Never let anyone make you believe that just because you don't have a specific skill which is 'required' for your dream job/a job you really want, you won't be able to reach it.

I've heard countless times that I could never do anything with programming/linux (server) engineering because I'm freaking bad at maths. They always said it was a requirement to understand it in order to become good at those two things.

Except for a few simple tests with 'okay' marks, I never got a good grade for it and failed it entirely at every school.

Guess who's a programmer (free time) and a professional linuxer right now!

It just pisses me off when people tell someone that because they don't possess a skill, they won't be able to make it to what they would love to do.

I'd like to extend my heartfelt fuck-you to the following persons:

- The recruiter who told me that at my age I wouldn't find a job anymore: FUCK YOU, I'll send you my 55 birthday's cake candles, you can put all of them in your ass, with light on.

- The Project Manager that after 5 rounds of interviews and technical tests told me I didn't have enough experience for his project: be fucked in an Agile way by all member of your team, standing up, every morning for 15 minutes, and every 2 weeks by all stakeholders.

- The unemployment officer who advised me to take low level jobs, cut my expenses and salary expectations: you can cut your cock and suck it, so you'll stop telling bullshit to people

- The moron that gave me a monster technical assignment on Big Data, which I delivered, and didn't gave me any feedback: shove all your BIG DATA in your ass and open it to external integrations

- the architect who told me I should open my horizons, because I didn't like React: put a reactive mix in your ass and close it, so your shit will explode in your mouth

- the countless recruiter who used my cv to increase their db, offering fake jobs: print all your db on paper and stuff your ass with that, you'll see how big you will be

To all of them, really really fuck you.

You start new job and take over huge codebase without tests and documentation.

It turns out programming language is custom language made by previous developer who was the only one maintaining project.

There is no source version control.

Language runs in vm developed in Fortran.

No one cared to this day cause everything was working.

Project is critical for multi billion dollar corporation that sells medical equipment that keep people alive.

You can’t test your code on real devices only on virtual ones that were made using same custom language but you can’t find source code for it.

Previous developer accidentally died before you were hired.

You signed contract with penalties that will ruin your life.

Your first task is to add “small” feature.

Good luck !

When I was 14, I was bad at many things. I sucked at sports cause I was weak and small. School was boring so I did not study. I mostly played games.
During a summer break, I wanted to change shit in WarCraft 3, as I heard from a friend that heard it from a friend, that you can do that. Many internet searches later I realised that you kind of just tell to the game what you want it to do, just simplified. If (target is enemy) do damage, for (every human player) make sparkly stuff...
After months of "playing" games, the new school year started and I got, for the first time, a proper computer class. Imagine my surprise when we started doing the shit I did all summer. That year I had 100% on all tests.
Many years later programming gave me friends, made my inner nerd and geek come out, gave me a free trip to the USA to represent my country, two TEDx talks, and finally a job that I like with the pay I can live with.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to my latest employee, Dave the Duck! Dave is the new head of debugging and took the job to support his out-of-hand caffeine addiction and 72 children (of which paternity tests are still being done on 10). Dave is also wanted in 4 countries as the leader of the popular gang, known as the Dangerous Ducks. Please do no feed Dave, as he is on a strict diet. #DaveTheDuck #ProgrammersTools #ImNotThatCrazy

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

I have coronavirus. Went to ER because I couldn't breathe Sunday night. Thought I was fucked. I decide to try to work a couple hours today because I'm getting restless. I'm an associate and have been on a project about a month. No prior software job.

Anyway. They ask me to clone a repo and run some tests. Cool, I can do that. They give me another example to look at to make sure I'm running the test right. Except the test files aren't attached to the email nor is the path to them provided.

I ping the other associate developer on Skype and ask for the test files and get a passive aggressive response that they're in the email. No, they're not you fuck stick, hence why I'm fucking asking you, and given that I almost fucking died a couple days ago, you should be fucking grateful I even logged on. Motherfucker.

Ok I feel better now.

I might have posted this before. But I am going to post it again. Because emojis.

Me: 😁 Software lead I have finished coding the thing.
SL: 😀 Cool, good job. That is going to really help out the analysts.
Software Manager: 😐 hey I noticed you have coded a new thing and pushed it to integration.
Me: 😁 Yes.
SM: 😐 Well how do you know when it's done?
Me: 😑 . . . When you run it and it does the thing?
SM: 😐 Did you write test steps?
Me: 😕 Yeah . . . they're in the issue ticket.
SM: 😐 Yeah but how do you know those are right?
Me: 😕 Because I wrote the thing and the test steps?
SM: 😐 did you put any steps in our acceptance test procedure?
Me: 😕 No.
SM: 😐 why not?
Me: 😧 Because the acceptance test procedure tests requirements. There is no requirement for this functionality.
SM: 😑 Then why did you do it?
Me: 🤔 Because it was an internal request from the analysis team. There is no customer impact here.
SM: 😑 I really think we should write a requirement.
SL: 🤔 But what requirement is he going to attach this to?
SM: 😑 We don't have to attach it to a requirement. We can just test it once and remove it.
Me: 😒 SM, you know we never remove anything from the acceptance test procedure.
SM: 🙂 We do sometimes.
SL: 🤔 When was that I have worked here for twenty years and we have never removed a test from that document.
SM: 😑
SL: 😒
SM: 😑
SL: 😒
Me: 🤐
SM: 😧 I really think there should be an acceptance test written.
SL: 😧 Looks like you're writing an acceptance test.
Me: 😒 Alright as long as y'all're payin'. Shit I was just tryin' to save y'all money.

*acceptance test written and sent to peer review*

Peer: 😐 The requirement tested section doesn't have any requirements spelled out.
Me: 😅 No.
Peer: 🤔 Why?
Me: 😓 Because there is no requirement associated with this test.
Peer: 🤔 Then why are we adding an acceptance test?
Me: 😡 WELL AIN'T THAT A GOOD GOD DAMN QUESTION!?

My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.

In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.

Once we were going to present a web service to governmental firm. All is going well so far and my boss asks me to host the web application the day before the presentation.

I hosted it and all was good with demo production tests, but I had a bad feeling.

While it was running on our server, I also ran it locally with a reverse proxy just in case.

* Meeting starts *

* Ice broken and down to business *

"And now our developer will run the demo for you..."

* Run the demo from my laptop to double check --> 500 Internal Server Error *

Holy shit!!!

* Opens reverse proxy link on my laptop. Present demo during meeting. Demo works like a charm. *

Firm representative: "Great! Looking forward to go live."

*Our team walks out*

GM: "Good job guys"

ME:

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

Once I applied for a Java position and they sent me a a online test, user and password. When I first tried to log in, it gave me an java exception. I lost hours trying to figure out the exception , thinking it was the test :/

tl;dr: spent 12 hours creating an api for a job interview challenge. Got rejected after 4 weeks with no real feedback, and all I can do is rant!

So I was in the interview process with a company that was a great fit for my background.

Got through a couple of phone screens, and was given a coding challenge consisting of writing a web API with a couple of endpoints and a filter function.

I'm like, ok no problem, I happen to have created apis for some mobile apps in the past, and I pick Django rest framework to get the job done.

Implemented it on a Sunday, wrote a medium size Readme.md and some unit tests and submit. Took almost four weeks and a partial resubmission to get a rejection with no specific feedback.

Now I'm shamelessly butthurt and I have nothing else to do but rant! Worse part is I looked back at the code and in my opinion is solid AF, so I put it on my public GitHub cause fuck it!

The most disappointing (not so sure about upsetting) rejection was from none other than Google.

I was ecstatic when Google respond to my application by inviting me to an interview. If I recall rightly I had two pre-interview screenings, two technical interviews, and about four interviews with people. The people were great and the HR person I was dealing with was open that the feedback was all good.

And then the rejection came! I called the HR guy and asked what happened. He said there’s a central group somewhere who approve all hiring and they decided I hadn’t worked for a “big enough” company in the past.

Yet - my potential colleagues and manager thought I could do the job, I passed the Google-scale technical tests … and then some faceless person somewhere says “meh” and that’s that.

It’s not like they didn’t have my resume that whole time, or the opportunity to ask any questions they wanted !

So that sucked.

Always deliver the goods.

Even if who you work for are idiots, and the product is useless. You never know who will see what you've done.

- I did a six-month underpaid project for ShittyCompany.

- Strived to write it nice and clean with unit tests and good(barely) documentation.

