of what I pasted in is gone, so is the checkmark for my name.

She tells me I am the only person experiencing this. I feel like I am being gaslit. I ask a coworker if they also have sync issues with OneNote, and yes they do. I am being gaslit.

She made me submit an IT support ticket for this shit and now I am sitting here waiting for the technician to finish and leave the remote session so I can do my fucking work. This is so pointless, there's nothing to fix for IT support, it's a shit piece of Windows software.

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!

WHY DO PEOPLE ALWAYS LEAVE CLOSE TO DEADLINES???

My team exists of three developers and a product owner. By the end of the month we have to deliver two new applications. It has not been going as smoothly as we'd hoped so far. However, one of the developers has cut his time for this project from fulltime to 1-2 days a week starting this week. The other developer is also needed on another project and has to run to the rescue whenever there is a problem with the servers, so he doesn't really solve any bugs either. Also he'll be leaving straight after deadline so he has to document everything only he knows and he'll be on holiday next week. Also, the product owner leaves tomorrow and will be back after deadline.

So.. Here I am, junior developer, have been here for about three months and I have to fix everything and do the communication to our testers as well. I'm feeling too overwhelmed right now...

First day back from holiday: after 30 minutes of work (excludes start-up, catch-up etc.) The P.O. (product owner) comes to me

Telling me I needed to switch project, ok I thought at least they switched the project from what ever it was to a propper OTAP street while I was away

Few tickets later the P.O. asked me if tickets x could be deployed to our test servers as well as production.. (note the ticket was already merged with our develop branch and he wanted only that single ticket x to be deployed)

WTF is the point of a OTAP street if you're going to deploy it to every server type at once?

So day one after my holiday I already needed to fight the P.O. again

At least I wasn't disturbed during my vacation... Witch is a first.

Regain work life balance.
The last few years especially with COVID I've started to do way to much for the company's I've worked for. Working while I was coughing my lungs out when I had COVID. Working during my holiday because it was finally a fun feature to develop. Working in lunch breaks because people would call me all the time (remote there are no boundaries)

I left that company on a good note, started actually healthy as the new company actually understands flex working. However as I gained responsibly more meetings started to appear also causing rushed lunches no more walks of sport activities. Than I was lead in a project and because of some personal circumstances (death in the family) that was running long. Again started to work overtime trying to catch up.

I need to stop doing this. Caring is fine but I just give to much when I feel responsible. Good thing is that my current company actually wants to help me with this.

TL;DR

Got Salesforce customised by an external company, took over the code and wanted to cry.

So my company decided to get a new crm for sales with contract generation and a whole lot of fluff. Specs included an easy to implement API to connect to our in-house software and an easy to adjust contract Wizard.

After month of checking various companies the CEO finally settled on...
Drumroll
The cheapest German based company.
Turns out the only part that is based in Germany is the sales department, development is based in Poland which made for interesting times during implementation because of the language barrier that comes with non native english speakers.

We as in our development department for told that we wouldn't need to worry about the solution because it would all be developed and maintained by the new company. As we are fairly small that was more then welcome.

Fast forward to integration day. No docs for the API available, contract Wizard is hardcoded, bunch of errors and inconsistencies. Get tickets for them.
Ok we can deal with this. Just tell the ticket writer he needs to address the problems with the external. Yep, doesn't work. External fixes bugs and introduces then elsewhere.
Fml. Ok I'll take a look into the code. Ugh, Java, I hate that shit but at least I don't need to worry about all the fluff, just the code, so it's ok.
No repository present, code is developed in the Dev environment and pushed to prod. Ugly but works. Code comes with a lot of functions but only one real class called "CommonUtilities" ... even the web API is defined in there. Meanwhile my colleague throws out the need for the API because we will just directly tie to SOQL. I'll let's check what's going on here, nice you reused Lead/Account/Contact for the branch offices of companies as well...
Is not like Salesforce has a bunch of logic tied to these objects...
Nice the required implementation of an automatic holiday import is not even there, just a custom object populated with this year's data...

Tell CEO how badly all of this was handled. Nice note this dumpster fire is our new in-house project because CEO cancelled the contract with the external.

Ok we can deal with this, let's set up a repo, define the CI/CD and get the extensions for vscode. Nice now this all makes sense. Fix all bugs and reimplement the contract Wizard using custom objects that sales can change so the contract is actually easily customizable by a non dev. Implement branches as their own object to avoid opportunities, triggers and the likes to be executed for them.
Took a whole day. Why did these 2000 lines of code that was shipped to us take 3 month to implement?

