I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

TLDR - you shouldn't expect common sense from idiots who have access to databases.

I joined a startup recently. I know startups are not known for their stable architecture, but this was next level stuff.
There is one prod mongodb server.
The db has 300 collections.
200 of those 300 collections are backups/test collections.
25 collections are used to store LOGS!! They decided to store millions of logs in a nosql db because setting up a mysql server requires effort, why do that when you've already set up mongodb. Lol 😂
Each field is indexed separately in the log.
1 collection is of 2 tb and has more than 1 billion records.
Out of the 1 billion records, 1 million records are required, the rest are obsolete. Each field has an index. Apparently the asshole DBA never knew there's something called capped collection or partial indexes.

Trying to get approval to clean up the db since 3 months, but fucking bureaucracy. Extremely high server costs plus every week the db goes down since some idiot runs a query on this mammoth collection. There's one single set of credentials for everything. Everyone from applications to interns use the same creds.
And the asshole DBA left, making me in charge of handling this shit now. I am trying to fix this but am stuck to get approval from business management. Devs like these make me feel sad that they have zero respect for their work and inability to listen to people trying to improve the system.

Going to leave this place really soon. No point in working somewhere where you are expected to show up for 8 hours, irrespective of whether you even switch on your laptop.
Wish me luck folks.

Got the ideal job right now. Over market salary. 100% remote. Mornings to myself until the rest of the team in another time zone comes online. Working within my competency with just enough challenge to make it interesting. Free products for being an employee. Only wish it came with paid health insurance but I do get a partial reimbursement.

To all of you who push their OS preferences like door-to-door religious zealots: I wish you stuck on your least-liked platform for the rest of your days.

I'll also throw in a side of providing tech support to the incompetent.

Fuck your lot.

Honestly, i hate math or actually i hate that i suck at it. I graduated CS and if u put a math problem any bit more advanced than basic linear equations i will turn red. I wish i was good at it. I think if i was, id be able to do much more cool shit because combining math and the ability to control a computer basically makes you a demi god.

If i had some free time i’d love to go over the basics on khan academy or something. But free time doesnt come by a lot coz we’re too busy trying to make money and id rather just rest and chill when it does.

Tho if a cute girl offered to tutor me in that free time i’d definitely say yes 🧐

This happened today
My Manager: How is the progress so far on the search module?

Me(After implementing some crazy shit requirements): It's all set. APIs are working well against the mock in-memory database. I need an actual database to run my unit tests. Where do we have it?

My manager: Let's pretend that there is no database at this moment. Go-ahead with rest of your activities.

Me(IN MY MIND): F*CK you a** hole. You don't know the first thing of software development! Which a** hole promoted you as a manager!!!

Me(TO HIS FACE): Ah.. okay!! As you wish!

I'll admit - I come from a WordPress background of almost 9 years in the making. I guess I can justify it because of all of the sites I created using it, it was the best that it could be on WP. Fast, efficient, custom - none of that off-the-shelf themeforest crap. I created everything custom. I actually knew what was going on behind the scenes of WP.

And then a buddy of mine and I had an idea for a new company/software project. I was smart enough to know that WP was not the foundation for this, so I did some NodeJS/Express tutorials. Started learning React, and really getting into the Javascript world.

And now I'm wondering WHY IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK I ever bothered trying to become an expert in WP. It's the largest use of PHP in the fucking world and it doesn't even have native composer support. And by the time you actually get your project set up using composer you have to add a fucking mirror of the wordpress.org plugin repo to get anything to work. It's 2018 and you'd think that WP and composer would have all of this shit figured out by now.

And don't get me started on git - as soon as you have more than 1 person working on a WP site, I hope you have hourly backups of your DB because someones work will get overwritten. So you all either need to work on the same staging area of work around each other by pushing/pulling the DB and schedule your workflows.

I guess WP CLI and the REST API are a step in the right direction, but the foundation of everything is just so fucked up.