- Got a call up a year later from a consultancy company who integrated with the application I wrote. Now I work for them, and it's as close to my dream job as I could hope for.

Today, one of my coworkers had to translate a bunch of pages to French ...
He did his job, committed, pushed, and asked someone to validate his branch in order to merge.
Tests didn't take long, the login screen was broken, because there was an there was an <input type="mot de passe"> ...

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

*job ad* We strongly adhere to TDD

Reality:
Me: yeah but shouldn't we write tests first and then get X finished?
Manager: No takes too much time, we finish X and then we decide if it's worth testing.

this is the state of hiring tests:

1. can you take an english sentence, and without a tutorial, write a for loop?

2. okay now write a full parser. but not in the language we want to hire you in.

also we can afford to pay you in bananas, experience, and exposure.

p.s. we also need you to do this backend test because this is a backend job even though the ad is for front end and you specified an hour ago when the interview started that you only trained for front.

on the positive side, we have a ping pong table and a bean bag chair. and a two hour commute. Think of the benefits!

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

I just released a tiny game for iPhone!

It's basically an attempt to mix 'Heroes of Might & Magic' and mtg.

In the screenshot my terminal says 'helloworld.cpp'. That's right, this is my first c++ program and I don't care how crappy you think this game is, I'm super proud of myself!

I've always worked in data science where managers assume I know how to code because there's text on my screen and I can query and wrangle data, but I actually didn't know what a class was until like 3 years into my job.

Making this game was my attempt to really evolve myself away from just statistics / data transforms into actual programming. It took me forever but I'm really happy I did it

It was brutal at first using C++ instead of R/Python that data science people usually use, but now I start to wonder why it isn't more popular. Everything is so insanely fast. You really get a better idea of what your computer is actually doing instead of just standing on engineers' shoulders. It's great.

After the game was 90% finished (LOL) I started using Swift and Spritekit to get the visuals on the screen and working on iPhone. That was less fun. I didn't understand how to use xCode at all or how to keep writing tests, so I stopped doing TDD because I was '90% done anyway' and 'surely I'll figure out how to do basic debugging'. I'll know better next time...

I FUCKING hate companies/startups/ANY WORK ENTITY that doesn't respond to job/internship applications , i don't care if it's a yes or a "your application is shitty and you are a shitty applier and there's thousands of appliers better than you" at least give me something to carry on with my internship search .

Even more hated are those who respond with a plethora of tests and don't answer back with results when you do them .

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Why... why the fuck do people write unit tests and then comment out the god damn fucking assertion lines....
Like what the flying fuck? Cool, we can get some code coverage marks but for fuck sake actually let your tests do their fucking job!!!

Oh, the asserts fail?
Well fucking sort that shit out instead of commenting them out.

I don't get it, if you're going to write tests, fucking test something with them, or we'd be better of without them.

At my old job, me and a colleague were tasked with designing a new backup system. It had integrations for database systems, remote file storage and other goodies.
Once we were done, we ran our tests, and sure enough. The files and folder from A were in fact present at B and properly encrypted. So we deployed it.
The next day, after the backup routine had run over night, I got to work and noone was able to log in. They were all puzzled.
I accessed a root account to find the issue. Apparantly, we had made a mistake!
All files on A were present at B... But they were no longer present at A.
We had issued 'move' instead of 'copy' on all the backups. So all of peoples files and even the shared drives have had everything moved to remote storage :D
We spent 4 hours getting everything back in place, starting with the files of the people who were in the office that day.
Boss took it pretty well at least, but not my proudest moment.

*Stay tuned for the story of how I accidentally leaked our Amazon Web Services API key on stack overflow*

/facepalm

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

Once on my old job I had several ssh sessions and I was running some tests where I frequently restarted the application... Until I entered the restart command in the terminal of the production system and shutdown the whole application. - Still gives me the creeps today, was just lucky the customer was in a break and we could remotely restart it, so probably nobody even noticed.

Now today I run a "rm -rf *" on a folder that is supposed to be local, but after some time I get suspicious because it is taking too long.. Only to discover that the mount point of the remote resource points to my "local copy". Shit.

What is next? The "delete from ...;" without where clause? Fuck, aren't you supposed to get more experienced and cautious?

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

We made a software for hospitals in my old department. The senior Dev kinda gave me the software, because he thought it sucked and was perfect for a newbie like me. I really loved my work and gave everything I had to improve the quality of software, introduced tests, refactored old smelly code and talked with the product manager to overhaul the ui. Several months later this little shit project the senior gave the newbie, was a huge success and better than any thrash that the senior has created. The senior was really pissed, so everytime I had some days off, he tried to sabotage me in any way. I couldn't take that and many other things anymore, so I left the company. The most tragic part is, that my software could become a massive foundation for the company, but after I left they abandoned it. I still had some good contacts within the old company and they said, that the senior dev told everyone how bad everything was, that I have done through the years and that they can't even describe how bad the architecture of the software is. tl;dr fuck off!! I've done so much things for the company and they never appreciated it. I'm glad I quit that job. Best decision ever!!

I did a job interview recently for a company and the test was something like this.

In ruby, write a web server that will serve a specific line number from a text file.

I thought up a simple solution and a more advanced solution, but I opted to go with the simple solution and submit my work quickly. I made a nice web server with tests and everything and it used the sed command to get the line number from the file.

Now, they had various instructions, like it had to perform. They asked how it'd perform with 10G, 100G files. I thought "Eh... it'll be alright."

The solution they were looking for was the "advanced" solution that I thought up, which involved storing a binary file of 32/64 bit integers that reference the byte-offset of the line they're looking for. Basically a binary index file.

This violates all of my sensibilities, because I would never build a database indexer like this using ruby, of all things.

I thought it was a stupid test, and how do these companies honestly expect me to spend hours coding and then tell me I didn't go far enough? It's unethical.

I actually followed-up with the "advanced" solution a couple hours after hearing I was out, just to show them that their process is flawed.

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

Write so many tests that QA goes out of job 😃😃

Super exited! Been thinking for a while now about getting back to software development (worked couple year as dev in my teens decade ago and since then have been in completely different field of work).
Finally made some effort towards my goal and applied for a position nearby.
After four rounds of interviews and tests, I got the job! Awesome!

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Im getting a bit tired of programming.

I have been struggling for years regarding programming. I did have some moments of perceived success, but most of the time it has been depressing.

I’m not sure if I dislike programming. But there are some aspects of it that make me feel not as passionate about it.

First of, programs are invisible. No one sees your program or you (assuming we’re talking about a non artistic dev job).

People can’t see lines of code executing, but even if they did it would be gibberish to them.

Users can only become aware of bad software and that kind of breaks my heart a bit.

You could write fast, stable, secure, easy to read, easy to update software. People won’t notice. Hell, even your boss/coworkers might not notice.

In fact, sometimes you try to do the good thing, you try to become a better dev, you try to write tests first, you try to i18n, and what do you get? “Uhh, that’s taking too much time and I don’t see the benefit”.

I know some people will say that people noticing bad service happens on every job.

But programming is the ultimate isolation job. No client has ever told me “hey that code you wrote was pretty good”. They can’t even read code.

I don’t know the users, the users don’t know me, and the users can only judge my program by the result, they can only judge the visual interface.

Let’s say you write a cool project at github. The code is great. Guess what, every language’s ecosystem out there is saturated. Everything is already written. GitHub is saturated. Your best project ends up being a just for yourself enjoyment.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy code for yourself. That’s how I bet most prolific coders start. I’ve been doing that for many years now. But at some point you want to be part of something with humans.

Imagine I’m stranded on an island with nothing no humans, just food, water and a computer. Would I write code just for myself, just for fun? I think I would off myself 3 months in.

Maybe I should do develop a more social talent...

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

I was impressed with my latest job interview in the government (got the job).

Applied online, and they extended the application deadline because the lack of quality of applications.

I got invited for an interview. Present there were HR manager, Department manager and an employee from the regional office (opening a new dev department in the region).
Most of the interview consisted of them telling me about the company, and asking a bit about me. Nothing technical.

1.5 month later I got a 2nd interview. Present were two developers from the main office in Oslo. Again, very little questions about my technical capabilities. Mostly just repeating the stuff said in the first interview. Though I did have to send some code in for review by them.

A month later I get a phone call from the department head saying they’d like to offer me a job, but they don’t have a concrete job offer yet, as it has to be approved by a committee (gov stuff). That takes two weeks, and I finally got job offer. 42% pay rise from the current job in the private sector.

