Tech Industry: “We need more developers!”

NewDev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “only experienced developers please! We don’t have time to train juniors ”

Older Dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “no, you want too much money and too much time off“

Mid dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “only experienced devs who are a culture fit!”

Robot dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “You are Hired”

Someone hacked into a teacher's school district email, sending random stuff to the juniors.

When the principal sent an email saying any help in catching the perpetrator would be appreciated, a bunch of people from my classes were staring at me throughout the day.

Programmer != hacker

I hope they don't report me, I didn't do it. :/

Companies: We can’t find any senior developers to hire.

Also companies: We pay seniors like juniors.

juniors

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

When you tell the juniors to comment on everything...

JuniorDev: I made some changes to your code and it seems to work better.
Me: Awesome, thanks dude.
Inner-me: Who the hell does he think he is.

Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):

1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.

2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:

3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.

Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.

Once I had to clone a repo and it was taking too long...

Went to gitlab to find out in the most wtf way that from 1mb it was 600mb+ now...

One of our new juniors pushed 600mb+ of a database backup to gitlab...

I came to her with a smile and asked in a jokingly manner (after cursing her for about half an hour in my head):

"lol, did you really not notice it took a fucking long time to upload it?"

The fucker was ashamed but just said : no, I think I pushed it and went home.

I constantly reminded her of it for the couple months...

Never done it again :)

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.

A Professor of mine - We need u to build that website so that your juniors could work on it too after u leave.

Me - Sure, I'll have docs and vcs

Prof : Whatever, at the end we need the "exe" ready.

---------😇

And then... Another junior arrives... With newer set of buzzwords XD

if you dont hire juniors, you dont deserve seniors

When I first joined the profession, I had a mentor who refused to give me straight-forward answers to my questions / queries. He always had the same answer, "Google it. Find the solution yourself." I hated him for that. Sometimes he used to explain that it was for my own good (blah, blah, the usual stuff) and not because he didn't know or couldn't give me the answer straight-away. I still thought it was just that I was too smart to ask all the right (complicated) questions and he didn't have the answers.
(Of course, that is a bit too exaggerated; he used to help me out with complicated stuff when he knew I was blocked and couldn't move further; he wasn't a sore mentor; he was a good one, in his own way.)

Several years later, I find myself giving the same answers and advice to juniors I mentor. It turns out that push to figure things out on my own did me a lot of good. I'm able to approach any problem head-on and not freak out even if the specs or the deadlines seem surreal. I know how to "figure" answers to problems that I come across for the first time. In the process you learn a lot of stuff that "keep you ahead of the curve and not grow old".

Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!

But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.

Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.

The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎

But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!

To all Juniors here(myself included):

If you ever feel discouraged just remember that a few thousand irrelavant mongolian horse nomads managed to conquer half of the known world in less than a hundred years, destroying countless empires and cultures far more sophisticated than their own using nothing but their wits and their brutal willpower.

If they could build a realm from Korea to Poland usibg horses, you can build some software using keyboards.

Being one of the top devs (and a good student admired by most lecturers) at college, my most humbling experience was when I joined my first job. I thought I knew SQL, I thought I knew C#. I realized in the first week, the thing I didn't know was "I don't know jack".
Thanks to a couple of great mentors (it took a few of them to bring me up to speed :P), I learned that the more I learn something, the more I will realize how much more there is to learn. I used tools to create storyboard animations in WPF, and my mentor would write it all in XAML! I'd write messy SQL and the other mentor just reduces it to a couple of elegant lines. They were like tech gods to my college self, all while being humble and friendly.
They also imbibed in me a sense of responsibility to carry on the culture of mentoring my juniors, which taught me much more than just the technical side of our profession.

Senior devs out there, please be supportive to juniors. Don't treat them bad just because they don't know as much as you do. Guide them and help them learn and grow as devs. That'll make your company (and/or the community) a better place to work at, because everyone will be a better dev, and you might learn and grow in the process as well.

Juniors nowadays are so lazy.

J: How to do X?
M: Did you try google this?
J: No I thought you will give me a solution

Thanks God there will be no competition for me in the future...

Asked to do a technical interview task. It has expected input and output.

My code does what it needs to and produces the desired result.

Get rejected and no feedback given when asked.

