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.

Me - "Has anyone changed the password on the print computer"
Him - "It's the same one."
Me - "Carrots99?"
Him - "Yeah, what's the message that comes up?
Me - "Password is incorrect."

The dumbest conversation I've ever had in my fucking life. You little shit, I know you changed the password just to fuck with people. You've been reading too many books on elevating yourself, tried to be important for something. It means fuck all if you can't remember what you changed it to. So you held up two hours of my work, not to mention everyone else, because you can't help but stick your beak in shit. You dont think people can't see what youre doing? Watching you scurry over to the computer with a big smile, only a to fuck off silent as a mouse not to be seen mumbling some shit about a system administrator. Yeah you forgot it you prick.

Stop sucking up to the boss, and commanding people on what to do, when you're as junior as junior gets. Don't change our fucking passwords, just so you can have the whole team approach you the next day asking for you, then not remember them. You cunt.

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

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.

!!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.

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

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 :/

We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.

The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.

The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.

He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.

I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.

"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says

Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.

This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)

I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.

He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"

The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"

He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.

(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)

Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.

"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"

PM : Have you finished the login issues?
Me, junior dev: No mister.
PM: Why not? You're going to delay the sprint.
Me: The other PM told me not to do it.

When you're the only dev in a project with two managers, life suddenly feels like you're back to 5 years old with your parents arguing all the time.

Dear senior developer with xx years of development experience, please, I BEG OF YOU hear my humble unprofessional opinion.

Not every junior is a inexperienced low life.

Even though I'm glad that I'm working with someone of your wide skill set and expertise, I'm not working with you by choice nor it is my intention to distract or "steal" your knowledge.

When I suggested using a newer version of jQuery for this new project that didn't mean I'm challenging you to work on something new for your domain, I'm merely suggesting this change because jQuery 1.2 is just old and a big portion of it is deprecated.

When I suggest some changes on your CSS selectors that doesn't mean I'm acting out of place, it is my genuine interest of having effecient css where possible.

I know you (in your opinion) are the best full stack developer in the industry, but maaaan you kill me when you use js and regex to validate input type=email (table filp) ... Haalllloooo it's 2017 this Sunday aren't we supposed to progress instead of remaining in the same old same ?

RANT!!!

Start-up: hires 3 junior devs to save money.

Start-up: expects things to get done faster-- BUT-- Start-up keeps adding things to the TO-DO list and backlog-- i.e. it's all relative!!

Start-up: gets angry at 3 junior devs why they can't deliver when they keep adding tasks and ask we fall behind.

Dev team: "Seriously? You hire more devs to finish tasks faster, but you keep adding more than are being finiahed-- obviously it's gonna take longer now regardless"

Git --pull life together

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.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

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.

!rant

At my last job, my boss would constantly tear my work apart, belittle me and patronise me. He didn't really understand web development and just wanted to hire someone to do it for him. I ended up burning out and he persuaded me to quit because of it cause he didn't want to go through the whole disciplinary process (because he had no real reason).

A year later, and I've had my first review with my current boss, who's also a developer. He said he's learned a lot from me, I've helped the business and the junior devs grow; and that he struck gold in hiring me. I've got no feelings of burnout and I actually enjoy going to work now.

I'll be the first person to say that I'm not the best developer on my team and my new boss was probably exaggerating with me a little bit, but it goes to show that the people you work with are some of the most important people in your life.

Dropped out after 4 months at Uni when I realised that I will learn absolutely nothing useful for my future career. We were either learning HTML/CSS or coding calculators in C# . At this point I was already writing my own PHP CMSs with huge databases for real life clients. I guess I can only blame my course level and maybe I could go someplace else but it probably wouldn't be so much different.

A month after I dropped out I got my first job as a junior Drupal developer. That was 7 years ago, now I'm a FrontEnd dev in a really great environment and throughout the years no one looked at my grades or even asked for them.

Experience and passion as as valuable if not more as your education.

More of a question than a rant. What to do regarding programming.

I'm self taught, php, c, c#, and I make stupid little programs that make my life easier as a sys admin.

I want to ask, how do I take things further? Where I'm from, it's really hard to get a job as a programmer without 5 years experience and knowledge in 5 other languages.

Do I try and make bigger apps to showcase myself and hope someone finds me, or what do I do in this instance. I'm not a fully fledged coder, but I'm comfortable and if I don't know something i learn it pretty quickly.

Is there a way that you get a job, even as a junior? Or is it pure luck?

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

TL;DR: shitty day, but stickers made my day

First off, I'd like to thank @dfox and @trogus for the stickers.

I had a really shitty day, It started off something like this. Usual day at University, faculty not teaching anything. Messed up shit with the girl I like very much, still not talking at this point. Pretty much downhill. Start teaching myself some Android, while this junior comes up me to be like 'please teach me this', ok sure. He fucking leaves the moment I start installing homebrew on his mac and says "you exploiting my mac", NO FUCKER I NEED A PACKAGE MANAGER TO GET PACKAGES YOU DUMB FUCK. Further, that day, come to know its half day and not going to learn shit. WTF! But still, I get attendance so it's good. I suggest going to this new cool place to grab lunch. the girl I like goes like this "Let's GO TO JAILLLLLLLLL, IT'S COOL PLACE TO HANGOUTTTTT" , LIKE. WHY THE FUCK YOU WANT TO HANG OUT AT A PLACE WHICH LITERALLY IS NAMED 'JAIL'. Fuck it, let's go. SO. FUCKING. NEGATIVE. PLACE. Food is ok, not good, ok. I'm fucked up and sad at this point because love of my life is hanging out with other people, I'm ended up in the shit corner of the world, with shit food. AND I HAVEN'T DONE ANY THING PRODUCTIVE.

But in the end of the day, I reach home. open gates see this parcel and I'M HAPPY AS FUCK. IT'S FUCKING STICKERS, OMG.

Seeing those stickers I realized I don't need to be sad anymore. Writing this post just to thank this amazing community and the members in it. I love you guys all, :) <3

Not sure if this is necessarily a prank, but I was working on a team that was split in 2. We had a group of senior devs in one country, and junior devs in another (god only knows why, and yes I complained about this a lot).

