Whenever the PM is pushing us to work "extra hard" on projects I usually drop this in the company slack channel 😁

Where do I even start?

Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.

Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.

Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.

Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.

I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.

The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.

I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.

The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.

The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.

Lol! I think I can totally do this 😂😂😂

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

You know what I realized we should always say no for demo driven application development.

We should always ask for enough time do a proper development and if its not enough, shouldn’t write a single line.

Because once we deliver a working demo. Its release ready for them because its FUCKING WORKING..

And trying to explain why this is just a demo and cant be put to production is even bigger pain in the ass than saying no in the beginning.

LESSON LEARNED .

Well some meetings usually go on like this...

Oh God, When your boss is reviewing your code and he pauses to take some meds.

Rant? I don't think so.

Government website only open certain hours of the day? WTF?

Me trying to understand redux 🤢

Hello everyone 👋

I see people blaming the developers when you see a crappy software product , saying that they have done a bad job.

But even it could be true also it could be the product managers who didn’t give enough time todo what needs to be done or project scope is too big for the persons knowledge.

I’ve worked in a company where deadlines were so tight I didn’t have enough time to proper UI and Testing. I used to be only developer who has someone experience and I had to train the interns as well. I am also to blame to joining such company but in desperate times takes desperate measures.

And now when i’m leaving the company and I have spend 2 years of my life for apps that I’m not proud of.

Just rant. Please feel free to give ur thoughts

Me : *writes code and feel good about the result and quality *
Code reviewer : Dafuq is this shit

There are legal companies in my home country who make a living by selling pirated games and software for only 2$ each...

Go a text from the IRS this morning.

Started with "Hello dear" and ended with something along the likes of "sir, please do this sir, thank you sir"

Yeeeeeeeh, definitely legit

SORRY JUST NEED TO RANT.....

JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE/WEBCHAT WITH SHITTY HR BLOCK CUZ THEIR SHITTY PAID SOFTWARE IS BUILT WITHOUT THE USER IN MIND AND NOW EFILED MY TAXES INCORRECTLY...

THEY CANT FIX IT SINCE ITS ALREQDY SENT TO THE IRS....

I SPENT 2 HOURS TRYING TO CONTACT A HUMAN BECAUSE THEIR WEBCHAT IS SUPER HIDDEN ON THEIR SHITTILY BUILT SITE THAT HIDES IT UNTIL I HAVE TO CALL THEIR PHONE NUMBER AND THE GUY WALKS ME THROUGH SOME SPECIFIC STEPS TO GET IT TO SHOW UP!!!!!!!!!

THEN WEBCHAT GUY ASKS FOR ALL MY INFO BUT THEN CONCLUDES THAT I NEED TO CALL THE IRS MYSELF BECAUSE THEIR SHITTY SOFTWARE ALREADY SENT THE INFO.... THE WRONG INFO....

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND I OWE THE GOVERMENT $2500..... ALL THIS JUST TO PAY PPL MONEY.... FUCKITY FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK....

AND THERE GOES MY WHOLE NIGHT.....

I was watching Ryan's talk on YouTube about "10 mistakes he regrets in Node " then on a point about node_modules he pulls this one up 😂

Who the fuck writes a 200 line method with 52 if/else statements, 3 try-catches, 6 loops and only 1 comment saying //Array of system records. No dipshit I thought that was a Fucking interface. What happened to the whole keep it simple notion?!

My company just acquired another company from some losers.
Gotta load their pittance database onto our thing.
Their entire "Technology Department" is one old fart.
One even older fart runs their accounting.
I asked the IT boomer for their accounting data.
He tells me to get the head accountant.
The head accountant says they do not have any historical accounting data.
I threaten to call the (equivalent of the) IRS on them.
They give up, admit that they do have some historical data. But they attempt to pull a "malicious compliance" on me, send me a pallet full of old receipts, on paper.

I do what I have done one hundred times before, I go to the closest community college (equivalent) and ask/bribe a teacher to offer the most trustworthy kids some pretty pennies to scan all those files for me.
A dozen of them barely took a week to do it using their not-so-bad camera phones.
It all for about the same price as a couple of older-but-still-good iPhones.
Then it's on to some simple OCR and data normalization tasks.

This morning I had another meeting with the losers, the first since I told them their "data" had just arrived in the mail (but a couple weeks after that). They log in for the meeting all smug, thinking we would ask for more time to load their data, and it would be my team's fault for any delays.
Then the regional business evaluator logs in and said he reviewed their financials yesterday and we have a lot to talk about.
I will remember their "just got punched in the gut" faces forever :)

How I avoid scammers. If the website works well: you know it must not really be the IRS.