Juniors won't get better if you don't communicate my dude 😒

A very experienced PM/WebDev came to us. His resume was fantastic but a bit strange. He wrote he had been working for 15 years but his experience in C# was 18 years. Though I was sceptical about this guy, others expected him to be a .NET guru. So, the interview began. The candidate described his brilliant career, then he said he wanted to move forward as a programmer and work with the newest technologies. It wasn't easy to ask him basic questions but they were in the list, so we needed to start with questions for juniors. I asked him to tell us about value types and reference types, and the answer was: about what? I repeated the question, and he said he didn't know about such complex things. I knew his resume was strange but I was disappointed. It turned out that our candidate didn't know C# at all.

Gotta love well meaning juniors with completely misplaced intentions.

Nathan: "Hey, do you want a quick 5 minute demo of the code we've changed to move to library version x?"

Almond: "Sure (I wasn't that fussed about moving to library x, but he seemed determined and there's some nice to haves with bumping the version, so we approved it.)"

Nathan: "Cool, so we have this built here, and..."

Almond: "...wait, that's not our CI system!"

Nathan: "Yeah, so I moved to a new CI system too because we couldn't get that working in the old one"

Almond: "...right, we'll need to discuss that, because..."

Nathan: "Sure, we also moved the templating engine as well as there were more examples using this one with library x"

Almond: "...yeah, so I don't think we're looking to switch the templating engine because..."

Nathan: "...and you guys also need to change a bunch of your code as it's all broken since we put the new version in, most of the tests fail..."

Great... so we've got a branch that breaks a bunch of code, switches the templating engine to one we don't want to use, and switches the CI to the one the company is trying to actively migrate away from...

Almond: "We're going to need longer than 5 minutes. I'll put something in the calendar."

🤦‍♂️😬😠

If I flag a bug on your PR don’t fucking do this:

if (bugOccurs()) handleBug()

Fix what is causing the bug, don’t bandaid it.

Manager: wElL yOu NeEd To ExPlAiN tO tHeM eXaCtLy HoW tO fIx It, hOw ArE tHeY sUpPoSeD tO kNoW?!

Dev: …

There’s a junior on my team, who has an ego problem.

Within 6-8 months, they have not progressed much, up to the point they still struggle with language and framework syntax.

Yet, they want to get the credit for doing big and important tasks, the ones they have no clue at all how to execute.

Our team tried to break more the tasks and tickets almost to the point of a tutorial. Junior got upset and complained that they did not want the tasks to be broken for them.

If we give space, tasks take forever to get completed. If we try to pair, Junior does everything in their power to cut the meeting short and again take forever to complete anything.

If we prioritize our own tasks, Junior complains that nobody pairs/assist them.

Took one for the team and started to work on finding ways to get this wonderful person to learn. Junior does not learn. In fact, almost feels like things enter from one ear and leave from the other instantly. Despite being repeated multiple times. Chewed. Presented in all sorts of way. You name it, I’ve tried.

Yesterday was the last drop. They fucking rolled their eyes while was explaining something.

This person is dead for me and I will make my personal crusade to not go out of my tasks to help them.

Thanks for coming to my TED rant.

I'm officially CTC.

Chief Technical Clown 🤡

How do I know? I've yet to write a single line of productive code today. I've spent the day purely as an administrative cog: writing emails, giving data to consultants, supporting juniors, and cleaning up the absolute hellscape that is also known as our Jira project.

I've become exactly what I hate.

Mid to senior devs flexing on juniors

Github Inc. (Feel good inc. parody)
=========================

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Github.
Fetch it, fetch it, fetch it, Github.
Fetch it, fetch it, fetch it, Github.
Fetch it, fetch it, fetch it, Github.
Fetch it, fetch it, fetch it, Github.

Fetch it, fetch it, fetch it, Github.
Fetch it, fetch it, fetch it, Github.

(change) Fetch it (change), Fetch it (change), Fetch it (change), Github
(change) fetch it (change), fetch it (change), fetch it (change), Github

Repos breaking down on pull request
Juniors have to go cause they don't know wack
So while you filling the commits and showing branch trees
You won't get paid cause it's all damn free

You set a new linter and a new phenomenal style
Hoping the new code will make you smile
But all you wanna have is a nice long sleep.
But your screams they'll keep you awake cause you don't get no sleep no.

git-blame, git-blame on this line
What the f*ck is wrong with that
Take it all and recompile
It is taking too lonnng

This code is better. This code is free
Let's clone this repo you and me.
git-blame, git-blame on this line
Is everybody in?

Laughing at the class past, fast CRUD
Testing them up for test cracks.
Star the repos at the start
It's my portfolio falling apart.