The "lead" of the juniors was very stubborn and refused to adhere to the official standards, as his way was better.

I was working on an app with him, I was fed up with how badly the app was working, how hard it was to find files etc. So I waited for him to be off on holidays and pulled some extra hours to completely re-do the folder structure, rip out his persistence layer and a few other things.

When he came back he lost his shit and complained to the architect. The architect (also fed up with his shit) told him that we don't have the time to invest in reverting back everything, and loosing all the new features I added on top, especially since the app is now adhering to standards.

Never felt such satisfaction in my life.

From a life of a junior developer...
Got assigned one task for a 2 week sprint. 'Finished' it in 3 day, not actually sure it's finished as all the other devs are too busy to look at the pull request. So here I am... Ranting away and being bored

Been studying front end development on my spare time for the past 8 months and tomorrow I got a interview for a position at a company as a junior Dev.
Even if I don't get it, it tells me that I'm on the right direction.
One can change their life by putting in some work.

Not a rant, I know but I'm so happy I felt like sharing. Soon I'll hopefully have some rants to share ;)

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.

As someone deeply questioning their life and career choices as of now, I wouldn't want to become a dev anymore because:
- you spend most of your time burning your eyes on a monitor and getting terrible back pain
- you might sell your soul to company benefits whose only purpose is to make you distracted from the fact that you're basically spending 1/3 of the day wishing you were doing something you actually want to do
- might have to do some exhausting communication ooga boogas to understand what supervisors and your other colleagues want to say (in a small company setting)
- again, as in my previous rant, if you're not on some less disposable dev position, you could as well become something else given that junior salaries are not that high
- get into an unhealthy work world where little hours of sleep, overworking, and other such unhealthy lifestyles are praised or used to determine your worth

Of course, these differ on a case by case basis. I'd become a train driver or something if I still didn't have to eat and not throw more money at a career change
Life's tough

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

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 ;)

My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.

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.

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

Im now working as a fulltime dev for 3 years. I do programming since im 9 and now that I collected some experience, I have to to say, its horrible. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with german internship companys? Letting me do 3 years of FUCKING CRYSTAL REPORTS. IN A DEVELOPMENT TEAM THAT CONSISTS OF A TEAM LEAD THAT ACTUALLY HAS TO LEARN SHIT LIKE PROPER OOP AND ASYNC/AWAIT FROM ME. THEY EVEN ASKED ME IF I CAN DROP OF MY HOBBY PROJECTS TO WORK ON SAMPLES THAT THEY CAN LEARN FROM! NO! FUCK! JUST BECAUSE THESE DOUCHBAGS ARE TOO LAZY TO FUCKING LEARN TECHNOLOGY THEY SHOULD BE PASSIONATE ABOUT IN THEIR FREE TIME, IM NOT MAKING IT MY JOB TO FREAKING SHOW THEM THAT HAVING A STATIC CLASS CONTAINING ALL MODELS EVER EXISTED IN THE APP IS A BAD THING! SERIOUSLY, THERES ONLY ONE INSTANCE OF EVERY MODEL WE HAVE! AND THEN THEY BLAME SQL SERVER FOR RACE CONDITIONS WHEN TRYING ASYNC!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!! AND STILL, IF I TELL THEM WHATS WRONG, IM AN IDIOT BECAUSE IM A JUNIOR! Please tell me that i didnt waste 10 years of my life dedicating to such bullshit. Will that change? Is it company specific?

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.

That moment when you are in a meeting with your seniors and no one is accepting your ideas, but you are still happy cause you don't have to work and you can day dream.

When I was a junior engineer I used to hate writing unit tests but now I look forward to writing them.

Well written Unit tests will save your life

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?

Former classmate: Our alma mater is looking for alumni to participate in career day. Share what skills you need and the steps you took for your career path!

Me: Thanks for the invite. But I’m not a good role model for this.

FC: Why not? You’re a successful engineer!

Me: So I used my full tuition university scholarship on an art degree because I was too depressed after a long physical illness. Oh, and for some reason a lot of y’all assumed I went to a private uni when I went to the public uni. Then I went to graduate school immediately after and during a recession and ended up with tens of thousands in student debt. Then I did a lot of part time jobs before going to a shady coding bootcamp. I’m lucky to have encountered an advocate and a company willing to take me on as a junior dev. I’m pretty sure I was a diversity hire and I was definitely underpaid. I’m lucky to have moved on from there and to be thriving now. I’d tell the students to skip college (like I had considered) and go into a trade. And I’d also tell them a lot of life is luck and not just hard work.

FC: 😧

I am a young junior with a big dick who gratuated top in my class so now Im making 300k a year in this first job in a fortune 5000 company. However Im not happy and I think I want more from life. What I should do? /s

Typical /r/cscareerquestions post

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.

Had my junior test at work yesterday, and...oh boy. I don't think I've ever been so stressed in my life.

>inb4 "welcome to the real world kid"

Yeah yeah I know but god damn, this was too much. I heard from seniors that you get used to everyday stress, it comes with the job, but junior test ( aka "stress test") is the breaking point for most "new" arrivals.

The test itself tho is not even that hard. Dealing with so much stress and time pressure for the first time is what gets you. Not knowing what happens if you don't pass certainly doesn't help.

I broke down at one point and even after finishing, going home (got no sleep) and coming back today, that feeling of hopelessness is still there.

No real point to this rant, I just needed to vent

Last week I got told by an incoming CTO, a week old to the organisation, that I'm good for nothing and unable to produce any work. He told me that he'll replace me and put me in a team where I'm more resourceful as I have been consistently underperforming. (He doesn't understand data science yet fyi) Then, he informed he's hiring 5 new teams members.

Me (junior data scientist) being really passionate about work was shook to hear this. So much so that it took me a week to even recover from it. I have considered counselling sessions too.