I don't feel like I've wasted my web dev career, but I definitely wish I had started down this path a lot earlier. I guess you don't know what you don't know. Thanks for reading!

Sitting at traffic lights on my way home from work thinking about the programming behind how often the windscreen wipers are triggered, how to store the values of each wiper setting in a meaningful data type, and how to handle the event of changing wiper settings eg. to ensure the wipers aren't triggered immediately when increasing the frequency.

Wish my mind could rest when I'm outwith work but I experience this sort of thing worse after drinking alcohol. Must have a problem.

fuck google! fuck the people updating the android OS! fuck android!

first you guys removed the feature to connect wifi using WPS and then promised to bring it back but instead brought a completely different feature

then you make all the clipboard manager apps obsolete. only keyboard apps can be clipboard manager otherwise the rest of them are screwed.

app needs my location permission just so that it can turn on my wifi! wtf!

app needs bluetooth, wifi & location just so that it can send data from one device to another device offline? why bluetooth? are we going back to 1970s?

fuck you google! fuck android!

I really wish some other companies fork it and removes all the clutters and makes it better.

Random thoughts that I need to put somewhere. that I’ve been holding in and have to get out.

I feel like I’m more welcomed and wanted here than in real life. My friends don’t really think about me when making plans anymore, no one really thinks of me in general.

In school I was the awkward kid that was nice to everyone and I’m not taking the whole graduation well. I miss high-school and my vocational school, I miss my friends and I’ve just felt like things ended too soon and I just kinda feel alone

I wish I could just sit down and program and not procrastinate the only time I seem to be able to get stuff done is when I force myself. I feel like I’m such a shitty developer for not fighting it better. I need to be better.

I’ve not had a good few weeks. Since I’m taken a semester off from college no one in my family besides me is able to stay with a family member that’s in the hospital. I volunteered because I care for them deeply and want to help them. but it takes a huge toll on me since I have to be the one that listens to the doctors tells the rest of my family what’s happening. While Im kinda freaking out because I’m scared and nervous and NOT READY and I’ve had to stay a week there and I’ve been having to stay on and off and I haven’t really told anyone how I really am feeling about it all because I don’t like to be vulnerable in front of people and it’s been really hard and taking a toll and not helping the procrastination.

I’m studying at uni remotely at the moment. I’m taking a software engineering class. I love developing software so I was super excited about this course. First assignment is to make a tic tac toe game in python. I finish the assignment super fast within the first hour of our first class.

We end up spending the rest of the fucking semester on this fucking program. No improvements, nothing. Literally just staring at this less than 200 line command line tic tac toe game talking about the same fucking shit every class.

Our fucking final is a presentation about this fucking program. The entire class is going to present the same command line python tic tac toe game

People told me that in the past, this class would find a local client and fulfill a request (making a website, etc)

However, now there’s a new prof teaching this course.

Best way I can describe it, 3 hours of this fucking prof screen sharing a google doc and droning on for 3 hours

I wish I could get the 20+ hours of my life back that this course has taken from me

I wish a can program a way to move the rest of my furniture to my new house.

I've been watching that "Mr Robot" lately, and its warped my sensibilities. Now, whenever I see something ridiculous, like "I've got the hard drive here" (holds up PSU), I'm irrationally angry and won't watch the rest of the show. I wish more producers would spend the time to build that sort of realism

after few months of working in the company, I was offered to trade off my weekends in exchange for increase of salary. I said hell no, I would go crazy.

winter holidays we had removed... thankfully for money increase.

all next holidays were often just removed... without money increase.

next week is going to be official week of holidays. all in our country are going to have paid days off / vacation. It was declared by our president. 2 days of holidays were extended to 5 due to COVID break.

I wonder, how hard it would be for us to get those days as vacation %
we would have to ask for VACATION days in OFFICIAL HOLIDAY DAYS!. Hell, we had never had real vacation yet, and we are just wishing to have official holiday days remaining being holidays.

Urgh. I understand that I get pretty good salary for my first work, but still wishing quite a lot for holidays, should I press for it? *sigh*

on another hand I don't really want salary decrease, which can come if I would press for it *sad face*.