Shit, I'm forking in the code of this here.
Compile, breaking up this shit this y*er.
Watch me as I navigate.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Yo, this repo is Ghost Town
It's pulled down
With no clowns
You're in the sh*t
Gon' bite the dust
Can't nag with us
With no push
You kill the git

So don't stop, git it, git it, git it
Until you're the maintainers
And watch me criticize you now
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Break it, break it, break it, Github.
Break it, break it, break it, Github.
Break it, break it, break it, Github.
Break it, break it, break it, Github.

git-blame, git-blame on this line
What the f*ck is wrong with that
Take it all and recompile
It is taking too lonnng

This code is better. This code is free
Let's clone this repo you and me.
git-blame, git-blame on this line
Is everybody in?

Don't stop, shit it, git it.
See how your team updates it
Steady, watch me navigate
Aha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Don't stop, shit it, git it.
Peep at updates and reconvert it
Steady, watch me git reset now
Aha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Github.
Push it, push it, push it, Github.
Push it, push it, push it, Github.
Push it, push it, push it, Github.
Push it, push it, push it, Github.

Team leader: hey why this bug is taking too much time? You could fix it hours ago let me try to fix it. I really fuckin hate juniors ...

*Hours later*
Me: could you fix it ?

Team leader: ....

*Couple of years later*

Me: ah i see it's not an easy but could you find any solution bro?

Team leader: no it's not a straight forward bug. You are right am sorry i shouldn't prejudge

My first actual rant on devRant:

Fuck corporate companies. Fuck agile development.

In the last 8 months I’ve been with this company, I’ve 1) made the app layout (which was super fucked) compatible with iPad. 2) reduced the apps size by 1/3 of the original size. 3) improved memory usage by double the efficiency, nearly eliminated all memory leaks. 4) gotten employee of the quarter for some of the above mentioned.

After all of this I got a talking to from product manager that “he knows I am a good developer but needs more consistency” after I spent a sprint on one story trying to consolidate front end validation logic and make a “validatableTextField” actually do some validation. So much for the MVVM you promised me.

Also, was promised I’d get some experience with Android, and with a team of 8 devs 6 of which have droid backgrounds and other two are juniors, guess whose only even built the droid project once in 8 months? You guessed it. This company has drained me of all of my knowledge, went against most of its promises to me, and values pushing features to the point of adding tech debt faster than I can solve it.

Unfortunately my personal life relies on this job or I’d quit right away. But you bet your ass I’m passively looking for something and I can’t wait till I get a job offer and quit on these ungrateful hypocrites.

Why write any specs anymore? The juniors don't read them, nor do the product managers. I'm just talking to myself at this point.

So, I waste time writing these nice detailed tickets, then when I go to review the pull request, the whole pile of horseshit is half done, and when I ask the product managers for resolutions, they don't have a clue either.

So just give me the whole fucking app, I'll do the whole damn thing myself. See you on Mars in 2025 while you and your pleb asses serve me fries and burgers.

Today I saw a code written by my junior. Basically excel export. The laravel excel package provide great ways for optimization.

My junior instead did 6 times loop to modify the data before giving that data to the export package. We need to export around 50K users.

When I asking him why this ? He said it works and it's fast so what the issue ???

Noob , you have only 100 users in the database and production has 10 million.

Sometime I just want to kill him.

Managers: Fullstackclown!!!! When are those features we poorly designed and spec'd going to be released to production!?!?!??!!

Juniors: WE SO DUMB DUMB REEEEEEEEEE HELP FULLSTACKCLOWN!!!!! WE PRODUCE GARBAGE CODE THAT TAKES MORE OF YOUR TIME!!!!!!!!

Designers: Hur dur, how can I export this stuff to png, help us, Fullstackclown!!!

Fullstackclown: * inhales sharply * AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Hiring junior devs is a game of Russian roulette.

You can get some one who is smart and loves coding. In this case stack, limitations etc don’t matter and experience will be great for junior and the rest of the team

Or it will be a lazy person who watched 5 videos and think to be better than everyone else. 95% of juniors are these fuckers. Takes about 1 week to find out and fire… which starts the 3 months recruiting loop again.

Arguing over PRs with juniors who try to push unnecessary badly maintained dependencies, which are in fact just turds wrapped in startup hypespeak, because they're too lazy to actually invent some non-square wheels.

Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )

Seeing my juniors getting so excited that their code worked.