Week later, 5 new team members decide to flip his offer and not join. Another existing senior member decides to leave as well. Meanwhile, major issues in existing systems emerge and only I could solve the same. Still haven't heard back any from him though.

Is this the industry standard though ? Is this how CTOs normally function ? Throwing shit at people without knowing their value or valuing their efforts ? Especially with junior developers. It's only been 2 years in this profession and I've not met more than 3 genuine and helpful people. Maybe it's just my organization.

people with 8+ years of work from office experience, is 9-6 the only truth of work life? today in sprint planning, our manager suggested assigning 81 hours of tickets in a 2 week sprint and when a lot of us had 60-65 hours of work he was like "ehh it seems less . junior mgr , look into the softwares and create more tickets"

2 week sprint is 9 days +1 day for sprint planning + 2 sat Sunday 🥲 . additionally it takes me arohnd 2 hours to reach home so i try to get out by 5 pm and everyone starts staring at me. as am a bad example, i will probably be hearing from my manager in future about this.

need some tips on handling a stable work-office life. i am a covid graduate so i have seen a great wlb in work from home but its a true reality that for mext 30 years , the chances to work from home for more than 5 cumulative years is next to 0. so need a permanent office hack.

i don't think buttering boss's ass is a reliable solution . i just wanna be back at home by 7, do some workout, roam in car/watch series/work on hobby project (aka relaxing) eat and die on my bed for next day's horrific life

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

Hi all,

This might be a long post so bear with me. I work for a company and there was a project for a huge client. I'm junior in skill (been programming for about two years) but my job title doesn't reflect that. Anyways, I got the design about a month ago but I was on deadline for two other projects so I couldn't pick it up until last week Wed. Ironically, that's when the final design was delivered & told me it was due next week Wednesday. I built it as fast as I could. Finished mobile but for some reason, this last part for desktop just wasn't working out and it just so happens to be the most crucial part of the piece. (I was also sick the entire time and didn't sleep for the last two days nor did I eat). I was supposed to demo it yesterday but I still needed to make a few updates and the project coordinator took me off the project & gave it to a dev with more experience. This has never happened to me before. I'd go as far as to say this is my first big fuck up. I've always delivered on deadline and I'm taking this pretty hard. Has anyone been in similar situations? What do I do? Any advice?

! rant
So i started my first job on thursday and even though I interviewed for a c# developer position, I'm now a Projectlead Junior. I'm not even mad. It's surprising where life takes you.

Day 1 of a new semester in college. Our 50 yr old H.O.D is a guest lecturer of this new subject called "Industrial Management" (why its included in the syllabus of CSE degree i wonder) . As there were only 6 students , the guy went on like a drunkard telling life lessons :

1) only 20% of the people in a company are only working. Rest 80% of them are just using sugar coated words at the right place ; doing politics and taking credits of the others .

2) those 80% getting benefits are usually the bosses (and in his example, the senior deans and H.O.Ds buttering the administrative dept and director ) and the hardworking 20% are the Juniors or the new joiners ( and in his example, the latest recruited ,honest teachers. Makes sense why we have shitty teachers :/ ). They altogether make sucesses to the company(although its just those 20%hardworkers doing the actual job) . But at the time of salary everybody gets the benfit.

3) Its always perfect to throw blames at senior or junior. (explaining how a parent complaining about the poor study environment to director is made to think that it's only the fault of his own child. blames going from director to dean to HOD to teachers to your own child's mistakes.)

4) Being your boss's favourite is super important. He gave example as : 2 teachers meets him with 100% results and 100% reviews. One of them is a known asshole with 0 knowledge, who makes jokes and sexist comments during the class, gives free attendence and question papers before the exam{therefore 100%reviews} . But he is dean's great ass-licker . The other one is honest hard-working teacher with real reviews and results. So he says he shows their combine results to the director along with his own buttering and ass licking, gets a hike himself and permit to give hije to one junior teacher. And who would it give hike to? The ass licking asshole, because that's how it works. What about the honest teacher?what reply would he get? Simply, appreciations and sugar coated words : "thank you for working so hard. But you did not do anything new. You were only hired to DO hardwork and give good results"

( and i was like fuck? Like seriously? Because that is something resonating with what i once heard in my internship :"yeah you are developing nice and all good, but that's what you are expected to do. You were only hired to achieve results, and you did nothing new". So that's what we are missing? Ass licking?-_- )

5) He believed its important to "look working" than being "actually working" . Quoting an example from his days as a dev, he told a story about how he once worked on a project with deadline of 1 month . He was young and worked hard and in 2 days completed the complete project and accidentally reported success to boss instead of his seniors. The boss simply congratulated his team(seniors and him) and assigned them another project. Later that day , he got an ass-wipe scolding from his seniors that if he had kept his mouth shut, they would have simply watched movies and relax for next 15 days, and submit the project during the salary time to gain bonus attention.
He even gave his short mantra or principle for such situation "kaam ki fickar kar, fickar ka zickar kar, par kaam mat kar " (get worried and tensed about the work. Display your tention and worries to the world (esp bosses) . But don't work.)

And there were many other short stories like that.

Mann, i was about to shout " you corrupt asshole ", but one thing He just told us about the importance of being in boss's good books made me stop ( nd he is a fucking HOD, senior to teachers)

But hell he told some relatable truths. Make me sad about the job life.

Bloody Office politics :|

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...

I honestly don't understand people who genuinely believe formal schooling will cover all the basics they need to know to do a real-life job, and still get barely passing grades on all relevant subjects.

I genuinely don't understand people who copy GitHub projects to pass classes, and graduate from a university with goddamn StackOverflow instead of a brain.

Whom I understand even less are people who don't do anything major-related on their spare time.

I mean, change your fucking major, do what you actually like, do things that actually light your nuts with passion.

Please don't waste my time pretending you are in it not just because it's potentially well-paid and "cool".

Please don't waste my time being my coworker.

Yes, I'm looking at you, trendy wanker with a CS degree and no personal projects.

P.S. Junior here. Yes, I'm full of hatred for all the "real programmers" in the industry out there. I hoped for a better experience.

