That moment when the development manager says "nothing is impossible"
And then starts to spend the whole day assigning the new tasks.

So I'm a entry level female Developer and I started a contract to hire position in July. Its my first job as a developer and I love almost everything about it. Except this..., there is a Senior Female Developer on my team who hates me and isn't shy about it. She goes for the throat man! She magnifies any mistake I make, hell she calls me out on things that people would consider positive. In sprint planning this week she got mad at me for pulling tasks from the backlog after finishing mine early. I've tried to do everything I could to make her like me. I patiently listen when she goes on and on about her damn cats, kids, sports, ah everything, and she is a non stop talker.

Her main problem with me, so she tells the head of engineering, is that I bug her too much. I almost laughed when I heard this was her main issue with me! Sure, I asked her the normal amount of newbie questions but it's not like I don't know how to read code or google! In fact I started avoiding talking to her about a month ago because she was so rude to me. Now getting hired on full time comes down to whether or not she can stand me still if I am working on another team. I'm so frustrated because it's impossible to prove my worth to this company with this crazy lady making me look bad. I have no problems with anyone else at work. In fact a lot of us have become good friends. No one understands why she hates me so much. It feels like middle school all over again.

On top of that there is an even newer hire who she is supposed to help bring on to the team, but because of her horrible management skills, I have become his defecto mentor for learning the project, as well as the technologies we use. The stress of being in an uncertain contract to hire position + tyrant coworker + helping the new guy + still learning and having my own work to do has been overwhelming! I don't know what to do other than hope that she doesn't try to sabotage me moving to a new team.

I work in a contract position and reviewed the code of a senior engineer recently. Regretfully I can't provide context to preserve anonymity.

He wrote awful JavaScript;

- handled a single DOM element with 2 different frontend libraries
- used the logical operator && to 'chain' two methods (it didn't work) instead of returning a boolean value,
- broke everything down into minute detail (a comment box had 7 components!),
- API calls were made for every component update instead of maintaining local component state where it made sense, which meant UI updates were slow,
- animated EVERYTHING, which made my Firefox on Xubuntu i7 64bit with 16GB RAM beg for mercy.

I had a rough couple of months with interviews, with 2nd stage technical interviewers throwing impossible tasks at me.

Example:

1. Create an online Python code editor with Javascript which can compile Python bytecode,
2. Use Mesos and Kafka to create real time architecture for Tensorflow with a Javascript frontend in 1 day. (I asked, and wasn't allowed to use Kubernetes or serverless architecture),
3. Hack a website from the browser's address bar using parameters ( what?!! ),

Obviously, the next time I meet a 'senior', I'm going to tell him talk is cheap;

'SHOW ME YOUR CODE.'

So I decided to positively tackle the negative energy surrounding me these past few days. I tried to be productive. I went overboard, of course. Where is the fun in normal?

I wrote down all the urgent tasks I must die-die finish. Anyone closed with Asians will know the severity of the die-die and must combo. I started with tasks I have to finish in 3 days. Then in a week. Then in 2 weeks. I ended up creating more than 25 cards across my respective Trello boards.

The tasks that come to me always need minimum 3,4 working hours. Literally. The furthest deadline I see is Oct 15. The tasks I counted is more than 25. No appointments nor meetings were counted yet. It is not impossible. If I finish 2 tasks per day, 14 days is enough to complete all. I might have to continuously work 2 whole weeks of course. But it is still fine, right? Right, guys? Right? It's doable. Right?

I won't get any unskippable appointment within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't get new tasks to finish within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to guide other people how to do their tasks within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to work other people's tasks when they absent within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to entertain any annoying client because customer service team can't deal within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to do other personal tasks within this 2 weeks. Right? (Like helping with creating a wedding slideshow for a friend marrying on Oct 28)

My life is totally fine. Right?

Project in college, many moons ago.

Team is building a robot for a project. Nothing too crazy, it does some simple tasks like walk along a path and shit.

3 weeks for the project. 3 team members.

