I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

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.

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

Quick recap of my last two weeks: 15 year old production server is basically dead, boss has taken over calls and claims credit for "resolving" outages (even though my coworker and I did the work, but ultimately the traffic died down enough to where it wasn't an issue anymore).

I go to a meeting to plan migration to a better server, boss bitches about not getting invited, I tell him I invited myself, and then he lectures about how that's not our job.

Different boss says we're migrating a schema for an application that should have been decommissioned 5+ years ago to use as a baseline. I explain what's going on, he says he understands, and proceeds to tell higher bosses it's perfect because there will be no user impact. OF COURSE THERE'S NO FRICKING IMPACT, YA DUNCE! there are no users!!!!

I merge two email threads together, since they discuss the same thing, but with different insight, and get yelled at, even though they requested it.

The two bosses I like are OOO for the next week, too, so I'm just sitting here hoping I don't say something that'll get me fired or sent to sensitivity training.

I'm just starting my on call rotation and don't know that I can do this. I cry when my phone rings, now, because I experience physical pain with how hard I cringe.

I got yelled at today by a guy because SOMEONE I DON'T KNOW assigned a ticket to him directly, rather than to the proper team (not his team). So I had to look into that, which at least had the benefit of preventing a catastrophic outage to our customers world wide, but no one will know because I don't brag at work; I'm too busy doing my job as well as most of my division/section/larger team, whatever the hell it's called. I saved us probably 25+ hours of continuous troubleshooting call from noticing something tiny that the people "smarter" than me missed.

**edit: sorry for typos; got my nails done yesterday but they feel like they're a mile long and I have to relearn how to type**

This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...

Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]

Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.

[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]

Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.

May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.

[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]

Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.

[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]

Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.

Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.

On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.

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. 😡

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

6 months ago:

Boss: We have this idea to improve our onboarding to avoid drop off in the new app. See this section here? Were going to take that out of the onboarding and just let them pass straight through to the app. Then when they get into the app, there will be a banner telling them they should go to settings and set this up. That way they can ignore it for a while and get into the app sooner

Me: Get into the app sooner to do what?

Boss: Explore it

Me: Explore an empty app with no content, as they are a brand new user with nothing setup? While theres a big banner on the screen saying "You have insecure settings" ... basically forcing them to do it straight away anyway?

Boss: Yeah, we can give them some recommendations or something while they click around. It will be good. This is months away anyway, we'll talk again

Yesterday:

Boss: So this weird unexpected thing happened. We showed some beta users our plans to remove this section from onboarding and they felt weird about it. They said they didn't like the idea of the banner telling them they haven't set it up correctly

Me: Thats not weird, I said the same thing 6 months ago

Boss: ......... oh, really?

Me: Yep. Its not an improvement to get them through onboarding quicker, just to tell them they have to now go do it somewhere else

Boss: ... right. Ok maybe we'll build it anyway and see how they feel with it in there hands?

Me: nope

Boss: ... what do you mean?

Me: We are behind, you've asked me 3 times in the last week if we are going to be able to get everything in on time ... and now you want me to build something that everyone, apart from you, says they don't like. So realistically, i'm going to build it, and then remove it next week ... and we'll have a discussion about what has to be dropped because of this

Boss: ........ right .... ok .... hhhmmm

Me: *sits with resting bitch face*

Boss: ... maybe we can hide the banner until later. Not show it to them until they've done something in the app?

Me: ... maybe we can not do any of this?

Boss: right but then the onboarding will ...

Me: *talks louder* ... yes will be the way our users want it to be

Boss: ... hhmm i'm not sure

Me: Ok heres what we'll do, so long as it doesn't delay me getting the designs I need, feel free to have the designer mock up what it would look like using that figma on device preview thing. If users say they like it, i'll build it

Boss: ... right but it won't be real on device app so ...