P.S.S. I mean absolutely no offense to people using either GitHub or StackOverflow outside of the aforementioned context.

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.

My image of dream career through different times of my life:
- frontend specs prodigy, css enlightenment, a member of w3c or a similar committee
- indie hacker and entrepreneur, leader of a startup community
- architecture prodigy, expert in scalability
- transsexual evangelist, popular article writer and a rockstar
- hardware engineer: Linux, C, chip and dale’s Gadget-like girlfriends, xkcd, latex, assembly, buying a radio station and a telescope
- scientist like NickyBones, papers, data, more data
- art expert

Though achieving one of this would take the entire life, I had a chance to grasp all of this. WHY does they feel so incompatible? Why do I have to choose?

Why do I feel so sad? Why do I feel like I haven’t achieved anything even though I objectively achieved what I dreamed of like five years ago?

Is it true that it’s in my nature to always seek an environment to feel like a junior in? Is feeling like a junior only pleasant to me because it reminds me of old times when I wasn’t actually this mentally ill and was still happy?

Why do I feel like that arduino and C shit is the equivalent of a red corvette?

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.

I had mentioned before I got offered a new role, with 50% increase.

I wasn’t expecting my current employer to counter, but they suddenly shat themselves and basically matched the salary, and offered promotion to software developer (sans junior). They acknowledge my role within the company is only increasing in responsibility and so far I have exceeded expectations. Its a nice response to have from them, although I do wonder how long it might have taken without the panic.

The new company have counter-countered, promising to raise salary by a further 20% of total, within the first 6 months, provided I learn React reasonably quickly (about a month), integrate with the team and start to take on my roles within the Agile set relatively independently (3-6 months). They also don’t bother with the junior role title at these pay bandings.

I currently get about half an hour a week with my lead dev on sticking issues. In this new team, I would be one of ten javascripters, working towards best practices, TDD etc. This is absolutely the realm I want to specialise in, at the first stage of my career.

I said I would stay with my current employer, before the counter counter move. Now I am full of doubt.

Has anyone landed in teams like this, only to find they didn’t offer increased learning at all? If that was a high risk for me, I wouldnt take it, despite the offer of more cash. I’d sooner get more skilled in the stuff I have been working in at my current role.

Pretty amazing how much amazing life experiences can cause anxiety. Never been in the middle of a bidding war before...

I dont. I am a struggling junior whos back at mobile dev after 2 years of a break while working on that 2 for 2 years prior. I dont know. I get addicted to problem solving and also some unresolved childhood traumas are driving me to tryhard and sacrifice personal life in order to perform better in my job. I am afraid of failure so I will sacrifice everything whaf I can to be better.

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.

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.

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

How do you handle work colleague who is becomming too chummy? Got this one guy who is my age at work (we are in late 20's), we've been working for the past 5 months in the same team. At first I was in a bad place so kinda overshared my personal life with him so did he. Went out for drinks and etc.

Problem is that its becoming weird in the office now. I am trying to fix my habits like quitting drinking and quitting smoking and all I get from him is pressure about why Im not going out and etc. He doesnt even really know me, just assumes that if Im not hanging out with him I just sit in my home on a couch. And in the end what if I do? What kind of guilt tripping is this?

Also I feel that he as a senior is kinda undermining me. I am not a senior but definetly also not a junior anymore, and he treats me as a junior while he has at least half of knowledge gaps as me. He has been working remotely for some time now and I noticed even how dynamics in the office changed. I see other devs coming up to me for advice and I see that I am actually competent enough to help them. If my big ego senior was here, he would be sucking all of the attention out of the room and I would be in his shadow yet again. Its just weird.

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!

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.

Being a Junior Developer, getting Cron Jobs working is like magic 😍 it's also a life saver

The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.

I am really having a hard time keeping an "open" mindset with my team...

So when I email you, the junior at your first job and an almost 6 months work experience, with a set of instructions, I do not want inline comments and feedback to the tune of "Yes, I agree. I think we should go ahead" or debates on why, in your opinion.. xyz, because you tested it yourself..

WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU SETUP AND TEST BILLIONS OF ROWS OF DATA ON YOUR MANY MANY MULTI BOX CLUSTER? You live in a data center? Oh, and say "Serverless" one more fucking time....

And so begins the painful process of performance managing you out the door. (You cant fire anybody in South Africa for being a prick. Or useless.)

I am sure there once was a time where you could beat guys like this to within an inch of his life with his own keyboard. If it wasn't wireless I could have strangled him with the cord. Ah, I miss model M's....

As a junior dev, you are stuck on a Problem and somehow you are not able to proceed and there is a ridiculous process to finish the task on a deadline otherwise you have to hear from higher management. Your manager cum senior dev is not helping you out or not responding in any way. Do I kill myself being so incompetent dev or burn my ears listening to management complaints or is there any way I can get out of it? My life is just miserable and I feel demotivated day by day.

Just ranting my heart out...

As the new year approaches, so does a new chapter in my life. This is a big one as I will be graduating college and hopefully landing my first big position.

My question to you lovely people: what do you feel qualifies someone for a front-end web dev role? As a junior front end dev? Obviously this will vary from position to position, but I'm trying to grasp what kinds of things I really need to have in check.

I am a junior developer, two weeks ago I got a job for the first time in my life as a fullstack web developer, I have felt bad for the times that "I should have read the code better before coding", I think I am distracted and impatient. I make mistakes because I don't know how the system works in some parts and I write repeated or unnecessary code, my boss has corrected me, but I feel very stupid and I'm afraid of being fired. Is it normal to feel like this?

Note: In this rant I will ask for advices, and confess some sins. I will tell my personal story- it will be long.

So basically it has been almost 2 years since I first entered the world of software development. It has been the biggest and most important quest of my life so far, but yet I feel like I missed a lot of my objectives, and lots of stuff did not go the way I wanted them to be, and it makes feel frustrated and it lowered my self esteem greatly. I feel confused and a bit depressed, and don't know what to do.

