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!rant
After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:
1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)
3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.
5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.
6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.
7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.
8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.
9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)
10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!219 -
Interviewing a junior dev.
> Make this function return false.
> junior: deleted all code in function replaces it with return false;
Literally no words.........20 -
Scene: Senior developer left, 3 Junior devs(including me) are now loaded with work.
*Intern asks for help*
JuniorDev1: I have 2 projects of which i'm the lead on one. I don't have time to help anyone.
JD2: 2 projects as well dude, speak to me after work, much easier then.
Me: 3 projects, lead on two. Sure how can i help you.
Took less than 5 minutes to help the intern.
2 hours Later. Check in meeting
PM: Our Junior devs are really busy and can't always help you guys. JD1 are you overloaded?
JD1: Yes, is their anyway we can split the one projects work?
PM: Sure. JD2 are you overloaded?
JD2: Not really, but i agree on splitting the projects between the three of us.
Me: *Are these fuckers serious? i have three projects, they have 2 and they wanna give me more work because they are overloaded and don't know how to manage their time*
PM: Ok cool, i'll update it. CooCooK4Choo, i see you building your own game during lunch time. You definitely not overloaded.
Me: Actually! what i do in my lunch time is my own personal work because it's the only time i have to work on personal projects. I actually do feel overloaded with the 3 projects and now more work from them, could we split the work load evenly please.
PM: I thought you said you could handle the 3 projects?
Me: I can, i have been, but with more work coming my way i don't think i'll be able to.
PM: Unfortunately i need the other Junior Devs on demand, so i won't be able to split the work load evenly.
Me: On demand for what? Why not let the interns help?
PM: In case i need their help. The interns are helping the other Junior Devs with things that don't require too much out of them.
Me: *This FUCKEN BITCH!* Cool, I'm done with the 1 project, expect the business rules at the end of the day. I'll see if i can get the other 2 near done by Friday so i can have time to look over the code of the new projects that i'll be splitting with the other Junior Devs.
PM: Cool, glad we all on the same page.
You know what? FUCK this stupid shit of favoring people in the FUCKEN work place.
This is my first full-time job ever, I've been here for a full year today and i can honestly say these people are just giant children with money. I should know, out of work i am a giant child, but from 8:00 - 16:00 i'm a FUCKEN adult.17 -
Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
Me, a junior dev: * reports an important issue and a possible fix *
Senior dev 1: nah, it'll do just fine.
Senior dev 2: that won't be an issue, don't you see? It's under control, man.
Senior 3: why are you even here? Why are you even talking?
Manager: yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
* a year after releasing the product, one of the seniors got fired and another one was hired *
New senior: this thing is bananas, code is inconsistent and there's memory leaks everywhere, how does that even work?
Me: nobody believed me when I said that.
Manager: it did work very well, where's the issue?
Me: it's everywhere, goddammit! Don't you see?
New senior: junior dev is right.
Me: I've been a WHOLE YEAR saying that!
Manager: did you? Really? Nah, you didn't.
...
I'm tired of this shit.15 -
IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE DRUGS:
JavaScript = Methamphetamine:
Anyone can cook some up at home but only pros can make the good stuff without blowing everything up.
Under the influence it tries to do everything at once, in seemingly no specific order before running off and making plenty of promises - but you have no clue if it kept any until it returns.
C = Heroin:
It takes some prep before you can take a hit but when you do it's far more potent than expected. When prepped (compiled) correctly it will induce complete and utter ecstasy but any error or abuse may kill you, leave you on the floor, in a coma or wishing you were dead.
HTML = Paracetamol(Panado):
Some don't think it's a real drug and others do. Either way you should grow a pair and try something a little more hardcore.
--------------------------------------
I came up with these after I randomly explained asynchronous js to a junior as synchronous code on meth. These were just off the top of my head, please feel free to correct or expand on them :-)25 -
Wholesome anti-rant.
There’s this Indian chick at work that I really, really do not get along with. Fortunately she’s on a different team so we have practically zero interactions. Her code was always decent, maybe upper junior level? but I went away fuming almost every time we talked.
However, I did a release security review today (I’m down from five/six per month to one) and read through quite a bit of her code. It was clean and easy to read with good separation, clear naming and intentions, nothing was confusing, etc. It was almost beautiful. Had I any emotions I might have shed a tear. I sent her a message and let her know :) I actually learned a better way of doing a couple of things from it.
She has grown so much as a dev.32 -
So after learning to code myself for about 9 months.
A local agency CEO reached out and offered me a junior position!
Happy days!4 -
Today I had a pissing contest with an account director coz she asked a junior dev to upload some code to live site without testing!!! You may own the business, but you have no powers here. my servers my rules.
6 -
1. Humans perform best if they have ownership over a slice of responsibility. Find roles and positions within the company which give you energy. Being "just another intern/junior" is unacceptable, you must strive to be head of photography, chief of data security, master of updating packages, whatever makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning. Management has only one metric to perform on, only one right to exist: Coaching people to find their optimal role. Productivity and growth will inevitably emerge if you do what you love. — Boss at current company
2. Don't jump to the newest technology just because it's popular or shiny. Don't cling to old technology just because it's proven. — Team lead at the Arianespace contractor I worked for.
4. "Developing a product you wouldn't like to use as an end user, is unsustainable. You can try to convince yourself and others that cancer is great for weight loss, but you're still gonna die if you don't try to cure it. You can keep ignoring the disease here to fill your wallet for a while, but it's worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigs a day." — my team supervisor, heavy smoker, and possibly the only sane person at Microsoft.
5. Never trust documentation, never trust comments, never trust untested code, never trust tests, never trust commit messages, never trust bug reports, never trust numbered lists or graphs without clearly labeled axes. You never know what is missing from them, what was redacted away. — Coworker at current company.9 -
My interviews to hire a Junior Dev will begin this week. Here's how its gonna go down.
Me: Star Trek or Star Wars?
My Supervisor: WTF? How is that relevant?
Human Resources: Let's see what he says.
Applicant: Battlestar Galactica
Me: Nice. I can deal with that.
Me: Tabs or spaces when indenting your code?
Supervisor: ... ?
Human Resources : ...
Applicant: Spaces.
Me: GTFO you imbecile! Next!27 -
Just finished assisting a junior dev with optimizing his code.
What used to take 2+ hours now takes less than 4 mins! 😎
7 -
You think a junior dev pushing his code onto a production server is bad? Wait till you have that admin who is illegally mining Bitcoin on your production server. 😂
I went for a Cyber Security conference today with one of managers and this was one of the life experiences some of the speakers shared.18 -
!!fml
"Root, go fix this bug. It'll take you two days."
The "bug" is a feature that was never implemented for one particular payment type.
The code in question is two years old, full of typos, smells, junior-isms, and is convoluted AF. The feature's commit touched 190 files and implemented many other features as well. Thus far, I have been unable to narrow down where this particular feature's code lives for the other payment types, nor which code or payment paths lead to it. Burned out, I can barely focus on the screen, let alone follow its many twisting and dynamically-inferred paths. I hint as to the ticket's scavenger hunt nature during standup.
"But I wrote comments on the ticket telling you exactly where to look to fix it," Thundercunt admonishes in front of the team.
"Sure, you did," Root replies. "You reworded what the original dev had said in the comments 20 minutes prior, and agreed with him. His comments were helpful, but it doesn't tell me how any of it works," she continues.
TC scoffs and closes the meeting.
Root stares blankly, seeing neither code nor screen, questions her life decisions, and recalls the previous tickets she has worked on: nearly every one of them busywork, fixing other people's bugs. Bugs she never could have gotten away with if she tried.
"Why do I put up with this?" She asks. "They don't care, and it's killing me."
But the bills remain, and so must she.
"Fuck my life" she finally decides.20 -
Junior dev: "I don't understand this code, therefore there must be something wrong with it. I'm gonna rewrite it."17
-
Junior dev: asks me an easy question cuz he's too lazy to figure it out
Me: listening, thinking he's gonna waste my time again 😓
Senior dev: eavesdrops and helps him out
Me: saved me, woohoo 😎
*Few minutes later*
Senior dev: "by the time you finished asking this question, you could have compiled the code yourself to see what happens"
Me: 😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣😂😂😂4 -
Can I only pick one?
I don't hate a lack of skill by itself. Incompetence, in my book, refers to a lack of skill combined with being in a position of responsibility.
The junior/intern in my team writes pretty bad code, but that is OK. He asks questions, I give pointers and bounce back his PRs ten times in a row, and he keeps fixing things without complaints.
My boss however... still writes PHP as if he's living in the 90s. He doesn't visit scrum meetings because he "isn't a developer". He thinks of a new feature while pooping, writes it without telling anyone, and throws it into production without making a PR.2 -
Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.
But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?
Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?
Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!
Fuuuuuck... Me...2 -
Man, we have a snake in our company.
This snake is responsible for terrible code. They oversee a offshore team, but hold them to no coding practices. They don't do code reviews or checks. They let them be lazy and get away with sloppy work every time.
And if you critize their team - they will defend them and get angry at you. You can't adress the problem because said snake is always around. He's in a senior position for giving our company cheap workers, doing years of damage to our product while the non-code savvy managers remain blissfully unaware of their product being ruined in the background.
This snake is the senior product office. He has a share in the company now. He is from the overshore team's country. That team now has their claws so dug into our companies roots and are just pumping lsd's into it constantly. Feels good untill you die from an overdose.
Here I am, the new junior software developer, trying to tear out the claws that have sunk into these roots. Im up against the snake. The snake hates me. I hate the snake. I am trying to open the eyes of the managers. They hate that. They want to silence me so I don't expose the awful, unprofessional level of work they do.
Well, that's too bad. I won't back down from this, snake.14 -
My whole team was a circus:
- Dev 1, the senior: he will be spent his days coding his personal projects and will convince management that everyone else needed to prove themselves so he will have nothing to do and we will do all the work.
- Dev 2, the junior: he was convinced that his mission in life was to be friends with his team. He's desk was far from the rest of the team so he will show just right after lunch EVERY FREAKING DAY with a list on his phone of random things he wanted to talk about like music, artists, art, news, etc., he really thought I didn't notice the list.
- Dev 3: the vegan: you will hear on every chance how she was so awesome for being vegan.
- Dev 4, the expert: if you ask him anything he will stare at you in silence to make you feel like you are a stupid for not knowing the answer and then turn around like nothing.
- Dev 5, the ghost: he will show early every day, code without mouthing a word and leave at 5pm, I think I heard him saying "hmmm" once but I might be wrong.
- Dev 6, the coder by accident: he was a graphic designer and ended up doing front end so he hated his job.
- Dev 7, me: the one who didn't care about anything but doing his job and leave.
- The project manager: she didn't knew anything about technology but will attend meetings with clients on her own, commit to deadlines and then inform us that the project that we estimated for 8 weeks will have to be done in 2 with new additions to the features.
You know the drill, here's your potato :/
5 -
Spent most of the day debugging issues with a new release. Logging tool was saying we were getting HTTP 400’s and 500’s from the backend. Couldn’t figure it out.
Eventually found the backend sometimes sends down successful responses but with statusCode 500 for no reason what so ever. Got so annoyed ... but said the 400’s must be us so can’t blame them for everything.
Turns out backend also sometimes does the opposite. Sends down errors with HTTP 200’s. A junior app Dev was apparently so annoyed that backend wouldn’t fix it, that he wrote code to parse the response, if it contained an error, re-wrote the statusCode to 400 and then passed the response up to the next layer. He never documented it before he left.
Saving the best part for last. Backend says their code is fine, it must be one of the other layers (load balancers, proxies etc) managed by one of the other teams in the company ... we didn’t contact any of these teams, no no no, that would require effort. No we’ve just blamed them privately and that’s that.
#successfulRelease4 -
Interviewed a dev for a junior role earlier this week...my first question:
const numbers = [0.1, 0.2, 0.3];
let sum = 0;
for (i = 0; i < numbers.length; ++i) {
setTimeout(() => {
sum += numbers[i];
}, 0);
}
// Refactor the preceding code so that the following returns true.
console.log(sum === 0.6);
---
He had no idea where to even start, so I asked him to walk through the code with me line by line, he couldn't get past line 1 - literally didn't know what an array was... I walked through the code with him and he just started to look more and more lost.
I didn't even bother with the rest of my questions on OOP, FP, etc...
Am I really expecting too much of somebody that claims to have 2 years practical experience in JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, and PHP?
Do you think this is a problem a junior dev should be able to solve...even if it takes some hand-holding?57 -
!rant.
I've worked for about two months at my (first) job. Its amazing.
We create audio/video software for the products we make.
There are 9 programmers besides me, I'm the only junior. And I'm still learning my way around the code, but they still value my input.
We only do stand ups for 5-10 min, like it should.
One if my colleagues helps me often when I have questions, so I've nicknamed him ducky.
My pm is awesome, he's great at coding and a great manager.
When we work overtime, the department pays for delivery food and drinks.
And we've already gone on 2 trips with the department, mountain biking and a BBQ.
I love my job and I hope that I'll soon be good enough to ask less questions.3 -
Back in the day when I was a junior developer, I somehow got hired by this guy who asked me to code his entire platform from scratch. I was being paid a junior dev salary, being asked to do senior dev work, and unfortunately I needed the money, so I didn't want to turn the job down. So I did what any junior dev would do in the situation... I decided to experiment and ended up with an insanely inefficient codebase.
For some stupid reason I thought that a good DB model would be to pull one record from the DB at a time, and then just repeat the method in a loop as needed. Keep in mind I was a self-taught junior dev. The backend worked great during development, and after 3 months of developing we decided to add a lot of data in the DB for further testing, and... you guessed it... the platform slowed down like shit!
Moral of the story... u get what you pay for, so hire great talent and pay them well! And also that self-taught junior devs don't know that the f@*k they are doing sometimes.5 -
So there is this girl who joined the company as a trainee.
The company developed a 1 year project to train 25 trainees and she joined saying that she already had some experience making websites. (remember this)
They started in the beginning of January and stayed for about 3 months just studying the platform (Salesforce) and receiving some classes from Senior Devs, on subjects like OOP basics, loops, conditions and features of the platform.
After this time they joined the teams, 2 joined my team, a guy with 32 years that worked 10 years in a bank and wanted to go for a IT job and the girl of 22.
We gave her a really small task, just to make a code to copy info from one field to the other on a list of objects.
After 3 days of saying she was working on it we asked her to show us the code, she had written the "code" directly in the class, VS Code was going crazy with errors. When we asked her "But where is the method?", she answered "What is a method?"
After it we had other experiences trying to teach her some things. The team was formed by me (mid level dev), another mid level dev, a senior and a architect (who was self taught and one of the best teachers I've ever seen).
We tried for about 3 months to teach her how to do basic stuff, like a for loop, and every time we learned that she was missing some "foundations" of this basic stuff, so we would come back and explain the foundation, and a couple times she needed to use this knowledge like a week later and didn't remember shit.
So after this the team talked with our leader that we wanted to let her go and focus on the other guy who was going really well and some other junior devs who had joined the team.
But the HR found out that she had sued her last company, we don't know the reason, but HR guys were afraid of firing her without a careful firing process.
So now we're stuck with her in the team, and everything we ask her to do need to be remade, not because the code is bad, but because it NEVER works
And after all this I still ask myself, how did she finish college? Every person that i know that studied CS or CS like courses had a lot of OOP or at least knew what a class and a method were supposed to be.29 -
Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.
I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.
Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.9 -
Me and a junior coder are working on a project. However, he likes to think he's funny and say "Ok google" to stop me from using my phone.
He said "Ok google, search midget porn" when I was calling my mom so naturally I need to get back at him, so when he's in the rec room, I backed up all his code on my flash drive, and copied it to the clipboard, and removed all project files from his computer.
He came back while I was in the bathroom, and when I reentered the room and was balling his eyes out, that his project was gone. I said to him, don't ok google me again and I handed him the flash drive back. He has never done anything bad again.12 -
I was assigned a girl that's new to the industry (but with a master's degree).
I had high hopes, as people told me she is quite a curious fellow. As I am just a junior Dev with 2 yrs of experience Ididn't know if I could handle her.
We started working on a project. Which was a change request for a previous project I had developed. I gave her 2 days to read and understand the functional requirements of previous project and this CR. Then explained everything too.
Then I gave here another 3 days to read the previous design document to learn how this code worked.
I asked her multiple times if she has any questions. She said she got everything. Cool.
One week goes by. We start to code the CR while she is shadowing me. I explained why we chose one of the two approaches. And why we are making any of the changes. She as usual nodded in agreement.
I asked her to create Unit test cases.
She couldn't write even one. So, I quizzed her, she knew nothing about the project! Nothing at all!
FUCK!
I wrote down the test cases in short hand and told her to document it (by reffering previous UTC). She wrote the test cases in short hand in the document. And she reused the previous document and did not even clean it out.
After fixing the document I asked her to execute them. But nope, she doesn't even know how the application flows for this project. FML.
It took her 3 days to write and test 8 test cases.
Now she is assigned to me in another project. This one is more complicated. And I gave her a function skeleton to complete. I figured that it will take me 15 minutes so let's give her a day. But nope. 3 days no progress.
I get it someone might not be quick to grasp something. But you know what grinds my gears? That even after this you act like a know it all! Fuck! For someone who hasn't worked with her she is the most dilligent developer.
How the fuck does someone survive masters and suck so bad!22 -
Me to a lead dev: hey, I noticed that junior guy pushed this bad code to prod that you approved.
Him: oh really that’s wrong? Ok we can fix it.
Me (cursing under my breath): no asshole, that’s not the fucking point. You should know enough to not approve such pull requests. -
So I have this best friend who is almost 10 years younger than me. (I'm turning 40 this month). He's a full stack web dev, nodejs-god, react-maniac, you name it. He fucking LIVES to code the most amazing shit I have seen to date.
I, on the other hand, am that old, little overweight PHP coder webdev with a shitload of experience in that field (17th year now), also with linux webserver administration and all the JavaScript knowledge I need in m job.