Bought a new toy drone to play with at home, Ryze Yello. It boasts an Open SDK on the box and claims to be programmable. Awesome, I think, I end up buying and going home to get to work.

All is great using the app, I can fly the drone and the video feed is mostly usable. Now let's get in to the SDK and see what we have.

Docs say I've got a few basic commands, 8 directional flips, 6 directions of movement, rotate, takeoff, and land. Plus a config option to set the speed. After a bit of tinkering I discovered that only 3 commands actually work: takeoff, flip, land. The rest error out with no (currently) useful message.

A bit more searching online tells me that they borked the commands with a recent firmware update and are working on it as of 3 months ago.

I wish I knew more about firmware or deconstructing the wifi packets from the app so I could try to do something useful.

So many stupid things I wanted to do with an automated drone and I'm stuck waiting for them to fix their firmware to put functionality back into the device.

Fuck I feel fucked up just for completing user account management, authentication, email verification, password reset. Securing all of this with ssl and checking for any security loopholes.

I can't believe this took me more than a couple months.
Well I was lazy and unmotivated.
I fucking hate crafting stupid ass routes in nginx.
I fucking hate making a nice responsive gui.
I have to design even the stupid html for the emails. Fuuuuck.

So much boilerplate on top of that with username and email validation.

I learnt regex 5 times over the past couple months, still not enough.

And now I actually have to build the functional part.

On the plus side I can reuse this stupid boilerplate if I can make it more modular and readable.

There's shit ton of comments to the point where I feel like an idiot for including so much info. It's like I've written it for a toddler to take over.

Gawd. Anyways it's over now. 50% I guess.

I can finish the rest of the server more quickly and then spend another year designing the Android application.

I'm really lazy in places where I have to design UI/UX. Although at this point it's kinda what could put my application at the top. (I'm lazy, I ain't bad.. I just hate implementing my ideas I wish I could just visualize and have it appear on my screen)

I do like parts of gui that involve little math problems that would make motion smooth and efficient.

So to keep me going through the day I sometimes entertain myself by adding funny comments to my pull requests. I sit there giggling to myself like some sort of lunatic and the rest of the office probably think I'm a nutcase.

Todays gem was:

Added timeout to prevent hanging. Bet they wish they'd had this feature in the 16th century

Honestly I think my talents are wasted here...

My office uses decade old refurbished optiplexs. One of them even runs win7 32bit (ALL the rest or 64 bit) last night I stayed late to finalize some setup for moving the shared folder from a network shared external drive plugged into one person's computer. Over to a system that'll act as a NAS as well as run some simple automation (nightly backups mostly)

While doing that I remembered one person complaining their computer not always booting right. So I turned it on. Made sure it worked didn't notice any obvious issues. Turned it off. Unplugged it. Opened it up. didn't see any obvious issues so I closed it back up. Tried to turn it back on and it refused. Then I smelled burning electronics. Quickly turned it off unplugged and opened.

I think something shorted and the hard drive finally failed or something. I don't know what exactly it could've been but I threw a fit and left for the day
I'm currently in my way in early to swap that computer out and do some more investigating. Wish me luck talking to my boss less than a month in and something breaks while I'm in the office alone

Working full time as a "Protocol Engineer" for a big company, taking care of pretty much everything related to AS/NAS on the network layer (2G, 3G, 4G).

I hate it, but it pays really well.

On my free time, revising ML/DL stuff from Udacity's nano (finished it last year) while studying for the VR nano and keeping my coding skills fresh (basic to advanced structures, coding strategies, best practices and stuff).

Love it, but usually I pay a heavy price to keep my mind in place.

Sometimes I just wish to give everythin up and travel the world with my 2 bucks and just try to get some rest. :v

To all of you who go through this kind of stuff, how are you holding up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I recently discovered .editorconfig and wish I had discovered it years ago and will encourage the rest of the team to use it too as we all use different editors.