I later went and re-read the ad for the job. “Bachelor/ master required. For particularly qualified applicants, this requirement can be ignored.”

Fascinating that they didn’t give me more tests.

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

Sometimes I really fucking hate this company

The code is an absolute shitshow filled with static classes, untestable and duplicate code, on top of that my boss doesn’t like open source

Yeah so i’m not allowed to use a mapping library or something because “Uhhh like uhh we don’t have a contract with the company so who knows what’ll happen when the maintainers leave the project”
I understand his reasoning but it’s an absolutely retarded reasoning especially considering most of the .NET platform is open source nowadays

Writing a webapp from scratch now as well and I HAVE to use vanilla javascript and AngularJS 1.5 even though all the developers here told me they would like to upgrade to Typescript and Angular 2+ but it’s never gonna happen I suppose

Oh and he doesn’t like TDD and our only product is SAAS so imagine the amount of bugs being pushed simply because we don’t have time to write tests or even manually test, let alone refactor our horseshit codebase

AND i have to pay for gas myself which takes 200€ out of my bank account a month just for driving to work whilst I’m only getting a mediocre pay

Have a job interview tomorrow and another one on tuesday

a small local social network i made around 2008 as a replacement for the original which the owner closed down.

i missed the people from there, so it motivated me to make a replacement in a week, while learning html+php+mysql+js.

it worked for about 3 years and i redid it from scratch 3 times as i gradually learned more.

it was cool to be basically a host of a community i've come to like in the years before, and it was basically the only project i felt, really felt, had meaning, a point. people were grateful that i made a replacement for the original closed-down site, and i was grateful that they were using it and that i could keep talking to all of them on it.

at the height of its popularity it had about 1500 registered accounts, 150 daily logged in ones, and about 30-40 very active ones.

it was also the place where i went to implement all the cool stuff i learned and came up with.

it had a pretty cool questionnaire creator (originally just a test of how deppressed users are, but then i thought "why not let people make their own tests/questionnaires?"), which tracked people's results over time and showed them on a cool interactive flash-based chart.

also a whole forum system made from scratch, wysiwyg article editor, later seamlessly integrated admin controls for those who had privileges, like, not a separate admin ui, but the admin buttons right on the site, later even a realtime chat persistent across page reloads where you could put special links which, on click, would highlight site elements/buttons, or even complete step-by-step path to them if it was more clicks. would highlight the first step, after clicking would then highlight the second one, and so on...

it was pretty cool stuff for 2008, and afaik it basically landed me my first two full-time jobs with almost no actual job interview, basically just "we looked at the site, interesting stuff, tell us how you did x and y and z on it, okay, hired"

back then i kinda felt i have a bright future ahead of me =D

Me: develops my first android app with firebase by google.
Me: finishes app, tests it and it works.

Firebase after 3 months: we were first going to scale our servers on our own based on how many people are simultaneously using your app. But now fuck you, we will have a cap of 100000 simultaneous users.

Me: fuck this kills my app if it scales. Have to Shard everything on the db side and overhaul the entire app to work will multiple db instances. Takes a month.

Android after 6 months: dude your app is working fine without any hiccups. Let me fuck it up. We will stop all your services when your app is not running or backgrounded. Also we will make it illegal to start services in this case and we will throw exceptions.

Me: what the actual fuck. They now want me to focus on a JobScheduler, fine... But now even intent services won't work properly. So use a job scheduler to start a JobIntentService which is essentially another job scheduler for queuing. wtf android.

Ps solved it and works again.

PS: WAITING FOR ANDROID TO FML WITH ANOTHER NEW VERSION. Maybe they'll say you can't run your app at all now

LPT: NEVER accept a freelance job without looking at the project's source first

Client: I have a project made by a company that is now abandoning it, I want you to fix some bugs

Me: Okay, can you:
1) Give me a build to test the current state of the game
2) Tell me what the bugs are
3) Show me the source
4) Tell me your budget

Client: *sends a list of 10 bugs* Here's the APK and to give you the project I'll need you to sign an NDA

Me: Sure...

*tests build*
*sees at least 20 bugs*
*still downloading source*
*bugs look quite easy to fix should be done under an hour*

Me: Okay, so, I can fix each bug for $10 and I can do 2 today

Client: Okay can you fix 8 bugs today for $40??

*sigh*

Me: No I cannot.

Client: okay then 2 today for $20 is fine, I want a refund if you can't fix them today

*sigh*

Me: Look dude, this isn't the first time I am doing this, aight? I'll fix the bugs today you can pay me after check they are done, savvy?

Client: okay

*source is downloaded*
*literal apes wrote the scripts, commented out code EVERYWHERE
Debug logs after every line printing every frame causing FPS drops, empty objects in the scene
multiple unused UI objects
everything is spaghetti*

*give up, after 2 hours of hell*
*tfw averted an order cancellation by not taking the order and telling client that they can pay me after I am done*

Attached is an image of a level object pool
It's an array with each element representing a level.
The numbers and "Final" are ids for objects in an object pool
The whole string is .Split(',') into an array (RIP MEMORY BTW) and then a loop goes through each element in the split array and instantiates the object from an object pool

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

When you think you've either found a bug in Python, or you're going insane, so just to double check, you make two mutually exclusive assertions that could never both be true, and yet, your tests still pass.

I think it's time to find a new job.

You don’t appreciate how large a project really is until you have to write tests cases for QA, to cover most work flows.

God this is mind numbing, only half way there... I think 😰

Recruiter is contacting me out of the blue for a vague job position. Tells me he is very interested in my skillsets as they are apparently difficult to find.

I don't hate my current job but it has some problems. My interest is piqued.

I ask for more details and tell him what minimum benefits I would expect, given I won't quit my job for less. I tell him I have a very tight schedule at work and at home right now but I could fit in some time for a 1-2h interview.

He tells me I'll get more details in the next interview and tells me there will be a little coding test. Ok sure...

Dude proceeds to send me a test description by email. It consists in designing an actual small python project. Would take at least 1 full day of work (tests, doc and functionality included). I have 3 days to complete it.

fuckThat.jpg

Is this guy for real? In this market?

just saw a contract job "Write tests for existing codebase"....

Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).

I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.

From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)

You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.

Our CTO doesn't believe that tests improve code quality. We have no tests on any level, no testers/QA, no code reviews. Nada. I wonder why production keeps breaking 🤔 Guess I'll start looking for another job 🤷‍♂️

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

I don't get people..

He is a good person and and realy tries..

Tries what?! To annoy coworkers that have to fix every single thing he does?!

Some people will justify anything with 'he is a nice person and tries hard'. WTF?!

So if someone is a nice person, likes to talk a lot, has 'good' social skills but writes crappy code he doesn't test at all.. or tests and see that it's glitchy and still doesn't fix it.. so he is a good worker for that?! Dafaq?!

So if he is a 'lovable' person, he deserves to be here, doing more damage than helps.. he deserves to have a job, with same pay (or even more) than me?! WTF?! How?!

Why is this ok?! If we were heart surgeons and he killed a person or two due to lack of skills or negligence, what would happen?!
He'd get fired on spot!! Why can't it be the same with devs?!

Why on fucking earth do we need to put up with people who try their best and fail?! Especially if their best is lowest of all, lower than the 'I don't give a fuck, just doing sth so the boss stops nagging'?!

Fuuuuuuuu!!!!

But ok, some people are not cut out for some work, I get it.. but why the fuck do other people justify that with 'he tries'?! Dafaq?!

Maybe next time 'I'll try' to perfom brain surgery on you..and you'll end up a fuckin plant.. is that ok with you?! I'll be trying (not really) and do my best (well I will try not to use a chainsaw when cutting open your head).. will that be ok with you?!

Fuck!!

New job surprise: I will inherit a 900k lines of php code from a contractor dev shop. It is the company erp web app.
It has no version control, tests, architecture or configuration management of any kind.
There are just 1800 bug ridden files with almost no comments in a directory with lots of code duplication.
Also just learned that the contractor was paid a lot monthly for over 2 years for this monster.

I will need a raise quickly. At least management understands that I will need a couple of months to get a semblance of order in this madness.

And to you contractor I have your address and i'll try to restraint myself from vandalizing your house but I can't make any promises.

And fellow developers send help or beers or come and join me to teach this bastard a lesson.