Me: Its that or we cut feature X

Boss: ... well we need that

Me: ok glad we agree, let me know what feedback the designer gets

Boss: ... ok

Me: well guys, after the 4th attempt and a week of waiting, I’ve gotten a response from the remote backend team about the errors affecting this release. Which are the same issues affecting the last release 2 months ago. The findings are: “there is in fact some issue with the API”.

I’d like to thank everyone who put in so much effort to get us to this momentous step forward. We can expect a fix any year now.

*equally sarcastic colleague on another team listening in*:
oh wow, this months long thing has just been “some issue” all this time? Well that’s fantastic. You should mark the ticket as “done” and reply “thank you” for all their hard work.

..... I laughed so hard at how ridiculous all this is and the joke, that I nearly did, hoping someone from product/business would have to review it

I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.

Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.

Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.

He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)

But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done

Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.

How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.

Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Me: “Hey boss, you assigned these things to me that I’m not qualified for and have no experience in. We should really hire someone with the specialized skills in this”

Boss “I agree. It’s a role I desperately think we should have hired for a long time ago”

Me “Ok so about these tickets the-“

Boss “I need you to write up a justification for this role, what kind of work the person would be doing and what budget implications we will incur”

Me “You’re asking me to write a job description for a class of work I’ve already admitted I have no experience or qualifications doing MYSELF?”

Boss “Correct”

Me “and I’m still responsible in the meantime for getting these other tickets done still aren’t I?”

Boss “Yes”

Me “Very well. I’ll email you a recap of this discussion then so we can come back to it later when we start hiring for the role”

(and so my ass is sufficiently covered when I inevitably bring down prod and people start asking why I broke prod)

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

Just hired an entry level developer in my company. Just graduated. He doesn't know what is code debugging, does not know difference between IDE and text editor like atom.
He doesn't know what is Bootstrap and git.

Gave him a task in AngularJS 1. Gave him 3 weeks and a half time. Read data from webservice, show them in table, filter, sorting and show details per record (which is easy in AngularJS. I got the same task years ago and finished in 2 days after I finished my AngularJS 1 tutorials). He did not finish any of those.

I know I'm judging but come on. What have you done these three years university? Only partying? Have not bothered reading something online? FOR THREE YEARS?

P.S. I have learned everything myself. Coding, debugging, structuring etc. I've had the bad luck that my 2 first bosses and team leader used to tell me "Do not ask anyone for help here in the office. Google is your best friend." And he encourage all developers not to help each other.

Ad I am writing this, I told him to download and install PyCharm and get back to me. It's been one hour and I have not heard anything from him. 1 Hour to download and install something. Imagine how long will it take to do a task.
Even my girlfriend (Yes, I have one), who dislikes computers can do this.

That's why I'm so frustrated.

I am thinking of firing him. Or should I give him more time?
I mean, if he can not do a simple task only by showing data in a table (which he can find them on Google, worst case scenario, how can he do more complex code, structuring it, etc ?)

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

Lessons I've learnt so far on programming

-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).

Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

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?

A loooong time ago...

I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.

Kind of.

Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.

Fast forward three months (yes, three months).

I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.

So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.

He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...

When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.

I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?

This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.

Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.

I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!

Haha. Oh no.

So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.

The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.

And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.

I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.

Hm.

Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...

On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.

This doubles the strangeness.

I want over to my colleague's desk.

I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.

"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"

What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?

"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"

"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."

"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"

You. Did. What?

I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.

So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.

Yep

It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.

Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.

Hm.

Project Management.

Karma's a bitch, right?