In another news. COVID-19 continues to ravage certain places of the world. Most notably India (for right now)

Is there a mathematical correlation between this and the decrease of scam calls asking about your social, vehicle warranties, IRS frauds etc?

A friend mentioned that he has not gotten scam calls in a while now, I noticed this as well. I would normally have vendors contact me daily, vendors with shitty practices and poor sounding accents that insist on them having names such as "Joe" or "Steve". This sucks for India since I believe it is a country with absolutely beautiful cultural heritage and good people. But man, the decrease in scam calls from there is outstanding now.

Xiaomi makes you wait for 360 hours before they can allow you to unlock their phone's bootloader! Now I'm just seated here dealing with bloatware as I wait for 2 weeks to do a 30 second operation. It's 2018, come on!

I don't know what's worse for a freelance dev:

1) Dealing with customers

2) Dealing with the IRS

Guess who has 2 thumbs, half a brain and lost his job today...

Mixing tabs and spaces on collabs with my friends

All hail! 😅

USA: you were born American, so you must pay American taxes even if you live and do business in some other country, or else say hello to the IRS. You know, we need money to feed our trillion dollar army (that can't handle protests and prevent civil casualties)

also USA: *prints two trillions of dollars in 10 months* Here's your $1200 stimulus package

Why the fuck these managers can’t understand that you can’t build a full blown system with in a week. After building a demo driven application to show the client you can tell the client we are fucking ready to launch the damn thing . I FUCKING MENTIONED BEFORE GOING TO THE MEETING ITS NOT RELEASE READY GOD DAMN IT.

Now when I say we can’t launch this app we need to fix things . THE FUCKING MANAGER HAS THE GUTS TO SAY “one day is enough to fix the issues right ? Shouldn’t be a big deal for you to fix this” .

Kill me now 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

The learning curve between learning syntax to hackerrank/leetcode feels massive

Oh! How I wish the ++ button was placed at the top/bottom center part of a post. Being right-handed, the level of laziness I have to stretch my thumb all the way to the left when scrolling on the phone with one hand is appalling.

Ah, when you run into a bug that only has 7 google results, and have of them is in Russian for some reason. Gonna be a long day.

I'm just FUCKING DONE. Everyone around me looks at me like a fucking paycheck they either don't want to pay me or like one they want from me but that I can't make enough of. Every time I open my stupid cakehole something stupid flies out of it that offends someone or makes me look incompetent or sets me back somehow. I'm not suicidal but I don't want to be on this planet anymore. I'm stranded here with nobody who wants to hire me and people around me who are tapping their feet waiting for people to hire me. I have nothing in my bank accounts to cover enormous and increasing monthly expenses coming up on the horizon and no way to pay for them. I have a stupid president who just keeps making it worse and worse with every stupid thing that comes out of his geriatric mouth or that he signs with his shaking dementia-ridden hand. He just keeps taxing me and taxing me and now has an army the size of the FUCKING NATIONAL GUARD of IRS agents ready to FUCK ME UP THE ASS if I have just one business expense out of order. I have all of this responsibility for my family and none of the power to do anything for them. And now that most of my kids are adults, none of them can afford to move out for the long-term future and also they're not able to get much money to help out so it's still incumbent on me to carry them until they're like FUCKING 35 YEARS OLD OR SOMETHING! The wife is pretty much sick of me and my shitty attitude about it all and she says she thinks that I think it's all her fault. We don't have any kind of romantic relationship anymore (well, I have all the interest and she has all the avoidance).

Also, I'm a man, and white, and straight, and "privileged" (oh, so privileged) so I'm the _worst person on the planet_.

I was born on this earth to be a FUCKING WARNING, not the lesson. When that meteor comes, let it take me out first.

Drupal makes me want to go back to the moment that life first crawled out of the ocean, and shoot that first land-dwelling organism in the head – just to make sure that the animal kingdom never evolves to the point where a crime as ghastly as Drupal can occur.

Drupal somehow manages to be both unforgivingly, bureaucratically rigid, and an anarchic, spaghetti-coded mess – at the same time. Other frameworks are toolboxes. Drupal is a series of windows at the IRS or MVA – and it *will* take you days to figure out which series of forms you have to submit, with which boxes checked, in order to accomplish your goal.

The documentation is complete and utter trash.

It models content in a way that makes all sorts of assumptions about your use case. And those assumptions don't have anything to do with *how websites are actually designed and built*. In 20 years of building websites, I've never *once* wanted to use anything resembling the bizarre data model that Drupal *forces* you to use. Nor have I ever thought "gee, I wish my platform forced me to stop writing code every 20 seconds, so I can use an atrociously designed point-and-click interface".