The largest graded part of the project is the ability to follow a path based on vision.

The 3rd member INSISTS on doing that part, he says “I want to prove to the professor that I am the smartest in the class so he helps me get a work term.”

Of course, my other partner and I see this as the complete selfishness of a child who will never be employed anywhere worth talking about anyways. He is a big asshole about it and we end up giving in.

## Week 1

We get our parts done (working together the way a team would) without his help.

He struggles, hits walls, complains. You know, dumbass grown child stuff...

## Week 2

We offer to help since we are done. He refuses. The teacher sees all of this and doesn’t like it at all.

After class the 2 of us go to the teacher and let him in on the details. The guy insisted, he is struggling and will not take help etc.

Teacher goes and talks to him and tells him it is a team project for a reason and that we should be helping. He says yes.

Then he misses the rest of the classes that week and send an email saying...

“Since everyone decided to keep interrupting me and breaking my train of thought, I could not get anything done in class. Therefore I will be staying home to finish the project from there.”

And to top it off, he didn’t even take home the robot’s connectors he needed to do the damn thing. Haha.

## Week 3

We know he wasn’t going to get it done, so we approached the teacher. We make it clear that we have done all we can and that we are not ok with losing marks because of this.

Since we are both good students that he likes, he decides to give us an option.

You can take a 50% on his part even if he doesn’t get it done (for trying to help) or we can do it ourselves and he won’t get the marks if he doesn’t finish.

## Night before

We say fuck it and do the thing.

In fact, since we were learning Java at the time we decided to do it in Java. Our other prof sees us playing with robots and gets excited, he stays with us and suggest improvements.

In the end we rewrite all 3 robot functionalities in Java and hand in the project the next day.

## The day of

Partner 3 comes into class and says this...

“That walking path part is impossible, I didn’t get it done, but I bet nobody else did either. So at least we will get a 60% on the other 2 parts!” (With a big shit eating grin)

Prof calls our group up. We walk up and the prof looks at the 3rd guy and says.

“Since you have decided to do your part alone, we will have you present your part alone at the end of the groups”

He tries to say something but the prof cuts him off and tells him to sit down.

We show all of our code and the robot does everything perfectly.

Groups go by, now it’s that guys turn.

He says that the walking part was impossible but seems to realize right away that he just saw EVERY other group get it working.

The teacher ask him to stay after class.

## Result

We got a 98 (prof said he was hoping we would have done in VB like asked but he liked the result a lot).

Other guy gets a 5% for his non-working spaghetti code on 0s on the other 2 sections. He blames us, of course.

Bonus Content:

That same asshat above once said this to me...

“I don’t indent my code so that if I work for a company and no one else can understand the code then I am unfireable!”

Yes, he wrote all code like this...

const Example = () => {
Stuff
More stuff
For() {
Stuff
If() {
Stuff
}
}
}

Fuck that guy🖕🏽

I don't know what you did yesterday, but i did make my company throw away 2 months of progress.
It all started in the beginning, since that i've made numerous complaints about the workflow or code and how to improve it. I've been told off every time, and every time i either told the boss who agreed in the end or wrote code to prove myself. Everything was a hassle and my tasks weren't better.
Team lead: you'll do X now, please do that by making Y.
Me: but Y is insecure, we should do Z.
Team lead: please do Y
Later it turns out Y is impossible and we do Z in the end...
Team lead: please do W now
Me, a few days later: i've tried and their server doesn't give http cors headers, doing W in the browser is impossible
Team lead, a few days later: have you made progress on W?
Me: * tells again it's impossible and uploads code to prove it *
Team lead: * no response *

After that i had enough. Technically i still was assigned to do W, but i used my time to look over the application and list all the things wrong with it. We had everything, giant commits, commented out code, unnecessary packages, a new commit introduced packages that crashed npm install on non-macs, angularjs-packages even though we use angular, weird logic, a security bug, all css in one file even though you can use component-specific css files...