Sitting next to him and doing some fun coding sessions always makes me feel like I am that "slow, fat kid in class"... while he is the coding master.
Sitting at work (marketing agency) where I started as the new webdev 10 months ago, I still feel like the coding guru because even the web 'developers' don't know jack shit yet (coz they never had to).
It's fine, they are learning and want to learn.
All I wanna say that even though one might be seen as a senior dev by some, he might sometimes feel like a junior dev when he's around others.2 -
Beware: this is me expressing how I feel about my programming/my skillset, and so on. It might be imposter syndrome but I am having a fucking bad episode right now and I just need to get this the fuck out.
I work at a distribution center right now. Can I provide for myself? Yes. Do I even slightly like my work? No I fucking hate it to the point. I hate going there every day, doing shit I don't like, not being able to focus on the shit I love but that's it for me for now.
In my free time I still am able to program a little but then the (I will call it imposter syndrome for now as I have no clue how to call it) imposter syndrome comes looking around the FUCKING corner.
*What the fuck are you doing? For real man, someone else could do that like way fucking better*
*Wow man your code..... there are so many people who would write that a million times better*
*You have re-written this for 10 times now. But seriously, this still sucks fucking balls*.
Fucking hell. Yes, at programming level I am still a junior, I fucking know that. But it fucking sucks feeling like anyone but you would do the shit you're making better anyways.
How fucking down can you get yourself. How bad can you make yourself feel through just a few fucking words/thoughts.
The only thing I am happy about right now is the fact that a very good friend is able to keep me at least slightly sane right now.53 -
When you've been too busy to keep up to date with the code and finally look at what the the junior dev has produced
-
For an ostensibly security-focused financial company, these people really don't know what they're doing. Everything I've seen thus far is so hacked-together that I feel like i'm looking at code written by high schoolers.
Seriously, some of API Guy's code is better than this.
And they even make a point to remind me of ultra basics like `.to_a`, `.map`, or "a good command to keep on hand is `rake db:migrate`" -- like seriously? Those are in bloody "Intro to Rails" tutorials (and it's `rails db:migrate` as of Rails 5). For an ostensibly all-senior team, these devs are awfully junior.5 -
Starting to wish I never got involved in this industry.
I am working for the most ridiculous, god awful place I have ever had the misfortune of working and I am having a HELL of a time getting out of it because everything wants 5 years fucking exp in some fucking specific framework that is basically the same as every other fucking framework.
Our previous cto was a closeminded totalitarian bully and when she finally left she was replaced by a lecherous fucking dinosaur who has no idea how to code in our code base. He also has barely been showing up to work for the last few months.
For some reason our fucking ceo allows this all to continue and only interjects whenever he can make himself the biggest nuisance (ie design handoffs etc where he has little to no knowledge)
I was already woefully underpaid but was recently 'promoted' to team lead and when I brought up my ridiculous salary (yes I was essentially just funneled into this role) they gave me a neglible raise and ceo told the fucking dinosaur to tell me he 'doesn't like when people ask for raises'
The only reason I am in this position is because we have such ridiculously poor employee retention and I am one of the people after only 2.5 years there that has the ability to provide any kind of knowledge transfer. Most of our dev team consists of people fresh out of school and our code base is just an absolute mess of junior dev spaghetti debauchery.
I have expressed concerns over this and was told that I'm negative and go looking for problems and that 'everywhere is like this'
The ceo has a few people he keeps close because in his words 'they're the only ones who don't disagree with me'
He also refused to hire anyone with experience because they cost too much and he doesn't like people who have opinions.
To make matters worse all the fucking dinosaur does is wander around and talk to the junior devs about video games.
His previous favorite past time was staring at my tits, ranting about his wife and telling me 'he'd offer to give me a back rub but you can't do that now a days'
I caught his fucking wife creeping me on LinkedIn a few months ago for some fucking reason.
Oh and as icing on the cake I had a fucking interview today for an intermediate angular position and a few minutes after I received an email saying that ACCTUALLY they had been informed they were now looking for a senior react dev.
Like seriously what the fuck.63 -
We had a client visit our PH office to "hang out" and see the progress in this educational type game we were building for their private school (apparently, it's the one that Obama's kids went to).
Manager oversold the progress and actually guaranteed some features that we were still working on and estimated to finish in the next 3 sprints (2 week intervals).
Client was due to be in the office in 2 days.
PM pushes back and says we need to manage client expectations properly.
CEO got wind and sat the dev team down. Dev lead, two seniors, and junior me. He sat us down and asked us what we think.
Lead says we can do it.
Now to be fair, I know this guy to be very competent and an INCREDIBLE programmer. He is the person I consider to be the first real mentor I ever had but I really thought we were fucked here.
Next day and half was hell--for me, at least and I really couldn't see how this was all possible.
But then the fucker came through. This beautiful, majestic meganerd and the two other guys shat out 6 weeks of code in ~30 hours.
And the crazy part was it was all working. Bugs were caught in the next few days for sure, but the demo went flawlessly.
I never doubted this guy again.
Years later, I'd meet up with him and would talk fondly about those days and all he could say was "I don't really remember". He remembers the project and that we had a demo but he couldn't remember anything around those days.
Two of the most stressful days of my life and to him it was a fucking Wednesday. What a fucking champ.4 -
Ok... gotta get this off my chest...
I was tasked to train a junior developer recently. Manager says he's (skill) is rusty, but has potential.
I thought to myself... "Rusty? I can deal with that... how bad can it be?"
He ran into some issues while going through the training material, and asked me for help. It was a simple task of printing something to the screen...
After glancing at his code, I said you have to make it (variable) a string. He LITERALLY types s-t-r-i-n-g...
Me: 😵💫7 -
I once reviewed a Pull Request made by a fairly junior developer. They had joined recently, and this was one of the first times they had to touch a bigger part of the code.
Due to a mix of inexperience, new (to them) coding standards and lack of git knowledge, they ended up with a mess of a PR, with a few thousand lines changed, and no way to split it off.
I ended up spending the best part of a day reviewing the whole thing and requesting changes.
Even with the long list of improvements, however, I wasn't sure they would get the magnitude of their fuckup.
So I decided to use a real-world, palpable way to show them what they had done: I went and printed the github diff for that PR. It rendered the glorious amount of 73 pages.
I'll never forget their face, and those of their teammates, when I barged into the room with a thick wad of paper and deposited them on their desk.
At least it worked. I never saw another big, ill-thought pull request from them again.3 -
I’m getting really tired of all these junior-turn-senior devs who can’t write simple code asking ChatGPT to solve everything for them.
I’m having to untangle everything from bizarre organization/flow to obvious gotchas / missed edge cases to ridiculously long math chains (that could be 1/10th the length), or — and I feel so dirty for this — resorting to asking ChatGPT wtf it was thinking when it obviously wrote some of these monstrosities. Which it gets wrong much of the time.
“ALL HAIL CHATGPT!” Proclaims the head of Engineering. “IT’S OUR PRODUCTIVITY SAVIOR! LEVERAGING AI WILL LET US OUTPERFORM THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY!”
Jesus fucking christ.29 -
Life of a junior self-taught dev with a sysadmin job:
1)At work, desperately try to script and automate every task, even when it isn't nessecary.
2)Learn dev skills from tutorials and web courses at every minute of your free time.
3)When returning home get self-guilt because you're procrastinating instead of doing an all-night development like your dev friends
4)The only productive thing you do is more tutorials and courses because you feel your dev skills aren't high enough for a self project
Frustrated.13 -
ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.
I'll summarize the few I remember.
First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.
Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'
and gems like:
def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end
^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.
Next up are a few of my personal favorites:
Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am
LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?
And for design decisions...
The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'
I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.
Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.
But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.
Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.
Yep, it's garbage all the way down.16 -
When I joined my team in august as a junior/trainee, we were 6 developers.
Now we are 4 left in the team.
By the end of june, we are 1.. I mean its me, myself and I.
Wtf did I do!? My code isnt that spaghetti. I think...
But its np, just me with a 20 years old database, 7 legacy systems and a new one planned.
Atleast my boss believes in me keeping this shit floating.11 -
It sucks, been working in restaurants for 18 years, switched to code, for the best (all details go between these ...) but now it's worst, no job, nothing, a 39 years old junior web dev doesn't exist, getting ready to live outside, happy I found that app tho. You guys are so much fun :)6
-
I'm leaving my job.
That had already been decided when I learned that the only other front end guy at the company put in his two weeks notice. I immediately decided that I was morally obligated to put in my 4 months notice to give the company enough time to find a replacement (because, contrary to the beliefs of some programmers, front end plays a critical role in web dev).
With only 2 weeks left, I was put on his project to do some "simple design work".
Jesus christ in heaven alive and dead...
I've never in my career seen CSS with such an intense level of specificity -- nobody on that team should have ever let that code get so out of control.
I've spent the past week cursing, walking out of the room, whispering "I can't believe you've done this", ranting to non-developer friends.
Here's an example: the application has a panel used all over the place with a header and a body. Every Single View has it's own duplicated panel, each with its own unique class names and CSS. And that's just one element.
Every view has hundreds of lines of duplicated CSS. Every button, link, list, all with unique styles.
To any junior developer reading this, please hear me: Write one block of CSS for any element that will be reused. DO NOT duplicate your code when it can be used over and over.
/rant4 -
No one uses Git, nor any code hosting service, but I'm the Junior.
Yeah okay, fuck you and your fucking siloes.
I won't tolerate lack of version control anymore, I'll be looking for the next "professional opportunity".11 -
How the fuck am I expected to salvage a fucking project that has been handed down to me with.
- No fucking clear architecture
- No fucking documentation
- Fucking shitty ass code base with no fucking coding standards
- The previous team was fucking learning a whole fucking new technology stack *Not fucking kidding* making fucking mistakes left and right
- No code reviews
- Mixing fucking local and cloud enviroment together
- No fucking testing
- Feature that were supposed to be implemented and are not working
- No configuration all the stuff are hard coded
- Full responsiblity for the whole stack
- Only one other guy with me
- And this fucking project has been delayed for a year
- MUCH FUCKING MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM
Like what the fuck am I expected to do? I took the job thinking that people knew what the fuck they were doing and surprise surprise that was a fucking bust.
the problem is also I am the junior and these fucking people have more experience than me, what the fuck happened to over seeing people's work, PM doesnt give a shit, developers dont give a shit nobody gives a shit.
But when I got this surprise surprise now everyone is interested in finishing the project
BULLSHIT11 -
About 2 months ago. My job fired half the dev staff including the only other web developer. I am a junior, and now the sole web developer. I have been yelled at for not working fast enough and not knowing the code base well enough. (I did a lot of Rails, and this is a Spring shop). I have daily panic attacks about coming to work and having to be here for 8 hours. I have never felt more abused. I'm constantly stressed, and drinking more than I should. All advice given to me has been "just stay there til you find something else or they fire you." but it feels like no one really knows how unhealthy this is for me. My one hope is that I didn't bomb this interview at a university. I fucking hate my job.16
-
Junior dev:Hey,see my code works :)
*After analysis of code*
Senior dev:Let's talk about complexity bro
Junior dev: shit :( -
Me (as a Senior developer): How will you solve this problem using regular expression?
Junior developer: *Explains*
Me: Good
Junior developer: I truly feel like a programmer when I code regular expressions
Me: Now, we have two problems.26 -
Today the CEO asked us to create KPIs to follow a junior tasks, daily.
The problem it's he wants KPIs to foretell problems or delays in his tasks.
The junior is analyzing 14 years old C++ code, made by an electrical engineer who had all worsts practices possible when coding.
We explained that we couldn't make real, true KPI that would foretell the advancement due to complexity of the legacy and the fact that the junior had NEVER USED C++.
SO.... He asked to know how many code lines he made daily and an estimate of how many lines he'll have to do to complete the task.... So he could foretell advancement.
....
....
It was the 5th time in less than 60 days, that the CEO bypass totally the CTO to ask some stupid useless shit. So now all developpers have resign, complaining about the CEO actions/stupidity.2 -
Today I saw a code written by my junior. Basically excel export. The laravel excel package provide great ways for optimization.
My junior instead did 6 times loop to modify the data before giving that data to the export package. We need to export around 50K users.
When I asking him why this ? He said it works and it's fast so what the issue ???
Noob , you have only 100 users in the database and production has 10 million.
Sometime I just want to kill him.15 -
99% of our server-side code is Python and PHP (legacy applications).
Asked a junior dev to make a small update to a PHP site so we could have it run some cleanup server side. Plenty of existing PHP code to look at and piece something together. Should be 50 lines max.
Did he use the existing PHP code to do this task? Nope. Did he at least use Python? Nope.
Node.js
His response?
"I couldn't figure it out and Node.js seemed to have good support for mongo so I used that instead."
We have 0 lines of server side javascript. Never had node installed. Literally none of the devs use node here. Not only is this completely outside of our tech stack, but he had to take the time to learn Node and JS just because he thought it was easier.
Much would of rather he put in twice as much time to learn the tools of our stack.8 -
Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )3 -
I'm working in a blockchain company for $180 as a junior programmer and there is a mid-senior guy who get ~8 times more than me. So we got a project to make a backend API with its tests. When I was partly completed my part of the project I asked that "mid-senior" to share his code with me. Nothing was done, and he asked me to push my changes to git so he could start to do something (view at my code and start copying). BUT. He couldn't even pull from git. He couldn't use that fucking Visual studio's team explorer and even the solution explorer. Ok, he was working with VS for the first time, but I did too. I cloned the repo gave him the environment to start "working" and get back to my work. After that nothing changed, he was writing each one-lined if block for half hour and the code was very dirty. Finally I've got his laptop and started to writing his part by teaching him all the programming. You may say I'm mad. I really do, I think that I did all project. This is sad... How can people get this much by being this far from the programming? We need really high quality programmers.3
-
Refactoring someone else's code (the dude's a senior).
I'm a junior, just updated my linkedin, burnout activated, I can't deal with this kind of shit no more.
Outro: this is the nicest piece of code from him, every other line of code just .... just.... D:
14 -
My worst interview ever was my first interview fresh out of college. After the initial phone screen, they asked me to drive 2 hours to their office to give me a "code challenge."
The challenge was to spend 4 hours writing a simple rest API for a blog type thing, but the catch was to not use any existing libraries for data access and instead write an entirely database agnostic DAL. Then after I finished they sat me in a conference room with 3 of their engineers and the CEO to just tear apart my code.
For a JUNIOR position to someone fresh out of college.
I guess I defended it well, because they asked to continue the process l, but after that I found a different position.4 -
So...
I'm looking for my first job as a web developer. I kept seeing these rants about how horrible and frustrating job searching is, all of which I thought were greatly exaggerated. They're all just jokes and memes, right?
Nope.
Every fucking meme seems to be true.
- Junior developer with +4 years of experience, expert in their field - check!
- Listing requirements for 6 different jobs under "Full-stack developer" - check!
- "Expert developer required ASAP" - $10/hour - check!
- 100% remote ... *scrolls all the way down* ... for 2 days of the week - check!
- Entry level font-end position - must be an expert in Vue, Angular, React, AWS, Drupal, Wordpress, PHP, Python, ES9+, OOP, TDD, BDD - check!
- "Cool" description written in js code with no indentation - check!
And I'm not seeing these every once in a while or something like that. No. Most of the posts are like this. I thought I may just be underqualified since I've never had a real job before, but this just seems crazy to me...4 -
Ok so this happend in the last 3 days, I didn't post it till now because I had to seriously take a rest with all the bullshit and stress that came with it...
(Legacy project I have the lead in called: "Foo")
Monday:
Management decided it would be effective to add a senior and a junior to Foo, which would make (together with me) to be 2 juniors and one senior developer
Well I've spend most of that day helping both the junior and the senior to setup "Foo" on their local development machines... So I could not do any programming myself
tuesday:
The senior wanted to refactor EVERYTHING... and I had to stop him multiple times because we simply do not have the time to do that...
The junior tried to work on other things as much as he could, and after he had run out of things to do, asked me for EVERYTHING... EVEN WHERE TO FUCKING CHANGE SOME GOD DAMN STRINGS!....
Also he did in total 3 commits, two of which existed of my code (because I had to "help" him
wednesday:
Both the junior and senior were removed from the project and I got another senior.. who fucking deleted the production database on accident
god damn rough few days man...7 -
Imagine this clusterfuck:
A small company creates its own CMS on PHP 5.5 and MySQL, coded by fresh junior devs who apparently just got into coding.
My new employer sadly is one of their customers and now I got the task to migrate a group of tightly linked websites on subdomains to an actually sane and maintainable CMS...
Fuck me...
Apparently the continuous extension of the websites over the years got so labor intense, that the mentioned company lacks the manpower to fulfill further development wishes.
I've looked into the code today... let me tell you, PTSD is helluva thing.
- Each subdomain has a complete copy of the Crap Management System, there is no use of composer packages and each of the 50 folders in the webroot contains a mix of source code and images or other resources.
- LESS is transpiled into CSS by PHP on requests.
- There is no central file for environment variables like a ".env".
- Each website uses at least 5 different versions of jQuery, of which some jquery.min.js files were manually modified.
Don't get me started on how the DB is organized...
My work on this has just started, there will be more I've yet to uncover.
"C'mon, man! Gimme a break!"16 -
It's my 2nd week into my new job. I asked people what they think they are doing.
The summary:
Senior dev: we fix bugs
Junior dev: we write code
Intern: we create the future
It depends how you look at it. They are all called software engineer or developer.9 -
I started drinking coffee when I started as a junior dev.
I loved its boost, but after a while being on coffee was exactly how I felt before as normal. I incrementally upped the dosage, while my resistance creeped up too. I reached a moment when I drank a liter daily, so I witched to yerba maté instead, which resulted in more potent brews. Then I got used to its strength too plus it tasted like horseshit. I switched to caffeine tablets, takingg more and more. Soon after I reached a level which was described medically as the top one should be allowed to take.