So, my current company builds a ERP system hand has a far to complicated database with one k tables and over 2k procedures. I started working there 3.5 years ago, well, first 2.5 years were educational. But I was mostly doing support work. From time to time I was tasked to do some interfaces ( around 15 currently I think) but since a few month I am just completely fucked up and don't know what to do. I still don't really get how this fucking huge database is supposed to work. I have 2-3 interfaces alto implement at the same time. Then I should create a app to allow users to stamp the personal and assignment times. Also I was tasked to create a html5 webpage ( never did something like this before) for also stamping times and some additional data to create a service report for customers on the fly. And finally I should create a asp.net based website for a dashboard overview which should be customisabke by our customers, which I also never did before. In the meantime I also have around 10-15 support tasks a week, and I don't see myself getting anywhere near finishing anything. But I am getting constantly approached by the boss and my team leader for not really getting anything done, even though they have no idea what the other one told me to do. And my boss has no idea if time management, he asked me how long a feature of the app would take and I told him at least two days and somehow he told my colleague I would be done in 4 hours. So currently I am permanently stressed and slightly depressed and I have no idea what to do, and I am just afraid of losing my job, because I am not able to finish my tasks.

Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.

We present to you the DevRant shitposter census!

Yes we pride ourselves in our quality bait and bullshit here at WS. Founded in [previous year a long long time ago], we focus on craftmanship, tradition, and doing it right. Our bait is loved the world over for "it's fresh flavor", "so good, it's like you're abusing heroin right along with the company employees!'

And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
Isn't it just *brilliant*.

Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].

Please, please, one vote per customer!

* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).

* Overly pixelated memes (obviously not) blatantly ripped and automatically uploaded via shitty selenium scripts

* Real life hijinxs, trolling shitty companies hiring processes for fun at their expense!

* DevRantCon now with 100% more orgies. Reserve your kickstarter ticket today.

* Disappointing vaporware announcements that take ten minutes to read and build your excitement up only to crush it before your very eyes like a child's first lego build in the hands of an angry nd merciless andre the giant disappointed by the craftmanship of a five year old.

* A livestream of a monkey on an actual typewriter, with a btc betting pool each time an actual word is typed, along with a $5 "shock the monkey" button to spice things up a bit
(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )

* Video conference with devrants creators where we all play "I've never" that doesn't end until at least one person passes out black drunk.

* Weekly comedy write ups with jokes (not obviously) blatantly stolen from cards against humanity

* HipsterRants: why your favorite [thing - game, music, movie, book] sucks, and why I hate you for liking it.

* Did we mention javascript rants?

* Cool new projects by devranters and our merciless breakdown of why each one is pure, unadulterated shit, everything that was done wrong, and why you should personally be ashamed for using it.

* SadRants: cancer, meth abuse, homelessness, how we'll all die at the end, and how the sun will one day turn into a giant ball of fire that will consume the earth and leave no trace that anyone ever existed, and nothing we do will ultimately matter.

* HappyRants: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) oh yeah, you feeling it now mr krabs?

* Technical breakdowns that are completely wrong, utterly incompetent, intentionally misleading, and wildly upvoted by people who are unfamiliar.

Vote for your favorite topic/idea today! or even submit your own for our 'consideration'!

Clickbait, now in technicolor!

(Part 1/2?)

Ohhh my god am I furious and this one's a gem.

Also I'm gonna namespoil all of the entities in my post. If this is against rant rules I'll reframe it.

So the story starts over an year ago. Me, being in a bad place, where I couldn't do a job due to external issues, wanted to try out an internship. Thought I could pull off a 5 hour shift and then attend to my problems.

THE INTERNSHALA ARC:

I apply to a bunch of applications on Angel, Internshala and Indeed.

I was contacted by a few handful of these places. One of them was called "ARCHITECTA SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS". These guys had arranged an online aptitude test for me which I promptly took.

I looked up this company and they seemed like a pretty okay big firm from the outset but didn't have many reviews on Glassdoor and likes of such. (first red flag). Post aptitude test, I was quite sure I fucked up and wouldn't get further contact. Surprisingly, a person from the company sends me his Whatsapp number over chat and asks me to save it. The message is worded like a bulk email (Starting with Hello everyone!!) which I thought was quite odd since the interaction from these platforms has always been a person-to-person contact for me. Since Internshala showed that only around 40 people applied for the position I was quite intrigued but attributed this to my lack of exp in internship operations.