I sent that to my boss, telling him to let the backend-guys have a look at it too and we had a meeting about this. I couldn't attend but they agreed with me completely. They decided to throw away what we have already and to let one of the backend-guys supervise our team. I guess there will be another talk with the team lead, but time will tell.
It feels so good having hope to finally escape this hellish development cycle of badly defined task, bad communication and headache-inducing merges.

It's almost midnight here and I just realized something. I just realized that none of my college friends have contacted me in almost a year now... Like none of them. They hang out every weekend near the college I cannot coz im working and it has never occurred to them that "hey there's this guy that we we were together for four years with , I wonder what he's doing how's he holding up" and I wasn't even an asshole or a douchebag or something I guess I just vaporizer from their memories like a volatile liquid.

I also feel like my boss gives me nearly impossible tasks so that I fail like "design these two complete web applications in three months while you do your actual job of teaching people java for 8 hrs a day"
And now here I am at midnight sitting curled up in the corner of my bed like a paranoid chipmunk that drank a pot full of dark coffee, trying to talk to this random bunch of people from random places in the world who are doing random shit right now. And the worst part is I chose this ... I wanted this I wanted to make a difference. I didn't want to be just a cog in a machine.

If I die right now how many people would cry? I ask myself that a lot it's never more than ten. This is probably creeping u out right now so I'll probably end this.
Rest assured six hrs from now I will put my mask back on. a mask of a happy, mildly funny, averagely successfully geek, until my next date with sadness

I hate arbitrary deadlines.
Cocksuckers just pull them out of thin air and force me to give estimates about tasks that are impossible to give an estimate on.
(Spoiler: The tasks are the problem and need to be split and analyzed)

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

I'm working on a codebase that is terminally ill. It's split so badly into microservices that no matter what you do, every one of them talks to every one of them over and over. If there's any way they can avoid just invoking a method on a class and send themselves a message or make an HTTP request, they'll do it. One of the services just sends messages to itself for no apparent reason. Except it doesn't even send messages to itself. It sends an HTTP request to a controller in another app, and that controller sends a message which is received by the same class that made the request.

The point is that this application is screwed. The defects pile up and there is literally no one who can understand what it's supposed to do in any scenario. I'm good at this. I can follow confusing code and document it. But not this one. It's overwhelming. It's insanity.

When these defects come in we're told to just run the app from the UI, see what HTTP requests it makes, and start tracing the code manually. Running and debugging it locally would be a nightmare but it's impossible anyway.

They decided that we all need to understand the application better so we can work on it, so we were each given six poorly-define five-hour tasks to "understand" various things. Those things don't make any sense. It's like if someone gave you the source code to Excel and told you to spent five hours understanding columns, five more understanding rows, and five more understanding cells.

Here's the thing: I'm okay with learning and understanding some code. It's part of the job. But I'm not going to abandon my career as a software developer so I can become an expert on debugging their awful code. I didn't make this mess. I'm not going to live with it. I'm moving on as quickly as I possibly can.

I've tried to explain to them that if they want the situation to improve they need to improve the code. They need to learn how to write tests. If your plan is that people will study your code, know it inside and out, and then spend all their time debugging it, that's a plan for failure. Everyone who can will leave and take what they know with them.

These companies just don't get it. They need their software to work, but the types of developers who can help them don't need that software to work. No one capable of doing good work is going to spend several years debugging their awful code unless you pay them a crazy ton of money.

Just don't make a mess in the first place. Hire developers who can do a good job. If you hire the cheapest people you can find you won't be able to get someone else to fix it later. It's not personal but I wish failure on those projects or even those companies. I want them to fail because failure is so expensive. I want them to fail so that others learn from it and don't repeat the same mistakes.

As an industry we're a bunch of genuine idiots. We just keep doing the same things over and over again no matter how much it hurts.

Trying to re-type a massive essay I lost because the app refreshed for some reason. I'll try to keep it short (spoiler: I lied).