I no longer felt any boost. In between caffeinated moments of normalty, I felt like a brain-dead zombie. When I was caffeinated, I was jittery, my shoulder and eyebrow was glitching, my stomach was flexing like before taking a huge exam.
After some miserable time like that, I quit caffeine entirely. I was fatigued, dull and my mind was hazy for te next 1-2 weeks.
I then finally, became gradually normal again.
I drink tea and coffee only socially, perhaps a few times in a month, and never after too much later than noon.
Now I can't wear my "Programmer. Converts coffee into code" shirt anymore. Apart from that, I'm much better off :)
What's your coffee story?14 -
I was working with a guy 3 years ago, he was junior web developer. Lazy for work, watching YouTube and game streamers all day long at the office. Sometimes i was fixing his crappy code.
And ... one week ago I was surprised seeing this guy come to my current work office as senior web developer.
Im also new at this office and i had good impression i was working with professionals before this happened. Guess what... This guy hasnt changed much. Still writes crappy code , no idea of clean code at all.
I got concerns about my work place now :/ thinking to change it.6 -
so I have a junior who merged in a fix for an issue yesterday, and it was tested today and there was an issue with his "fix".
so he comes to me and says "hey this is an issue" and i'm like "yeah, remember i told you about that yesterday when i tested your changes? why did it get merged?"
so i tell him "its because of <reason> and that's why i specified the approach that i did in the ticket originally"
so he's like "ok i'll try that" and before doing that i leave him with "you will probably want to do <thing> because of <reason> with that approach"
so fast forward to like 10 mins ago. literally half the fucking day has gone by.
"hey, so i can't get this to work"
"yeah its because <reason> but what you /can/ do is <same fucking thing i told him to do this morning>"
"oh ok, ill give that a shot :thumbsup: "
and yet he's had this chip on his shoulder since reviews because he feels like he should have gotten a bigger raise and he's worth more than he's paid. and wonders why after 3 years he still hasn't been promoted from a junior.
and don't fucking say 'that's above my pay grade' all the time like you aren't fairly compensated, and then struggle to employ the same fucking patterns in a code base you've worked with for 3 years now.4 -
A coworker that is producing incredibly bad code and refuses to learn new stuff was declared "senior developer" by my boss. And me with over 20y experience? I am just a junior.. and have to clean up his mess all the time. I guess it is time to find new job.
5 -
The lead dev left the company two weeks ago. His last hurrah involved committing a bunch of complicated code into our API. The code he writes is generally overly coupled but this particular code is INSANE.
It is so coupled that the tests for it almost mock the entire application end to end. I only found this heap of garbage when the deployment tests were hung after I made a simple change in a totally unrelated file. THEY DIDNT FAIL. JEST GOT INTO A STATE WHERE IT CANT CONCLUDE AND HAS NO ERROR MESSAGES. We are taking about entirely different parts of the code. As far apart in the code as it can get. It took six hours of playing Sherlock Holmes to figure out what was breaking.
He got the most junior developer to approve the garbage PR as well.26 -
I work with junior developers, guiding them and teaching them on a daily basis.. my biggest pet peeve?
When they finish typing code and without testing it ask: "Is this right?"
HOW THE FUCK DO I KNOW? Seriously! I don't know what all your specs are, maybe try running it before asking??
ffs.11 -
I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).
He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.
I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.
I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?
Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.
He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.
I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.11 -
Let junior dev design module.
Make code review.
What junior dev says: "It is a totally flexible concept!"
What junior dev means: "It is extremely shitty to use for the one use case it was meant to do, but it will be equally shitty to use for all the use cases we will never have."
Back to square one.9 -
[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.
Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)
It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)
First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.
The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target
All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...
Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.
"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.
---
I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.
Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.
I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )
The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.
---
It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.
The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.
The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.
---
Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.
Cheers!
4 -
Me: junior dev
Assignment: build a REST search service that also does (thing x)
Me: gosh I just can't figure out how to make (thing x) work! Nothing I try works and there are no online resources!
*goes to meeting with client*
Client: (thing x) is impossible in our application, so we are expecting (much more manageable thing)
Me: awesome! I think I can build that
Manager who can't code: what are you talking about, (thing x) is clearly better and it should be possible to do
Manager: *sends email outlining shifted requirements after the meeting, including (thing x)*3 -
Am I really unlucky, or are juniors these days all lazy af and such pampered babies that need hand holding all the time?
So back when I was a junior, when I wanted to learn something new, I would ask for some pointers from my seniors, could be an article, a video or even a book. From there I would look up further knowledge, play with the idea in my machine. If I couldn't understand something, or if I needed a better explanation of something, I would go back to my senior, but it was really rare.
Then comes this modern day, I'm the senior now and I'm in charge of mentoring a bunch of kids, who would treat me like their personal chatgpt. "Hey Junior #0, this is something you may want to read to help your next ticket, let me know if you have difficulty". Next day junior #0 would come back and say "I don't understand, the article mentioned X but I don't know how to do X. Can you show me how to do X?". Bro, no one knows how to do X after being born, just google "how to do X" and it gives you the fucking answer. Why the fuck do you have to circle back to me because of this. Junior #1 would refuse to read any articles longer than 250 words, and require constant 1-1 meetings to give him personal lectures. Dude this is not a class room, grow the fuck up! Junior #3 would write the messiest code possible despite my efforts to introduce tons of resources, then complain "why I'm still junior, how do I grow". Bro maybe if you learned half of what I sent you, you would have gotten promote by now. Fucking lazy kids these days!
Oh I can't fire these juniors. Top management was very clear that "we don't have budget to hire other devs for you, it's your responsibility to train them better".22 -
There's this junior I've been training. We gave him a bigger task than we usually do
"How do I link an object in table X with the corresponding object in table Y?"
"How are objects in two tables usually linked? How did you link Y with Z in the first place?"
"Em... Foreign Keys?"
"Yup"
"But there's not foreign key from X to Y."
"Well, create one. You've got full creative freedom over this task."
I sometimes feel like Juniors are either completely careless about past code or overly carefuly with not editing any past code. Frustrating but adorable2 -
I am extremely particular about writing good READMEs in my repositories. I make sure that it has everything from prerequisites to run the code and tests on a new machine to how to actually run it (and the tests) and everything in between.
Despite all that I was asked questions that should have been avoided if you had seen the README.
One of these times was by a junior DevOps asking me about an error which was clearly due to him running the code without a virtual environment. Pings me with the entire stacktrace, I go to his desk and tell him to install the environment, which he does. 3 minutes later, another error message.
He was running the wrong script. I go to his desk again. Open the repository. Show him the README. Show him the section titled "To run the pipeline"!
There's a reason they're called README. You're supposed to READ them! 😑3 -
So here's the deal. I am a team lead of a small company and I have a junior who is an idiot. I mean literally, idiot. We code in Python mostly and as Python is not structured as a default Java or C# project, the developer needs to be very careful so that the structure (or tiers) is maintained properly.
Now this girl, always messes up the tiers. Say one enhancement can be easily implemented in the UI tier, she would do the implementation in the core Db access layer, which may complete this particular enhancement, but breaks all the other functions (sometimes the whole project) connected to that particular module of the Db layer. She doesn't do any integration testing after updating the code, she only checks the current enhancement she is working on. When the enhancement goes to the testing phase, the testers find those broken functions and that results a re-work (most of the times done by me).
I have warned her. Even our manager has warned her. She always tells that she is working to improve herself. But I know, she isn't. She mostly chats with her boyfriends (yes, with an 's') when she has no work to do. She never upgrades herself or works on her skills.
I can easily report about her, and they will fire her without any warning (they did it already with a guy earlier). I don't want to do that again. What should I do? Any suggestions?
Oh, she has a great ego. She thinks that knows and understands everything. She will listen to your suggestions carefully, but will never follow those.11 -
How do I know when I’m ready for a junior dev job? Currently I’m very familiar with syntax rules, data structure, I even created my first p2p app and I’m feeling more comfortable with server side programming and handling dependencies.
But I can’t like code blindfolded and I’m very slow and have to think very deeply and concentrate very hard before doing any minor thing.
How do I know??10 -
Never be egoisitc about your code. Its good to feel proud on your code that you did it. but sharing is caring.. don;t be like only I can do this.. ego is not for dev community.. be adaptable for changes whether you learn from junior or senior :)7
-
Fucking hate when "senior" and "lead" devs ignore the advice of numerous junior devs when it comes to technical and process driven decisions. Especially when said higherups don't even code anymore and don't really understand the consequences of their decisions.10
-
My boss pays me well and treats me well, but he expects me to do project management (documentation, giving tasks to 2 junior devs, reviewing their code, helping them when they are stuck), coding, architecture and to finish the project in a time record time.
When I told him that this week I will not work on development but will start to do documentation because the project got so big that it is difficult to keep track, and also the other 2 developers are waiting for tasks for me to give them, he looked disappointed.
I noticed and told him that if he wanted to speed up development, he must hire another project manager, or another senior developer because I can not do them both and expect to finish in a record time.
He keeps asking almost every day, "When are we going live?"2 -
You utter &@£#s. You give rediclious promises to clients without consulting Devs how long items will take, when issues with project are clarified with client months in advance you turn around week before last and do a massive U turn. Expect junior developers to be masters of Photoshop, flash, server side technologies and to get around and code the front end. Then developers who are putting in the over time already you demand a massive load of overtime extra and threaten us if we don't meet the deadline?! Sat here blood boiling. last guy here litrually rage quit because of issues like this and #&## I think I'm going to too, so hard to try stay professional! ##&##&# I have had it!2
-
I may cool off a little bit after this rant:
One of my junior coworkers weirdly peeks into my screen while I code or do any stuffs - this is what I hate the most.
Also whenever we discuss something by my desk, he looks for the opportunity to touch my Mac every goddamn time. Even after I told that shitwit several times about it.
Once, I went to have a conversation with a senior engineer just a few desks away only to come by and see that fuckface peeking into my project.
I had to tell him off with my absolute verbal retaliation.2 -
Grr the feeling when one of your interviewers has a hard-on for trying to find ways to sink your boat.
Went to a job interview yesterday during my lunch break for a mid level dev job in central London , i have been trying to transition from a junior role.
First were two senior devs , that went quiet well...
Next up was the tech lead and a team lead, lets call the latter Mc-douche for some problem
The tech lead was fine, very relaxed and clam guy more interested in seeing the logic of my answers and questions as to why i did certain things in this or that manner....
Mc-douche, he would always try to find something wrong then smile smugly and do that sideways head waggle thing
His tech lead is like " yup that's correct"
But he would be like " yeeess but you didn't think about bla bla bla" then talk about shit not even present in the context of the question
Ah also he would ask a question then cut me off as soon as I begin to say that i didnt mention or take into account x or y even though literally my next sentence is about address those details he wanted.
let me fucking finish you dickbag 😡
Had a js question, simple stuff about dom manipulation, told not to bother with code... yet McD starts asking me to write the code for it....managed it , quite easy stuff
Then a sql and db test , again technlead was happy with the answers and the logic am approaching the question when writing my query, yet mc d Is bitching about SQL syntax....
Ok fine, i made a simple mistake, I forgot and used WHERE instead of HAVING in a group by but really?! Thats his focus ?!
Most devs I know look up syntax to do stuff , they focus on their logic first the do the impl.
Then a general question on some math and how i would code to impl a solution on paper
That was a 20 mins one, the question said they didn't expect me to finish it totally so
I approached it like an exam question.
First
I focussed on my general flow of my process, listing out each step.
Then elaborated each step with pseudo code showing my logic for each of the key steps.
Then went deeper and started on some of the classes and methods , was about to finish before it was time up.
Mc douch went through my solution
And grudgingly admitted my logic was "robust enough" it was like he really had to yank that deep out of his colon.
I didn't really respond to any of his rudeness throughout the whole interview,i either smiled politely or put on a keen looking poker face.
Really felt awful the rest of the day, skipped the gym and went home after work, really sucks to have a hostile interviewer.
Pretty sure i wont be hearing anything good from them even though the three other interviewers were happy with me I felt.4 -
PORTFOLIO INFLATION
when every junior is writing algorithms, the next step up, the only way to keep up is writing apps. When every junior is writing apps, the next leg up is writing an entire SN.
Eventually junior full stack devs are writing microservice streaming cloud backend content delivery optimized social networks wrapped in virtualization with load balancing, proper CI, public accessible analytics apis, written in custom webaseembly compiled scripting backend utilizing both the latest graphql and every single feature of postgres, while also being a web site builder, an in browser app, mobile optimized, designed to transmogrify your asset pipelines linearflow functional-oriented modular rust cratified turbencabulator while cooking your turducken with CPU cycles, diffusing your gpt, and finetunning your llama 69 trillion parameter AI model to jerk you off all at the same time.
And then the title "wizard" becomes a reality as the void of meaning in our lives occupied by the anxiety of trying to reduce the fear of rejection in job hunting, is subsumed by the brief accidental glance into the cthulian madness-inducing yawning abyss of the future which is all the rest of our lives we have to endure existing for until at last sweet sweet death consumes us and we go to annihilation never having to configure one more framework or devops deploy of another virtual environment.
And it dawns on us that we no longer develop or write code at all. No, everything has become a "service" in this new hellscape future. We slowly come to the realization that every job is really just Costco greeter, or eventually going to be reduced to something equivalent, all human creativity, free will and emotions now taken care of by the automation while we manage the human aspects, like sardines pushing against one another not realizing their doom has been sealed along with the airless can they have been packed into, to be suffocated by circumstance and a system designed to reduce everything to a competition of metrics designed by the devil, if the metrics were misery", and "torture", while we ourselves are driven by this ratfuck wheel to turn endlessly toward social cannibalism, like rats eating their babies, but for the amusement of wallstreet corporate welfare whores who couldnt turn a dime if it wasnt already stolen.
And on our gravestones, those immortal words are carved, by the last person who gave up the ghost, the last whose soul wasnt yey shovelled onto the coal fires driving the content machine consuming the world:
Welcome to costco. I love you.12 -
Won a new job; 50% payrise which, for a junior, is a pretty big deal.
A bigger team, with more established practices, a commitment to testing and code coverage, code reviews, and a smaller learning surface area as I go forward (focusing entirely on the js ecosystem, 80% frontend).
So this is all good.
But I *have* to go back to Windows. Windows *7*. Their infosec practices move at a glacial pace. After two glorious years on mac/linux I feel like being sick.7 -
I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.
I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.
Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.
What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.
I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.
Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....12 -
Told juniors about coding guidelines that don't put another if-else just to fix a bug. Think through about it and see if you can come up with better solutions.
Today one bug was filed, they asked what happened, one junior said that he [my name] asked me for no if-else in code. He kinda deleted all if-else in codebase and started using same implementation for everything.
I'm standing with a WTF face.
😐8 -
Today was not a good day for me at all ,being considered a junior developer is not a good thing.
Yes I know due to my lack of the understanding of your 3 years old code base I could not meet up with the deadlines.
So as a punishment one of our senior devs asked me to bring my chair to his desk and told me to commit and push my progress every ten minutes .
He'll then review reading each code line by line ., Reverting too.
The worst part was that for the ten minutes I'll need to wait another 5 , because he was watching some Fifa19 gameplays on YouTube.
This went on for 3 hours .
It worked because I feel like a title noob today .8 -
For fuck's sake man! I know you are an inexperienced junior dev/student but estimating 3 months at 6 hours /day for slightly modifying some C# code is just ridiculous.
I may have never touched anything .NET before but the modification required just 3 fucking lines and I did it in a day. In three months I would have finished the whole fucking project.
PS: VS2017 (RC) was quite lovely.8 -
getting into dev work is such a shit show. thinking back 2 years ago I decided to switch career so went on bootcamp and starting looking for junior role.
as you know full well all jobs requires 5+ years when the tech has only been around 3. Anyhow, got a junior full stack role at a start up, all good , great pace (cos of startup) and wide range of tech to learn. one minute i am doing great , next day I am not good enough and got let go (WTF?) ,also whats up with some backend devs Jesus why wouldnt you let me put a " on aws because you are the backend dev what the fuck is wrong with your ego man?
fun story number 2: after being let go of my first role due to being good dev for one day and bad the next. I went for an intern role for really low paid. well fair enough I am here to learn right guys? nope, i have experience with the main tech from my last job and I managed the take home test and despite I told them i have more experience front end they criticise my backend code , despite i was able to tell them what I have done not so well and I have found a better solution AT THE INTERVIEW. still not good enough. I was really doubting myself If I am that shit at being an fucking intern with a stack I have experience in.
fast forward another job interview I landed my current role with fantastic culture, good line manager & tech lead. nice colleague and I am being treated like a prince with the work i put in. Why is this industry so fucked?
so, folks out there trying to get into this game. dont lose hope, you can do it , you just need to get fucked a bit to know whats good out there!5 -
This junior dev is killing me with all of the bugs in the code ... like did you even test it to see if it works fml1
-
Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447
pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.
when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)
one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.
i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"
jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"
seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???
it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.
JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.3 -
!rant
I suddenly remembered that time when I was a junior, faced an issue in the code. I assign a parameter for a method for background-colour, where I have to declare a Colour value with the hexcode, then I got an error thrown at me. That's says Colour(); not found something something.
Took me one hour to realise most programming languages are American. Should be Color() not Colour()
Facepalm. That day I thought to me self, how stupid can I get in a day.7 -
Do you ever wonder if you got promoted to senior developer too early? I keep making stupid mistakes that get picked up by more junior developers at code review I need to up my game11
-
I'm a junior dev working with some very proprietary applications. The point is, I can't Google for code solutions at all.
The seniors are all very put upon and too busy to offer much actual help unless it's urgent.
I beg for assistance until I'm blue in the face and eventually stumble my way to something resembling the solution.
I get one of them to review my code, and while they do I point out all the places I STILL need help.
They don't answer any of those questions but damned if they don't have opinions on how my comments should be formatted.