After working 3 years in my current job and my boss hating anything to do with unit testing etc, I used my spare time to refactor our Makefiles to allow for the creation of unit and integration tests. I technically didn't tell my boss about it, so my heart was in my throat when he Skyped me with 'what did you change in ...'?

After having bashed any workflow with testing in it, I showed him the new workflow and automatic testing in Jenkins and he was actually enthousiastic, just like all other employees! I was hailed a hero in the R&D department, after all this time we can finally write universal tests. :D

Worst hypothetical Dev job... hmm 🤔 well I think I have the right scenario for you. A medical company stores patient charts and critical life saving information in a database. This database makes medical decisions for lifesaving incubators and if there’s a bug it means 10,000 newborn sick babies will die because of your fuck up (oh and you’re criminally liable too so good luck!). But beyond the high pressure job that sounds at least somewhat normal, the database is written in a special form of assembly for a custom undocumented CPU where only one copy in the world exists so all tests and development are on production. Google and StackOverflow is banned so your only resource is your brain. Good luck🍀

Here is a brief list:
- Idiots from marketing
- idiots from sales
- the lawnmower man (while doing his job)
- sun
- AC off && summer
- no ventilation / fresh air
- civil defense siren tests (we're just next to one...)
- idiots talking to me while I'm on my headphone
- music stops
- phone rings
- light theme
- devRant
- MySql Workbench
- etc

Just had the shittiest job interview ever. Had to do two tests. And since i was nervous as fuck and can't do proper JS i obviously failed!

Job seeking is mentally and emotionally tiring.

Done several skill tests that I think I killed every single one of them.

I've heard "Can you go through your resume?" a million times, 1 company hasn't said yes or no for 1 month, I have at least 2 job interviews a week. Recruiters low balling.

I also feel that being hispanic is more challenging. They think I didn't code anything back when I was living in my country. 10 years of experience reduced to the ones I've been working in the US.

It's been a long and tedious journey.

Thanks for bear with me up to this point...

That I am not good enough for this shit.

Recently left my job because anxiety, a lot of it.

Tbh, I should not burntout myself, because:
- salary was a shit
- the scrum was a lie, there was no end of the sprint, so no retrospective meeting ever done.
- They change the """sprint""" task pile at any moment, usually adding more tasks for the same sprint.
- previous project manager was an idiot who said "yes" at EVERYTHING the client asked, even if the request was outside tje scope of the project.

The project was heavily delayed, and I was the only developer left on the most hideous backend you can imagine (the code was just tje very definition of "what not to do"). NO UNIT TESTING at all.

My task: clean the mess so we have a """stable""" release (with the tests), add the new features and re-do the backend again, but this time properly.

8 months of develop for this shit and they wanted the stable-shit-backend in a month and the new backend in other month "because everithing was already done in the shitty one". Do not forget the new features too.

So, I was doing the imposible to try to do tje task, overdoing hours and reading the docs of the project (because I was new in it), but it take me.a lot of effort to simply correct bugs because of complexity of the code and not understanding fully some parts of the project.

Then the comments like "why this is not finished yet?" Or "I do not understand why this is taking so long"

So, I had poor sleep, I was anxious because my inhability to do the imposible and in the end, a feeling kind of defeated because I quit.

So... that.

Sorry if something is wrong typed or so, english is not my native language.

I did an assessment for a company and passed the tests. A Microsoft teams interview with the lead developer and 2 other developers is in 2 hours! Fingers crossed boys!!!! I hope I get my first developer job!!!

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

Job posting: "we require 1.5 years of experience in iOS development"

Also job posting: *doesn't mention a requirement for a degree*

Me: "Cool, this looks exactly like a job for me, I'll send them my résumé!

Recruiter returns to me a day after with this:

"You said you have no work experience, we said in the posting that you need to have 1.5 years of work experience"

THE JOB POSTING DOES NOT MENTION THIS ANYWHERE, THEY ONLY MENTION EXPERIENCE IN IOS DEVELOPMENT

WHY MAKE IT SO AMBIGUOUS AND THEN CHANGE YOUR STANCE

When I finally get a fucking response from a recruiter after sending my résumé to dozens upon dozens of companies, it's a bullshit response.

FUCK YOU.

Note: I am aware of the massive amount of AltRant crashes, I am sorry for making it worse. I need to work on 2 more major final tests that I must pass, but I think I will start fixing some of the crashes today.

I'm pretty sure that the technical tests for FAANG are just to prove that you'll bust your ass doing trivial bullshit for them / and that you're a sucker -- instead of actual meaningful skill checks. Is this guy a total sucker who will drink our Koolaid when it's time? Are they wearing Nike? Yes. This is going to be a good investment.

I was down and out once and got a job a Micheal's Art and Crafts store. The application was clearly a mindfuck test. It asked, "If your boss was stealing - would you report them?" BTW - the answer is "No." You only report people below you. I answered in the way I knew the computer wanted me to - and I got the job. Same shit.

Are you subordinate? You're hired.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.

I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.

The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.

But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.

The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.

“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”

The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”

SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.

Talk to your recruiters, not me.

The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞

It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.

The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.

Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞

My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”

It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.

If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.

In my three years experience so far I can honestly say that 100% of the developers I've worked with are narrow sighted with regards to how they develop.

As in, they lack the capacity to anticipate multiple scenarios.

They code with one unique scenario in mind and their work ends up not passing tests or generates bugs in production.

Not to say I'm the best at foreseeing every possible scenario, but I at least TRY to anticipate and test my code as much as possible to identify problems and edge cases.

I usually take much more time to complete tasks than my colleagues, but my work usually passes tests and comes back bug free. Whereas my colleagues get applauded for completing tasks quickly but end up spending lots of time fixing up after themselves when tests fail or bugs appear.
Probably more time wasted than if they had done the job correctly from the start. Yet they're considered to be effecient devs because they work "fast".

Frustrating...

Nobody Unit Tests.

So it's already 1:15am late night and I am all tucked up in bed watching Roy Oshrove talk on unit testing and ways to write correct unit test. My friend walk in and finds me in bed watching this. He seems surprised as what are you doing ??
I replied it is an interesting talk on unit testing.

He says are you mad? Who the hell does unit testing ?
People out there are spitting on unit test code base. And they don't write unit tests.

Nobody unit tests.!!

I stay calm. I know there is no point of arguing. I said I'll sleep in some time.

And he works as developer, a job that I applied an never got because of connections.

I am optimistic someday I'll find a job that I deserve. The developer world is in danger. !!!

Worked as a student in a big company. Just doing data entry and checking product data. It was a nice part time job at the same time with computer science study. After a year I asked for something else and switched to the Android Team. I said I could do a little bit of Java and wrote for another half year Unit Tests. That was the point where I really learned coding and got experienced. Would never learned so much in my study because I was lazy. Now I can call me a Android Developer. Still love the company for giving me this opportunity.

I got cut from a contracting job yesterday I have 3 weeks left in the contract. They said I worked well with the team, had a great work ethic but didn't think I had strong enough tech skills. In the past this would have hurt my feelings and it does a little but I think my tech skills are fairly high. There were three devs working on 66 apps with no tests, some source control but most of the code in source control was older than code deployed in prod, no automatic builds, people would wait a week before checking in code, others would check in code that would not build. Today the boss asked if I had messed with app pools on the prod iIs server because something was wrong. I said no because never remote into the server. Anyway it is the end of the world and I feel fine.

I don't like interview coding challenges. At the same time, given the skill level of some developers I've worked with who work for a contracting firm and presumably didn't get a coding test in their intervies...I understand the necessity. Some people are so bad at coding that even the simplest of coding tests can show how bad they are.

I think my favorite is being given a simple task to write code for. And that's it. No "use this specific language feature to do this specific thing". Just a task and that's it.

I got a really simple coding test once. I had to reverse a string. I could choose any language. Presumably they wanted to see loops or something, but I just used Python and did this: string[::-1]

I got the job.

Does anybody out there actually really love their job? Because I do. I'm not sure if it's just me or that my job is actually great, but my coworkers are respectful, my boss lets me have control over each project's pace, I get to write tests and invest in refactoring, and I make good money doing it.

Is this just me?

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

Today I told 3 devs that they either get their shit together or they can pack their things and look for a job.

I can get easily pissed, but it's rather rare for me to get to that point easily.

Now my dear friends, can you guess what they did?

I give you a hint...

They made a test suite validating a network library.

So we have roughly 200 plus lovely splitted tests, neatly put in a directory structure - lovely organization.