Recently, I had a conversation with a couple of non-tech people about AI and the fear of computers making humans obsolete. I have some strong (borderline ranty) opinions about this, and thought I'd post here to see what reaction is get.

This is not a "machines will destroy us" post, it's more about the very legitimate great of losing jobs.

- AI is a tool. It's main use would to be help optimise the more complex routine tasks and free up people's time to be more creative in their jobs. Basically, it's the next step of automation.
- Human intuition can never be replaced. Sometimes, things just seem a bit off. Sure, an AI would avoid ever getting in that situation, but only if it had learnt it in the past. A human will always have to be at the helm of any such system.
- Achieving true intelligence and sentience is like trying to travel at the speed of light. The closer you get, the more challenges you face.
- Getting hyped by sensationalist news that claims the end is nigh because two computers optimised the language they used to communicate when trying to reach a goal is stupid. All this shows is that the tech is working as expected and the systems can optimise on the fly. To me, this was a pretty awesome moment.

Now, I'm not saying dystopia is impossible, neither am I saying that it is inevitable. Just like any tool presented to us, if we use it responsibly, we can make life and society a lot better.

I work with a few 'idea' and marketing guys. The quicker we can turn out a project, the quicker we can make money. Some days, I can get 3 quick, easy projects out. But sometimes, these guys get 'ideas' that are out of the norm so they can take a few days to get going.

One of the guys had an idea I knew was going to take longer than a day, especially with the rest of my daily tasks. This guy loves reading 'how to run a business' books and tries to say we need it today, 'nothing is impossible' (because it was in his book).

I explain reality to him and he gets all pissy. The following day he tried again, with something that would take less time. 'so, which one do you want? Yeah, I can do that one quicker, but the first one will take longer then.'

This guy don't get it. I will burn everyone of his fucking books.

never before have I been happy to be asked to work overtime, but for once, fuck yeah...

Bit of back story, I am tech lead on a massive project that has been run like a complete shit show, the PM who also happens to be the brains behind the project seems to think we are miracle workers and for the first 9/10 months of the project would make significant, like delete a weeks worth of code and start over changes, 3-5 times per week. There are features for the v1 release that have been built in excess of 5 times. I have been saying since October that even without all his constant changes, we will NOT make the deadline, and naturally as is part of my job I argued against every unnecessary feature he tried to implement, eventually he pulled me into a meeting to tell me how much he values my opinion, I need to stop arguing with him and he does not want to work with yes men (I have a rant about that convo already).

I believe our CEO finally started smelling a rat as he insisted on joining our daily stand-ups, during which said PM scripted some lovely stories to disguise the fuckup we are in, and since has assigned another PM to take over and do proper project management and risk analysis.

That is where the email comes in, a lot of the work assigned to me will miss the deadline by a month, honestly I am impressed that it is by so little and so few people will not be missing it, but anyway, he probably spun a few stories there too.

So I spent part of the work compiling the most perfect surgical response as not not actively throw him under the bu, but create a quite a few questions that they hopefully as, as himself and the CEO where cc'd into the mail.

And the jist is, the deadline itself was still impossible and 8 of the 10 tasks assigned to be have ZERO back-end whatsoever, and those tasks are about 80/90% integration to said non-existent back-end, some of those services and data structures have not even been planned yet and we are a week past the deadline and 3 weeks from the just as useless extension.

I have been given the displeasure of updating a company's WordPress website which was built and (sort of) maintained by another company which ended up closing down. NOTHING WAS DOCUMENTED. Almost no comments added anywhere. Not even a description of the what a particular file does. File names are basically completely random. There are 3 versions of the same theme this company made and no indication of which one is actually being used. On top of this; they used plugins and modified them, so they cant even be updated without them breaking. As well; after looking around it seems they used jQuery mixed with Angular (or maybe the plugin creators did this?). The website isnt mobile friendly either; one of my tasks was to see what I could do with fixing this. Seems basically impossible based on the complete mess of a project this is.
All this being said, I just graduated from Post Secondary and have almost no experience working with WordPress, There arent even other developers to help assist me on this project.....
Gonna be quite the experience.