Aaauuuuggghhhh5 -
So I decided to get a master degree at my capital city (I got my first degree from my small hometown), and decided to get a job as a junior developers. I tried for an easier job like starbucks or something but apparently all of them turn me down as soon as they asked “What major you graduated from ?”
Never though I would start a career in software developing. Any tips I need to know about this job? (I can actually code quite well and my class starts at night)2 -
Coming up on a year as a junior dev, nobody told me about the vicious cycle of the more I learn the more I want to keep learning. I would rather code than do lots of stuff I used to love doing. And the lack of sleep, oh the lack of sleep. Best career ever!1
-
Sometimes I see advice given to others that is either clearly wrong or even dangerous, but it's not socially acceptable to call them out on it because 'everyone is entitled to their opinion'.
Yes, you're right. I'm entitled to my opinion based on doing this for 20 years and facing your exact, usually "junior" situation a hundred times. You did a code camp earlier this year and still think JSX is part of the Ecmascript standard.
There is a difference, and not being able to point it out without being scolded for being "entitled" (ironically) is slowly draining me of any interest in helping others.
How the fuck do you cope with this?18 -
Junior dev: Can I run lint on your codebase
Senior dev: hmmm
Jdev: Its a very nice code inspection tool
Sdev: Go ahead
Jdev: wow 50 errors
Sdev:
1 -
My boss just called me and asked to write a email informing our clients to not to download the update we pushed this very evening because Application is crashing when you will open that particular page.
What went wrong? One of our senior Developer, let's call him Mr. X, is totally against of testing the app before deploying it to clients. He believes that as i have created the application, i know exactly what to change to accomplish a requested feature or bug in application.
When a ticket assigned to him about a bug in the application, he simply make some changes in code, create the package and send it to test department. How do I know? He even boast it in front of us.
Most of the time it works but not every time like today. And I am pretty sure my boss is not going to ask a explanation about this to him.
I have great respect for him. It's okay to have confidence but testing before sending it to anybody will not make you junior. Will it? Being a senior You are making others to be careless about his job.
That's what happen today. Mr. X failed so does the testing department. So am I. I am the head of testing department as well.
I am not blaming him. I just cant. It was our job to test app thoroughly. I am feeling pretty bad now. His confidence made me vulnerable. Say his confidence made me clearly a fool. Lesson has been learned though.2 -
Still dealing with the web department and their finger pointing after several thousand errors logged.
SeniorWebDev: “Looks like there were 250 database timeout errors at 11:02AM. DBAs might want to take a look.”
I look at the actual exceptions being logged (bulk of the over 1,600 logged errors)..
“Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”
Then I looked the email timestamp…11:00AM. We received the email notification *before* the database timeout errors occurred.
I gather some facts…when the exceptions started, when they ended, and used the stack trace to find the code not checking for null (maybe 10 minutes of junior dev detective work). Send the data to the ‘powers that be’ and carried on with my daily tasks.
I attached what I found (not the actual code, it was changed to protect the innocent)
Couple of hours later another WebDev replied…
WebDev: “These errors look like a database connectivity issue between the web site and the saleitem data service. Appears the logging framework doesn’t allow us to log any information about the database connection.”
FRACK!!...that Fracking lying piece of frack! Our team is responsible for the logging framework. I was typing up my response (having to calm down) then about a minute later the head DBA replies …
DBA: “Do you have any evidence of this? Our logs show no connectivity issues. The logging framework does have the ability to log an extensive amount of data regarding the database transaction. Database name, server, login, command text, and parameter values. Everything we need to troubleshoot. This is the link to the documentation …. If you implement the one line of code to gather the data, it will go a long way in helping us debug performance and connectivity issue. Thank you.”
DBA sends me a skype message “You’re welcome :)”
Ahh..nice to see someone else fed up with their lying bull...stuff.
-
During the majority of my career, I've been the stereotypical pissed off guy with earphones in mashing away at his keyboard.
During lunch hours, I absolutely love listening to other pissed off devs. Their tales of buggy Microsoft products, oblivious project managers, dangerously unqualified directors, and severely disabled bosses are often the only thing that put a smile on my face in a workday, and here in Tokyo a workday is often your whole day. I don't feel there's anything wrong with it - the targets of their abuse often really are leeching tons of money while contributing little to nothing, so I feel like they deserve the abuse.
However, I don't like it when devs trash-talk other devs. I sympathize with those guys, even if they wrote bad code. I know writing good code is really, really hard, and I know that they were trying to do it under extremely difficult circumstances (in an office). If they're junior I sympathize even more because they're often better than I was when I had the same amount of experience.
So in conclusion, don't hate your fellow dev. Don't let hatred control you and poison your well-being. Direct your hatred where it belongs, at project managers.5 -
I'm working with some too smart junior. He rarely listens, does his own magic.
In his last MR, he did an ugly fix, 100 lines big. I told him exactly, what to check first, but nope, he's likes being a magician.
Now, I took 5 min and fixed it with single line of code.3 -
My fav interview was at my previous job. It was a junior position. The lead was a very friendly and wise guy. He kept pushing me (positively) with subtle hint until I get a code right. After completing each problem he give me elaborate explanation about the meaning of the problem and how to approach it from other angles. It felt like I'm in front of buddha who is making me realize the inner working of the world. Didn’t get 50% of the questions right, still he recruited me because "You were very curious and you were having fun solving problems". Best one and half years of my career.4
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Context:
Me, Front-end Developer, Javascript stuff
---
Junior Dev: Hey xxzer0, could you help me with this? I spent the entire day on it and at this point, I think I just broke Chrome.
xxzer0: *---* Okay, let me see.
Junior Dev: Do you see it? I am updating the Javascript code but it's not working at all. The browser is not even loading it... Literally, the code I just wrote is not there.
**
Now be me, be the fucking idiot I was and I have been my whole life, I already knew what was going on because I lost a fucking day on it as this guy.
**
xxzer0: Well, let me see just one thing...
'Open Chrome Dev Tools' -> 'Network' -> 'Disable Cache'.
xxzer0: Now try again...
Junior Dev: What are you..doi........ IT'S WORKING! O.O
Chrome, I love you but sometimes I wish you could make this more "accessible" to newcomers.5 -
After noticing 4 operations in a single line, I comment a pr stating the line is not simple to read as there are many operations which can be, especially in the eyes of a junior, hard to read.
I proceed to suggest a better solution.
Colleague: “what??? How is this not readable??? Is it [op1], [op2], [op3] or [op4]? 🤷♂️”
I kindly explain this person that it’s not about the single operations, but the fact they are all on a line. Inside an object assignment.
Colleague: “you should learn stuff! (4 links to websites giving that snippet of code”
Ah yes, the oldie: “but other people are jumping off a cliff, why don’t WE do it???”5 -
So I finished all my tasks for the sprint (3-weeks long) in the first 2 days.
Shit that happens when senior team members underestimate your abilities...4 -
So this just happened,
Me and my co-worker (we are junior developers) were working on the same bug, it was a post call throwing a server exception.
We had asked for help to debug this issue from a senior developer the day before, he was quite busy with his own tasks.
He is one those kinds who would keep working even if the entire bay is wasting their time, always keeping to himself, needless to say I haven't seen him smile.
Back to my story, he couldn't spare time yesterday so we tried to squash the bug ourselves thinking he might have forgotten we had called him.He then comes out of nowhere, he firsr checks the button bindings, params sent and the call being made.
He then went through the backend code strategically placing the break points, clicks and debugs a few times and then opens the console. BAM!!!!
" D' hell yo !!" Shows up in the console, not just once but multiple times. Turns out I forgot the logger I had placed in the catch block.
He turns to me in super slo-mo looks me in the eye and whispers "what the hell yo!" and kept quite for some time, meanwhile the sense of cringe was slowly creeping on me. That was when he let out a loud blurt and the entire cabin turned to us. Needless to say it was awkward.
His smile was creepy though :/ -
Extract from a quite old recruiter email (excluding the formalities):
Position: junior dev
Workplace: office for first year, can be changed to remote after (salary will be 50% lower if you go remote though) *suspicion levels starts raising*
Payment: 1€ per line of code (empty lines/comments excluded) or page of documentation *alarms start ringing*
Additional info: on high alert for 4 weeks every 6 weeks *wtf is going on*, salary bonus is 10€ per week *I stopped reading here and moved the email directly to the spam folder*6 -
So....
I was asked to transfer a spaghetti Android/iOS project to xamarin for a bank client yesterday because "that's what they use".
This is a crm/loyalty app that has been around for 2+ years now (you can imagine the mess). On top of that I have no knowledge of c#, .net or xamarin.
So I ask: "When is this supposed to be delivered?"
Boss: "It was scheduled for 2 weeks ago but let's say 2 weeks from now"
Me: "..... This is a huge remake it won't be even close to ready in 2 weeks"
Boss: "Let's check on the progress in 2 weeks and see how it goes"
Why is it hard for bosses to provide an actual timeframe???
He's been pulling the same crap with junior devs for years and of course they get nervous and create more spaghetti code...
Anyway long story short (not) I have an interview Monday!
Let's hope it's not more of the same!
P.S.: to junior devs: When you are given a deadline... IGNORE IT.5 -
As a junior developer it's frustrating to not have the skill yet of mentally mapping data models in your head, so that you can figure out bugs.
I see senior developers being able to quickly solve bugs because they can translate code into data models and they can figure out what's wrong.
Me on the other hand, I spend hours and days with my hands in my hair trying to figure out why my algorithm isn't giving me back what I expect it to.
It'll take experience.. I only have 1 year experience..10 -
A guy who had the same nationality as the enterprise we were working for was promoted from JUNIOR js developer to UX/UI coordinator for the entire department just because he was 2 year older than me (26 vs 28). Literally he was a junior dev and went to that.
One day he was accusing me of writing a piece of code which led prod to downtime. I was in the office, he was in another country with our manager and technical director next to him and we were talking over internal conference system. I shown git history + his name + his code and he was saying ‘that’s not true!!!’.
I couldn’t resist and I began to yell something like ‘You fucking fuck piece of shit cocksucker...’ for 5 minutes. Since that day i was the god on my project for UI/UX side.
Even now he is in the same place on the same position...
PS: more stories to come with this guy6 -
I was junior developer. My friend recommended me for JavaScript Senior developer in the company he was working. He had settle the interview without asking me. I knew a little of javascript, but I was not ready for this interview at all and I knew that.
So I went to the interview. The questions were very difficult and complex for me, I answered two question of ~15. I was very upset, I was sweаty and blushed ... one of the most uncomfortable moments in my career.
After the questions, the interviewer decided to give me a MacBook to do an exercise with JavaScript to see me in action. The exercise was easy, but MacBook ... Damn it, I saw a MacBook for the second time in my life. I knew the solution of the task, but I was very slow in implementation because of Mac..
After 15 minutes of slow coding and sweating, the interviewer said "OK, just finish it at home and send the code to my email...".
When I got home, I made the perfect solution for 30 minutes and I sent it to him. The only answer was "ok, tnx" and that guy didn't call me anymore.
This is kind of rejection I think ;)3 -
TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.
Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.
But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).
Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.
Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.
So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.
I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.
How do you cope with something like this?6 -
I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.
So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.
I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.
About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.
But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.
Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!
And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.4 -
naiive idealism to the max:
medior+senior to junior: "hey, buddy, we need you to do this, here's the codebase, here's the button, here's what needs to happen when that button is clicked, here's the relevant files and classes, make it happen."
medior to senior: "so what you just said about how we should redo the whole order processing pipeline, na-ah, not possible. i've been in those parts of the code many times, and based on what i've seen, you either leave that thing mostly alone or nuke it from orbit and build a completely new module in its place, but these "medium adjustments" you're proposing... not feasible...
senior to medior: "okay, i've seen how slow your progress was on even the most basic-sounding bugs in those systems... looks like what you're saying makes sense."
senior to *EO: not possible to just do these changes with this budget and deadline, that wouldn't even cover the "unexpected bugs" overhead, either you let us do it properly as a new greenfield project, almost, or you're stuck with what we've got.
*EO: mmmkay, so that's 20 times more time and budget that is in the proposal?
senior: yup, something around those numbers.
*EO (with a pained but understanding expression) : go for it, imma explain to the rest of the EOs at the end-weeks's meeting.4 -
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.10 -
Ordered a takeout wok/poke this evening from a new place. The only thought after tasting - what kind of junior made this....? I hope I write code better than he cooks food.
It looks like what it's supposed to look
it smells as it should
it has all the ingredients
but the taste is just... Not right.
I takes special skill to make it so wrong!3 -
Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".
Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM. -
I'm a junior dev less than 1 year into my first job out of college. I'm halfway done reading Clean Code (my first software book out of college) and I'm really enjoying it!
What should I read next? I was thinking something about design patterns. Should I go for the classic GoF book or continue with Robert C Martin and read "Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices"?9 -
Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.
App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.
Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.
Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.
I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).
He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.
Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.
Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.
After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.
Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.
I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.
Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.4 -
I work in a consulting firm.
I started right after graduation. I entered with candy glasses. Thinking is all well and ready to climb the ladder.
I entered as a junior developer.
On my first project, i am constantly belittled by my team lead. To the extent i suffer from ptsd.
On my second project, i am the only dev. I am amaze i manage to handle all the development job by myself for a year. Still i get nasty comments from my boss. Despite i am able to deliver on time.
On my third project. i left due to office politics.
Currently i am in my fourth project. The code is complete mess. The development environment is crappy. It doesn't reflect change right away.
My passion has dried up.
I'm seriously giving thoughts, should i switch career path.12 -
We spent 9 hours taking a vote, across all of the dev team (including junior devs), about how to design the backend architecture and which security measures we should take.
The CTO refused to listen to the person assigned to the design (me at the time) because he preferred fire-and-forget for EVERYTHING, ignoring all of the blatant drawbacks, and claimed that "there is no truly fault tolerant system", which is such a cop-out that my mind still cannot fathom it.
So therefore, since he couldn't have it his way, we took it to a vote (not my decision). Spent nine hours discussing the pros and cons of HTTP vs MQ systems to arrive at a vote.
I "won", and then left the company shortly after, because it was clear that even though the votes were in my favor, I was going to be "nickel and dimed" to death about the changes and how it's deployed, etc. to the point the system will end up like the previous systems they wrote.
Oh and the fact I was asked to help "improve morale" for the team that was working on the old, broken, overengineered project (I don't manage them nor did I write any of that code) by being assigned to arrange breakfast catering because it'd somehow mean more "coming from a senior dev".
I loved the people there - truly, some of the best people - but the company was broken from the ground to the ceiling.
CTO was let go a while after I left, I guess - most of the dev team has since left too and the majority of their work is being outsourced to Indian subcontractors. -
I am a junior web developer, currently working in my first job for a small company, I was hired because I have an interest in meteor and modern web dev.
When I say small I mean I am the only full time js dev.
So the project we are working (my first ever professional project from start to finish) is a travel booking web app (being a little vague, for the sake of privacy). I am the lead developer, as a new programmer of a project that is far from trivial. There are no other javascript devs in office, no sort of code review. We have an outsourced dev but as I got in a flow with one dev my boss supposedly told him to do it part time (without discussing with me), but haven't heard anything from him, so assuming he's just disappeared (probably annoyed at being treated like a commodity).
Boss has set up the stages, and forces me to move on to the next stage before that stage has been finished. I will have to go back over the whole thing to finish things off.
He will only hire cheap juniors, one front end guy with barely any experience is styling the site.
He is used to churning out WordPress and Magento sites.
Wish I had a senior I could learn off.
I want to stick at this project and see it through, but i can only see it ending in a train wreck.
At the same time I want out, I want to work under a better team with senior programmers and better code review.
I just have to do my best and see how it goes I guess6 -
I'm fucking frustrated.
Almost Every project, almost every task I did in the past 6 months has been a failure or partly done. Even the most trivial of tasks take me hours to complete, after immense googling and copypasting.
I know that I'm a junior with less than a year of dev experience but it feels I'm traversing through hell itself. I truly love to program, have tremendous passion and want to be a professional dev but it seems destiny itself wants me to keep doing what I do best but hate(Sysadmining).
When will this nightmare end? When will I be able to accomplish anything I need with code with so much ease, like my dev friends do? How many more courses, bootcamps should I fucking attend and how many more tutorials to watch? When will be able to work at nights without falling asleep? When will I have a fucking dev job and freelance projects instead of being a goddamn server-managing monkey?14 -
I've found a job as a junior developer several months ago, but I really want to find another job...
I know, my knowledge and skills aren't superior yet, but I am tired of that feeling of being useless.. I constantly self-educate myself after work and university, but still, I often need to ask co-workers "where's this form?", "wtf is that", "how do I access this"... Plus, their projects are HUGE, but no matter how big the project is, there are 2 to 4 people working on each at a time. And 1 person may work on 2-3 projects. And we are usually late for deadlines :/
Also code quality is meh..
Me: Why do we implement it here?
Co-worker: oh, we don't actually use it, it's just to hide warnings and pass the test.
Holy shit, wtf, I've spent half day trying to figure out wtf is this and why is it not working :/2 -
Just before the holidays started I was given a task by my manager, $M.
$M: "Kyntak, while I'm away I want you to look into this new way of starting $important_service"
$me: "Okay $M, is there a bug for this that explains what is needed?"
$M: "Yes, you should be able to find it"
Goes looking, finds someone else working on something connected but not the same, finds the code change that makes this available... It doesn't explain how to use it, when the async events fire or (well, to a junior engineer like me) really anything.
Message the other (very experienced) eng.
$me: "Hey I've been asked to make $important_service use the new starting API, can you tell me about?"
$eng: "Yup, here's a bug for that and I'm happy to answer any questions you have" *goes offline*
I read the bug. It doesn't mention the original problem I was trying to solve, it doesn't even mention $important_service. There's no design doc mentioned. The bug has a higher priority assigned than any of my other work. It has an expected completion date only days after I get back from holidays (which $M told me to take).
I try to contact $M and $eng. They've already left for holidays.