THE WHATSAPP ARC:

I was contacted by the number on WhatsApp saying that they'd be interested in moving forward and I gave them my work experience details.

The person sends me over a development assignment to complete within a few days. The assignment consists of massive scope of details. I'm talking production level concept and implementation. Asks to me implement a custom emotion detection CV model (worded as "emotion camera" lmao), generate a 3d model (specified nowhere and expects to implement a mono-ocular system for the curious) and deploy it over AWS with a website to go along with it and also host that. The website should contain a VR ("360 rotatable") view that can explore the depth-map ("not worded as depth-map") of the face. My first assumption was that they had picked this work up for outsourcing and didn't bother to chip off parts so as to create an assignment out of it (I know very optimistic).

So I shoot it at him on WhatsApp asking which parts of the assignment should I do?

Him: So, which parts CAN you do?

I thought of it as an HR thing.

Me: I could do most of it but given the time-frame of the assignment and my applied position as a web developer it is perhaps out of scope for my application.

Him: Don't worry about the assignment. You can submit when you complete the whole assignment.

I was visibly angry over the stupidity of this man.

Me: This task is a Full-Stack + CV + VR task. It will take over two months to get working. Am I supposed to work on it for that long for an assignment?

Him: Okay just do the basic functionalities like add to cart. But also try to do the camera thing before next week.

At this point I'm sure that they are having trouble handling an eager client and they're offloading work to interns. So I do only the backend and minimal frontend and submit the assignment (a 2 day job done over a weekend).

Nothing. Empty. No messages since then. I tried sending in a Whatsapp message on the application and how to proceed. Then, if I could get to know if I have been rejected. Nothing.

And all this time I can clearly see the account is active as it pushes pretentious motivational quotes over it's Whatsapp status.

Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.

** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...

Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *

Me: Hello Ma

G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)

Me: It's really nice to he...

G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.

Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...

G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.

Me: Excuse me Ma, but...

G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!

** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**

CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?

Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.

Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**

G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**

CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*

Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!

But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.

While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.

CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?

Me: *Explained the situation to CC*

CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.

Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!

Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.

GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)

Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello

GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?

Me: ... 😲

CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...

G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?

CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.

Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **

G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.

Me: All good ma'am

CC: ** Hangs up **

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

This is an actual transcript...
Since it's way too long for the normal 5000 characters, hence splitting it up...