(I might have written in the ticket that as a requirement... Cause I know my lil hellspawns)

But as I started looking at some tests, there was always something missing...

Network library...

So we needed to create an endpoint... And handle of course the tests communication with the endpoint *somewhere*.

I'd guess you know already what these mofos did...

Yeah. We have one class.... That handles all tests endpoints... Via different methods... Plus additional methods like utility functions....

The ticket was easy they said.

Me chewing their heads off was easy too.

Jesus Christ, I really doubt sometimes that some devs are able to go to a toilet.

Maybe thats the reason some wear baggy pants - easier to hide the pampers.

*rolls eyes*

Yeah i applied for a job once without much js experience. I got invited for an interview and a couple of tests. The interview went well. I think the cognitive test wasn’t bad either.

However they wanted to see funky js shit i hadn’t ever done or see before and also was totally useless skill wise.

I asked if i could google answers (who doesn’t in their daily script job?) but i wasn’t.

I tried for like 5 or 10 minutes and then blurted out to the major CTO super tech savy master degree microsoft-o-worthy, that my js skills weren’t up for the task.

He gave me a couple of links to pdf’s with programming basics teached at a high school. Totally cool and understanding.

I walked away ashamed and probably red as a tomato. Excused myself for wasting his time and left as quickly as possible.

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

Wanted to move to London out of curiosity/adventure. Started doing interviews online and all companies wanted a stage 2/3 in person but that would've been a pretty expensive flight just to go on a short interview, especially with my budget back then.

The guys at my current company were pretty cool and instead we did more video calls and coding tests, then they offered me the job without having to do the face to face.

Had a week to pack up and move here. Never had been in the UK before that. I arrived in the evening, slept at my temporary accommodation and went to work next morning. That's basically how I got here :)

I'm getting really tired of those dumbass programmers that do not understand shit and then come to me when production breaks. (I am also a programmer, not really a DevOps engineer, but I'm the least worst at DevOps stuff, so it's my job...).

We're programming some kind of document management tool. Today we had a release, and one of the new features is to download all of your documents as a zip file, which is asynchronuously generated. When it's done, the user gets a mail with the download link to the zip file.

The feature works basically, but today it broke our production service, as somebody was running a test of it.

Turns out all the documents are loaded into memory to be zipped. So if you have 2 gigs of documents, a container with memory restrictions in that area will crash.

I asked the programmer who reported this «ops problem» to me, why he didn't just shit the files into a temp foler in order to zip them in there.

He told me that he wanted to do so, but did not know how to mock this for a unit test, and therefore went to the in-memory «solution», which was easier for him to mock.

For fuck's sake, unit tests and mocks are fucking tools, not ends in itself! I don't give a fuck about your pointless mocking code when the application crashes!

When I got to deal with such dumbasses, I'd prefer to mock those motherfuckers with a leaky bucket of liquid shit, which basically accomplishes the same task from my perspective: dripping shit all over the place and make everything suck as fuck.

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

When you realize you hated taking tests your entire life and then you find out that to get a job have to take tests while someone is literally staring at you

I long for the day I get a job with an actual developer team, where I can do things like getting my code reviewed or pair programming or being forced to write better tests.

Working as the only developer (or a team of 2) sucks :(

My current job at the release & deploy mgmt team:

Basically this is the "theoretically sound flow":

* devs shit code and build stuff => if all tests in pipeline are green, it's eligible for promotion
* devs fill in desired version number build inside an excel sheet, we take this version number and deploy said version into a higher environment
* we deploy all the thingies and we just do ONE spec run for the entire environment
* we validate, and then go home

In the real world however:

* devs build shit and the tests are failed/unstable ===> disable test in the pipeline
* devs write down a version umber but since they disabled the tests they realize it's not working because they forgot thing XYZ, and want us to deploy another version of said application after code-freeze deadline
* deployments fail because said developers don't know jack shit about flyway database migrations, they always fail, we have to point them out where they'd go wrong, we even gave them the tooling to use to check such schema's, but they never use it
* a deploy fails, we send feedback, they request a NEW version, with the same bug still in it, because working with git is waaaaay too progressive
* We enable all the tests again (we basically regenerate all the pipeline jobs) And it turns out some devs have manually modified the pipelines, causing the build/deploy process to fail. We urged Mgmt to seal off the jenkins for devs since we're dealing with this fucking nonsense the whole time, but noooooo , devs are "smart persons that are supposed to have sense of responsibility"...yeah FUCK THAT
* Even after new versions received after deadline, the application still ain't green... What happens is basically doing it all over again the next day...

This is basically what happens when you:=
* have nos tandards and rules inr egards to conventions
* have very poor solution-ed work flow processes that have "grown organically"
* have management that is way too permissive in allowing breaking stuff and pleasing other "team leader" asscracks...
* have a very bad user/rights mgmt on LDAP side (which unfortunately we cannot do anything about it, because that is in the ownership of some dinosaur fossil that strangely enough is alive and walks around in here... If you ask/propose solutions that person goes into sulking mode. He (correctly) fears his only reason for existence (LDAP) will be gone if someone dares to touch it...

This is a government agency mind you!

More and more thinking daily that i really don't want to go to office and make a ton of money.
So the only motivation right now is..the money, which i find abhorrent.

And also more stuff, but now that i am writing this down makes me really really sad. I don't want to feel sad, so i stop being sad and feel awesome instead.

Not 100% of dev nature:

- Got an informal interview a few days ago: Got me super happy.
- Another 2 recruiters on LinkedIn showed interest: Made me happy.
- Psychometric & technical tests popped today: Feel like failed them completely.
- 2 more career days coming up: Not all hope is lost.
- Lack of portofolio and job experience: Brain is stuck and emotionally being meh. Maybe I wasn't meant to be a dev. :-/

I've just wanted to let it out of my system. Thanks for reading it. :-)

Starting to feel like shit about my new job. Every task my boss gives me I return with a "sorry it can't be done" for one reason or another. At first it was because user interface testing is a nightmare, then it was because the API postman tests he wanted is for endpoints we haven't exposed so it can't be done and the automated login on postman and retrieval of cookie information can't be done through postman because it requires rendering the site in a browser. I feel worthless to the company but I also feel he keeps making up tasks for me without checking if they're actually useful to us or even possible first, rather than let me touch any of the real code.. I don't know if I should just quit tbh.

Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.

Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.

Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.

But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.

I really want to stress that we should add the ticket for adding the missing test cases in *this* sprint and not postpone it any further.

-- "Isn't there something more important to be added instead?"

There. ALWAYS. Is. Something. MORE. Important. The real problem was that we implement the test cases in the past to begin violating our definition of done. We have to fix and one point and we have to own that decision as nobody else will care about passing tests and test coverage. It's our job to care for that.

Yes, we can instead focus on all the other high-priorities task that should have been done yesterday, yet that won't change the fact that large part our codebase will remain an untested messy blackbox just asking for weird bugs and wild goosechases in the future.

Don't hide behind "high priority tasks". A job is done when it is fucking done and tests are part of that. Hurrying from one important task to the next will just mean we'll never do it. There is no better time than right now.

If code coverage got left behind in the past, then we'll have to suck it up in order to fix it as soon as possible, otherwise we'll just suck forever.

PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!

I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.

But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!

But it pays to be paranoid.

So I handed in my official resignation last week as I will be changing to a new job next month. So one of the last big things that I have been working on is a Jenkins server for the rest of the team to use and currently writing up the documentation for it.

However I haven't been told who I will be handing over my work to, but the bigger thing I feel is that even if I write all the documentation, no one will actually read it. Reason I think this is because I doubt anyone else in the team will even use the Jenkins server. The major issues are that no one writes unit tests and don't even understand what CI is!

So right now it feels like my final month of work will all be for nothing and makes me wonder if I should even bother writing documentation, especially if it isn't going to be handed over to anyone.

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

That feeling when you’ve got a reputation of preciseness etc, and the code you just submitted for review has so many silly little mistakes you just want to do that ostrich thing. Gosh, how can I suddenly suck at my job this bad?

Okay, the changes affect EVERYTHING in our codebase (a major change in core business logic), and there is no way I could’ve tested every possible case by myself without a decent coverage of automated tests - which we obviously don’t have. So yet another argument for it (damn management, won’t you listen?!)… but still, some of the mistakes found during code review make me seem like a complete idiot.

Normally I don't give a shit when I lost a job opportunity.