"Hmm"
Implements as much of the fairly inevitable boilerplate that I can infer from the bugs and surrounding code.
"Hmm"
So, I'm into my second week of holiday and am starting to think about the potential shit storm I may return to.
I hope the bug's priority was wrong.4 -
Today I was debugging some shitty code left by unknown developer whos linkedin account is dead and phone number left in contact card calls local pizza house.
I knew it qould be hard so i've made myself comfortable, gathered 5 redbulls and other items that diabetes people would kill for eating again.
After around 10 minutes i was already frustrated but i kept the pace. "Who is the best, little devie, you!" - I fooled my ego to keep up and shut up.
After around 10 next minutes my attention span has ended. Limbic system started injecting some hormones into my brain, but I remained silent.
First two energy shots were applied. I felt like hero again. Two minutes after I was debugging through some library that was written fo java and found out that it ahots some natives to a c lang lib called "mypreciouslib".
Oh flock, how can i debug it if ita compiled , I cannot do such things, Me be only junior dev. I started swearing, but silently.
Started ollydbg to see what is inside livrary, i searched through but i couldnt match anything it was like mess stirred with fecals of an elephant.
So I opened aida pro " with vitamins" cause obviously, our pm says "but you write in java right " so we dont need those tools right ? Fuck no.
Aida was better at least i could find some funcions calls, but hey, the progress. I was swearing out loud, with earplugs in. And by the time I've sweared all the things in company i got a reminder.
"Hey -insane- stop swearing, the children are here."-sayys pm, it is some kind of " family and work " shitfuck day.
So i asked them: " why wouldnt you buy this fucking tools for programmming for us , you wouldnt have to hear me fucking swearing" . then i realized that , colleagues in room heard all of it, and one of them, total fuckface buttlicker(dev without bit of knowledge) started something like "you are wrong, see how good our software is sellling". Pm was like smiling like he thanked him for buttlicking again. Not to mention he is officially retarded and i know his password to all our services cause he is so smart to put it into text file and then have sharing files in windows turned on.
The other one told aloud, that we would be much better with some debugging tools that are better than fucking eclipse if we have to work without code.
PM told us that he will arrange a meeting. At that point I didnt care any longer. I just fired myself, fuck them.
Please saint Stallman give me hope and joy of programming from my teenage years. Uhhh..2 -
getting part time job as a "junior web developer" while doing my uni, things go well at first. Now my profession is, senior web developer ... and database administrator, and server admin, and the one who call for hotfixes, and who code js for frontend, while under paid because I am still "a college student" ..3
-
Junior, junior, junior. I'm like -junior. We want a junior with 3 years experience. How is someone supposed to get to the 3 years experience if there aren't any jobs accepting juniors will no professional experience. I can code, , albeit not professionally, that's why I want a job, to learn in a professional setting, but the junior jobs all want past experience.
Maybe one day. Maybe never. For now I'll just keep rolling on the grind in my shitty factory job. Moving boxes from one place to another with the toughest mental challenge being which way to stack said boxes.2 -
I worked at a startup that indulged in pair programming thing. Where as a junior, you'd be partnered with a senior developer.
My mentor, always insisted on having shortest variable names possible, so that the "size of codebase" will be very small.
It was a nightmare going through his code and understanding what's he's done. Best part, no comments as well.
In a way it has primed me to go through any codebase possible.5 -
You know what's fucking horrible?
Implementing new features to an Android app in production that another dev wrote...
...which has no architecture, no documentation, no modularity, no testability, everything runs on the UI thread, filled with spaghetti code and it somehow works smoothely so I have to not fuck it up.
Oh and I'm also a junior. So fuck me, right?1 -
Worst:
Juggling two jobs, both being 100miles (~160km). apart from each other: one working for a big VFX studio as a render wrangler getting paid peanuts, and one as Junior SDET for an electronics company. I lasted 6 months on the former as I couldn't handle the insane drive anymore, and stayed on the latter for three more years due to the higher pay and comfy environment. I was really hoping to make connections with the former, too, since I wanted to get into Game Development or into programming cool VFX shit for Hollywood at least. Alas, I digress.
Best:
After I got laid off, I took an offer from a small company as a Graphics SWE that happened to have a terrible reputation. Upon reading glassdoor reviews and a few days deliberating, I just told myself: 'fuck it, I need a job so bad,' and took the offer. Turns out that was the perfect time to get hired (all the previous engineers are gone). Hell, those guys did not even practice proper version control, there was no git/svn repo to be found, and all their projects were in hard drives scattered somewhere in their office. I was a bit astounded. All the knowledge the devs had of the framework the company used were salvaged from tons of uncommented, spaghetti code. It was like the entire future of the company was riding on me and the other new guy that got hired 1 week before for the same position. A year later, CEO promoted both of us, which tripled my salary compared to my QA job. -
I started off in a MNC company as a junior developer. I entered with candy glasses.
I didn't expect to win the lottery. Of getting abuse by superior.
I stayed for a year, at the project. Constantly being belittled by this team lead. It was awful i enter as a fresh grad. All the new tech were so new and scary at that point.
During my time there, i constantly think that developer is not my stuff.
Ultimately i reach the state of burnout. I reached out to the manager and broke down in his office.
I actually told the manager. "I hate coding"
I remember staying up to 4am just complete a piece of program. To be ready to be push to production the next day. My team lead just come screaming at me saying there is bug.
Upon receiving that message via skype. I broke, tears flow down my eyes.
After which i reach a state of burn out. I start to reach out to external parties for help to get me out of there.
Now i am recovered from the burn out. I am curious of the technology that were utilized in that project. I literally face palm. After understanding the technology it isn't so hard after all. I just didn't gear myself up with the tech.
I still do enjoy working on code.3 -
It is easy to believe something is over-engineered as a junior. You open a solution and get slapped in the face with a wet fish of many classes, with strange names, doing very little, with everything coming together in ways you don't understand.
My advice is to learn about design patterns, clean code, clean architecture, and model driven design. Until that point I don't think you can make such a distinction. And indeed once knowledgeable of patterns and techniques as well as the domain, the same solution can look obvious, elegant and readable.
In a field where everyone is saying 'dont over-engineer', one must be able to tell if something is actually bad, or just uses techniques you don't recognise.
Telling your senior you think something is over done just because you don't understand it is not good. First learn techniques, understand the code, then form opinions that are at least relevant then.
From someone who committed that crime.4 -
Ah, the little subtle things we have to iron out as we progress from Junior Developer to Medior Developer.. things like:
- knowing the difference between a carriage return and a line feed (although having worked with analog typewriters helps) and later knowing that Unix-based systems and Windows NT-based systems implement it differently..
- knowing that serialization is important because not all computers interpret data the same way and some computers allocate 4 Bytes for a construct, others 16 Bytes.. and then we get the funkiness of transferring character sets between machines..
- knowing that a whitespace character is not only an actual space (as is known in ASCII as code 32). This one can cause even medior developers a headache, as in: why the fuck does this string function say that "hello I am a duck" and "hello I am a duck" are not the same?! Turns out then in the debugger that when you expand every character in the string you see that string1 contains 32 32 32 32 as usual.. but then string2 contains -96 -96 -96 -96 and you're like.. what the fuck..? Then you know you have to throw \\h regex at it. Haha.
- finalizing our objects and streams (although modern languages do that for us).. otherwise we have to do funky shit like trying to find what's locking a file, which is not so easy to figure out.
- figuring out why something won't work often requires you to not only break down the problem in smaller steps, to use a debugger, but sometimes it's even better to just create a proof of concept, slap some minimal code in there and debug that.. much easier.
- etc.
:)7 -
TL;DR despite 0 year professional programming I am lead of a large travel booking web-app, this is new to me and my boss, who has repeatedly ignored my advice and moved me on before finishing work. Client is not happy, project is way overdue, and yet has just sent NEW FUCKING DESIGNS.
Recap
https://devrant.com/rants/480004/...
https://devrant.com/rants/431725/...
https://devrant.com/rants/872255/...
Client has sent some redesigns of core search functionality on a project that is overdue and over budget.
DO YOU ACTUALLY *WANT* THIS PROJECT TO FAIL?5 -
The feeling when, as a junior dev, you realize the code base is a mess and learning from the senior devs is more accurately learning the preferences of the senior devs. There is no "right" way to do things.
Also, how did anyone get anything at scale with JS before typescript!?2 -
So this post by @Cyanide had me wondering, what does it take to be a senior developer, and what makes one more senior than the other?
You see, I started at my current company about three or four years ago. It was my first job, and I got it before even having started any real programming education. I'd say that at this point I was beyond doubt a junior. The thing is that the team I joined consisted of me and my colleague, who was only working 50%. Together we built a brand new system which today is the basis on which the company stands on.
Today I'm responsible for a bunch of consultants, handle contact during partnerships with other companies, and lead a lot of development work. I'm basically doing the exact same things as my colleague, and also security and server management. So except for the fact that he's significantly older than me the only things that I can think of that differentiates the seniority in the team are experience and code quality.
In terms of experience a longer life obviously means more opportunities to gather experiences. The thing is that my colleague seems to be very experienced in 10 year old technologies, but the current stuff is not his strong side. That leaves code quality, and if you've ever read my previous rants I think you know what I'm thinking...
So what in the world makes a person senior? If we hired a new colleague now I'm not sure it'd be instantly clear who should guide and teach them.5 -
If you're going to look for junior devs on facebook... make sure you don't try to be funny and write any kind of bullshit-code.. there is a f**king space in the function name! Dude....
Text says:
"Rieke Computersysteme is looking for you!
void send Application () { ... }"
9 -
I'm a junior dev, been on placement a year.
I get tasks done mostly on time, my pull requests are merged, yet I still feel like what I'm writing is seriously under quality.
What point will I stop writing code that isn't good enough to not be stressed about? 😷7 -
Spent 2 days refactoring code written by our "offshore team". I've done refactoring on the same code in the past, probably upto about a week in total of refactoring now. The code looked like it was written by someone who had literally just finished their first "Hello World" app - loads of code blocks copied and pasted instead of declaring reusable functions.
The whole thing should have been done by us in the first place.
And yet our money-conscious company wants to employ more of these developers. Cheaper than us? Sure. Quantity over quality though, but I guess money is all that matters to the big cheese1 -
> Moment you thought you did a good job, but ended up failing
> Times the bug wasn't actually your fault
> Times you took the blame for a junior or other dev
> Times someone took the blame for you
> Times you got away with something you shouldn't have.
> Most valuable data loss
> The bug you never fixed
> Most satisfying bug to fix
> Times where a "simple" task turned out to be not so simple
> Debug code left in production?
> Moments you wish you could undo
> Most satisfying optimization
> Have you ever been ranted about? -
I hate my current work with this piece of bad written legacy $hit. As 2 year old 'junior' without any code review and mentor I feel depressed. I should improve my skills at home and run away from it.
F#$ck you, corpo.3 -
When you commit code to the repo and a a junior on the team takes it upon himself to rename all the classes and methods coz he doesn't like them even though his changes make no sense and then sends them to you for a code review .....
Wonder what the results going to be ;-p1 -
This is so annoying, I had 9 diff. jobs the past 2 years and this is my 10th and if this doesn't change I might reconsider my options again.
I came to work at a company that pays me like a Junior and treats me as an intern. My 20yo "boss" who acts as a project owner/lead dev doesn't want to learn anything new and sees any improvement as a waste of money. The problem is he thinks hes a great programmer but he doesn't know shit. Im mainly working on the Laravel installation because "I claimed I know Laravel". And its absolute garbage. They haven't used a single Laravel features besides routes and everything else is vanilla PHP. They write for loops that loop through $_REQUEST to remove a single character. Write 100 deep nested ifs and they abuse Elasticsearch to the point ES crashes because the program is using 1000 deep multidimensional arrays. Its only a webshop...
Everytime I try to make a suggestion like making the master branch protected, doing code reviews etc etc I get shut down because they are autistic and don't want anything to change.9 -
The saddest and funniest side of our industry is (atleast in India): someone works hard and makes it to the best colleges, do great projects on AI, ML; get a good score on Leetcode, codechef; gets a job in FAANG-like companies...
Changes colors in CSS and texts in HTML.
And, why is there so much emphasis on Data Structures and Algorithms? I mean, a little bit is fine, but why get obsessed with it when you never write algorithms in production code?
Now, don't tell me that, we use libraries and we should know what we are doing, no, we don't use algorithms even in libraries.
Now, before you tell me that MySQL uses B-tree for maintaining indexes, you really don't need to solve tricky questions to be able to understand how a B-tree works.
It's just absurd.
I know how to little bit on how design scalable systems.
I know how to write good code that is both modular and extensible.
I know how to mentor interns and turn them into employees.
I know how to mentor junior engineers (freshers) and help them get started.
Heck I can even invert a binary tree.
But some FAANG company would reject me because I cannot solve a very tricky dynamic programming question.4 -
As a junior dev from a sysadmin and security background, this is a list of software development concepts I never seemed to truly understand but hope to(rated from most intimidating to least):
1) Frontend web development and all the huge world of javascript frameworks and tools. - It's more overwhelming than the political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.
2) Machine Learning, Deep Learning and A.I- too much math that fucks with my brain.
3) low-level programming(kernel,drivers) - sounds extremely interesting but the code in assembly/C/C++ looks like Linear A Minoan hieroglyphics.
4) Rx(insert language here) - I never get why it is useful or why someone invented this. Seems interesting though.
5) Code Reflection - sounds like Thelemic magick.
6) Packaging, automation, build tools, devops, CI, Testing -seems too complicated. I just want to run an executable at the client or make a web app that does something. Why all this process?6 -
Holy shit man...
I know its supposed to be hard but I cant ignore how much I want to give up right now.
I've been learning JS for months now, doing daily algorithm challenges, going strong on my freecodecamp dev map and still, I feel like I might no be cut out for this.
It's been more than a week now trying to implement a minimax algorithm into my tic tac toe game. I can't, for the life of me its just getting more frustrating by the day and its driving me crazy! How the fuck am I supposed to ever get a junior webdev job if I can't do something as simple as this!, And I keep reading and reading the theory but I cant implement it into my code! It just makes me want to quit (again)!
I really need to work on my attitude...1 -
Do you agree?
Junior: What are comments
Mid-level: Hah! My code is so clean, I don't NEED comments!
Senior: comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comme-...25 -
After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.
During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.
After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.
After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...3 -
once upon a time I went on vacation.
It was for 5 days and I went to Leh-Ladakh with my family. (Me, My big bro and my parents.)
It's a beautiful and cold place. Snow and High Mountain and no phone call from anyone.
It was supposed to be no call. But on the 3 days, I got a call from my junior and he said to me that server is not working and it's giving 404 error.
So I told him to go to Cpanel (It was client's server). After 1 hour I got a call back from him and he was not able to fix it.
So I had to open the Cpanel in my Galaxy Note 8, Open file manager, go through all the files and logs and fix it code in 2 or 3 files.
It took 4 hours to fix the problem. But that day I understood the value of my Note 8 and its big screen. Thank you, Samsung.
Note: The lake in the photo is Pangong Lake/
5 -
Hello everyone! 👋
Work on Chaaat is going rapid so far. We got our own js.org domain – https://chaaat.js.org
We now need a designer help! All we need is to create a simple SVG icon we just can’t draw ourselves.
We are always open for contributors! If you’re intern or junior developer and you want a real world experience with NodeJS/Express, REST API, OAuth2, MongoDB and React/Redux stack with detailed code reviews from senior developer, we’re open for your contributions. No experience required.
Cheers!11 -
You know that feeling when the junior programmers do their job quickly, properly, and elegantly just like how you would have done it? :)
Yeeeeah, me neither. What the fuck is this dog shit?? God dammit! Why we have 2MB of CSS?? Do you even you this jQuery plugin?? What do you mean frontend.php and frontend2.php?? Why is this block of code indented all the way to the right?? "Just 1 bug left" OH REAAAAALLLYYYYY?4 -
Being an unsupervised junior developer, I wonder how shitty the code I write is, and how being unsupervised will affect my future in this career.5
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Just got my first job as a junior front-end developer. I am currently working on coding emails and holy crap trying to code for all different email clients. Never thought each client rendered stuff differently. (Outlook is the worst!)
But I am loving the job!5 -
Hi everyone, I’m new here and this is also my first rant.
I’m in the job hunting boat once again and I’ve been looking at Junior front-end positions. I thought I’d rant about something that always annoys me when looking through the requirements.
Wait, so in order to land a Junior front-end job, I have to be a freshly graduated person with a Master’s degree in CS, with a minimum of 3 years working experience and all that just to come code in HTML, CSS and JS?
For the love of god, I’m one person damn it. It’s not like I’m a self-taught developer that taught myself those things and more in a shorter period of time after quitting college.
On a more serious note, I’m not by any means claiming that I know everything, but having a CS Master’s degree for these types of positions is clearly ridiculous in my opinion.
Sometimes I wonder if the people writing these things are making it up as they go or whether they’re actually serious.8 -
C# has become shit.
I work since 2013 with C# (and the whole .NET stack) and I was so happy with it.
Compared to Java it was much lean, compared to all shitty new edge framework that looked like a unfinished midschool project, it was solid and mature.
It had his problems,. but compared to everything else that I tried, it was the quickes and most robust solution.
All went in a downhill leading to a rotten shit lake when all this javascript frenzy began to pop up and everyone wanted to get on the trendy bandwagon.
First they introduced MVC, then .NET Core, now .NET 5-6-7-8.
Now I'm literally engulfed with all these tiny bits of terror javascript provoked and they've implemented in all the parts of their framework.
Everything has to be null checked at compilation time, everything pops up errors "this might be nulll heyyyyy it's important put a ! or a ? you silly!!!" everywhere.
There are JS-ish constructs and syntax shit everywhere.
It's unbearable.
I avoid js like a plague whenever I can (and you know it's not a luxury you get often in the current state of a developer life) and they're slowly turning in some shit js hybrid deformed creature
I miss 2013-2018, when it wass all up to me to decide what to do with code and I did some big projects for big companies (200-300k lines of code without unit tests and yes for me it's a lot) without all this hassle.