I ask the community how to accomplish [insert extremely fucking basic task here], and they say: "well, you just install these 17 modules, glue them together with a bunch of configuration that couples your database to your code, and then shrug at the hideously broken HTML/CSS that comes out, because we give exactly zero shits about UX! isn't it great how Drupal makes things so easy?" Like, no – literally *every other framework on the planet* allows you to accomplish the same thing with just a few lines of code.

Most of the community seems to have little or no experience with other frameworks – so they seem solipsistically unaware that these are even problems. If your platform has been stabbing you in the arm for as long as you've been building websites, then you're just gonna assume that being stabbed in the arm is part of developing websites, you know? They seem oblivious to the fact that things are *so much easier* when your platform just lets you build whatever abstractions you need, instead of forcing its own weird-ass, undocumented assumptions on you.

Uruururrrrrrrggghgh. I can't understand how anyone defends this piece of garbage. If you're a Drupal developer reading this – please, for the love of God, try learning another framework. Once you've spent a couple of weeks learning saner ways of doing things, you'll never look back. I cannot comprehend how Drupal is still a thing.

The IRS has a form on their website that can only be submitted during business hours.

Do you need a degree to become a software engineer ?

Now this is a question I’ve seen many people ask. I personally have no degree and I’ve been doing programming for the past 10 years (since I was 18 ). Whatever I learned, I learned from reading and watching tutorials.
So far It wasn’t a problem for me.

What do u guys think and what is your experience is this matter ?

If you're reviewing someone's code, do you run/test the code before reviewing the logic? Or do you review logic before running the code?

Well, I love react-native and how easy to build mobile app with it. but damn look at these folder sizes jeez

My city's subway has one of these;
I wonder why the tickets gate need Windows XP to work :|

Inherited a massive code base today... All JS is still being accessed via global scope... what are modules & modular design even... SOLID and DRY are things that clearly never crossed the devs mind during inception of this beast... and to top it all off all there is a weird BEM / SCSS style going on that somehow manages to confuse the IDE... thus all style helper utilities in the IDE are useless...

Front-end development leaves me slightly in awe of the developers. How do you do it?

I come from a background in scientific computing. I can write boundary element code that's fast, performant and safe. I can build Monte Carlo simulations that work well. I'm even decent with backend development in Flask somehow. But ask me to build a simple web form and... argh!

When my mom asked what would I like to have - sweet corn or Avacado.
I said - Let's document all the possible approaches and setup some time to discuss pros and cons.

pip kept screwing me up with permission issues in /usr/local etc. Changed permissions for respective python folders, still got pip permission errors,did a chgrp - R user /usr.
Sudo gone
Have to reinstall :/

Ok, @jestdotty , today, i give up on china.

I've been messaging with a rep who is taking the time to keep editing a contract... Im pretty sure she was genuinely trying...

As typing this we finally got to a 'correct enough' contract... so I could click the damn pay button.

Over the past 7 hrs.. at 3 back and forth exchabges and modifications at each issue:
1. Used previous PI from the dude i gave up on... so had a qty at 12 when only 11 exist a colour wrong for a crate of items, and listed the dude i refused to sign a contract under listed as the rep.

2. Now the item subtotals were off... just a few pennies or so... assumed she left the usd prices but calculated with ¥... didn't want alibaba to reject in a day so i checked if it was noted anywhere... Oh boy was it... VERY clearly, all caps, bold in the body of the total row... that the total was, exactly, 11680 (spelled out ofc) RMB aka ¥ chinese yen. I told her this, she sends me a cropped shot of the $ numeric total field... so i sent her the giant all caps bolded line, the one thatd typically be considered final say in most international courts... no clue where that value came from, it had zero relation to any actual values... and i was as curious as when chatGPT creates totally new, unique, lyrics for satirical german songs... i really tried.

3. Wrong incoterms (trade terms... abbreviated to a few letters... had it that I'd be physically going to the tbd port to accept/clear customs... no)

4. Technically it was accurate (well a few strange subtotals since she used ¥ half the time... told her it was fine as long as it had the company name on the label (gave 3 full examples to use whichever)
I get the contract ...shipping...
"To: Sara"
Then the right address (seriously wtf)

5. I point this out and carefully explain in mostly just examples and "the us government doesn't like anything being sent to just a first name, there's no legal way to sign for acceptance"

6. She gets stressed enough to tell me she doesn't have time to keep editing (since this horrid pile of poor formatting was just thrown at her a day ago... i dont point out the ridiculous irony)

7. Imo, the highlight of my night/morning... in her stress she promises me it'll ship right... sooo many issues there...
Even if it was delivered/allowed a signature for "sara" for 7ish large boxes just off a sea freight from china to a residence in the middle of a corn field (which tbh would be hysterical)...the IRS would have a valid reason to audit me... theyve done it w/o valid reasons several times, since I was 18 doing international trade and a contractual employee of a large gambling company, quarterly reporting, and ofc declaring more than my taxes in donating melted glass and crane game prizes...yea, they hate me and always do all that work to find the same thing... i underdeclare charity by 10%.