But dude, this year everything is bad as fuck. I moved out (yet again) to marry and start a new life.

And as I said a previous Rants, I got a client that just made me lost another client when they started to get shady. For almost a god dam month now, I can't find even a crappy job.

This never happened. I got more than 10 opportunities. A handful of interviews, a few tests and none of them gave me a job.

Now I have one week to get married.
The money I saved whent to all expenses. And now my anxiety is kicking in like it never did in years.

I really don't know what to do and I
can't fucking sleep.

Overengineering. Finding the right point between overdesign and no design at all. That's where fancy languages and unusual patterns being hit by real world problems, and you need to deal with all that utter mess you created being architecture astronaut. Isn't that funny how you realize that another fancy tool is fundamentally incompatible with the task you need to solve, and you realize it after a month of writing workarounds and hacks.

But on the other hand, duct tape slacking becomes a mess even quicker.

Not being able to promote projects. You may code the shit out of side project and still get zero response, absolutely no impact. That's why your side projects often becomes abandoned.

Oversleeping. You thought tomorrow was productive day, but you wake up oversleeped, your head aches, your mind is not clear and you be like "fuck that, I'm staying in bed watching memes all day". But there's job that has to be done, and that bothers you.

Writing tests. Oh, words can't describe how much I hate writing tests, any kind of. I tried testing so many times in high school, at university, even at production, but it seems like my mind is just doesn't accept it. I know that testing is fundamentally important, but my mind collapses every time I try to write a single fucking test, resulting in terrible headache. I don't know why it's like that, but it is, and I better repl the shit out of pure function than write fucking tests.

Not really a rant (?)

I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.

1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.

So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.

I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.

This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.

TLDR;

When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.

When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.

I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.

It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.

I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.

I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.

After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.

People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.

I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.

Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.

Fuck...
I'm not getting that job then.

So I just had one of those interview coding tests on hacker rank and screwed it up big time.

I'm a C# guy and it was a Java position. I worked with Java, like 10 years ago, and they're pretty similar so I brushed up over the last week when I had free time.

Absolutely blew it. It's not like it was hard, I just got into one question (of 6) and it ate up all of my time. The task was simple, make a JSON call, read the data, check if you need more calls, pull out a data field from all the concatenated results and return it in a sorted list. ONE HOUR it took me. A combination of not knowing the API well enough, simple syntax errors and relatively slow compilation.

Godammit.

The next question was implement an Object hierarchy but since I'd run out of time, all I got was the class declarations before the timer ran out.

fuck, fuck, fuck.

I guess the test did it's job and weeded out someone who can't contribute to the team...

probably every time I see my tests failing.

Each time I am writing tests I'm convincing myself "it's an investment", "spend 2 hours now to save 2 days later", "unit-tests are good".

And each time I'm chasing away ideas like "perhaps they are right, perhaps writing unit tests is a waste of time..", "this code is simple, it should ever break - why test it??", "In the 2 hours I'll spend writing those UT I could build another feature"

Yes, it is terribly annoying to write tests, especially after writing the production code (code-first approach). Why test code that you know works, right?

But after a few weeks, months or years, when the time comes to change your feature: enhance it, refactor it, build an integration with/from it, etc, I feel like a child who found a forgotten favourite candy in his pocket when I see my tests failing.

It means I did a very good job writing them
It means it was not a waste of time
it means these tests will now save me hours or days of trial-and-error change→compile→deploy→test cycles.

So yeah, whenever I see my tests fail, I feel warm and fussy inside :)

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

Last couple of days as a dev at this job. I'm polishing up my documentation and making sure my reference guides are up-to-date. All the while knowing that my documentation, tools, and tests will likely never be touched. They'll sit on a share drive somewhere, like ancient tomes, while the next devs re-invent the wheel. So it goes.

First dev job is my current one.

I'm a software engineer in test, writing automated UI tests for web and mobile apps.

Its pretty great. I work from home with flexible hours. I have a boss but he doesnt manage my dev team, he just checks in to make sure I'm getting support, training and have all my questions answered. My dev team is myself and 2 other people, both of which are cool, and all the work is dev-driven.

Might just stay here until retirement, that sounds easy.

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 😂

Coding tests. I hate them. On any timed test, I completely lock up and forget everything I know. I'm amazed I've gone 26 years in my career without being fired for not taking tests well. Because, as we all know, that's the core task of every single job. Taking timed tests and shit.

Developer tells me jenkins job is broken and to fix it.Doesn't even look at the test report. "Works fine locally." 3 failed tests.

My "dev specialty" when I first started was Flash and ActionScript. I just wanted to make funny games and shitpost animations on Newgrounds.

Eventually I got steered into building basic websites. Those were the Dreamweaver MX days. JavaScript + jQuery were all the rage.

Then I got a job building SharePoint modules, got exposed to legitimate programming languages like C# and learned more about enterprise software architecture, design patterns, yadda yadda. I started hanging out more with the front-end guys, who taught me SASS and SMACSS and all that jazz.

Eventual jobs kept leaning me towards front-end, so I guess that's the hole I find myself in lately. Sometimes I get a sprinkle of devops, some infrastructure stuff, maybe a little solution design here and there.

Now I maintain shitpost enterprise applications built by other devs who like spaghetti and meatballs. At least I put in funny ASCII art for strings in my unit tests.

Started a new job as junior developer. One of my first task was to sent a simple notification on an event in out product. Write the code, test that it works, push to devops.

Code compiles, tests pass, it’s deployed to internal test env. Check that my notification works in the test env. No problem.

It’s deployed to the customers test environment. It works and customer accepts it for prod.

We release to prod and of course it fails. Seems to be a simple string.Format that fails for god knows why. After 3h of debugging on prod without success we decide to roll it back.

Today we decided to try it on a backup of the prod db since one of the strings was taken from the db. Still working. No matter what data I input when trying it locally it still wont reproduce the issue we saw on prod.

Fuck this

After 3 months of working at my current and first job I inherited a spaghetti codebase with files as large as 1000 lines because my mentor left.
Everything works but dare to change a thing. No Unit tests or any sane practices. At least our CI/CD is automated. 😂

Now I am asked to bend the library backwards in order to integrate it with another product. No one helps me and I am slowly starting to feel devastated. 😩

I've finished the knowledge tests at the local DevJobCon and I got the following question on the easy part of the Java session:

Which of the following is NOT a Java IDE:
a) Eclipse
b) Netbeans
c) IntelliJ IDEA
d) Notepad++

😆

So after 7 months of soul crushing searching I was able to land an awesome job I never thought I'd get! I didn't really get hired for my projects, I think I was more of a culture fit that knew enough of what they were talking about. My colleagues are awesome, helpful people but they are also clearly way ahead of me as devs. I know that many new hires have similar feelings and it's more a matter of drive + time. I understand that and I'm ready for the marathon ahead of me but I have one HUGE concern... I don't understand unit testing. I've never written unit tests in JavaScript or Java (just on paper I wrote random assert statements for a college exam question that somehow turned out correct). More importantly, I don't understand when to write unit tests and what my main objectives should be when writing them. At work they talk about unit testing like it's just as basic as understanding version control or design patterns, both of which I have had no problems asking questions about because I at least understood them generally. I come here looking for resources, mainly things I can go through over the weekend. I understand that I'm going to have to ask my colleagues for help at some point but I DON'T want to ask for help without any solid base knowledge on unit testing. I would feel much more comfortable if I could understand the concepts of unit testing generally, and then ask my team members for help on how to best apply that knowledge. I'm sorry for begging, I'll definitely be looking for resources on my own too. But if anyone could point me to resources they found to be helpful & comprehensive, or resources that they'd want their co-workers to use if they were in my position I would be very grateful!!!!

Dear devs, making your software "work" is the least thing you do as a dev. Write tests, write readable, maintainable, extensible code, and ensure that your code runs sufficiently fast and efficiently. Also consider using the right tech for your use case and nature the of the software. It's your job to ensure that your software runs efficiently and effectively, and stop saying "it works" and end there. God forbid you use bubblesort and say it works or do some dumb **** like that.

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.

We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.

I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.

We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.

We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.

I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.

I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D.

I have a co-worker who won’t stop “refactoring” our codebase. He will go on a long tangent — under the guise of working on a proper story — and then reveal proudly after a few days that he now introduced a new middle-layer into the code which will help us such and such.