From such a healthy environment this job turned into an extremely toxic one. Now i finally understand how a toxic environment looks like. It's extremely disgusting. Putting 5 tasks on my name to work in parallel and as i work they put 2 more. All High priority tasks. It is physically impossible. The scrum master whore told me to just check the code how to do something to users and understand this for monday so i can help QA guy to test it. I went over the code with a colleague and understood it. Today she screamed at me angry i didnt do the task. What the fuck are you talking about? I checked the code and im ready to do help the QA guy test it whenever necessary. Then she talked shit changing the task that i was supposed to not only understand the code but also do the task on Monday and now its the end of tuesday and its not done. Fuck you. That was not what she said initially. Its very Fucking confusing. Then she said to QA guy i give up i cant handle it with this guy sorry but ill have to report this to product owner. So be it. I dont give a fuck. I am ALONE working on a GIANT, unmaintainable, spaghetti, caveman technology codebase with broken outdated or nonexistent docs, nobody to help me, the colleague whos supposed to guide me is a good guy but overloaded with tasks himself so he doesnt have time, i him and many of us requested another person to join to work with me on same role but they dont have the budget which is a Fucking lie, a client worth trillions of dollars does not have a budget, yeah get fucked retards. This suffering and downfall of your project is mostly their fault. Theyre too arrogant and proud to understand or admit that it's not possible physically for 1 person to manage and keep knowledge and code on 7 tasks per day. All that for Fucking $8 an hour?????????? I hope cancer eats all of u. Every single one to the very fucking bones till ur bones break. This is fucking disgusting and sickening. Right when i was supposed to get paid $17 an hour (and thats gross income not even net.....) I am now fucking forced to quit this shithole toxic job. Because i realized no amount of fucking money, not even before-tax-$17-an-hour money is worth the weight of stress that i get punched with every fucking day. No fucking job is worth more than health. This is saddening and depressing extremely. All of my fucking plans are ruined. The car to buy on leasing--ruined by a whore. The 2 day vacation this week--ruined by a whore. Going out with my hot blonde gf during this miserable 2 day vacation--ruined by a whore. Meeting with 2 american clients I've been in touch with for several years to work on a side project--ruined by a whore, meeting canceled and delayed due to my overtime work. I am literally fucking treated like the Moscow Crocus Hall terrorist. They have no fucking sympathy or understanding for how fucking HARD this fucking DevOps job is where i work on a 30 year old legacy codebase with no fucking help. It is simply not possible. Now its a race between who's gonna fuck who: either i quit first or they fire me first. At this point its not a matter of if but when. Surely soon enough. Cant wait to get the FUCK away from these pieces of shitheads. I either have option to cry and go mentally insane by giving it my all until i fix the task on time but the stress i would get for that would need them to pay me at least 9 mill $ a year. Fuck with someone else you fucking retards. You're using slave labor to work for basically free just so u can profit a lot. Literally on the meeting one of their bosses said they get 50% of margin which is a lot in biz world for tech field. This is absolutely sickening and saddening that im treated like a fucking terrorist. Fucking Disgusting. Cant wait to not Ever fucking work in this toxic fucking place. Quitting by max 1st of april.

So we have this new vp guy, and a team in US and another in india

The vp asked me to finish one task by tonight 11pm, and if I need help with the India team's code, call a guy there to help debug

After some debugging with that dev, he replies with:
The code won't work because we haven't implemented it yet

.........

Yo, what the hell is wrong with people

How am I supposed to finish a task that isn't even implemented, and why pushing so much to have it done, wtf I'm so confused with this

Every week a new headache like this, but this was laughable, in two weeks I start a new job 😂

My biggest personal challenge as a dev is getting help. Sometimes I feel so deserted.