Ok so this happend in the last 3 days, I didn't post it till now because I had to seriously take a rest with all the bullshit and stress that came with it...
(Legacy project I have the lead in called: "Foo")

Monday:
Management decided it would be effective to add a senior and a junior to Foo, which would make (together with me) to be 2 juniors and one senior developer
Well I've spend most of that day helping both the junior and the senior to setup "Foo" on their local development machines... So I could not do any programming myself

tuesday:
The senior wanted to refactor EVERYTHING... and I had to stop him multiple times because we simply do not have the time to do that...
The junior tried to work on other things as much as he could, and after he had run out of things to do, asked me for EVERYTHING... EVEN WHERE TO FUCKING CHANGE SOME GOD DAMN STRINGS!....
Also he did in total 3 commits, two of which existed of my code (because I had to "help" him

wednesday:
Both the junior and senior were removed from the project and I got another senior.. who fucking deleted the production database on accident

god damn rough few days man...

IT head ruined the company. The whole product is delayed, no single feature is working.

As I hurt his ego 6 months ago by pinpointing his fault. He kept me out of the whole project and handed over to my juniors.

The investor has spent lots of money and they are demanding work.

Now, he avoids eye contact as possible. Don't know how I should feel.

Be happy for "told you so!" or be sad that we have to look for another job.

My first performance review as a graduate:
Boss: "we can't give you the rating you deserve because HR"
Me: "ok whatever, what can I do to get the rating I'm suppose to get?"
B: *lists job description of a senior developer* ... "Interview candidates, mentor juniors, start a project and make me profit"
Me: (if I can do that as a graduate, what am I doing here?)

My last performance review at the same company:
B: "we can't give you the rating you deserve because HR"
M: "ok what can I do to improve?"
B: *lists everything I did before the first performance review that wasn't expected of me*
M: (LoL funny, I just wanted to hear your response because I know you'd forget about the first review. Another reason to validate my resignation)

Told my junior the optimization idea i was going to say in the upcoming meeting

Fucking guy stole it and got all the claps in the evening meeting

Now i cant even look at his face.

It's even worse when somebody doesn't see any problem with things being this way.

{
Dear whoever made devrantron available on the AUR: BLESS YOU. MAY UNDERSTANDING CLIENTS AND JUNIORS WHO RESPECT AUTHORITY COME YOUR WAY.
};
( with kde's app-loading cursor animation, the devrant stressball bounces and i think that's absolutely fantastic )

Story of me trying to connect to a colleague from neighbouring team with 12 hour difference timezone:

Me: Hey! Shall we catch up to discuss a feature that will help us dominate the world?

She: Sure.. what time works for you?

Me: Since we have timezone challenge, I'd say boundary times would be good so none of us have to stretch.

She: umm.. good..

Me: How about 07:30 PM your time?

She: oh sweetie.. evenings don't work for me.. I want my evenings free..

Me: fine.. how about 07:00 AM your time?

She: no darling.. I am not a morning person..

Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF BITCH. I CAN'T COMPLY WITH EVERY TANTRUM OF YOURS.

And with that.. I didn't respond to her invites which were either super early for me or super late. Let her keep waiting..

Juniors with ego are shittiest folks to work with.

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

Listen, I get you're a junior.

But please read the fucking spec I spent quite some time on writing for you before you ask me a bunch of irrelevant questions, which you know would be irrelevant IF YOU READ THE SPEC!

Trust me.

Read the spec.

It will be clear.

There's this junior I've been training. We gave him a bigger task than we usually do

"How do I link an object in table X with the corresponding object in table Y?"

"How are objects in two tables usually linked? How did you link Y with Z in the first place?"

"Em... Foreign Keys?"

"Yup"

"But there's not foreign key from X to Y."

"Well, create one. You've got full creative freedom over this task."

I sometimes feel like Juniors are either completely careless about past code or overly carefuly with not editing any past code. Frustrating but adorable

Am I really unlucky, or are juniors these days all lazy af and such pampered babies that need hand holding all the time?
So back when I was a junior, when I wanted to learn something new, I would ask for some pointers from my seniors, could be an article, a video or even a book. From there I would look up further knowledge, play with the idea in my machine. If I couldn't understand something, or if I needed a better explanation of something, I would go back to my senior, but it was really rare.
Then comes this modern day, I'm the senior now and I'm in charge of mentoring a bunch of kids, who would treat me like their personal chatgpt. "Hey Junior #0, this is something you may want to read to help your next ticket, let me know if you have difficulty". Next day junior #0 would come back and say "I don't understand, the article mentioned X but I don't know how to do X. Can you show me how to do X?". Bro, no one knows how to do X after being born, just google "how to do X" and it gives you the fucking answer. Why the fuck do you have to circle back to me because of this. Junior #1 would refuse to read any articles longer than 250 words, and require constant 1-1 meetings to give him personal lectures. Dude this is not a class room, grow the fuck up! Junior #3 would write the messiest code possible despite my efforts to introduce tons of resources, then complain "why I'm still junior, how do I grow". Bro maybe if you learned half of what I sent you, you would have gotten promote by now. Fucking lazy kids these days!
Oh I can't fire these juniors. Top management was very clear that "we don't have budget to hire other devs for you, it's your responsibility to train them better".