I literally feel the need c# had to have some compiler rule you can quickly switch called "Senior developer mode" that doesn't trigger alarms and bells for every little stupid thing.
I'm sure you can' turn on/off these craps by some hidden settings somewhere, but heck I feel the need to be an option, so whoever keeps it on should see a big red label on top of the IDE saying "YOU HAVE RETARDED DEV MODE ON"
So they get a reminder that if they use it they are either some fresh junior dev or they are mentally challenged.20 -
Most memorable co-worker for me is my senior dev at my first job. He is awesome. He taught me everything and he never complained even if I ask some basic things and never got irritated when I made dumb mistakes.. he just simply explained and ask not to repeat that mistake. He gave me one advice that never ever be egoistic about your code, Yes you can feel proud but don't be like I will never tell or explain to my junior ones. Cause of Him I am good mentor/trainer also :) along with developer. Thank god at my first job he was mentor.
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So a junior at Twitter created a linter that detects harmful language, then twitter decides to migrate all of their code and documentation to avoid “dangerous language”. The twitter handle of said junior - “negroprogrammer”. The only words twitter should start including in their business is cognitive dissonance.
Ok this should be interesting but this is devRant after all and I couldn’t just not mention this. Cancel me.6 -
I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.
I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.
My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.
Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.
Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.
The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.
So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.
It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.
After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.18 -
Tldr: I think I made a company fire some dev a year ago.
I was working for this company remotely, alone, on a very big and old legacy php project where they still used echo '<code><code/>'; and i was a very junior junior front end developer, needed to make the website work somehow (whole new design). They brought in a random guy to work with me, and we started working.. I was using bitbucket to version my changes, and I asked him to do the same. He tried pushing his changes once and then practically never again because he started working in files that i was working on and there were git conflicts, and he gave up, even though i asked him to do that... he then statted using general classes to style the page (like .color) with absolute positioning and it broke everything everywhere. He then proceeded to minify half of the php files 'because of performance', I remember talking to other few people in the company and he disappeared a few more days later. I never finished the project because they stopped it randomly and i think i got him fired even though he could've continued working in the company -
Since ive started college my will to program has become non-existant. Im a self taught programmer since 12, it used to be MY thing and i loved it. I used to spend hours a day just programming personal projects because i love it. However since college has been getting serious with this being my junior year and having part-time contract work i dont "love it" as much. Im a little scared, i have no time to just code for fun and when i do have time it feels like work because thats the only other time i code.
What should i do guys, i dont want to fall out of love with programming, it's part of who i am and i can feel im losing it.1 -
I really need to get out of this clusterfuck of a mess I got into, A.K.A. our website projects. Now, it feels more and more like all these problems and issues we're having are all my fault.
Here's the thing: I had 0 experience on web development before I got this job. I started as an intern, expecting to learn all the right practices and techniques on building websites. Nope. What happened was I was thrown in this big project, responsible for almost every functionality that it was supposed to have.
A junior-level guy. Doing a huge project on his own. Hell, I'm probably even lower than a junior. But here I am, pigeonholed in this shittard. My boss even said to me, "you know more about the website than I do." Fucking hell. He's not even aware of the clusterfucks I've done on the codebase because, fuck, what did I know? I don't even get feedbacks about my code. I don't fucking know if I'm doing all of these shit right. I don't know if this function is supposed to be here, or if it's supposed to behave that way, and, shit, the concept of test-driven development is probably something my boss has never heard of before.
So right now, I'm a bit obsessed with web development best practices, and how to write clean, maintainable code. I would probably get more learning from going to meetups than I will ever have from this place.
This has been a very shitty start of my career. I hope a much better learning experience will be plentiful at my next job (if anyone's willing to hire me). It would be like starting all over again. Sorry for the long post. I would like to put this as a blog post, but it's probably not a good idea, specially since I'm looking for a new job. Thank God for devRant.2 -
Biggest hurdle in my Dev career?
To be as good an architect as the developer I am.
Challenges: You'll have to convince fellow architects, business clients, junior developers, mid level developers. Some understands UML, some only wants POC, some wants to see code, some just wants a PowerPoint deck, and some just wants to see the cost benefits only. -
I think I'm getting to the point to where I'm burnt out at my job. Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to work. But it is very, VERY boring. And I'm starting to struggle to even pay attention anymore. I know it's important but I'm struggling to care. How am I supposed to do good work when I can barely even focus? Good code is not magic! I can't be barely holding my eyes open and expected to be worth anything.
I'm also still technically a junior developer which I have some issues with >_>6 -
Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.
Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).
Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.
Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:
1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.
2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.
3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.
Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.
My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.
How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.
In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.5 -
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?13 -
I feel bad for bitching a lot on this site, so I'm going to try something positive for a change.
I got finished building this basic database web application that I ported from a Java EE based API to the Spring/Hibernate API. Took me about 3 weeks of work to do it. There's a new feature to search the database that I added just today. Had to do some debugging on it but it works fine.
Back in May I had never written a line of Java code or setup a LAMP stack, to doing stuff like this. This stuff gives me the strength I need to keep going. Someday I'm going to get a job as a junior dev.
4 -
I just don't get it.
Been looking for a new job for 2+ years and have failed at every opportunity. Numerous white board interviews, code challenges, hours upon hours wasted. Just can't seem to make the next move. I believe I have my soft skills down because I am able talk and do meetups just fine but either I'm too junior or something else is going on.
What started all of this was my latest rejection that I thought I had in the bag. Sailed through all their questions, did a live code thing, all of that being for 3+ hours. As it's called a final interview with them. Not to mention they're a startup, figured their standards might even be a bit lower than normal since they're needing people. Yet, still got rejected.
This sort of stuff, I'm seriously considering just leaving tech in general and probably just go do a outside job. With supposedly everything going for me like working in a hot job market, in a growing tech town, experience, and doing extra coding on my own time to beef up my portfolio. Doesn't matter. Still continious rejection. Lol in fact how I even got my current job was through completely unconventional means and based on that, I think it's done me more harm than good, which is why I'm trying to leave my current job and go into a place where I can be a better developer.
As of now, back to the grind of trying to find something.7 -
I had literally JUST learned to code, after completing an online course. I had played around making some tiny C# programs was looking for my first Junior job. A recruiter got in touch and to him I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. So he contacted the employer, called me back me later on and said that the employer wanted to see some sample code of mine.
"Sure!" I said eagerly and pasted my programs into an email. My two programs were probably about 20 lines of code in total - both Console apps. One was a stopwatch which I "hadn't quite got working yet", the other a Quadratic Equation solver.
The response came back that I was "too Junior for the position".
I know we all have to start somewhere, but I painfully cringe when I think about this employer and probably alll the devs there crowding around his monitor, pissing themselves at my tiny programs.3 -
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?1 -
code reviewed a "senior" developers code (guy has been at the companyny since noah and his clay computer tablets), he replied with my comments against it stating he has more experience than i have and that i shouldnt do anything except just sign off the stuff to production, stuff goes to production and breaks a massive financial cluster fuck of a mess, who gets the blame for releasing the code to production ? Junior me !!! gotta love it when management needs scapegoats of FIFO people.2
-
Have u guys ever wonder, all those devs we rant about (mostly senior developer), how it feels like to be them? Today I realized, I am most probably becoming like one.
I joined devops 7 month back(around one and half year in industry). Right now, I am 2nd senior member in project. I have done deployment on multiple environments more than 100 times. But till today, I never knew how the deployment is being done. I knew to trigger job but I never knew how it worked. Today when a junior asked me, then I learn ansible, then I understand whole deployment process.(and remember I am 2nd senior most with 7 month in project)
Sometime I wonder, till now I always had good rating and most responsible title. But how much is that because of my technical knowledge? Sometime it feels like I have very good luck. But man, it's very depressing. Sometime it feels like my junior don't get enough limelight because I am in their way although they have good knowledge but they lack the though process for now. Most of the time my senior present me as role model to juniors, and it's very embarrassing for me(this will not continue on as I talked to my seniors) . I did work on good projects from time I joined company. And never had any issue and always deliver what needed. But I still can't write code in Java to take input or do for each on array in javascript without seeing stackoverflow once.
Now I fear that someday I will write piece shit of code and whole efficiency of project will go down cause of me. Atleast, the person who will get to fix it will get a chance to have good rant here. I tried open source projects to understand how to write good code but I always have hard time understanding new-projects which I never worked on.
Then there is reputation on Indian devs. This is my another Fear. That someday cause of me, my fellow devs will get bad reputation as well.
This coming year, my goal is to fill up all the holes but I don't know why my fingers are crossed.
Sorry, I had to bring this out somewhere. And please ignore my grammatical mistakes.3 -
I really miss having a team. Don't get me wrong, right now I do what I love and I got into a position where I can actually do Quality Assurance instead of just testing and I enjoy being able to actually change things instead of just repeating what problems there are and acting surprised when the same processes produce the same bugs over and over again but I really hope that we'll interview anything else than mouthbreathers soon.
I'm aware of the fact that QA isn't sexy and that few people who could become "Software ninja Rockstars" choose to go into it but can it be that hard to find at least two or three people who can write and read code at least on a junior level and understand how web protocols work? I get the feeling my entire branch is nothing but shit talkers clicking around blindly on pages.
I just want to exchange ideas again, come up with innovative tools, tweaking processes, learning from and teaching each other while we watch the entire operation get more and more efficient.1 -
Call me a novice, but isn't the point of a user story to be concise, limited in scope and only concerning one purpose? Kind of like a class should only have one responsibility.
This stupid other reviewer developer comes whining at me saying I broke some shit in my user story and that I need to fix it. The weirdest part is that I didn't break anything. I wrote all my tests, they all passed and yep, this guy has the nerve to come and say that I broke other shit. Well genius, if it's OTHER SHIT, then it belongs as a bug in ANOTHER STORY. What the fuck man, seriously.
A few minutes of debugging later, I found out it was someone else who broke some code earlier on a piece that was part of my part of the application.
Why are others so quick to blame? This is unprofessional. OMG I DISCOVERED AN ERROR, YOU'RE PROBABLY THE ONE TO BLAME BECAUSE YOU'RE AN IGNORANT GUY BECAUSE YOUR TITLE IS JUNIOR DEVELOPER!
Right.
Companies like these, people, have bad communication. Bad companies.2 -
Teach students the importance of clean code/architecture and testing. Even if they dont yet understand the more complex topics such as architecture, they should understand why quality is important and that software is a craft more than a science. You cant just apply principle X and insert design pattern Y and profit++. You actually have to think and constantly improve. AND TEST.
Think I would probably also cover things like build automation and continuous delivery. These are now important things for junior devs to know about going into companies. -
One advice I've given to most junior developers which they've practically benefited from is...
"Avoid duplicate comments between interfaces and their base class at all times".
As a smartly-lazy dev, you shouldn't enjoy writing same thing multiple times... be it code or comment, don't write it twice!
2 -
whining
So I'm sitting here, working my ass off developing something far above my current skills.
On the opposite side of the table sits relatively new guy, working as a part of support "department". Relatively new means that he's with the company for around 1 month.
The guy started speaking to me. I took off my headphones and listened, while still reading code. He told me about how he'll have to carry out the recruitment process for the support department today. And that he was told to present himself as a leader of the department, blah blah blah.
To be honest, I stopped listening at that moment. I got really pissed. And it's not because of the absolute lack of the professionalism of the company (srsly, make a new guy do recruitment work?). It's because I asked boss to get someone to help me half a year ago. He did employ around 3 new support people (4th today). But no one for me.
And he has the balls to tell me that I NEED to work harder to make it for deadline that he imposed. That he won't employ anyone new for me because new people could stole his "idea". Because MAYBE in a month one guy, a junior like me, will come back (he's on a break to finish his master thesis).
Product I'm working on is probably the main reason other companies are even buying the system he's reselling. As a student I'm working only half-time, so those deadlines are almost impossible.
I wonder how he'll manage if I'll get accepted for the work I'm currently applying.4 -
Hey devs!!
I just can't stop myself from sharing this.
Its been two years now ... my junior is working. and now she is handling standalone WP projects.. but somehow her task got stucked so I was asked to help her.
So I just said check the count of variables and she messaged me with code .. Ma'am this isn't working .. Haha.. I mean come on she better can google out atleast for syntax :(
<?php if(count($content2 == 3) && count($interestt2 == 3))
{
print_r($content2);
print_r($interestt2);
}else{
echo "not checked";
}
?>2 -
My company ex-IT Maintainer, left a long automation script in c++, bit of python 2, and bash for our server which developed long before i went to junior high school. and now, the system is outdated, and have a compability problems. so i got task to give it a fix.
when i opened the source code up. i was like; holy shit who the hell write a code especially c++ all aligned to the left, Yes All of it, not a single line are indented. but in the other side the code seems maintainable, and after autoformat, autoindent and couple of fix later, it was readable. I am just wondering who the hell in the world write a code with a style like that ???? i knew he was aware of code style and indentation since he wrote couple of python scripts. Unbelievable.
sadly i cannot show you the pict cuz of company things. -
FML having to take on and support a python test framework that looks like it was written by a junior C embedded dev without a mentor.
- Imports everywhere in the code
- No abstraction or OOP
- sys.path.append fest (broken imports of course)
- Global variables fest
- No docstrings
- No readme
- Somehow mixed with a jUnit test framework as well
- Uses Windows environment variables profusely
- Pycharm has a stroke when I open files from this project5 -
When you marvel at your code creation and the beauty of your envisionment only to be painfully whittled down as your boss tells you to change it all, because he doesn't like how the code looks. Joys of being a junior developer!1
-
Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.
My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.
We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."
As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".
His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.
But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...
Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.8 -
Hey guys, I need some junior advice. I work at a small startup in a team with 2 other backend developers.
The "new" guy studied at a university for a few years. He writes beautiful code. I try to learn from it and use his short hands a lot. I came from highschool and don't have a degree in it (yet).
I recently wrote a piece of code which handles some timeslot logic. I was really proud of it.
New guy needs to fix a bug and add a few things. He completely refactors my code and makes it more structured and partly better. The logic stayed the same.
It sort of bothers me that he touches my (precious) code. How do you guys handle these things?21 -
how do you tell a junior dev on your team there code is shit and please don't push to the main codebase without approval first,
without crushing them and and sounding like an ass cause there a good person just a n00b developer8 -
Junior newbie dev here.
I want to buy "Clean code" by Robert C Martin. Its tad bit pricy here in india.
I wanted other devs (especially senior devs) opinion on the book. Is it worth the buy ? What are your reviews ?4 -
Starting a new job tomorrow as a junior Java developer. Let's hope this works out better than my last job which was supposedly also as a java dev but involved zero code writing2
-
Today I had a full-day job interview for a junior data scientist position.
First I met the team which was only like half of everyone because apparently everyone was gone on Fridays. However the few there were really nice.
First task is to do some basic data analysis stuff even though I already spent a week on the coding challenge and sent them all my code/tasks. I log into my machine and create a new virtual environment but can't for the life of me figure out how to use the command line in windows to install packages. Turns out there is some problem with their proxy and they have to log me in on that. Then I am struggling on the keyboard because it's for a language different that my mother tongue and it takes me 3x as long to so the most simple things. All my shortcuts are out the window. Haven't a hard time typing parentheses and brackets. Start freaking out and have a panic attack mid task. I'm sweating bullets. I didn't even make it to the simple visualization tasks much less the models at the end. Time gets called and we all go to lunch and I'm freaking out on the inside the entire time. Angry at myself because I know I am better and just couldn't think.
After lunch I present my code and results from a coding challenge I did weeks prior. People from other teams get invited and I end up getting grilled for 2 hours by 15 people. Questions are flying in from all sides. They ask me almost everything I know about machine learning and some more. Under stress I forgot the name of the optimizer I used and couldn't answer some easy stuff because my mind was racing.
Right now I am on the train home and my body physically hurts. I am disappointed with myself and wish I could have shown up better. Never really froze up like this before.2 -
How do i handle code review as a junior developer?
I understand its need and I don't want to skip it.
But I feel under confident after code review when my mistakes are pointed out. They always seem so trivial and wonder how did I even miss them. How should I handle such situations? And how do I improve from here?6 -
Ok…I know I’m a junior dev and all and I have to submit to my meh leads, but I want to put this guy on company wide BLAST for editing LIVE PRODUCTION CODE without telling literally anyone for MONTHS. Like how in the fuck do you think that’s a good idea?!?!2
-
Not sure if junior dev is lying or just really bad at using the search function. He made sweeping changes in code he inherited from me and failed to find all the jQuery selectors that broke because of it. And he didn't think of clicking on all the other buttons on the page to check they are still doing their thing. Of course claiming that there is no time for testing when I pointed out his mistake. Wish he'd stop being such a bad, this is not the first time this has happened!
-
Suggest a good back end language to a junior Android developer? I am thinking of learning a back end language ( I'm leaning towards RubyOnRails) for making API and some server side code . What would you guys suggest?12
-
Junior asks me to help him with his Microprocessors project. I was like cool mail it to me I'll check it out. He sends me a .s assembly file and tells me this is machine generated code, can you make it look like it's written by a human. I was like wtf dude -_-.
-
I'm in a situation at work where management and even the team I'm on, does not want to create a test suite, because:
1. It takes time to get decent code coverage. Time that could be spend doing new features
2. My team doesn't like to test.
We're now in a situation where we break something every single fucking time we relase and the manager just ignore that it's now a common occurrence. It it literally just a matter of time before the entire fucking backend will shit itself over poorly maintenanced code (who has time to do refactoring anyway) and poorly tested flow.
It annoys me greatly that a developer with many years of experience fails to see and understand that just doing test by hand, screws us over so badly.
As a junior dev, i would like to know, how are your team dealing with testing?
Because we're clearly not...9 -
!Rant
Tldr: great spike to solve deployment problem may be a wasted effort.