I'll start: I'm 23 years old. 2 years ago I was still a soldier(where I live there is a forced conscription law) in a sysadmin/security role. I grew tired of the ops world and got drawn more and more into programming. A tremendous passion became to burn in me, as I began to write small programs in Python and shell scripts. I wanted to level up more seriously so I started reading programming books and got myself into a 10 month Java course.

In the meanwhile I got released from army duty and got a job as a security sysadmin at a large local telco company. Job was boring and unchallenging but it payed well. I had worked there for 1 year and at the same time learned more and more stuff from 2 best friends who have been freelance developers for years. I have learned how to build full-stack mobile apps and some webdev, mainly Android and Node.js. However because I was very inexperienced and lacked discipline, all of my side projects failed horribly, and all attempts to work with my experienced friends have failed too- I feel they lost a lot of trust for me(they don't say it, but I feel it, maybe I'm wrong).

I began to realise I had to leave this job and seek a developer job in order to get better, and my wish came true 6 months ago when I finally got accepted into a startup as a fullstack webdev, for a bit lower wage but I felt it was worth it. I was overjoyed.

But now my old problems did not end, they just changed. My new job is a thousand times harder and more intensive than the old one. I feel like it sucks all the energy and motivation that was still left in me, and I have learned almost nothing in my free time, returning home exhausted. My bosses are not impressed from my work despite me being pretty junior level, and I feel like I'm in a vicious cycle that keeps me from advancing my abilities. My developer friends I mentioned earlier have jobs like I do and still manage to develop very impressive side projects and even make a nice sum of money from them, while I can't even concetrate on stupid toy projects and learning.

I don't know why It is like this. I feel pathetic and ashamed of my developer sins and lack of discipline. During that time I also gained some weight that I'm trying t lose now... I know not all of it is my fault but it makes me feel like crap.

Sorry for the long story. I just feel I need to spill it out and hope to get some advices from you guys who may or may not have similar experiences. Thanks in advance for reading this.

At first i was told to go to college BY PEOPLE WITH NO COLLEGE because i wouldnt be able to find a job without degree

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i sacrificed my life for school

Then later i found out PEOPLE WHO FINISHED COLLEGE told me i just need knowledge in order to be hired, and turns out degree is unimportant

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i studied and worked on practical projects and gained knowledge

Now when I try to get hired, they admitted that i am able to complete complex projects and i know how to solve the problems even if i see them for the first time. But they rejected me because "im not sure why the car leaks oil".

I have to understand and know what the whole framework is doing under the hood, how everything works, how dependency injection works under the hood, SOLID principles under the hood, decorators how they work under the hood etc.

So now it turns out
- sacrificing life for school is not enough
- sacrificing life for degree is not enough
- sacrificing life for learning and gaining knowledge is not enough
- now the new trend is i have to know not only how to drive a car like a professional formula F1 driver, i also have to be a mechanic and know how to fix the car if it breaks.

MATRIX IS A BIG FAT BULLSHIT AND A LIE.

I feel like they're looking for a senior developer knowledge to pay him junior developer salary

WTF IS THIS BULLSHIT?

I sacrificed 10 days of my life for their bullshit to build this project from scratch as a technical interview. They never said congrats on all the parts that were built right, but only complained about the small portion of bugs i didnt have time to fix.

ALL OF THIS FOR A SALARY OF $1500/MONTH THAT I ASKED. THATS LESS THAN 20,000$ A YEAR. THEY EITHER GAVE ME AN OPTION TO WORK FOR WAY LESS (500-600$/month) OR CALL THEM BACK IN A FEW MONTHS.

I JUST FINISHED COLLEGE AND THEY EXPECT ME TO HAVE 20 YEARS OF SENIOR DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE.

WTF IS THIS SLAVERY BULLSHIT?

HAVING A 500$/MONTH AS ENGINEERING SALARY WITH A DEGREE IS BELITTLING OF THIS JOB.

NO I DONT LIVE IN INDIA I LIVE IN SERBIA. MY DOG IS SICK AND IT COSTS 100$ A DAY JUST FOR HIS TREATMENT. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SURVIVE WITH A SLAVE SALARY IN THIS ECONOMIC CRISIS.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

#justAthought
I was recently playing max payne 2 on my pc when this colleague of mine comes up and boasts "You playing max payne now?? I have completed this game so many times, even in the hard mode. Which mode are you playing in" (I was playing easy -.- )

But then it struck me. how cool it would have been, if we had a chance to take a decision at some point of our life , to continue the next phase in easy medium or hard mode. The harder the mode, the bigger the prize, but its not that you are suffering by the consequences of taking easy mode.

Like take college for example. Instead of companies deciding the quality of a candidate based on popularity of their college, they would take based on the mode of education they took for various subjects.
- The education mode system would be something like this: at the end of 6 month an exam will happen as usual
- the easy mode of exam will have just the lighter , more basic syllabus and lenient checking .
- the medium mode will have slightly more research based questions from the a more standard version of the previous syllabus and unbiased checking .

- the hard mode will have deep knowledge requirement professional questions and strict checking.

- students willing to dedicate heavy time to their choice of subject will then have better opportunities at big companies, making a fair ground for all.

- student more focused on non academic/ specific topics could take easy mode for most of the subjects, and focus on the career of their choice. They will still have a backup to apply for jobs requiring knowledge of certain subjects , but for lower wages( since they took the easy mode for those subjects they would be learning the required knowledge in the company, working as proxys/junior devs)

what do you think?

Story!!!

I'm feeling very bad for the choice I make...

TLDR: I started looking for a new job, just because the salary wasn't enough. Talked with my boss, he agreed to raise it and I agreed to stay. Two weeks after that (today) I talked with him and told I will be leaving.

---

Starting January, just arriving of three weeks on vacation in another country to see my girlfriend, I started looking for my first house, to live with my girlfriend. Because of this future life (she arrives March 13th), I started to look for a new job which pays more. By now, I have worked there for the past three years.

At the end of January I found a house and had some good proposals, so I talked with my boss that it was possible for me to leave in the near future because I really needed the money, despite really liking to work there, so he made me a proposal to give me the increase I wanted (250€) and I agreed.