No rant, just appreciation

A thank you to the senior developers out there who take the time to help us juniors out, to look at our (potentially) shitty code and point out how to improve it.

To help us to see the bigger picture and maybe take a more lengthy approach to a problem that'll pay off in the end.

And lastly, thanks for allowing us to learn from your years of bug splatting, stack tracing, null pointers and error messages.

You guys rock

Me: I need more programmers for the project.
Boss: You have 4 people, that's enough.
Me: I have 3 juniors taking 50% of time of a senior (me) contributing less than a medior and rest of my time goes to managing project. I know that in 6 months time invested in them will start paying off, but right now I need more people. Also I don't have me, by that logic, cleaning lady comes to the office every day and we couldn't work witout her, so there's 5 people, at least.
Boss: You'll manage.
Inner me: I would if I was working 8 hours as programmer without tutoring and managing.
Me: Sigh.

New country, new company, new team, new projects.
I'm supposed to be the TL of a team working on a React project.

A guy in his late 40s celebrates himself as "the senior", he basically just finished watching a youtube thing, React 101 crash course or similar. The other two juniors who did only Wordpress so far venerate him like a god.

The code, of course, is one on the finest pieces of crap I ever had the pleasure to deal with in my life: naturally a bunch of JQuery plugins for everything, no tests, no state management, side effects everywhere, shared state and globals like hell, everything written in ES3/ES5 style, no types, no docs, build and deploy totally manual, deep props drilling at every level... and not to mention the console.log() shipped in prod.

First day, already headache.
Full rewrite start tomorrow.
Hiring real devs as well.

The other day a non-programmer colleague asked me:
"How do you know what to type in, like, did you write all of that?"
As I responded, he asked me another question; "but how do you know wuat to type".

I use to have those same thoughts years ago.

It occurred to me that through constant bugs, errors, bad (team) projects and failures that its become second nature, like breathing.

So, as an experienced developer to people just learning the craft and juniors. Don't give up on your collabs, don't be disheartened by group projects, don't be discouraged by your peers who seemingly try to make your life harder.

Take it as an experience to better yourself and teach them something.

These are the experiences that will make you a better developer.

Told juniors about coding guidelines that don't put another if-else just to fix a bug. Think through about it and see if you can come up with better solutions.

Today one bug was filed, they asked what happened, one junior said that he [my name] asked me for no if-else in code. He kinda deleted all if-else in codebase and started using same implementation for everything.

I'm standing with a WTF face.

😐

Helped out a junior today with a minor JS issue he had. Told him, "cool so that should fix it on this page but it may break things elsewhere. Make sure you check it otherwise the client will go into meltdown. "
30mins after they go home. Client emails (All Caps) "WEBSITE BROKEN, URGENT HELP REQUIRED"
😡 you didn't bloody check it did you!
Ffffffffuuuuuuuu

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

Biggest challenge as a dev was breaking away from the mindset that I was some brilliant, genius programmer and accepting that I like most people knew nothing. And that there was something I could learn from everyone, including my juniors.

Folks...

I think I need to get away from web development...

Honestly, no grudge held against web/mobile development itsef... But the projects, the teams, the workflows... It's always shitty af.

I'm fed up with the bad architecture, poor management decisions, unmaintained legacy code, broken windows, arrogant juniors, arrogant seniors, code smells left to rot, the freaking red door... Hell! The fucking "we don't have time for that" answer to testing... Damn!

Been there done that.

Feels like it's always the same crap and unfortunately, it's rare to start a professional project from scratch.

Fucking angular, broken piece of shit.
Fucking react (& RN) community modules, broken pieces of shit.
Fucking lazy-ass node developers.
Fucking ES and fucking garbage proposals submitted to the TC39.

I wish I could do Haskell / Rust / Clojure professionally... I could even enjoy Go with a good team... Anything but that huge pile of dogshit JS and its community of brainfucked so-called developers.