Infra Guy: mr Dev, could you please give some rational for update of jjb?
Dev: sparse checkout support is missing
Infra Guy: is this support mandatory to achive whatever you trying to do?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: u trying to get set of specific folder for set of specific components?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: bash script with cp or mv will not work for you?
Dev: no
Infra Guy: ?
Dev: when you have already present functionality why reinvent the wheel
Dev: jenkins has support for it
Dev: the jjb is the bottle neck
Infra Guy: getting this functionality onto our infra would have some implications
Dev: why should I write bash script if jenkins allows me to do that
Dev: what implications ??
Infra Guy: will you commit to solve all the issues caused by new jjb?
Dev: you show me the implications first
Infra Guy: like a year ago i have tried to get new jjb <commit_url>
Infra Guy: no, the implications is a grey area
Infra Guy: i cant show all of them and they may hit like in week or eve month
Dev: then why was it not tackled
Dev: and why was it kept like that
Infra Guy: few jobs got broken on something
Dev: it will crop up some time later
Dev: if jobs get broken because of syntax
Dev: then jobs can be fixed
Dev: is it not ???
Infra Guy: ofc
Infra Guy: its just a question who will fix them
Dev: follow the syntax and follow the guidelines
Dev: put up a test server and try and lets see
Dev: you have a dev server
Dev: why not try on that one and see what all jobs fails
Dev: and why they fail
Dev: rather than saying it will fail and who will fix
Dev: let them fail and then lets find why
Dev: I manually define a job
Dev: I get it done
Infra Guy: i dont think we have test server which have the same workload and same attention as our prod
Dev: unless you test how would you know ??
Dev: and just saying that it broke one with a version hence I wont do it
Infra Guy: and im not sure if thats fair for us to deal with implication of upgrading of the major components just cause bash script is not good enough for u
Dev: its pretty bad
Infra Guy: i do agree
Infra TL Guy: Dev, what Infra Guy is saying is that its not possible to upgrade without downtime
Infra Guy: no
Dev: how long a downtime are we looking at ??
Infra Guy: im saying that after this upgrade we will have deal with consequences for long time
Infra Guy-2: No this is not testing the upgrade is the huge effort as we dont have dev resources to handle each job to run
Dev: if your jjb compiles all the yaml without error
Dev: I am not sure what consequences are we talking of
Infra Guy: so you think there will be no consequences, right?
Dev: unless you take the plunge will you know ??
Dev: you have a dev server running at port 9000
Infra Guy: this servers runs nothing
Dev: that is good
Dev: there you can take the risk
Infra Guy: and the fack we have managed to put something onto api doesnt mean it works
Dev: what API ?
Infra Guy: jenkins api
Infra Guy: hmmm
Dev: what have you put on Jenkins API ??
Infra Guy: (
Dev: jjb is a CLI
Infra Guy: ((
Dev: is what I understand
Dev: not a Jenkins API
Infra Guy: (((
Dev: (((((
Infra Guy: jjb build xmls and push them onto api
Infra Guy: and its doent matter
Dev: so you mean to say upgrading a CLI is goig to upgrade your core jenkisn API
Dev: give me a break
Infra Guy: the matter is that even if have managed to build something and put it onto api
Infra Guy: doesnt mean it will work
Dev: the API consumes the xml file and creates a job
Infra Guy: right
Dev: if it confirms to the options which it understands
Dev: then everything will work
Dev: I am actually not getting your point Infra Guy
Infra Guy: i do agree mr Dev
Dev: we are beating around the bush
Infra Guy: just want to be sure that if this upgrade will break something
Infra Guy: we will have a person who will fix it
Dev: that is what CICD is supposed to let me know with valid reasons
Dev: why can't that upgrade be done
Infra Guy: it can be done
Infra Guy: i even have commit in place

I just... I have no idea. I am supposed to be responding to a soft offer this morning but I am not sure what kind of "ball" to play.

Awhile ago my boss took a higher position at a somewhat higher esteemed and larger but hierarchically lower level sister company. My current company basically told me my current position will be dissolved because sister company is going to form a team under former boss to do those duties. I can stay on but would have to take on totally different duties. I love what I do and I think I have a valuable skillset so that doesn't sound appealing to me. I applied for sister company's job and have the soft offer - always being considered a shoe in because - well it's my job.

It's time to negotiate and their offer is OK. I get to keep my accrued leave and my years of service (heck yes!) but the salary bump is a little less than I had hoped for.
Budgets are super duper tight right now and I don't want to push it with new company. Even though I have two options - keep current job or accept new job I feel like I only have one option - go and I don't have any leverage for negotiating. We will not be getting raises for at least two years at either company. I also feel like this will be my only opportunity to negotiate anything for a long time.

If they can't budge on salary should I ask for a sign on bonus? Flex schedule? Or should I just accept the offer (1500 increase from current salary) as is and be done with it?

There is actually more complicated history and stuff but I tried to boil the situation down to what is going on now.

Any advice?

So today my teacher told me to do that project for some competition or something(frankly, I don't remember clearly what this is for). He gave us the machines we need, the CDs with the systems we have to work with. We are supposed to make a properly working Beowulf cluster from the things I've been given.

Well, no.
Fucking no.