Just after that, I started calling the companies to say that I would not be available anymore. I usually try to be the most honest as possible with these things.

Past a week, I was talking face to face to a recruiter to say the same thing, but this time he increased his past proposal and showed me the company he wanted to send me; it was one of the unicorns of Portugal and with a really really great technology stack, and after convincing me that I could be wrong about the decision I had made (well... I recognize I can be wrong sometimes), I agreed to go in a meeting with the company.

Past Thursday I went there - Well... I was wrong. I really loved the culture of the company (the thing I most like in the one I'm right now), I would be working with a great technology stack, and having a really good salary.

Today I talked with my boss and said I will be leaving in April 23rd. He told me that didn't think it was right the way I handled this, because, if he knew with some antecedece, he wouldn't have made a proposal for a new development that only I could do (I did the analysis for it), and would be searching for a replacement sooner.

Right now I'm 22 years old, junior developer, going to live with my girlfriend in the next month, and the only one in the company who knows PHP with its stack (Linux, MySQL, Apache).
Before all of that I had a net salary of +- 750€, and it was increased to 950€ after the proposals, and in this new position it will be 1150€.

I don't know how to feel. People usually said that I have to start thinking a little bit more about myself (my bosses included) and I tried this adviced... :(

I am being moved from one team to another in short periods of time. Just when I start getting comfortable in the technology in one product and decide that this is my life now, they put me in something else where I have to learn from scratch. Been a junior developer for 2 years now.

!rant because I love it that I get to learn different technologies. Also the opportunities to travel.

I'm so down that i didn't see the red circle with the cross to add a rant...

Why is that? Because several month ago i began a job with all my motivation & optimistic mood.

I was so glad that a compagny payed attention to my profil that it was the best day of my life. I wanted to improve myself and learn!

At this point i did'nt know yet that i will began to work with assholes.

In this fantastic world, designers are kings and you have to do magic to adapt one of their stupid static design on web.
Because the suprem king is the client and designs are validated.
And don't even ask for an fonctionel analysis they will laught at you!

I did everything that i could do to make things work, fast and good. One time i managed the end of a project all by my self (like said once Celine Dion). I maked the work of my colegue who was on holiday because she left with unfinished work. She said to me "it's easy". She liked to say that i maked lost her time because of my questions and that i need to search the answer by myself & work more and more and more. So i worked, day & night because i didn't have enough time. And other thing is that some persons loved to say "if you don't do that someone will need to do that for you"!

I'm a junior developer and i had acces to staging and prod environements and crashed it both several time... I needed to develope in one year the experience of a senior developer.
Every thing is my fault because i need to pay attention to things that i ignore.

Today i'm not glad, i learned a few things but can't remembered it because things went o fast for me and i can't memorized everithing. All i know is that i'm just happy to still be able to get out from bed.

I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.

My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.

apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.

- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.

- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.

- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain

- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :

--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)

- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev

- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company

- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.

- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)

- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.

- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.

- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)

- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/

I'm seeking opinions and thoughts on my predicament.

I have 2ish paths before me.
Next year I resume my studies in Science Communication and Computer Science in particiliar a bachelor of science, I have considered then doing master in managent or computer science.

1) I am able to have a income of about 800 AUD a fortnight (this is to support me during study without requiring work) plus extra from a part time job whilst I study for about 2 years. Throughout this time I would like to skill up in a variety of fields as immensley as possible.

2) I can accept a full time junior web developer job while I study, this job is with a great government research organisation which as a first FT job looks great on a resume, it is is project based work where I get given a project and code and pretty much complete it. The job is flexible, I can mostly work where-ever I want, at home, at a cafe, travelling. With maybe a meeting once a week. The pay is about 65kAUD a year.

Both options are very attractive options with each containing there own pros and cons. With the extra money I could learn more or use it to grow a business or do more.

However without the FT job I could still earn about 1-1.5k a fortnight for alot less time.

I am still discovering what to do in life, I'm very good at public speaking and would like to experience and learn more about lots of different things. My current knowledge is very broad from engineering to CS, graphic design, authoring, trade skills, Digitial design and more.

Ideally I would like to learn how to lead people, to make the world a better place and help people. Figuring out where my strengths lay and where to apply them is difficult as I am fascinated by so many things.

I worry about taking the FT job as it might detract from my studies and lead me to pursueing mostly only web development work as well as take up time that might be better spent on extra study or in a leadership position in a uni club.

The PT job is a IT Systems Technician in the Australian Defence Force.

Which is a interesting experience within itself, different from civilian life and also I would be learning about systems that I might have less experience with.

I have such broad interests in alot of fields that I don't seem to be focussed on select things or areas like other devs I've met, Science Communication is a versitile field, one of my professors expertise is on doctor who and it's role in science engagement, she has written books on it. Others are in public policy or directed podcasts or even made games. Despite my broad interests computer science was always a gield I did well in.

Any thoughts, opinions or questions are welcome.
I have a blog/portfolio I put my work and projects up if it helps people know more about me, you can find it at curiosityplace.wordpress.com

A bit over one year ago I wrote the post about my sadness because I had big problems with changing my job to developer. Today I want to share with you about my happiness because I made that big change :D From January I’m Java Junior Developer, I met many awesome people and increased my programming skills over level I could imagin. Last Monday I changed my job and back to salary from before I started coding. Curve of skills and money is going in good direction. Thanks everybody for supporting and good words :) You’re awesome ^^,

I love to sleep a lot and can't stay up too late.
I love cooking meals that take a long time to make.
I love video games, books, TV shows and exercising at the gym.

But I also love software development, and I fear I can't enjoy both worlds.

All of my freelance developer friends always stay up late and never have time for anything. In one hand I'm very jealous of their programming skills and wish I had these too. But I fear I will lose my life to it.