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

Sometimes it feels like I'm not as passionate towards coding as I was before. Seeing bright-eyed juniors with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge makes me wish I could feel the same again. I mean I still like it and all, but it's just not the same.

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

My advisor: Can you teach Lean to these juniors?
Me: When shall we start?
Him: In two weeks.
Me: Sure.

And that's how I learn a new language in two weeks!

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Hey guys how do you deal with juniors who code like this?

As a Senior this give me OCD and anxiety.

Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.

Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.

For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.

I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"

Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"

And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.

the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.

Plus, you learn more when you teach others.

HR is getting so desperate they are prescheduling me interviews attached with CVs in the hopes that I will interview the candidates for a senior, even though the candidates have no experience whatsoever in embedded software programming. Workday, JIRA and Excel does not count you absolute fucknuggets.

For fuck sake, I asked management to hire new grads or juniors, at least I can get a person motivated to learn, but I swear they just don't listen.

They just are content with wasting my time lol

At a previous company we hired an 18 year old guy and father from a minority and without a high school degree. He could write enough code to get the job. However, he took 3h long lunches, came in late to work and apparently had a problem taking orders from women. At one point all the juniors got an earful because of his attitude and he got let go, not long after. It still saddens me because he could have made a really good career if wasn't for his attitude.

Every University should make it a requirement that CS and Info technology juniors and seniors spend time on devRant. It is an education in real world coding and business challenges. No surprises. Easier transition to being a pro.

Wish it were available when I was starting.

I know I was one at some point, but juniors can be so frustrating at times.

After some pairing for a while they're quick to adopt the "Dev" mindset and think as far as they need to...

... but with this latest batch... that day couldn't come sooner 🫠

Having to explain how exceptions work again is the last thing you wanna do under tight time constraints 🙃

Once upon a time we were normal remote professionals and our sprint meetings were characteristically professional, no more, no less.

Until.

one of our juniors, a Southern sports-bro type, suddenly started saying "SIR" to the scrum master in literally every sentence.

"Good morning sir". "Yes sir." "Thank you sir." "I can do that sir."

SOMEHOW this plague caught on to half of the male members of our team like we're in the military or something. We have ONE veteran and ZERO Indians and I can't think of a logical explanation for why we're suddenly sir-ing each other and people who aren't even high level executives.

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.

I'm working with some too smart junior. He rarely listens, does his own magic.

In his last MR, he did an ugly fix, 100 lines big. I told him exactly, what to check first, but nope, he's likes being a magician.

Now, I took 5 min and fixed it with single line of code.

Damn simulation.

Some juniors grabbed keyboard and reprogrammed main species to stay at home and fear of death while I was busy working with other features.

Moreover someone made additional changes from infected computer and guess what....

Unfortunately it’s real time system with increasing entropy and we can’t revert changes so fixing damn shit would take from one to two decades.

We don’t have backups cause last time we used them we also killed dinosaurs.

It would be just easier to erase everything and start from beginning cause our statistics charts are fucked up - again but motherfucker boss don’t want to do it.
He’d rather teleport again to adjust the world. Damn fucker thinks he’s god but in fact he’s just prick with rich parents.

I’ve decided to piss him off by adjusting planet thermostat so we can start over.
2 years more and changes would be irreversible.

Damn job.

Biggest challenge was to accept that no matter where you go, what you do, you will have to deal with stupid people.

They come in all ranges, starting from hr, interns, juniors, coworkers, code reviewers, seniors, managers, boss, clients.

And in order to grow in life, you have to learn to deal with them. Better even if you could make them a little less stupid.

Who am I?

Some of you, because of the hyperbolic, outrageous, trollish, and often self-satirical nature of my posts, might doubt me. Thats completely relatable.

Heres the truth:
I was diagnosed in childhood with ADHD, fucking everyone, every male, these days is diagnosed with that. I was diagnosed bipolar. Hell anyone reading my posts could see that from a mile away. I was diagnosed on the borderline personality spectrum. Yeah, I could see that.

I was tested. They said I was in the 98th percentile for clerical ability, not extraordinary but pretty good, mathematical ability a little higher than that. My SAT was 1491. Not yale material, but I coulda been someone.

Over the years I studied a LOT of politics and read a metric fuckton of books. (40+ books over the course of three years).

I predicted every single presidential election since bush juniors second election. Three supreme court picks. Senatorial elections. Congresional elections. More than that.

I have a better analysis track record than some of the multidecade analysts sitting in the fucking NSA.