Deployments of an ancient electron application need to be done in CodeDeploy to deploy the latest build. Customer hour restrictions cause this to be done only after midnight, and manually checked.
The whole team knows this is the wrong method of deployment and that there are many other operational problems with the project.
A few other senior team members get together and decide to spike out a way to use electron auto-deployment to accomplish this without using code-deploy at all.
After a shallow dive into this subject, we all get pulled aside to handle a change in another part of the software ecosystem. It happens. We leave the spike behind.
A junior-intermediate developer on the team pics the project up and gets a good spike going in a day and a half! We are all high fives and beers. This is Friday.
By Monday there is a pull request in for code review and it looks solid. Seems like it will make deployments a lot better.
Preparing the last deployment (hopefully) with CodeDeploy ever...
Marketing team members inform us that they are running an add system on the customer devices and to do it they are using Linux.
The current application being deployed is using Windows 10 (yeah, another problem).
They say they have made plans to move our application over to Linux. This means we may not be able to launch the junior devs great spike and the old deployment method may stay for the time being.
Meetings soon to find out how all of this will hash out.
End of rant. I hope I'm doing this right -
Tl;dr I am incredibly ashamed of my code at work.
I recently started working as a junior dev. I know many aspects of the stack I use, and I feel pretty comfortable when solving simple and specific problems.
But this is the first complete project I make, and I received no peer review until now. And my code sucks.
I tried my best to deliver a good and working code, but it became messy in too many places. Now it's too late to refactor.
Probably I just cannot see the right way of modeling specific situations, I don't feel I should blame the frameworks I'm using, but the point is that my code sucks. Or at least this is how I feel.
I'm going to leave this workplace soon (personal reasons, not related to this topic and/or the company), and I am kinda scared of the shit I'm about to leave to them. It's a very nice environment and they don't deserve this crap. Also I have some other good reasons to worry about this, but I cannot tell them.
My plan is to finish a couple or personal stuff I have to do and then spend as many hours I can on the project trying to finish it asap and make the code better (for now I've been working only 6hr/day).
I'm really thinking that I just suck at this.12 -
I see that many junior level programmers are being given fairly large take home programming test/projects. I think that if you interview someone and check out their git hub or discuss some code together you should not need to also do a take home test. You don't have good interviewing skills and are making your company look bad. I also think it is an incinerate way to waste a candidates time.1
-
!rant
The code I've been writing the past weeks has finally been activated in production mode yesterday, thousands of items have been processed and I'm so proud as a junior developer to have this 100% self-written program working and, above all, to create value for my co-workers :D
The code is not as beautiful as it can be, but it's a truly one-off thing that can be deleted afterwards, so it doesn't matter :)2 -
In recent time my anger comes from a junior dev who keeps saying he's got no time to test and breaks working code leading to others getting the blame and the team leader not addressing the problem.
In the past it was micro managing managers who thought they knew how to make a UI best, and also that one project where they gave a client carte blanche on changes to avoid legal trouble. Nothing more infuriating than multiple people telling you how to change things over and over while you're being passed around in their power struggle.1 -
I start my first "real" job on Monday. I will be one of roughly three new junior full stack developers on a team of 15 senior devs. The company has a casual dress code and they allow headphones. What should I expect? I want to grow and I don't want to be a nuisance, I also want to earn a reputation and become respected when I do have something to say.6
-
Is the past repeating itself? Am I in that situation again where I, as a junior developer, is left to my own devices on a project, with no code reviews, and with features being added/changed as they wish? 😟1
-
Day 3 as the Junior Dev.
Co worker fucks every time on defining functions in python
What my asshole teammate does is:
def someShitFunc():
print(shit)
And he was clearly instruct to return value not print the value what a jerk he is.
I have to fix his all problems and in meeting he brags how his code worked. What a sucker.4 -
Working on a piece of code, first created in 1994 and has had constant changes and modifications till 2014
I need to take it and turn it into a procedure library and new methods and classes and I have 3 weeks to do it.
Worst off I'm a junior programmer and I only have 9 months experience with the language5 -
So I have a colleague who never tests and claims to not have time. I've sent him various emails with errors and their solutions, because he keeps breaking my finished code and I'll find out about it by pure luck. I've informed my team lead, I've also informed HR when he got downright nasty in email. But it feels nothing gets done. Today again I get finished code back because the save function is broken. Again changes that weren't tested were made. I'm so sick of this! Do I really have to escalate this to the CEO because nobody takes responsibility? The colleague is a junior in his first role and without a degree. But in the half year I've worked here I've not seen him improve, and he recently had his one year work anniversary :/3
-
I hate these Mondays. You start really motivated after a nice weekend of seeing lots of old friends, but instead of your own work, you have to pick up the mess a coworker left for you while fleeing into holiday and because that's not frustrating enough, you try to review code from that new senior developer and get confronted with the probably most awful commit history someone ever managed to create.
Of course he also needed handholding and multiple trys to stop breaking like every coding convention we have for branch management...
I am still a junior and I feel pretty disappointed when being confronted with people being so..confused with stuff like git even though they have like 10 years of experience.
While I was still studying, I somehow imagined this industry to be much more...sophisticated?2 -
After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...
So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.
Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.
Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.
Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...
So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.
Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).
We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).
I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...
Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks... -
developer=new Developer({wantsTo:'learn/code node',tiredOf:'Java'});
try{
if(developer.applyFor(company.fullStackPosition)==='Success'){
deeloper.setLevel('Junior');
if(company.checkForJavaBackground(developer)){
javaProject.assign(developer);
developer.startCry();
developer.setLevel('Mid-high');
developer.getPaid():
developer.stopCry();
}
}
}catch(err){
console.log(err);
}1 -
Approaching the end of my first week as a junior web dev.
Spent the week writing automatic web suite tasks for an entire e-commerce platform.
Arguable the best way I could have been introduced to the code base 10/10 would recommend. -
Man, I enjoy the work I do and my boss is a great guy, but being rushed is never fun. And it's hard to say "it'll be done soon" if there's still some major features missing and the implementation is still unclear.
Can't a junior just take his time to make some decent code that won't end as spaghetti? I have enough PTSD of the first project I did here, which I still have to bugfix at least once a month 😂 -
- Am a junior dev in an awesome team & exciting project after my apprenticeship and while having just started my part time studies
- Have restructure in company so I land in an other value stream
- Get laid off by new value stream 6 months later (now) because they have a serious budget cut
- Take time to come to terms with situation. I could finally work more on my side projects or focus a bit more on my studies. Hey actually I will have 5 months time to look for something while being paid by the company and they help me brush up my CV. Pretty neat!
- Now my former boss wants me back because of my experience in the project, but only as a production support and not as dev (because budget and they're bleeding with tickets)
Not sure if I should take the offer as it feels safe to have an income and the team is cool. However, it feels a bit like a degradation as prod support sucks in that project and I'd like to code (which wouldn't be possible then).
And as this is still my first company I'm working in, it would make sense to look for something else...
Grrr need to sleep about it... Decision-making isn't exactly my strength.7 -
So i had two jobinterviews at a company and i was basically through for a test. It just so happens that the person who should give the test is sick for a couple of weeks. So instead they asked me to send them some code to evaluate.
Today i got an email telling me that the level of my code doesn’t match my years of experience so the process stops here.
Somehow i can’t help myself but to wish that the guy who evaluated my code now just is sick for at least
another moth!
Funfact: in one of the interviews i was told that they don’t work with junior people. I personally think everyones view on jobtitle/rank is different so i’m not a big fan of it in any case.
However this company LITERALLY has a blog describing how they hired someone without any working experience and thus being a junior.
Guess i’ll be stuck in my current deadend job for a while.1 -
It's funny how alcohol actually makes you remember all the crazy shit you had to deal with.
As when I was a junior c# programmer at an ERP shop.
I was new, naive and full of energy.
I used to dive deep into the code base, and one of the things I noticed but didn't pay too much attention was.
Error stacks were usually meaningless.
And why was that?
First, well it was c#.
Second, the guys use to do this.
try {
ThrowingFunction();
} catch (Exception e ) {
throw e;
}
PS: I'm not doing c# anymore, that was 10 years ago. So syntax might be a bit off.8 -
What are peoples thoughts on taking a sort of backwards step in their career in order to get more experience?
I took my current job as I thought it would be a stepping stone to go on and do more development work (it was my first dev role), but I’ve been here 4.5 years and I rarely do anything other than maybe fix a bug every now and then.
They mainly have me doing non-dev support type stuff, and they don’t use any best practices or anything like that, and I feel that I am falling behind where I should be experience wise.
I am doing a degree (distance learning with the Open University) so I am working on personal development but that’s not much help when I go to interviews.
Should I think about trying to go for junior jobs, rather than just developer jobs, and the pay cuts that may go with that, or should I just grind out leet code etc and keep booking interviews?6 -
!rant
My boss has influenced me the most at work. He was the first person to introduce me to software development. Though I'm self-taught since, I still owe him my career. Now I teach support techs and junior devs how to code, as well as oversee the architecture of major systems. It's crazy to think now that my computer building hobby would turn into something like this, and it's all because someone convinced me to try what I thought would be terribly boring. -
One my junior was trying to re-build the code for 2 hours, he tried every possible ways: clean - build - rebuild - run and tried several times changing the codes. Then asked me for help, I just stopped the current running process in task bar and rebuild it. It worked!
He started starting at me like I wrote Windows OS :) -
What to do when you think your boss sucks at a language they're developing in, but everyone assumes they are awesome because they don't know that language, and you're stuck as the junior fixing their code?
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Failed to make a decent demo for client because spaghetti code. I want to work on the project to sort out codebase to avoid same thing happening again, boss wont hear it and switches me to another project of which I have little knowledge of the stack when we have another guy who has experience in it.
My main project (the one I want to sort out) is so big it should have 4 people full time on it, but it has me and one part time outsourced contractor. I was hired as a meteor dev and he makes me work on an angular project like its totally easy to switch from meteor to node+angular+Jade.
I am a junior dev, boss has no idea how to project manage and ignores advice I give him.
This is going to be hell when we miss deadlines and have to explain to the client why their product has so many bugs.2 -
How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?
I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..
70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.
My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.
I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…
My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.
Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.
I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.6 -
Why do I always have to refactor bad written code ? Is this some kind of karma ?
Undocumented, written by a senior but looks like it was a junior, no unit tests, variables with meaningless names, duplicated code and every possible thing you can find in that kind of code.3 -
Commented on a hacky pull request that the junior dev called the same method twice for no reason.
Junior dev didn't get it and asked me to explain in person.
I went over and traced the code, finally he understood my comment. Then he said "Yes, I call it twice"in a tone that as if there's nothing wrong in that statement.
🤦♂️2 -
Junior Dev about 18months in my current job and I've got a problem
Started to feel not wanting to code at work, despite working on a greenfield project thats critical and using new tech. I get a little defensive about PR's over stupid small things (PR was once rejected due to auto indentation "not to standard").
Talked with boss (who I get on well with and like) and thinks my problem is I've lost confidence coding. Trys to get more senior Dev to on side to help me out more.
Same senior Dev is really close with other junior on my team - pair on alot of stuff all the time, have lunch and spend free time together, and will work way past working hours just to try and finish something that day (even though it's not due that day).
(Probs working ~60h weeks, where as I'm ~42h and contracted for 37h. I'll work on if I need to but tries to have balance)
Senior and other junior tend to ignore tickets on the board, do the work and then when I pick it up they say "I did that last night". No docs, no PR for me to ask about how it was done (as they merged it themselves). (They have previously completely refactored my branch in the past overnight then not told me atall)
I'm not saying its favouritism here, but I'm not happy with the situation. I feel I can't ask questions as they are always together or they discuss the problem themselves and just give me the answer (not really acknowledging my points). I dont tend to ask for help from this senior Dev now as I don't feel it's worthwhile learning wise for me.
Other people in the team are great but working on other aspects so not a direct one-to-one alignment (others are DB Dev & principal senior dev)
Furthermore I'm wanting to possibly work on full stack web or more architecture stuff, both which are not in my current teams remit (backend up to API).
So - what do I do? Try and remedy the situation in the current team as best as or look for a new teams as cut my losses.
I'm torn between the 2 and I'm unsure how to get out this rut. I feel I need to find a solution to this soon though
(Sorry for the long rant folks)4 -
I've been training a few junior devs for about a month in the use git and adopting to a collaborative team workflow. My blood is boiling at this point. As part of the training we had the junior team build an iOS app. Their solution was for each of the to have a git repo of their own and a master repo for everyone. If they can get it to work in their individual repos, they would move that code over to the master repo. This seemed to have worked for them but it's completely wrong in trying to understand how integrating their work by the hour or so would benefit everyone involved and ultimately how that can influence the quality of the product. So I highlighted the problem with the individual repos and encouraged the use of a single remote repo. OOP is none existent all the code is slapped into a view controller. I have about given up. Let's see what this week will bring.3
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Just need to vent out a bit. There's already been a few times at work where the senior developer asks me why I take so long to do something, and I'm unable to fully explain why.
Now, I could think of several reasons. Maybe it's my lack of experience; I just start researching on Google for solutions, start putting things together, and then I guess things start to get too complicated for me to be able to explain clearly. Maybe I end up "over-engineering" to solve problems that could be solved in a simpler way.
And this leads to my second reason, and that is there's no code review going on. I've wanted to just tell him, "If you'd just take a long look at my code, you'd understand why it's taking me so long! So you can tell me if I'm doing it right or wrong, or if I'm making it too complicated!" But, of course, being the junior developer, I also think that when he's explaining how to do something, I'm just not understanding it right.
I could ask for clarifications, and believe I've done that on some things, but my third reason is that he's just not good at explaining things, or that there's some miscommunication happening. English isn't his first language. His English is ok, but I know there's a lot of room for improvement. I also notice that our other co-workers are also having a bit of a hard time but it seems they already developed some sort of adaptation to communicate with him.
So yeah, there's my rant, and I'd love to know everyone's input on this. -
Any good advice for managing junior developers?
In my experience I have found that loose definitions of work to be completed yields poor results. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if I have to write the code structure and leave a bunch of TODO comments for people to fill in.
Or alternatively people get going on tangents without thinking of the concrete problem given.
Or go try building generic abstractions that are unneeded and will not be reused complicating even the simplest use case.
Maybe the problem is in me and that I am not clear in communicating what's needed. What techniques do you guys use to get more or less what you want?7 -
My friend asked me to forward his website along with Github profile to Software Engineers to take a look at his current profile. https://github.com/DawidCyron
https://dawidcyron.me
What do you think about the code? Seems good to me, but I would like to know what you think. Also, with 2 more Java API projects and 2 Mobile Apps, could he try applying for Junior jobs?5 -
Now as I am refactoring the internal codebase of my company
I understand how important it is to have a good code documentation and writing patterns.
And also how much it is important to help his a junior when someone is in senior position when the junior was given the task of refactoring the internal codebase.
It's such a pain the brain situation these days for me. The documentation is not properly matched here and there and code writings are random. It makes me hates the code.3 -
I’m trying to update a job posting so that it’s not complete BS and deters juniors from applying... but honestly this is so tough... no wonder these posting get so much bs in them...
Maybe devRant community can help be tackle this conundrum.
I am looking for a junior ml engineer. Basically somebody I can offload a bunch of easy menial tasks like “helping data scientists debug their docker containers”, “integrating with 3rd party REST APIs some of our models for governance”, “extend/debug our ci”, “write some preprocessing functions for raw data”. I’m not expecting the person to know any of the tech we are using, but they should at least be competent enough to google what “docker is” or how GitHub actions work. I’ll be reviewing their work anyhow. Also the person should be able to speak to data scientists on topics relating to accuracy metrics and mode inputs/outputs (not so much the deep-end of how the models work).
In my opinion i need either a “mathy person who loves to code” (like me) or a “techy person who’s interested in data science”.
What do you think is a reasonable request for credentials/experience?5 -
First rant ever:
So I occasionally have to work for managers who say things like: "Don't reformat that code, the diff will look confusing in our repo browser". Said with such conviction that they initially made me feel retarded when I was more junior.
As time went on I realized that if we tried to "preserve" code so that the only changes visible were those that resulted in functional changes to our app, our code would eventually degrade into a steaming pile of unreadable piss.
I thankfully am working for a more technical manager at the moment so I don't have this issue and can make small refactors to make the codebase less gagworthy as I go.
I don't know though, maybe I'm wrong. Thoughts?2 -
Mid - senior dev (L from now on) comes in on a project to help out. Starts working on creating a dashboard for the application. Work is progressing, new ideas come in, team lead (TL) is ok with everything, business analyst (BA) is also ok. The dashboard even gets thru testing (T), everything is great. In comes (A), a (probably bored) junior backend dev.
A little backstory about (A):
- seated right next to (TL)
- most discussion about every developed feature take place at (TL)-s desk, right next to (A)
- (A) was also present when discussions took place between (TL) and (BA) about dashboard
- (A) could have easily heard any number of the other team members (over 15) talk about the dashboard
Well, (A) comes into the picture ... and the dashboard (first page after login, big shiny new thing, working just fine ...) breaks. Well, breaks is a little understated. Disappears would be more exact. Cause (A) commented it out. NOT deleted from code. JUST commented out the code.
But why you ask? Because he didn't know what it did and why it was there.
No asking around, no looking up history in repository, no looking up tasks that might be related to that ... no nothing.
He's a backend dev, there's something new and unknown in the backend, the new thing has to go.
(L) didn't scream, (TL) didn't scream, (BA) didn't scream, (T) didn't scream ...
I almost screamed. This didn't happen to me, or (A) would have screamed!3 -
Some Coworker - developing about 20 years with WinForms and very ugly code.
Me - Junior Dev about 4 years now started with WPF and not long ago with MVVM.
Me trying to teach him some MVVM... Just frustrating. Like talking against a Wall..