Can I still be a developer and have a life?

don't you just hate, when this happens? translated from Slovak we call this "the system of the falling shit" you know this under "hot potato"

email:
from: marketing coworker
to: senior dev 1
* asks for a lot of stuff, deadline yesterday, high priority, on a site for which the jenkins build is crashing every once in a while, because we are migrating all the time so some folders are already deleted or not created yet and the build config is really strict *

forwarded from: senior dev 1
@senior dev 2

forwarded from: senior dev 2
@senior dev 3

forwarded from: senior dev 3
@junior me

ಠ_ಠ fuck me i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How is everyone handling their day job lately? I'm feeling pretty safe about my position, but my day-to-day is definitely suffering as my mind wanders off.
Cost of living crisis, trying to have a social life, impending fatherhood, all while trying to do good work and improve my knowledge. Not easy.

I work in a small office (about five people) and probably once or twice a week, we will do a group order of delivery/take-out for lunch. I’m the most junior at the company, and often I end up asked to place the lunch order, so I put it on my personal card and have everyone pay me back. All of my other colleagues are quick to ask how much they owe and reimburse me, but on the occasions where my CEO joins the lunch order, he has never paid for his food or even offered to do so. I honestly don’t think it crosses his mind to wonder who paid for the meal, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s often because my other colleagues simply pay for him. (I have another sneaking suspicion it’s because he’s a white man who has had a great deal of wealth his entire life.)

After the meal there’s always a conversation, initiated by my colleagues, in which everyone ask me how much they owe. We are in an open office space with our CEO, but he seems to be entirely oblivious to these conversations. I would love to be able to simply Venmo charge him, but alas he has made it clear that he is “anti-Venmo” (what?).

I’m feeling very bitter that he is in a position where he doesn’t have to think about the cost of a $14 salad, and frustrated that my other (wealthier) colleagues are all willing to eat the cost to avoid asking him to pay. He knows how much I make, but how do I gracefully make it clear that he should be expected to reimburse me like everyone else (and ideally, should do so without being prompted)?

Person: CooCooK4Choo, i see you're doing more than one form of development. What do you want to do as a developer?

Me: I want to do everything i can possibly do.

Person: You have to pick a stream to go into, you can't do Web Applications, 3D Development, Unity Game Development, Swift and Java.

Why can't i do everything? As a junior developer i feel that doing everything keeps you prepared for those unwanted situations. Besides Its not like i'll be doing Web Base Applications all my life. if i do, i'll probably kill myself before 30(currently 21).

My biggest regret is not becoming a programmer sooner in life. Ever since I saw the computer wore tennis shoes when I was 5 I wanted to be a computer programmer. But my brother discouraged me saying it was so difficult but no one did it. So I thought I guess if no one is doing it.... Then in both Junior High and High School they have computer classes but you had to be friends with the teacher to even know it existed in the first place. I was not on good terms with him.

Thanks to a very encouraging Teacher at Art School I finally I was able to pursue my lifelong interest in computers.

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

So basically I joined this new android dev job 3 months ago. I did android dev for 2.5 years and then had a gap of 1.5 years where I did game development so Im comming back into android dev as "junior" however Im tryharding to prove myself and reach mid level as fast as I can.

I had it planned like this from the beginning: original plan was to do really good during probation period so I could ask for a raise (which I did). Now while Im waiting for answer (which will take 2-3 weeks) I need to keep the show going so I am sacrificing evenings to accomplish goals. I ham going to these teambuildings, I am volunteering in this job fair event and Im joining bars with the not-so-social devs 1-2 times a week just to "fit in" and be noticed. After getting a raise I plan to take it down a notch and somehow relax....

During the usual work week I rely on stimulants (coffee/cigarettes/concerta) to get me through the days and then I use xanax or alcohol to relax. Worst part is that I am totally drained exhausted after long working week. I dont want to go out with my girlfriend. My libido is at its lowest and we do it maybe max 2 times a week and it feels like a chore to me. It feels like I exist only for this job and only to please everyone around me and it drains me out completely.

I feel like I am burned out. I wish I could just quit this job and run away somwhere warm for 6 months to chill alone and take it easy and recover but I cant. Im stuck in a trap. I have to pay off mortgage, I have to pay off bills. I am approaching 30's soon and I became fat and balding, I want to loose weight, I wanna get a hair transplant to at least enjoy my 30's properly. Im only 28 but I already have a lot of grey hair just because of immense ammounts of stress I have to deal daily because of my ADHD and anxiety. Also my gf is kinda dissapointed that I havent proposed her in 3 years of our relationship. I feel so much pressure and obligations to the point where I feel that theres no point in living if I just exist for the needs of others. I cant imagine getting married and having a child now - life is already complicated chaotic mess as it is.

I dont't know why I throw myself 150% at projects and hyperfocus so much to the point where it becomes my priority in life? Am I compensating for my lack of executive functions by throwing lots of effort and care in hopes that I will be validated? How to learn to take it easy instead of always thinking that what Im doing is not enough?

It's not even the problem of this job. Its just me. I had my own company for 2 years and I was dealing with same burnout problems...

How do I overcome the fear of failure as a developer? I know that failures are a daily thing in the life of a developer but I'm severely afraid to mess things up. My colleague explained something to me that also involves making changes to the database but I'm really afraid to make mistakes. How does one overcome that initial fear? And did anyone experience the same as a junior developer?

Is there any language or framework I am guaranteed to get a job in if I learn right now?

I know this is a shot in the dark cuz if such did exist, every job seeking entrant would simply flock to it; but I don't know how developers switch between stacks. Off the top of my head, recommendation but what if such social capital is missing?