Now and then I have to do things that are not my expertise and I feel out of my depth. I think if I had an expert come in for a day they would be able to save me weeks of slow progress. There are dev things like updating frameworks, etc which I am fine to struggle through or read the docs, etc but things like setting up servers, enabling single sign on, database administration, integration with other systems. These are not really software development tasks but they need to be done. It seems every time I try to get help it is so much effort then the help I get turns out not to be helpful.

In my current role I have no budget or company credit card, etc. To make any sort of purchase I need to get my manager to write a business case to get approved by his manager signed in triplicate, buried in soft peat, etc. Even if I went through this process there are so many companies out there who want to get paid to do nothing and say they are experts in all things. It is almost impossible to know if we would get competent help or if I end up just wasting time explaining issues to people in phone meetings who are no help.

I just started on a Laravel project for a customer. Damn I’ve got a hate/love relationship with that thing.

I fucking love how fucking fast development is it in, even for fairly complex tasks, amazing.

I fucking hate how goddamn fucking slow development is when you get an error, as that shit is near impossible to debug, and you keep getting weird exceptions that you just need to know what means.

Drupal is such a fucking wortless and infuriating hinder in software development.
I've been a software developer for the past 6 years, I have worked with many different frameworks and technologies in both backend and frontend, such as .net, react, php, you get the idea.
In my current project, we have been forced to use Drupal as backend. Initially I had no complaints, but after trying to use it for the past month, I'm beyond mad at the ridiculous and overly complicated way of doing the most basic tasks in existence.
Not only is installing Drupal such a dependency hell, that we had to modify our entire ecosystem just to accommodate for Drupal's versioning, but it's just a crutch that we have to carry around and make ridiculous exceptions for.
I've seen other projects made in Drupal by professional companies, and not a single one of them actually makes use of the CMS that is meant to be the entire point of this piece of shit.
Instead, we have to make a regular backend database, force the PHP code into Drupal's modules and then try for the impossible of making use of the pointless structure system integrated in Drupal.
It's almost pointless since we still had to make a react application to actually do the pages, since Drupal is limited as hell when it comes to personalization.
Just to end up with this error message: "The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later." no explanation, no nothing, just going after an endless debugging using [drush] commands.

Anyway, I fucking hate Drupal

I hate working with sh*tty Devs

I used that term specifically.. No it's not about juniors, it's about those who pretend to be seniors.
In a major company project, one of us has to take a week or two to refactor that one "senior" dev work. When tested it performs poorly, when checked, it violates every SE principle and the business people are wondering why we keep seeing `refactoring User Stories/Tasks` and why we still don't have a working project yet. Yes, we will never have, that mess that `senior` dev created is almost impossible to refactor without major rework.
Now, major rework coming, we need to give something to that Senior so he doesn't feel left behind. Argue to never let him get anything in core or this company will go under...

In short, I hate working with sh*tty devs.

So being in ops, I have certifications in networking and Linux, and am currently working on my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam.

I've been talking to a few "professional" (they have jobs) devs that I personally know, and with the exception of 1, it seems like version control, automation, networking, and server related tasks are beyond them.

As I want to get into the dev side of things (devops preferably), I feel somewhat overwhelmed at some of the requirements of the job, especially knowing that I cannot take too much of a pay hit as I have a family to support.

My question is this, based on real world experiences with hiring, how much weight do you think knowing your way around networks, cloud, virtualization, servers, and all of the other things ops does when it comes to getting your foot in the door for a dev job?

I've casually looked around, and it seems that getting the foot in from this side is almost impossible.

Fuck ticketing systems man.. jumped from a good job that i previously thought was going to be a deadend and jobhopped to a new one with a significant salary increase. Problem is that The stress levels increased 5x, and there’s significant rush to complete tasks that have sub optimal descriptions to put it nicely. The problem with that is that the lead doesn’t have enough time to properly write them and catching him during work hours for him to explain them is sometimes impossible. Sitting in limbo with 4-5 tickets open, all of them with high priority and stresing the fuck out.