I am really okay with making this the way my teacher wants us to do. I am okay with installing an ubuntu 16.04 server that is completly irrevelant to the project, because it's not part of the cluster. I am really okay with using some weird linux distribution on the master nobody has ever heard of. But I'm not okay when the software we've been given(including operating system) has seven pages of documentation, escpecially when fucking screenshoots of how PXE booting should look like are roughly 70% of it. No, I couldn't find a thing on the internet about it. I couldn't read the fucking manual. There was no fucking manual. There was no fucking --help. There was no motherfucking english language. Everything was motherfucking spanish, including that 7 pages long document that was supposed to guide us through our work. It was planned to be done until march. The only reason I can think of about why doing the stuff the document tells us to do would take four motherfucking months is that we'd have to learn spanish to do this. And I'm not going to do that. Not because I don't like spanish or learning. Simply because I didn't sign up for this to learn languages.

And no. I can't switch to other, human purposed software. I am only allowed to use the things the teacher has given us. Because somebody has worked on it already couple of years ago and they had left a pdf file about how to install that ubuntu server I've been writing about a while ago. Which, by the way, was the "installation guide for animals". Showing how to install a system, screenshoot after screenshot.

It took about an hour to figure out the thing supposed to handle pxe booting computers all the time was telling us that it can't work because we had to configure ethernet interface manually. Because why the fuck not.

(imagine all of this said in Undoomed's "hey moron" tone)

Hey, moron, fuckin moron! How about if you're a noob with no actual programmer on your side, you just tell me so we can work it out together, instead of sending a moronic 4page "acceptance criteria" that pretend you know what you're talking about, and then bury me under loads of moronic noob questions that reveal you as thenmoron you are, all of that for a fuckin 50 quid?! I thought it's me being an idiot, not being able to do the task within two days timeframe, but now I see you're just too much of a moron to have any idea how much these things take. And now you nonchalantly mention a one-line one point from the four page document full of drivel, which (loads of moronism credit for me here) i didn't notice amongst all of that other mundane drivel, which actually like doubles the whole workload on the task, but your moronic document, which makes 3 parts of the same algorithm into three separate MILESTONES, makes this whole thing that nearly DOUBLES the workload into a shitty SEVENTH SUBPOINT of the completely unrelated first "milestone"?

FUCK YOU, YOU STUPID ROBBERY CHEAPFUCK, and fuck me for letting myself be tricked by all your fancy wordings that pretend you actually know what the fuck you are asking for, so i assumed you did, so I missed THE POINT, WHICH ACCORDING TO THE SEGMENTATION LOGIC OF THE WHOLE REST OF THE DOCUMENT SHOULD BE 3 SEPARATE FULL-SIZED MILESTONES, NOT A SINGLE SUBPOINT, YOU FUCKING FUCK!

... so much for still trying to at least a bit trust people.

FUCKING DISGUSTING MORONIC CHEAPSKATE FUCK.

and I can't even tell him to fuck off through the rectum he came here because he's all nice and polite so I would be the asshole!

"hey, please, can you build me a house?"
*house is basically finished*
"oh, great job, i love it, but i think you might have missed the fineprint in our contract that says that the house is supposed to stand inside an entry hall of a multibillionaire-sized mansion, so could we please sort that out and add it to the building real quick before i pay you the toolshed's worth we agreed on based on the contract? "

FUCK. HIM.
FUCK
FUCKFUCKFUCKSHITFUCKERYFUCKDISGUSTINGIDIOTICFUCKINGFUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!

i thought i can be a shitty liar and a con man, but this is some next level shit that would be totally beyond my abilities to pull off...