Some background: I built and published a php framework called Suphle (angry-cray-9c191b.netlify.app), which surprisingly neither got any users after a year nor impressed any php employer to hire me despite hundreds of applications sent out

Rather than throwing in the towel, I wish to switch to some other software stack but I don't know where to start, If with all my proven php experience, I'm unable to land any php roles. I have tried searching for nestjs and spring boot internships or junior but nothing comes up. I have run out of time to study a language I will never profit from

I have a flutter app on playstore, built together with a product designer who worked on the ui cuz my front end chops aren't strong. I will preferably continue in a back end environment but if I can solicit immediate employment, I don't mind brushing up on any available tech, be it devops or what have you. I've also worked with spring in a professional capacity, although a very turbulent one where the team we had issues ranging ranging from absence of adequate docs for something as basic as authentication, to using nosql (totally unnecessary), trying to separate codebase into different projects to mirror the real life department (this was my idea). I don't know if it's Conway's law but I decided project should be split into admin, user and common modules/repos since they were being worked on by different devs and had little in common. Unfortunately, there is no doc for importing/sharing local projects so we had more days chucked off

Anyway, I Built a react native app a lifetime ago. Been around the block a bit and pretty confident I won't take much time to get up to speed with a tech. Where do I go or how do I start? I stay in Nigeria so may be limited from on-site roles as well

I was doing android apps for a year and a half, but then during the pandemic my hobby gaming projects blew up and I had to quit my fulltime job and focus on them. Spent last year working for myself. I managed to save enough money and got a mortgage for my apartment. Now I feel accomplished what I wanted and Im tired of working alone on my own projects. Its sad doing all these mental gymnastics and not having anyone else to share the results with.

I'm considering getting back into part/full-time position. Main reason is the social aspect, as well as stability. I'm tired of stress, too much responsibility. I want a better work/life balance. Also I think I need a position where they would allow at least 2 days a week working from home.

How to recondition myself and first of all to motivate myself to get back into the rat race? I haven't done android app development in a year and a half, I'm rusty af. I'm a junior at best right now. Also in the past year I got fat and I'm too conscious about my beer belly lol. Thinking of loosing weight and sharpening my app dev skills first, only then applying.

Can anybody advice anything?

Just had a memory popup about my uni days about 5 years ago. I was in my Junior year in business school and was doing a "consulting" project involving the whole Class (200 students). Groups of 4 were assigned an international company in either Europe, Asia, or South America. We'd visit them (as well as do some sightseeing) and learn about them (performance, market positions, products) during Spring Break and come up with a real proposal. We would then compete with other teams, and the winning pitchs for each would be presented in the school auditorium in front the entire class.

Our team didn't get that far but that's not the point. We did win the individual classroom competition. Our company was Deutsche Telekom (owner of T-Mobile).

This was in 2010, when the iPhone/smart-phones started to become mainstream... And our team's idea was location-based advertising.

Looking back, we basically predicted the future... though we got the wrong industry...

It's also sort of funny though because I remember the main reason we came up with the idea was to be different.

All other teams just went with some expansion plan to a neighboring country or cutting costs.... pure MBA/business plan. But I guess I was being a natural techie so thought of a tech idea instead.

We had a meeting with our professor after he picked us and he told us he had a history of spotting future hits. We were like "hm... ok... let's give it a shot... we definitely got an A!" but at that point I was sort of skeptical if this would actually work in real-life (the basic idea was they would sell ads to local businesses and if you were nearby, you would get a text message with an offer).

But guess he was pretty right... we just needed to have Google or Facebook to have been our company... though Groupon or Yelp works too... basically a tech company with larger scale rather than a mobile carrier...

Hey all! I'm gonna be graduating soon from grad school and I'm starting to realize that I have no idea what I wanna do with my programming career!

I currently work as QA but have been really working towards being a programmer but the only problem is that I really dislike web applications ... specifically front end.

With most jobs being full stack web apps, I feel like I'm really gonna be limiting myself once I'm applying for junior software engineering jobs.

I'm just wanting your thoughts and some advice on what I should do since in still trying to figure things out. The only goal I have in life for my career at the moment is to be a software engineer.

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

i wanted some advice on career progression. I am a CS graduate from 2020, have been a decent mobile dev for last 3 years and switched 2 companies so far. i currently have an average ctc (considering i reside in the world's most populated country) as a junior dev.

i want to grow but don't know the next steps. here are my options:

1. stay in the same company . role growth: senior in 2 years , more senior in 4 years . comp growth : avg 10% every year

>> this feels okay-ish path but 10% growth seems very less

2. switch every x years . role growth : unpredictable. comp growth min 30-50%

>> this has been my approach. as i grow bore of a company, i switch . the first time i got a 200% hike, but at that time, i was already earning very less. however companies do not usually take you for a senior role unles you were a senior before, so i think i am losing something here

3. do a masters in tech . comp growth : ? role growth :0
>> this is an unknown territory for me. i haven't heard of anyone bragging about how they did a masters in some tech field and got a better job/position. most people prefer masters in business or do a masters in tech only if they had a poor bachelors degree

4. do a masters in business. comp growth ? role growth?
>> another unknown territory for me. i really wanna consider a managerial position, just because i want to be leading the action , but that's probably because of being a beta guy in all my life and not just the tech/work.

1. managers have a great comp but they also get fired more often than techies. how do you become a good manager/vp/director etc?

2. what are your goals, how do you improve/work upon the goals as a manager?

3. how do you grow as a manager?

honestly i put a lot of tasks and capabilities into one category : the skills of a manager. but i think there might be different roles for such categories. let me know which one is which and if they are worth going into:

1. an x is a person that researches on market trends, other companies, amtheir audience etc and come up with new ideas to implement and improve growth/business of the company

2. an x is a person that makes sure that devs , qa, designers etc are aligned , knows what to do , clears their doubts and ensure the proper functioni5 of the team and timely releases of new features.

3. an x is an ambitious and curious person who can think of new , original ideas.

4. an x is a person with all knowledge of product features.

-----
in all above statements, is x== junior manager? then what are senior manager, vp, directors, president, tech lead, qa,etc?

also how can one start to become x?

!rant

Anyone out there care to share a resource that they like for web app layout? Things I'm finding are more UX or just app clone versions.

I guess I'm looking for a book on standard layouts used.
Thanks

Team I'm on consists of four devs, two being contractors who have hit their necessary month off period (something to do with contractual laws), one junior developer who is off on holiday for a while, and me, the person with most experience but busiest home life.
Next few weeks are going to be a real test of patience until I'm no longer alone on the team.