I have never seen any benefit from this. I think sometimes cleaning up variable names is nice, but a lot of the things just add noise and complexity. He’s a junior dev, I’m a senior dev. My progressional opinion is that he is doing a bad job. Management doesn’t know the full extent and the lead programmer scolds him every now and then but in the end let’s the code changes pass code review. “It has already been implemented so what’s the harm”.

Then the rest of us are stuck with horrible merge conflicts. I recently noticed that some new business-important unit tests that I wrote were mysteriously gone. Oops — lost in some misguided refactoring I guess. I’m assuming they were failing after the refactor, so clearly they had to go... Fortunately the underlying logic still works I think.

His main tactic in all of this seems to be to just use argumentative stamina. He will lose discussion after discussion but doesn’t seem to care. He’ll just talk and talk. And the in the end the lead tech gives in. And/or doesn’t have the energy to catch the error introduced.

I swear, the company would be better off without him. Maybe even better if we keep paying him but he just cleans the toilets instead. Sometimes I almost believes he gets up in the morning to come to work and just fuck with people all day.

Until today, I had assumed deploying stuff to prod would NOT be one of my responsabilities in this company. Apparently that's not the case.

Had to deploy my code and pray it didn't break anything. Why is this a big deal at all?

Well you see, there is no repository. At all. No git, no svn, not even duplicate folders. No tests, no pipeline. Just a bunch of CPanels.

Had to manually copy files and folders from the development site to the production site and partially copy a database. "Just drag and drop" were the instructions I was given.

As if using CakePHP2, PHP5 and having to parse fucking Excel files wasn't bad enough, now I have to deal with one of the worst ways to deploy code.

Fuck it, I'm switching on the looking-for-job flag on linkedin.

About a year ago I said I'd be migrating from development into something else. During one year, I studied it, practiced, applied to many job postings, did tests, projects, collab, etc.

So after the latest job application, and being rejected of course, I suddenly thought again about my dev life, and the fire within me ignited like my computer ignited when running Android Studio.

Now, just removing the dust and rust from my fingers, and catching up by following some free project tutorials on YT.

I'm back

Long story ahead

Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.

Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.

I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).

So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”

This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.

Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.

Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?

tests? ain't nobody got time foh dat. my brain already does all the job. it assumes and says to myself "all tests passed ✅" whenever i make quick changes

i like to live dangerously 😂

If coding is fun then your job (Backend Developer) should be fun right?

No.
You have to setup projects which isn't fun.
You have to setup tools which isn't fun.
You have to write unit tests which isn't fun.
You have to learn to use some frameworks which may not be fun.

Month passed so I looked at job offers and I am tired again.

All of them look the same and all of them look like crap. Some require stupid online tests preparation ( cause everyone likes to traverse tree 10000 times a day ).

Seriously I think I will go to supermarket and work there.
It’s more pleasant then getting input and pushing it in some stupid places all over again.
Finding some shit in shit pile, then moving this shit pile back and forth between different shit holes.

AI should start writing this stupid code, robots should provide food and build shelter.
The sooner the better for all of us.

I'm very sad. I had to do 5 challenges in Hackerrank for a job and I managed to complete only 1 in the allotted time.
What makes me sadder is that in one challenge, the testing the compiler did was different than the challenge description (getting me failed tests).
Damned job hunting, I'm losing hope with each passing day... 🙁

We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?

Well... It's not all white and black...

As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...

Let me take an example:

Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.

Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.

So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.

A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.

So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.

Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?

Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?

---

Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.

I'm faszinated by some dev's ability to write legacy code.
Not maintaining but plainly creating code so horrible, that it can be considered legacy.

I wrote a new API for a silly Application because the old one had hardly anything to do with rest. At all. And despite the code being only 2 years old, it was still unmaintainable.

Now that I'm finish with this task, i got the next generation of the angular Frontend.
A guy wrote a completely new version of the frontend in angular5.
Only untyped variables, no documentation, no tests at all, no idea whats going on where,....

I thought my job was to adjust a few URL's and change some DTO's, but now i have to refactor everything again...
And the pain continues.....

Hi guys!

Hopefully going to be heading to a job interview as a Junior Front End Developer over the next few weeks. Primarily a web designer but taught myself to code as well. The job uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Angular. I've heard a few people mention tests companies use in interviews, has anyone had any experience with these? What type of things should I prepare for?

Need to rant / maybe some advice.

Working remote is hard.
New company, remote on boarding. I feel like my coworkers are robots, and I'm being tossed into the deep end with minimal guidance.

The codebase is so unnecessarily complicated, its impossible to read. I've been trying to figure out how things work for a whole month, still not sure.

My mentor that is supposed to help onboard me is a robot, and answers questions in a somewhat acceptable manner, but it still feels like a lot of "figuring out" is still left for myself.

My other work partner that is also a newbie like myself is also a robot - doesn't talk or ask many questions whenever we have a sync up meeting.

The codebase is huge and feels quite overwhelming, I don't feel like I got a team "with my back", I don't enjoy work as much as I have before, I barely do any coding (mostly reading code and trying to understand how everything is working by setting breakpoints and debugging tests that take foreeeever to run), and some days I'm seriously considering cutting my losses and jumping ship just to save my sanity.

Am I paranoid? Am I just dumb? Should I just suck it up and be happy I have a job? Is this how Remote work is supposed to feel like? Why does it feel like my soul is dying?

Anyone in similar situations, or who can give some insight/advice/etc, I would highly appreciate it.

And this is supposed to be a good company too from the reviews. I don't know how it can be so crappy in reality. Did I make the wrong choice joining? Should I jump ship sooner rather than later? I've only been here about a month or so, and maybe its too soon? Halp!

Just started a new job at a big co.
Expected to implement small new feature, no sweat about 30 LOC. Unfortunately no unit tests, no way to test without real data.

Spend 2 weeks trying to get it to run on the test rack. Lo and behold the entire testing system has been sitting broken for months and nobody knew. Why is all the documentation so vague!???

How can I ask my coworkers for feedback without coming off as insecure?
A year and a half ago I got my first job as a remote developer when I was 30. I've done web and IT related jobs before but not full time development. Everything was fine for the first 10 months and then I started getting negative reviews, that my productivity rate is much lower than the rest of the team. I felt really sad and stressed, which led to a minor breakdown, which led to my contract being changed from a full time employee to a contractor that gets paid by the (estimated) hour. After a bit of research, I found out that my productivity rate was low because I was the only developer following our "One test per pull request" policy, which was obviously cancelled at some point, but nobody informed me. I didn't bring this up to my boss because I didn't want to make my manager and coworkers look bad. Working as a contractor isn't so good because a lot of times my features are delayed because of external factors I can't control(code reviews, testers, tests randomly breaking). I want to find out if I'm a bad developer or if the company is trying to cut costs by taking advantage of my insecurity and inexperience.

My math teacher.

Simple story: His way of teaching was like bible study - he dictates the mathematical rules, the students had to write it down _exactly_ as told.
(Yes. He even dictated spaces / newlines / ....).

Had him for many years....
Since I was the rotten apple in class (I was always very weak regarding math), he had joy in mobbing me specifically.

It was one of the reasons I never thought about programming at all - or to be more precise, I _feared_ programming since everyone told me it would require intense knowledge of math.

Well. Fast forward. I went to university despite my fear, just because I was too stubborn to prove my math teacher right.

He was one of the counseling teachers too - and he made _very_ clear that I would fail in _anything_ regarding mathematics job wise.

I failed university, yes.

I gave up simply because I was too bored to learn and replay stuff by heart you'll certainly never need to remember your whole life.

Math played a role, too. Since I lacked the whole mathematical background, I barely passed the tests (mostly by a point).

But thanks to a lot of friends I learned that mathematics is helpful for programming - but not a must.

After giving up university, I started an apprenticeship.

And while I dreaded the decision for a long time, I couldn't be more happy about it.

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

I'm in a team of 3 in a small to medium sized company (over 50 engineers). We all work as full stack engineers.. but I think the definition of full stack here is getting super bloated. Let me give u an example. My team hold a few production apps, and we just launched a new one. The whole team (the 3 of us) are fully responsible on it from planning, design, database model, api, frontend (a react page spa), an extra client. Ok, so all this seems normal to a full stack dev.

Now, we also handle provisioning infra in aws using terraform, doing deployments, building a CI/CD pipeline using jenkins, monitoring, writing tests, building an analytics dashboard.

Recently our tech writer also left, so now we are also handling writing feature releases.