No I am not shitting you. No I am not exaggerating.

It's about the only claim to fame I get to legitimately make.

People ask me, "then why aren't you famous?"

How do you know I'm not.

Look I'm gonna tell you my actual name.
My real name is Lawrence B. Lindsey

Okay, I'm bullshitting for fun. But words I have written on alt twitter accounts have legitimately come out of presidential hopeful's mouths. No, this I am *not* bullshitting you about.

Imagine that. A guy who lived in his parents attic for five years, writing words that came out of presidential candidates mouths.

At one time I was about as popular and influential as that fuckboy catturd.

yes, really. No I am not fucking joking.

Under normal conditions I wouldn't talk about this or reveal it, because who the fuck cares? I'm just some dude on the internet, drunk, both on alcohol, and the pseudo-anonymous equivalent of bragging rights.

You know how many women I turned down because I could? You know how fucking drunk I am? They say a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts. Well, I'm not usually honest like this because the internet is full of false braggarts, and you tell people the truth and they don't fucking believe you.

I swear, it seems like I made some faustian bargain at some time, and can achieve no fame or lasting wealth in my life--to save my life.

Shit, I was talking to a chinese women who ran a bank in china (yes, really), who advised me to buy into bitcoin early on. Didn't have the money to. Woulda been a fucking millionaire if I did.
*Non-obvious* Ideas that major corporations are now persuing? Yeah those were sitting in my card index since the early 2000s.

I helped two people build and sell businesses. One for me tens of thousands. Another for millions. Yes, really. Got zero, and I mean, *zero* credit for it.

Point is, doesn't matter how famous you are, or coulda been, Doesn't matter the ideas you have, or had.

The world doesn't promote runners-up, or hasbeens, or wannabes, or could-bes.

What matters is execution.

If you're wandering through life, wondering when you're lucky break will be, stop. You have to realize, you make your own luck. Recognize the difference between what you can control, and what you can, and work on promoting your own ideas or business or values, instead of other people's dreams.

And for those wondering, yes I am drunk, and no, I ain't fucking kidding you in anything I wrote here.

The most important lesson I learned is this:
First work on your own success, before you work on the success of others.

p.s.

I give surprisingly good advice for someone who doesn't benchmark well on traditional measures of success. I know, even I was shocked when I looked at the statistics.

One of our juniors was adding a feature and made a small mistake in one of their (copy-pasted) unit tests by forgetting to cast a return value of a mock

So he spent a ton of time changing the main code to do type checks, try/catching and error handling.

Poor soul realized the mistake in code review one day later

How I got selected for GSoC'19:
I will describe my journey from detail i.e from the 1st year of the college. I joined my college back in 2017 (July), I was not even aware of Computer Science. What are the different languages of CS, but I had a strong intuition of doing BTech from CSE only?

So yeah I was totally unaware of the computer science stuff, but I had a strong desire to learn it and I literally don’t know why I had this desire. After getting into college, I was learning HTML, Python, and C, also I am really thankful to my friends who really helped me to learn, building logic and making stuff out of it. During the 1st month of joining the college, I got to know what is Open Source, GSoC, Github due to my helpful seniors. But I was not into Open Source during my 1st year of college as I thought it is very difficult to start. In my 1st year, I used to do competitive programming and writing scripts in Python to automate various stuff. I never thought that I would even start doing Open Source development, also in the summer vacations after the 1st year I used to practice programming on HackerRank and learnt an awesome course called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python(which I think is one of the most popular courses for Python) which really helped me to build by Python skills.

Now the 2nd year came, I was totally confused between doing Open Source development or continue with my Competitive programming. But I wanted to know about Open Source development, so I thought to start now will be a good idea. I started attending meetups of OSDC(Open Source Developers Club) which is a hub of my college, which really helped me to know more about Open Source development from my seniors. I started looking for beginner friendly projects in Python on the website Up For Grabs, it’s really helpful for the beginners. So I contributed in a few of them, and in starting it was really tough for me but yeah I continued, which really helped me to at least dive into Open Source. Now I thought to start contributing in any bigger project, which has millions of lines of code which will be really interesting. So I started looking for the project, as I was into web development those days so I thought to find a project which matches my domain. So yeah I finally landed on Oppia:
Oppia

I started contributing into Oppia in November, so yeah in starting it was really difficult for me to solve any issue (as I wasn’t aware of the codebase which was really big), but yeah mentors at Oppia are really helpful, they guided me which really helped me to start my journey with Oppia. By starting of January I was able to resolve around 3–4 issues, which helped me to become the collaborator at Oppia, afterward I really liked contributing to it and I was able to resolve around 9–10 issues by the end of February, which landed me to become a Team Member at Oppia which was really a confidence boost and indication for me that I am in the right direction.