Getting a headache now. I need a stressball -.-1 -
What to do as junior, if multiple seniors (4) aren't in sync with each other. Following different convention on same client's project. Even after 3 years they didn't able come up with seemless infrastrure. The code is getting ugly day by day. No review happens. Is that normal? As they are not in sync, we, juniors are frequently getting confused what to do. What could be done? I'm planning to leave the project somehow. Don't know what to do. 😑6
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I know a senior developer that knows quite a bit, im glad, this is how we grow. He has a habbit of wanting to be the main attraction in all conversations, either tlaking louder than others or sticking to a point in a subject he is not correct in to try force his opinion (i dont speak kuch around him because of this exact reason).
Today we talking about react, we have been working together as i am suppose to transition into senior and we are going incremently rewrite the application in react. So learning react was fun as you could imgine. I came from a background already knowing this and being exposed and that is react and react native. For skme reason i let him talk but he doesnt me especiallt knowing im correcr about something because we have the internet to check things. He looks at me and literally goes red in his face when i suggest standards that would make the code easier to read. Less to type and all the small things and showing him old things i worked on to give a base for him to work off and be there when he needs. Allnhe does is complain and i dont know how to tell him he has a way of approaching a situation not the best andni worry for other junior/mid developers that has to work with him because he will make them believe they are wrong and when they arent hust because he wont calm his ego. We are suppose to be in the community all together to build platforms and progress the sector and better the lives of people. Not waste time picking on eachother. We have prefeences abd we can debate that is important as it allows us to doubt and then make us want to learn more. I just wish there was a way to tell him because we all know. Noone would want to work with someone that is suppose to better you in your career and as a person1 -
Isn’t it delightful when you come in to a large project to discover that they have a large underlying core that no one wants to touch but everyone relies on.
Quickly perusing the code you realize that the base was clearly created by someone who found their first tutorials for Java, but were previously a c developer.
It’s funny cause this code is of course from ~20 years ago and in different sections you can tell they were a C developer, a business admin, a Db admin, a junior conforming to pressures from others.
I recently looked at the deep rooted abuses of Java beans, and this entire internally created state management engine that serves no purpose but to create contrived complexity.
The use of propriety tools, that they paid lots for that perform incredibly simple tasks that have long since been solved by the open source community. Many of which are long defunct.
And the constant focus is on monkey patching the engine to solve small issues, which bloat the time to deal with issues. Since everything needs to be tested by their methodologies.
The inability to understand that the underlying structure is the issue and that tackling that, rather than just shifting the entire solution to new languages will suddenly solve the problems(or other underlying systems).
It’s just sad.1 -
Me: 'if you can, favour code that reads like prose. It is easier to understand and maintain'
Junior: myMethod(x.method()) << 52 -
Hey fellow devs,
i finally did it! i applied as a junior dev in a software company for inHouse projects. the job interview is today in one week.
little background story for those of you who are just procastinating at this time:
i have started coding when i was in school. just little stuff - nothing special. after i finished school i edjucated in the business field (did not found the english word. something like office person or in our words "user").
after that my company changed the ERP System and i wanted to do that so badly. and i got that job. i worked my ass of to get that baby running. from entering the orders to production to shipping and billing, i made that all happen by myself. as we had some very specific requirements i also wrote applications myself. after about three quarters of a year we switched to the new system and it ran smoothly (company is producing windows and doors). i was so proud when the first windows were finished.
BUT there was one problem. I was alone. no second it person i could talk to. no one i could learn from and no one who could learn from me. i then decided to change the company. same product, same job - but within a team. It was a whole other experience. i really enjoy the exchange with my colleagues. we learn from each other and we solve problems together. we can rely on each other. As i worked there i also wrote applications for inHouse usage and i even launched my own first app (not related to company - private commercial project)
BUT there is one problem. I am still the only dev. so i try to code the lease i can at my current job so that the team still works and the whole system stays maintainable for everyone. I do not feel good holding back the desire to code something. so after two years (and with a lot of talks with my cousin) i finally applied for a job as a "real" developer.
I have no bachelor, so the invitation for the job interview made me so damn happy. i really hope that i can transmit my passion for this job and if everything fits that they take me.
The next rant will then be about the result of my job interview :)
PS: even if i do not get the job. i am proud of myself that i applied!
Thanks for reading, potato potato1 -
I am planing to create a reading list for technical books and am looking for recommendations.
Currently I have:
- Spark: The definitive Guide (need it for a university project)
- Clean Code
- Clean Architecture
- Functional Programming, simplified (or any other beginner-friendly book about FP)
Do you have any recommendations and must-reads for a more junior developer? I am looking for stuff about FP, Code Quality, Java, Python, Scala, and any general interesting technical stuff.3 -
My main project in work is making program in C# (right now .NET Standard) that can read scans of invoices that are sent from contractors. I'm working on it for almost two years now (with breaks and only halftime because university). Alone. And for last two months I've been redesigning, refactoring and making whole app "better", using experience and knowledge gained in the last two years.
Obviously my boss wasn't happy with that but I got him to accept it, promising that it'll make it work faster, expansion will be simpler and I'll make core as a separate library that can be used anywhere, not only in the JobRouter ecosystem.
And so I reworked most of the code, made it cleaner, I hope, and a tad quicker. And I was happy with it while testing on a package of invoices. Today I made first integration with customer's JobRouter.
The results aren't any better - in some cases they are much worse. Especially while searching for invoice entries, which can be in any shape or form and on any of document's pages.
I guess, being a Junior, I wasn't really up to the task. I'm sick of working on a "guessing" program that has to work with every invoice template users can imagine. I'm sick of not getting any recognition for what I did good. And I'm sick of constantly being pushed to make it work better when I just don't have any more ideas or my skills are just lacking.
To be honest, I don't know what to do. I'll probably have to work on making it search the data better. But it's not trivial to just look at the code and see errors. Iterating on the code while working with different invoices worked for a bit in older versions, but I reached the point where changes made to make one invoice be read better, made another one worse.
Its like on those GIFs where you squish one bug to make another two appear.
So yeah, I'm currently really doubting my career, skills and intelligence.8 -
While logging a boatload of bugs on the code my junior dev checked in, I added a couple of items to our product backlog.
Instead of fixing his bugs, junior dev started pulling things from the backlog. I found this out when he messaged me about the requested search results sorting.
His message was:
"hey, the sorting is going to be harder than I thought. Angular 2 dropped native support of filters. But I did find an MIT licensed npm package that should let me add sorting functionality to our JSON data objects. "
Um... You know you can sort using plain JavaScript, right?
BTW, junior dev has more than 3 years of professional experience in addition to a degree.6 -
Our lead dev has convinced the board to move the new software suite forward into .Net Core 3. Much of his reasoning is sound, a mainstay of which is the cost and ease of hiring developers to actually make and maintain it.
My own roadmap with the company focuses around one of these products, so I am to become the core developer and maintainer. Given thats the case, given that my primary skill is with Javascript/Node and given that we have deadlines, I am going to make the case today that this product might be better built in Node.
We are going for a microservices architecture. Combined with Typescript for type safety as the code base gets bigger, I am not sure I can think of many real advantages to choosing .NET instead. It will benefit from its async I/O later too, as the plan is to build in API driven dynamic UI down the road.
He is a fierce man, and I am the junior. Wish me luck.7 -
At what point do you say a junior dev is no longer a junior? What metrics do you use? Like scope of knowledge, impact on team / code decisions, years experience, management skills, etc.?
I feel I'm qualified as a mid level developer now despite only being a junior for a little over a year. I had tons of internships in college and was kind of placed in a role where growing fast was required.
I broke a sweat for most of that ~1 year I worked as a junior and my contributions to my project aren't insignificant
I don't say that to toot my own horn here, I really do want to ground myself in reality. But I don't know if my standards are too low or my organizations standards are too high. FWIW, other devs on my team have commented privately / informally that the junior title isn't super fitting.
I'm still pretty dependent on my boss but that's more for final say of things. He'll often have some input to my work but I'll also be involved with design discussion and take up a large chunk of work without question. On light sprints I'm knocking out 20+ taskhours of work, going closer to 30/40 when things pick up. Not uncommon to kill 10 user stories in a sprint.
I don't know, what do you guys think?8 -
https://remotelyawesomejobs.com/job...
Looking at the "ideally you should" sections doesn't make me feel this is a junior position:
You are passionate about making data useful to the lay-person, there is no data you couldn’t derive visual meaning from. D3.js is your go to and Canvas is your friend.
You build components in your sleep, rock solid and performant using atomic design patterns.
You bend CSS processors to your will or throw them out and code by hand.1 -
I’m the only junior software engineer at a small startup where I do mostly web development, as well as other bits and pieces (automation, ci/cd, etc)
Our software team is extremely small so we do not have anyone dedicated to QA. I usually just ask a team members with related experience to review my merge requests. So if I have a merge request for our ci/cd, I ask the software engineer with the most ci/cd experience to review the MR.
Recently I realized that my MRs will usually sit for days, and sometimes weeks without the reviewers taking a look. And when they eventually do, they don’t even run the code. It seems like they just gloss over it and look for obvious syntax or logic errors.
It makes me feel as if my code and efforts do not have much value to our team.
It also pisses me off because whenever a issue happens in our codebase, me and my code is the first thing blamed even if my code is not the issue
Is this typical in other companies? Or is this something I should speak to my boss about?4 -
In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...
As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.
1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.
3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.
Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.
4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)
5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.
6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)
7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that
8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.
9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.
And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.
10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.4 -
I just got a new job as Web Director, leading a team of 4 (junior and mid level) developers. Thankfully I still get to write code, albeit less. After 7 years of development out of college, I am finally making the salary I dreamed of. What are some tips to make sure I can succeed in this position, and not have my team hate me?3
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!rant
Hey folks, I need some tricks. I am currently a junior dev and struggle with starting side projects. I have some fancy ideas I'd love to work on. Problem is, I HATE UI design. I can't start working on an idea because I want them to look awesome. It is absolutely no problem to code the logic / backend, but the fucking design... I just hate it.
For example, I have some fancy ideas for an file manager that fits my needs. Haven't seen something yet like I imagine right now. I mainly code in C# (or Java) and I have to develop custom UI controls for it, align shitty controls, think about freaking color schemes,... I hate it. I simply hate it.
Do you also struggle with that? Any ideas how to overcome that?
Cheers!4 -
Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.
That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.
Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.
Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.
That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic
Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.
It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.
In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.
If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.
For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.
The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.
Good luck!6 -
Junior Dev: Today I'm porting my (TDD'd) C++ code to C# but having loads of issues.
Me: You should throw away the code, port the tests across and write the code again.
Junior Dev: I think I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.
Me: *triple face plant* -
I started learning to program through my junior and senior year of high school. It was a required 2-days-a-week course where we learned basic JavaScript on Codeacademy and mapped out logic gates. Loved every second of it.
Since then, I've been using Free Code Camp, many Codeacademy courses, and many YouTube videos alongside my practice. -
!rant
I’m thinking about switching job and trying a consult company and be a consultant.
I’m trying to get a grip if it’s any difference between that and being a developer at my current company.
I try to google but the result varies from “This is the best job ever!” To “This is the worst job ever!”.
I talked to a colleague of mine awhile back that said all in all there isn’t any difference. The code is the same, the work methods are the same and so on. One difference is that you can work at a project for one year and then you never see it again. Which is good if it’s a bad project and bad if it’s a fun project.
Another difference that he mentioned is that you have to make every hour count and you have to do something that the company can get paid for. And this is what makes me think twice. I’ve worked with IT for about 7 years but I’ve only been a developer for 1,5-2 years. I don’t know if I can produce as much as they want, being a junior developer and all, and maybe stay where I am for a year or two.
Do you guys have any thoughts about being a consult? Experiences, stories? All is welcome :) -
How do you normally train junior PHP devs?
1. Tell them to figure it out themselves which definitely take longer time
2. Spoon-fed what they need to do which hopefully will make them understand something (?)
3. Others
I hardly ever have a good senior dev above me that can teach me. So I'm really open to any suggestions.
Some of the problem of what I see in my junior devs:
- inconsistent lines and spaces (lol)
- multiple unused db calls
- not reading requirement properly
- not diving through the code and try to understand it properly (usually needs to be handheld which is understandable since they are new)3 -
I was having a weird time playing manager because we had none. And the new one kind of sucks and it is too junior for the role. Acting as TL too and had almost no time to code or do PRs. And. Gee. Yesterday I went back to coding after a few months. And I found out that We have a team member that just shits all over the code. Tests that are invalid, basically testing nothing. Methods done apparently for no reason. It took me a good deal of time to sort things thru. And now I'm at a point where I can finally do some reviews. Long day today.1
-
2nd week at my first job after I got my papers and what am I doing?
Background:
I followed a course of three years where all we learnt was web development with php and javascript. I of course wanted more and spend hours after school learning as much as a could without any help from others.
About the course:
We learn to tinker with code (php, javascript).
There was never a mention of design patterns.
We never got to know about TDD (test driven development).
Now:
Got the papers, found a job as a c# junior development and am currently working on a C# .NET web app using azure cloud and high standards using unit tests to provide a product for the awesome company I work at which should generate a stable income.
Tldr;
Hard work pays off. -
Getting ready to start sending out applications for junior dev positions.
What would you suggest should I look into/repeat/prepare for possible interview questions? For example, typical algorithms they might ask me to code?
I already have a list but maybe you have even more ideas to add :)4 -
Junior: "I've deleted the unnecessary migration files after a rollback, just like you recommended me, but the DB-table that tracks which migrations where run still shows them after running migrations"
Me: "That shouldn't happen 🤔 How did you delete them?"
J: "I deleted the code in the Up and down scripts"....
Is it so hard to understand that a migration will "run" even if it doesn't do anything?4 -
Not a horror. I'm rewriting services.
It started as a help request. I was asked to help with completing a service dealing with push notifications which was a research prototype. It was suggested to keep core part of it, but it was so awful that I just removed all files and wrote the service from scratch.
The second service had been developed for more than a year by a junior and then by our manager who wanted to complete it as fast as possible, without taking care of code quality. Then I was asked to take over the project and after some time I agreed with one condition: I'll have 1 month on takeover. But when I looked at the code, it became clear that it's much faster and better to rewrite everything except API and database than to takeover existing code.
The third service dealing with file exchange was working, but the junior who wrote it advised to rewrite it because it was a very simple service. So, I initiated rewriting, designed a new API and reviewed the final result.
And now I'm dealing with the fourth one. It was developed in my team but not under control. Now, when I "inherited" this complicated project, I decided to rewrite it because it should be simple, but it doesn't. It features reflection, layers inside layers, strange namespaces, strange solution structure. And that's after months of refactorings and improvements. So, wish me luck because I want to keep part of the infrastructure, but I don't know if it's possible. -
Junior Colleague: can you help me fix this small issue in my code? I believe it's located in this file...
Me: *spends half an hour deleting console.log, inline comments and blank lines*7 -
Tomorrows meeting couldn't be more messed up
•boss(we are kind a thing now)and her ex sitting at the same table while she tries not to kill him
•me sitting there with someone else's shitty website with 20 day old code to show as a back end (previous dev was a cunt and deleted all copies from everywhere)
•them expecting a junior dev to build a whole accounting package on the 20day old code
•deadline 3weeks
• crying on the inside 😱😱😱5 -
I am an intern and was put into a fresh project to do node back end. They didn't really give me any supervisor because the company lacks employees and has too many projects, and they were afraid I won't do myself. I was assigned to a front end oriented colleague to make a team, and cooperation with him is really demanding. After a month, a company that outsourced for us did a complex code review and said we wrote some darn good code, and they were said we are both mids (while colleague is a fresh Junior with an intern by his side). Damn it felt good :)
And also our pair is said to be the only Dev team in the whole company that can call client for itself, without PM or any host of the call, as others, with a lot of experience, need to be guided through each call :D -
@highlight
disabled: Set<string> = new Set();
@highlight
<input
class="form-control"
id="pushBack"
type="text"
[attr.disabled]="disabled.has('pushBack') ? ' ' : null"
[(ngModel)]="local.pushBack"
/>
---
Do you know what's wrong with this code? If you know and you are a junior how would you tell this to your super boss without hurting his feelings?7 -
Brilliant rant from Redditor OK6502 in a thread about a "tech screen" being used to get free labor:
Usually when something like this uses the words complex tech stack it means you're going to have to deal with shitty server code distributed over a mix of Azure and AWS nodes and a lone Linux server running under someone's desk, an infuriating configuration hell with no safeguards for keeping dev and prod isolated, a hodge podge of different scripting languages (why not make scripts in pero that call power shell which then calls more perl? Should work right?) and random but critical shit checked into 3 different SVN, stuff stashed on people's shares that will never be checked even though you can't do your homework b without it, usually copied from someone else's share who left the company 3 years ago, no QA process to speak of (while claiming to be agile, somehow) and a front end that is maintained by one exhausted junior dev who inherited a mess of 20 different js frameworks that all load at the same time with every single click, somehow.
The full thread is really worth reading:
https://reddit.com/r/... -
My team and me nearly finished a big new feature for our website.
I am a junior dev and this was the first big thing I was in charge of and now that I see how it unfold I feel really bad.
It consists of php backend (integrated into a 20 years old monolith) and vue frontend (punctually jumpstarted by a clusterfuck of typescript files included into php rendered html) and especially the frontend part looks so bad.
Vue is relatively young in our project and almost nobody has a clue about it. I learned so much about vue in the process, but the result is a behemoth of awfulness that grew over several months.
I have a really strong desire rewrite the whole mess, but I will never be officially allowed because it works and practically all the flaws in our code base are subject to the classic
"well, someday, somebody probably has to do something about that, but for now let's start this shiny new feature"
So for now I think about doing it secretly and pass it to my buddy to review it. I guess chances are high that not even the colleagues in my team (apart from my buddy) are going to notice, since they aren't as interested into vue as I am and don't have the overview over this features code as I do, but on the other hand it feels like something I could get in trouble for and apart from the cursed code base my company is great.
Have you ever bin that disgusted by your own production code before it was even one year old?3
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