Few days ago, we also had a meeting where they sort of discussed that the maintenance of the engineering shared services, e.g. jenkins servers, (and about 2-3 other services) will now be split between teams in a shared board, previously this was handled only be team leads, but now they want to delegate it down.

And ofcourse not to mention supporting the app itself and updating bug tickets with findings.

I feel like my daily responsiblities are becoming the job responsibilities of at least 3 jobs.

Is this what full stack engineering looks like in your company? Do u handle everything from app design, building, cloud, ops, analytics etc..

I tried to apply to TrippleByte just to see if I could get a job through them...
Their tests are soo hard imo
It's not like I lack skills in programming its just that they require you to have a VERY varied background and only give you about a min to answer each question which can take a slow code reader that long to read without having even processed what the answer may be ;u;

This isn't making me feel good about my white boarding skills since I have yet to be in one of those. I'mma need all the help I can get @_@

Got a job as front-end developer. Writes tests for backed API. Bullet hit.

Maybe im wrong but still, damn policies, at my job i need a code review and a commit review before committing code and Im ok with that but hell, I was required to run the api tests when I only modified 2 front end file, i mean seriously i need to run c# tests after modifying angular components. It just seems silly and foolish and a complete waste of time to run the tests for all the projects when i didnt even modified one.

If you work with me and know who I am then stho and accept it. :p

Hennies I need your assistance!
My boss has put me in charge (wow yes I was surprised too) of figuring out what a good solution to our current testing nightmare would be. Therefore my questions for you are:

What kind of testing strategy do you work with at your job? Do you use any tools for it? How's the division of unit tests/service tests and/or UI tests?

I'd really appreciate you guys' input on what works (and what doesn't, in case you're living a nightmare with testing daily)

I'm still looking for a job after more than two months. Never thought I'd say this but after all these interviews I'm starting to prefer live coding tests over take home assignments. You spend a few hours preparing by reading interview guides (the interviewers usually get their questions from these same guides) and then you either do well or fuck up but it's all over in a few hours and you move on with your life.

An employer should ALWAYS make an indentation test among the tests given in job interviews. I swear to God I'm cleaning this scss file with a flame thrower

Worst part about my job is training junior devs with their supervisor insisting them to write unit tests without prior programming experience

I once went on multiple interviews, took multiple tests (IQ and personality) and then went on anothet interview for a job. After the last interview I didn't hear anything more from the recruiter.

A year later the same recruiter contacts me to ask if I have any friends who might be interested in a position.

🖕🏻

Guys, please share how many i interviews you had before scoring the first job?

I am currently a BSc in Software Engineering London and already hate the interview process due to all the aptitude and puzzle tests :D

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

How the fuck am I supposed to fucking keep working if these fucking clowns add mandatory peer code review and passing build gating on main repositories (which I completely agree with to be fair) but they don't fucking review pull requests at all? For fuck's sake, am I the only one that reviews them seriously and promptly in this shit ass fuck company? I follow all the recommended guidelines so don't bullshit me with "iT iS nOt FuN tO rEvIeW pUlL rEqUeStS", do your job or just remove yourself from the fucking gating process, you worthless admin ass crust.

And don't get me started on fucking builds that fail randomly because some worthless shit bucket added unstable networking tests as unittests somehow, making your pull request get auto-disapproved by peers upon failure.

I got so many pending pull requests and management won't do fuck all about it because they won't force people to do their job by fear of pushing them around and get HR complaints that I am tempted to simply give up and just start playing videogames.

Worst: lost my job due to the pandemic, and struggling to get interviews! Yes in spite of how well i did at my previous role (and please don’t give me crap about how they never would’ve laid me off if I was good, you’re just saying that to stroke your golden e-penis, you fucking reptilian scumbag) and with all that “experience” on my resume, I’m apparently not smart enough for these companies to even bother with. Yes if i kept failing tests a blind monkey would pass i would question my ability but that’s not the case. Yes my stack may be old but learning these newer tech stacks that recruiters love is a total cakewalk for me! They do so much cognitive lifting for you that I worry that if I don’t practice lower level stuff my mental capacity will diminish which is why I still solve leetcode problems lol.
Let’s not forget, I lost my dog this year too ☹️

Today I read a great article on mutation tests, how to use and why they are important. It looks like a great thing, but...
I have never wrote any unit test in any of my jobs. Nobody in my workplace does that. And now it seems like 100% test coverage is not enough (I remind you, that I have 0%), they all should mutate to check if the quality of unit tests is high.
It seems that I'm left behind. I played with tests in my free time, but it seems the more you write them, the better you get at it, so I should be writing them in my job, where I code most of my time. Not only that, of course, I would also want to ensure that what I'm working on is bug-free.
Still, it will be impossible to introduce unit tests to my project, because they are novelty to the whole team and our deadlines are tight. The other thing is, we are supposed to write minimum viable product, as it is a demo for a client, and every line of code matters. Some might say that we are delusional that after we finish demo we will make things the right way.
Did any one of you have a situation like this? How did you change your boss and team's mind?

I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...

I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.

The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.

The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.

My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.

While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.

If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.

I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.

Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.

I am tired of a glorified code monkeys cosplaying software engineers.

Disclaimer: in general, I have immense respect to engineers and technological advances that came from FAANG/MANGA. Bbbuuuuttttt...

Especially people that has a few relatively short (less than a year) stints in a few of them and thinking that their salary expectation for their skills is reasonable.

What I've saw so far, based on a few hires for past few years in a company of ~50 engineers, Python/JavaScript stack, monolith to microservice transition (all people had senior and above titles):

* Have no idea how to setup own development environment on MacBook.
* Have no idea how to run code and tests for Python (from discussion, the two only development experience was "code - commit - push - done" and "clicking button in remote coding environment".
* Have no idea how to use bash/zsh (the person had "Linux skill up to 11").
* Grinding leetcode and interviewing during work hours (were let go immediately).
* Introducing a new microservice for each task (we're transitioning from Django monolith, but not to that extent).
* Ignoring all the onboarding, documentation and ignoring every request for writing documentation "I am not a technical writer".
* Knowing nothing about Kubernetes (this was in the job posting/requirements).
* Person actively hostile to any frontend task (the position is not full stack, but JavaScript is a required skill).

I am pretty open and I understand the eternal "generalist vs specialist" thing, but if the person do not posses certain skills and actively lie about it, just because "I worked at FAANG companies, obviously I have that skills" - it's dishonesty at best and fraud at worst. And if with the end of ZIRP you suddenly became unhireable in FAANG/MANGA - you need to think why.

There are tons of small software companies that nevertheless have a good salary and benefits, and most of the time hiring was a breath, because for the most of the people they were flying under the radar.

Unfortunately, since this year the hiring is exhausting, the amount of incapable candidates is incredible (a lot of them with credentials), and instead of 10-15 candidates per position (before and during pandemic), now there are more than 300 candidates per position with "impressive" working experience and only 10 people who really spend time on interviewing.

In short, if you think you're worth gold only from 3-4 companies in the world and all of them stopped hiring you - you should rethink your worth.

I am just student looking for job, and got this pre interview test:
Develop an Android or iOS app with login and password input field, download button, place for image we prvided.

... reading further:
What we are looking for in the code ?
internal quality:
-consistent formatting of the source code
-clean, robust code without smells
-consistent abstractions and logical overall structure
-no cyclic dependencies
-code organized in meaningful layers
-low coupling and high cohesion
-descriptive and intention-revealing names of packages, classes, methods etc.
-single small functions that do one thing
-truly object-oriented design with proper encapsulation, sticking to DRY and SOLID principles, without procedural anti-patterns
-lots of bonus points for advanced techniques like design patterns, dependency injection, design by contract and especially unit (or even functional or integration) tests

external quality:
-the app should be fully functional, with every state, user input, boundary condition etc. taken care of (although this app is indeed very small, treat it as a part of big production-ready project)
-the app should correctly handle screen orientation changes, device resources and permissions, incoming calls, network connection issues, being pushed to the background, signing deal with the devil :D and other platform intricacies and should recover from these events gracefully
-lowest API level is not defined - use what you think is reasonable in these days
-bonus points if the app interacts with the user in an informative and helpful way
-bonus points for nice looks - use a clean, simple yet effective layout and design

... I mean really ? and they give me like 2 days ?

I started a new job, got through on-boarding and took my first ticket. Made my modification to the code base and the tests fail .. each time I run them .. on different tests .. randomly.

What the hell have I gotten myself into?