I just wrote my exam in IT class. I'm really happy with the fact that we use a computer for a few tasks. That's how the average IT expert works. Think-code-debug. It's practically impossible to write a Java program on paper without mistakes.

Other than that I named my variables like
boolean iCanWriteNowWoohoooo = false;
etc.

It didn't work 100% in the end but I hope to still get a decent grade.

So, I got hired as an independent contractor and the first thing they do is put me on a trial period which will be paid if I am able to complete the tasks. But, they said they'll pay me if I complete the tasks provided each day and not hourly. which is fine except the tasks for one day is impossible to complete in a day. Now, I am not sure if it is a big prank or they don't know how much time it takes to implement something like that. Or are they willingly trying to fail me to see my limits? because as far as I can tell, the tasks are impossible to complete in a day and I don't know what am I gonna report in the next meeting. I don't have much experience being in these kind of situation. So, what should I do? should I tell them that it's gonna take more time? are they expecting me to tell them that or should I just shut up and try my best to finish it in a day? is this fairly common?

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

So, I just finished a semester project on Software Project Management, and this was my self analysis and my conclusions, along with my analysis of my team. I think some of you will relate. Hope you enjoy the reading!

My main contributions to the project were helping reviewing the documents syntax, to make sure it was smooth and easy to read with a good english level, working on the systems architecture, coding the application, helping measuring problems within the project and putting people to work by distributing tasks.
I tried to help whenever I could with things that were not assigned to me, even though we are a team, everyone must do what they are assigned for, otherwise disorganization will be installed and everyone will derive from what they are doing to focus on a single thing or point and that would cost us time. I tried to avoid that to see if people could be capable enough of fixing the problems presented to them with the least help possible, making that an example for future use so they don’t always rely on others to get tasks done and to be more independent. Also, helping others figuring out what they were supposed to do helped the team wasting less human resources and consuming less time, which lead to some faster developments on specific tasks. Making the impossible possible was kinda of a weekly routine when the deadline approached because time was short and sometimes tasks were not finished when they should be, so, in a way I helped speedrunning documents to see if they were close to presentable to the client.
As the overall performance, there were highs and lows, where some members worked more than others and that is not fair for everyone because that kept happening again and again, so, my point of view performance wise is that we behaved wrongly when it came down to it. Some of us kept on pushing tasks to others and continuously criticizing over other people’s work without having a logical background to motivate those critiques neither providing solutions to the problems encountered. Well, that couldn’t end well, and it didn’t. It brought our performance down and ended up causing a lot of damage on the project itself.

Some days: I have a completely perfect focus on my BAU tasks!

Other days: It's difficult to focus on my BAU tasks. Maybe I'll slack off in dR for some time.

Recent days: Impossible to focus on BAU tasks. Impossible to focus even to complete reading a single rant in dR.

I am an apolitical person, politics don't bother me. The pacifist inside me is yelling "STOP THIS MADNESS!!!". This yelling is why I can't concentrate. It's not like ANC Headset can block out this scream....

I am so sick and tired of ChatGPT being down all the time! It's like the developers at OpenAI just don't care about the people who rely on this tool to get their work done. I mean, come on, it's not like we're asking for much here. We just need a stable, reliable language model that we can rely on to complete our tasks. But no, instead we have to deal with constant downtime, error messages, and other issues that make it impossible to get anything done.

And don't even get me started on the lack of support and communication from the OpenAI team. It's like they're completely oblivious to the fact that their product is causing major headaches for so many people. I mean, I understand that developing and maintaining a large language model is no small feat, but that's no excuse for the constant problems we're facing.

I'm honestly at my wit's end with this whole thing. It's just so frustrating and frustratingly frustrating to have something that should be so simple and straightforward be such a constant source of stress and frustration. If the OpenAI team can't get their act together and provide a reliable product, then they need to step aside and let someone who can do the job properly take over.

I just hope that they're listening and that they'll take the necessary steps to fix these issues and provide a service that we can all depend on. Because right now, it's just not cutting it.

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.