Lesson learned: never trust an external to just do a good job.
New rule implemented by company to always have a Dev check in regular intervals on projects handled by externals for standards and overall logic

10k down the drain for what amounted to 2 weeks tops (one dev) if we had handled the implementation of Salesforce and all the requirements in-house

Boss: so we've got to call an app to verify data in this project. But I've got no more info and I'm on holiday next week. Please contact GuyA next week.
Me: ok I guess?
*writes email to GuyA*
GuyB: GuyA is on holiday please hold the line
*1 week later*
GuyA: we need more time it's not ready yet
*2 weeks later?
Me: so?
GuyA: yeah it's ready here's the wsdl etc your client already has the password
*1 week later*
Me: yeah so I got the data but the api says my auth isn't working
GuyB: yeah your user isn't activated on the test system. I'm gonna forward that and come back at you
*1 week later*
GuyA: so we're going live in about 2 weeks hows testing going?
Me: well I'm still waiting for the response and activation
*suddenly it works*
Me: yeah so auth is working but i can't find any data. Is there any special test data?
GuyA: oh no there is NO test data on the test system. You need to wait for GuyB but he us not here today...
Me: are you fking kidding Me?????

... no response since then and it's been days....

Just imagination but, if infinite money and resource was present (and if this was hypothetically possible)...

A machine that is able to replicate ONLY one portion of the brain thinking activity and produce a version of a robot with that thinking capacity. This would be unique per person, and licensed in a way so that the owner of the robot is only able to use and control it. (I'm saying only one thinking capability should be allowed as a robot should never replace a person ideally.)

This would mean that the person is able to increase efficiency as the robot could be set to resume activities in the period that the person can't (i.e. sleeping).

One example of using this scenario could be that the person chooses to create a robot by replicating their coding thinking capabilities. This would mean the robot doesn't do much but has the same thinking ability to code as the owner. The robot could be used when the owner is sleeping or on holiday. As the thinking capacity is the same, the code logic would be the same as when the owner would have wrote it.

This would be a DREAM project to work on.

But alas... This isn't happening anytime soon in my lifetime (or ever realistically).

Project manager assigned me 12 tickets before my holiday in a week... 10 are blocked :D

just started a holiday project. creating a silly game using Processing 2. finally done with day 1 drawing, and baselining.

Today I dont feel that good.

I have only 1 month of my holiday temporary job left. After that Im going to university, the place that i have been dreaming about, the place where finaly i would finish my projects, where i would meet people like me that could support, help me with my passions.

I have no idea where i got that wave of saddnes. Normaly i dont feel that way. Job is unconfortable and sometimes stressing a bit but it is not the end of the world.

I just want to stay in confy bed for the whole day but i cant, i need that money for uni.

I tried to code yesterday but i just couldnt focus! Always when i try to finish the project, no matter what it is i just lose my motivation, its just gone.

Sometimes I wonder if that university is going to be as good as i was imaginig it, after numerous rants on devrant about their uni im not so sure... That dosent help me with my mood.

Is my terrible mood caused by loneiness? bad diet? or lazyness?
I just dont know... I just want to feel better. I just want to survive that month somehow, without that crushing feeling and constant depression.

Best: Got my first dev job a month before I graduated my bootcamp. Was hired till rona layoffs started happening. Found another dev job 4 months later, and just received a promotion from said job just before going on holiday leave.

Worst: Being laid off for those 4 months. Sure unemployment + stimulus got me through financially, but mentally and emotionally I was starting to crack. I had thought I broke through the barrier with that first job and was going to be set. That layoff threw a wrench in my whole plan. In those 4 months unemployed I developed some imposter syndrome. Regardless, I plugged along with my side projects. One company was really impressed with one of them and was using a similar stack for an upcoming project, so luckily they ended up hiring me. Confidence restored.

So I've started a little project in Java that creates a db of all of my downloaded movie and video files. The process is very simple, but I've just started incorporating Machine Learning.

The process is quite simple: You load the files into the db, the program tries to determine the movie's name, year and quality from the filename (this is where the ML comes in - the program needs to get this and dispose of useless data) and then does an online search for the plot, genre and ratings to be added to the db.

Does anyone have any feature suggestions or ML tips? Got to have something to do during the holiday!

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

So I've been back to work for 2 weeks after going on a holiday. Getting back into the flow of things was easy, but seeing the status of the project that I am a part of, and seeing the kind of implementation work that my co-workers has done, it's kind of a no surprise.

So the past 2 weeks I've been completing features that I left my co-workers to finish, but didn't. And rewriting other features that they worked on, but does not meet the specifications.

Will I ever be able to work with reliable/competent developers?

Today was a holiday and I wanted to make a mini project for practice purpose, the generic idea was to submit form details and view the details in another file and get the said details on e-mail too.

The main purpose of this exercise was to strengthen my OOP skill.

Not two minutes and 1 text box later I get a call to reset all passwords of "friend" because it was "urgent" somehow..