YES I KNOW IT'S MY FAULT I DIDN'T COMB THROUGH THAT BULLSIT "SPECS" OF HIS LETTER BY LETTER TO MAKE SURE THERE'S NO CON BULLSHIT LIKE THIS HIDDEN AMONGST ALL OF THAT MUNDANE SELF-EVIDENT PSEUDO-TECHNICAL DRIVEL, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

fucking disgusting moron, pretending all nice and innocent probably even to himself because he HAS NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT HE EVEN ASKS FOR.

i bet it's one of those pukefucks who get an overpriced contract for 50k without even knowing or caring what programming is, because "i'll just outsource the core functionality of the app for 50 quid to some naiive idiot who lives in the illusion that people are not diarrhorea-worthy pieces of feces, and this other third of the app to some other moron for hundred quid and then i somehow outsource gluing it together to some third poor sod, and that's 49.8k quid of pure profit for me, yay"

and now i'm torn between three options, just cancelling the "contract" with a comment saying "fuck off, you con man", or cancelling it with a lengthy explanation why he's a know-nothing piece of shit who conned me already into having done something worth about 5x more than his shitty "acceptance criteria" requests, or just start conning and bulshitting him back, which won't net me any money, and waste my time, but at least will also waste HIS time, which might be nice because he seems to be on a tight schedule so if i play this right i might have the chance to sink his whole contract which might be mighty nice satisfying...

FUCK THIS, ALL OF THIS, FUCK HIM, FUCK ME, FUCK ALL OF YOU, I SHOULD HAVE STARTED FUCKING OVER EVERYONE RUTHLESSLY A LONG TIME AGO BECAUSE FUCK THE WHOLE WORLD, WHY SHOULD I CARE WHEN NOBODY ELSE DOES, WHY SHOULD I BE DECENT WHEN NOBODY ELSE IS, AND IT ONLY ROYALLY BITES ME IN THE ASS.

stupid fucking lobotomized fuck, IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO SOMETHING, DON'T OFFER YOURSELF TO DO IT FOR MONEY AND THEN CON-SOURCE IT TO OTHERS YOU SHITTY BARFPILE!

FUCK.

So this month I had to do two major features which required unexpected refactors and I had to handle unexpected edge cases all over the place. Since I work in another timezone and time was of essence, I was kinda working around the clock to complete refactors as fast as possible because it was "important and critical". I have 7 other devs in my team but only half of the team are actually competent and even less are motivated to push through. Most of the team prefer to sit on low hanging fruit tasks and cant even get that fucking right.

So that resulted in me doing at least 100 hours of overtime this month. Best part all I got for pulling it off was a thank you slack message from teamlead and got assigned even more work: to lead a new initiative which seems to be even bigger clusterfuck...

So today I had a sitdown with my manager and I asked for 3 paid days off and told him that I did 50-60 hours of overtime. He okayed it as long as my teamlead was happy.

So I created a chat, adder manager and teamlead to it and explained my situation. That Im feeling burned out, I need 3 days off and combined with the weekend that should allow me to finally relax.

My fucking teamlead told me that these days are mine and he cant take them away from me. But then he started guilt tripping me that no one else will be working on the new initiative these days so we will have a very tight timeframe to deliver this (only until August).

Instead of having at least a drop of empathy that fucker tried to guilt trip me for taking days off for fucking unpaid overtime. What a motherfucker. Best part is Ive talked with manager and we actually have until end of August to deliver the new initiative, so fucker teamlead is gashlighting me with false sense of urgency.

I guess a hard lesson learnt here. Waiting for my fucking raise to be approved for the past 6 weeks (asked for a 43% bump which is on the way since I got very strong positive feedback).

So Im done. I proved myself, will get the salary of which I only dreamed about few months ago. Not putting any overtime anymore. If something is very urgent, borrow fucking decent devs from another team. Or replace half of our useless team with just one new decent dev. I bet our producticity would increase at least by 50%.

Its not my fuckint fault that 2-3 people are pulling the weight of 8 people team. Its not my responsibility to mentor retards while crunching under immense pressure just because current processes are dysfunctional. Fuck it. Hard lesson learned. If you want overtime, compensate with extra days off or pay. Putting my 7-8 hours in daily and Im not responding to your bullshit slack messages or emails after work. I dont give a fuck that you work in another timezone and my late responses might result in stuff getting done postponed by a few days or a week. Figure it out.