The entire concept of getting USA mail, even when pristine and you know logistics agents in every major company and port or distribution center, to properly deliver anything... ROFLOL ... and im already on some 'open and check everything' list with customs for a hysterical misconception they made years ago... cant/shouldn't get into detail publicly... but it was caused because 2 packages from different cities in China were both going to my address/through customs at the same time... package 1, 75 of those cheap af ball-pit hollow plastic balls for a 2yr old's bday(very delayed) package 2. 75 rechargeable batteries (the kind in power banks) 9600mah.

8. Told her to change "sara" to company name... glad it's registered to this address still.

It took me under 5min to type this... had to get the WTF out.

Dear AliBaba, please give an option to allow buyers to create the supply side contract for review, not just req modification... please?

*Triggers OAuth request through browser
Returns : success and valid tokens.

*Another project triggers the same process and code.
Returns : well shit nigga, I know I use the same logic as above but fuck you.

Rant and geniune question:

How can a group of 'devs' make 2 functional(enough unfortunately), many active users, phone apps, not just basic af, over a few years... but apparently not know how to make a working referral link of any kind???

Am i missing something like referral code link logic being extremely hard for typical devs to understand? Or some odd or trending reason for for forcing manual, explicit, referral code binding instead of a simple (imo) link that attributes the new user account to the referring user's? If you dont believe me u can check either/both of their actively running, decent/moderate size user base apps, claw eden (on play store) and/or claw party (possibly only via finding an apk... at least not on google play).

They have legit rewards, relatively very fair/honest policy... etc... i get 60+ items won/delivered a month (i have paranormal crane game skills #AutisticSuperpower) which i donate the vast majority of to charity (1 of 3 reasons the IRS reeeeally dislikes me).

Im just baffled by this apparent inability.

Some developers just can not ever change!

God fuckin dammit, I swear to heaven if this bitch ass code returns IO.Exception file is being used blah blah blah even though I'm using filestream and streamwriter. I will lose my shit in this fucking office

I'm trying to set value of a kendo js property using value from dB. I would like to do something similar to

template : "#= dataItem.Item1 #"
But I can't use template for what I'm trying to set

Apparently on demand tech support expecially when their wifi is down or computer is being 'bad'

Living and growing up in the east coast feels like I've severely hindered my opportunities.

First and foremost, it's essential to figure out which IRS office is closest to your location. That, in itself, can be a daunting task, especially if you're not familiar with the area. Using the IRS's online office locator is a helpful start, but sometimes, even that leaves you with more questions than answers.

Then comes the joy of trying to get in touch with someone who can provide the specific information or assistance you need. Long hold times, automated systems, and a seemingly endless stream of recorded messages can leave you feeling like you're caught in an endless loop.

And let's not forget the paperwork. Different IRS offices often have different procedures, so finding the right forms and knowing how to fill them out correctly can be a headache.

In the end, it feels like a journey filled with frustration and uncertainty. But, here's a tip from someone who's been there: persistence pays off. Keep trying, be patient, and, if possible, reach out to others who've had similar experiences. Sometimes, a bit of collective wisdom can make this daunting process a little more manageable.

The official IRS refund site has a sa.www4 prefix (sa.www4.irs.gov)

Can anyone tell me what the sa.www4 part is and how it's different from a standard www.? Never seen that before

Have you noticed a change in the typical location of internet/phone scammers from West Africa to Pakistan? All the IRS scammers I've seen have been in Pakistan for example.

!rant

So, at this day I have two jobs as software engineer (I'm self thought). The first one with a friend from high school, a billing platform. The engineer he had flew to Canada and leave him with nothing, so I made one from scratch, I couldn't deliver on time and most of the clients he had moved to another services so the benefits of the deal I made with him ended being less than expected (there was a deadline set by our government as these clients are merchants and the Costa Rican IRS equivalent is moving everybody to electronic billing to mitigate tax evasion). The backend was done using Go, the front-end with React and MobX.

Then, the second job. I'm being staffed to a big outsourcing company for a North American business. The engineer team is small compared to the other departments and the people are really nice. Their stack is Python and React, I'm the only guy allowed to use a different editor than Neovim (Emacs in my case).

between the two I work 11 hours per day, and I'm satisfied with this.

This is way better than my old CS job at Amazon Spain where I couldn't use Emacs to have a decent text editing experience.

Thanks, Lord.

Just curious as to what security measures/programming languages the IRS uses on their website on form submissions and stuff.

Most people here think they are real developers because they are on devRant