Reset passwords for fuck's sake...Now I am having this idea of automating reset password job..

So, I'm on holiday for a week from Friday. Woo! The plan is to head to a cottage in the middle of nowhere with the wife and the dog and chill the fuck out for a while.

Just found out from my boss that, due to some fucking colossal mismanagement, I have to support a huge release for an architecture rebuild project from 10pm til 8am on Sunday night. While I'm on holiday. In the middle of nowhere.

FML

Why the fuck does it happen every god damn time???!!!?!??!! Oh look the 5(0) year old designer created an Armageddon (layout) and went on holiday but that's okay cause it has been already approved by our sweet project manager WITHOUT SHOWING IT TO THE DEV TEAM FIRST. Fucking this fucking fuck fuck! FUCK. You deal with this idiots, i fucking QUIT bitch bye.

One of my tasks for today was to change one (ONE! I REPEAT, ONE!!) field in over 2100 clients. SAP has a transation that changes anything you want in mass, all I had to do was select the clients I wanted to change and the new field value. This transation has been running since 2pm, it's almost 6pm and it's only halfway through.

Tomorrow is a national holiday and I wanted to focus on my personal project, but I bet I'll have to do this again tomorrow, because there's no way in hell I'm staying here for 4 more hours to get this done today, and 4/5 hours when I get home is not enough!

So yeah, fuck SAP for taking so long, and fuck whoever didn't notice sooner that we had to change this.

Rant and opinions wanted. Its a long one.

I have been working on a project for a month and a half. For the first week I was requesting designs that I got about 2 of out of 15. For the next week and a half the designer was on holiday so I couldn't do anything but delivered a few more designs once he got back.

This takes us 2 weeks in already. I have other things to do as well so at the same time I work on support tickets and some bespoke development coming in.

I get given 2 or 3 more designs and can't get anything else out of the designer after waiting a week so I have to design everything myself as I go and build it. Something I have never done before.

We are now 3 and a half weeks in. My boss randomly tells my pm it needs to be demo ready the next day. I work furiously to hack something together. It works but key functionality is missing.

I move house and work from home for a week and a half. I do my best but the project is full of bugs and the CSS is horrible because I didn't know what I was making at any stage. It is therefore CSS rules repeated in IDs everywhere.

My colleagues join me on the project because my boss has decided to try and sell it tomorrow.

They run through it and find all the bugs left from me working furiously to get things done quickly. Things like no search pagination and missing validation.

My boss is now pisses at me because the project is not finished, my colleagues are now all working on it. Throughout it all he knew the designer was not delivering me anything and that I was struggling.

Am I in the wrong for writing shit code that came about because I was coding with no idea of what the finished project should look like? Is he in the wrong for dumping this on me and just letting me get on with it even though he knew there were no designs?

Btw I am just finishing a 1 year internship and before this have never done web dev before.

Discuss.

Get told a colleague finished work on a new web service thing on Friday.

So I fire up SOAP UI. Get an error due to problems with a sql statement. Look through code, issues already fixed so I build the project ct add the new dll to the app, another error, this time a column included in a select statement that doesn’t exist in the table being queried.

Colleague is on holiday, there are no comments in the code and there’s no source control.

Boss wants to know if the column needs to be added, or whether colleague added it and then decided not to use it.

I think I have an idea what it is meant to happen, but my only exposure to this project is as a 30 minute intro, and we didn’t look at any of these parts.

And sadly I left my crystal ball at home today fml

Holiday times. Let's finally try out building an app with react native. Download expo-cli. Scaffold project........
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Project finished installing.

finally no more lecture, no more class, holiday is here. time for side project :D

no, most of the time i hate vacation.

Oh my... I'm so exhausted and tired of everything. First I got really sick for two weeks and couldn't work. I also collapsed on the floor one night and hurt myself. Well what happens yesterday? You guessed it - I fell down the stairs and hurt exactly the same spots as two weeks ago... (no I was not drunk).

And then I have to work on a holiday today (yes, still with that same fucking shitty shopware project) because I have to attend an appointment in a different country on Thursday (I need Thursday off, but I don't have any vacation left).

So here I'm sitting almost crying in pain because of this FUCKING project, everything hurts, I still can't think straight and shopware is denying my refresh tokens. FUCK THIS JOB. Seriously. Fuck it. I have had the chance to look into a lot of companies and do different things, but this is the worst.

Nobody fucking cared about the project for nearly 8 months, and now that I'm close to leaving the company they begin to act like "oh well it must be done by then". ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! I told them a million times I need help and that I won't be able to finish it in time. That's what happens when nobody plans a project, but accepts it anyways because "it brings in money".

Seriously?! This project has been a waste of money and my energy and nerves. We're already 100% over the budget and will never ever see one cent coming from this shitty project. WHY FOR FUCKS SAKE IS IT THAT THOSE PEOPLE JUST DONT SEE IT WHEN A PROJECT IS GOING DOWN THE FUCKING DRAIN?!

19:30, still in the office fixing server issue. Lync message pops up from "let's call him the ba", help! Need to rollback a change on someone else's project that has just been deployed changing the username and password from Xxxxxx Xxx2016 to xxxxxx xxx2016 to stop people from accessing it.... Genius design! By the way, I've just had a look at that 40 page doc of changes you emailed him. When do you want it? Tuesday. Wtf? (Bank holiday here on Monday so one day to make the changes) Ok, if you're busy, it's only text changes so can some of us help? It's only a find and replace right? Er, do you have visual studio? What's that? FU

my employer moved our company to the UAE. we were in a dying and collapsing country. Now we are in a stable and great place to be. We are even paid about double the average salary here.

But...

He now seems to believe we all owe him. so every time a long weekend / holiday comes up he tells us you have a week to deliver X or ur career will be in danger.

I have been living the past 2 months with those continuous threats. In utter anxiety over possibly losing a job i love because of him.

Before the weekend started he tagged us and said you have 48 hours to fix X. and here i am on a weekend working 10 hours a day as a result.

But i have been pulling 2 day shifts in one day. spending nights, weekends and holidays working on the project he wants fixed. and he still seems very angry at me and my team all the time. very unappreciative. and just very hurtful.

im just scared shitless because i have a family i support and have Just moved to a new country and paid thousands of dollars to rent and furnish my new place. If i get fired now i would be ruined...

After my Holiday i was totaly rested... But a week ago three collegues and myself started a side project... It is soo hard to get up these days!

Best and worst part of being a dev?

The side projects

Being a project lead would be fun I thought... boi I was wrong!!

It's still early on but I will be a project lead in the next 6 months or so... and I'm running this project for a few months and taking over a couple of tasks from the actual project lead but now he's on holiday and everyone is looking at me!

I need to get used to this...

I'm so down that i didn't see the red circle with the cross to add a rant...

Why is that? Because several month ago i began a job with all my motivation & optimistic mood.

I was so glad that a compagny payed attention to my profil that it was the best day of my life. I wanted to improve myself and learn!

At this point i did'nt know yet that i will began to work with assholes.

In this fantastic world, designers are kings and you have to do magic to adapt one of their stupid static design on web.
Because the suprem king is the client and designs are validated.
And don't even ask for an fonctionel analysis they will laught at you!

I did everything that i could do to make things work, fast and good. One time i managed the end of a project all by my self (like said once Celine Dion). I maked the work of my colegue who was on holiday because she left with unfinished work. She said to me "it's easy". She liked to say that i maked lost her time because of my questions and that i need to search the answer by myself & work more and more and more. So i worked, day & night because i didn't have enough time. And other thing is that some persons loved to say "if you don't do that someone will need to do that for you"!

I'm a junior developer and i had acces to staging and prod environements and crashed it both several time... I needed to develope in one year the experience of a senior developer.
Every thing is my fault because i need to pay attention to things that i ignore.

Today i'm not glad, i learned a few things but can't remembered it because things went o fast for me and i can't memorized everithing. All i know is that i'm just happy to still be able to get out from bed.

What's your holiday project?

I am going to rebuild my website (maybe, let's see!!)

So today was my last day before heading off for an2 week holiday. Spent most of the day explaining to my team what needs to be done and how everything has been structured for the current project, but I get the feeling they don't understand any of it.

Pretty sure I'll be coming back to a clusterfuck.

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

That feeling when your clients are very well aware that you're away on holiday but they still try to contact you to work on some last minute edits on a project.

I handed in my notice last week, now I have to be held prisoner for 6 weeks in a company that hits all my Asperger triggers, and causes me daily panic attacks. But then... I get a big pay jump, remote working, more holiday.. and a much more fun project

Just started my new college education (going for embedded systems engineering) and we found out we don't have any holidays except for christmas.
No biggie, can live with that.

However, we just got a project which we need to pass to continue to the second year and of course it's a fucking group project.

Guess what, one of the asshats had a holiday planned for a while, so he'll be out somewhere in Africa while the rest build stuff for a week. 1 week on a 3 week project... Amazing.

Finally got some time on my holiday to do some side project work! Turns out it was a looong time since I started this computer.
So what I believed to be one lovely night of coding turned out to be one looong night of software updating...

I'm soon off to bed. Fingers crossed that I'll get some more time to do actual coding soon.

Back from a 2 week holiday, inbox says 100+ messages

What is your back 2 work routine to get the current project status?