Also in February, the GSoC organizations list was out, and yeah Oppia was also participating in it. The project ideas of Oppia were really interesting, I became even confused to pick anyone because there were 4–5 ideas which seemed interesting to me. After 1–2 days of thought process I decided to go for one of them, i.e “Asking students why they picked a particular answer”, a full stack project.

I started making proposals on it, from the first week of March. I used to get my proposal reviewed frequently from the mentors, which really helped me to build a good and strong proposal.

I must say a well-defined proposal is the most important key for getting selected in GSoC, also you must have done some contributions to the organization earlier which I think really maximize your chances of selection in GSoC.

So after my proposal was made, I submitted it on the GSoC website.
Result Day:

It was the result day, by the way, I had the confidence of being selected, but yeah I was a little bit nervous. All my friends were asking when is your result coming, I told them it will come at 12.30AM (IST). Finally, the time came when I refreshed the GSoC website, Voila the results were out. I opened the Oppia organization page, and yeah my name was there. That was the day I was really happy and satisfied, I was thinking like I have achieved something in my life. It was a moment of pleasure for me, I called my parents and told them my result, they were really happy for me.

I say cracking GSoC is worth it, the preparation you do, the contributions you do, the making of the proposal is really worth.

I got so many messages from my juniors, friends, and seniors, they congratulated me. After that when I uploaded my result of Facebook and LinkedIn, there were tons of comments and likes on the post. So yeah that’s my journey.

By the way, I am writing this post after really late, sorry for it. I must have done it earlier, but due to milestone 1 of GSoC, I was busy.

So the juniors finished a feature and it's okay, it passed all tests.

Now I'm cleaning their code and... I opened up a whole file with trash code that is either repetitive, or not even used. I decided to save it in case it breaks one of the features but... nope, everything seems to be running perfectly with just half of the code they wrote.

I applied for a frontend dev position.
The HR sent me a mail with details for MERN developer position (Full-stack) and asked me do an assignment with frontend and backend 🤔
I requested to clarify if I'm supposed to do only frontend as that's the position I applied for.
No response on that. They got back and requested me to schedule an interview.
I have worked with NodeJS before but I primarily work on the frontend, still I went along with it anyway.
I aced the first two rounds, but for the final round they emphasized on the backend and then it went downhill. At the end they said I was really good on the frontend but for that position they needed someone particularly with expertise on the backend. 🤷‍♂️
Well, I didn't intend to work Full-stack anyway.
They wanted me do everything and also lead the team and mentor juniors and take ownership of multiple projects.
I mean, why would I want to work the job of two people (or more) and not get paid that much 🤨

had to reject a junior candidate today. Couldn't really write an if else statement.

Always feels bad, I remember being mortified when I was at that level.

If you dish out the same shit you inherited from your senior colleagues onto your juniors, you have just successfully become the part of an ongoing shit show.

Be kind and supportive. Earn their trust, be approachable. Listen to them and help them learn to solve problems. Give constructive feedbacks, not harsh criticisms. Point out room for improvements, not belittle someone. Be that mentor/teacher you wish you had.

Learn. Build. Teach. Grow

So I am conducting an introductory seminar on git and GitHub for juniors and as per my knowledge I've drafted this outline, please add your inputs..

The seminar will be of 1 day only

1. Install and configure Git and Github

2. Digital Signature mapping

3. Git init

4. New Project with HTML

5. Configure remote (git remote add <origin> <url>) ends with .git

6. Git commit (git commit –m “Title” –m “commit message”)

7. Pushing git push (git remote push origin master)

8. Git commit –amend

9. Git pull (git pull origin master)

10. Git checkout (git checkout –b new_branch_name)

11. Do some changes

12. Git push new branch (git remote push origin new_branch_name)

13. Git switch branch (git checkout <name_of_existing_branch>)

14. Pull requests

15. Git log (git log –oneline –graph)

Clown manager put three juniors (and ”senior” dev on work visa) on new project.

They will never finish it.

It’s too hard for them with some legacy dynamically created complex database queries which will spook the hell out of them!

But managers like, ”it’s going to be good” and ”making good progress”.

Fuck no! Putting juniors together? With little support? It such a waste. They spent weeks just to get even the slightest progress.

No best practise. No tests. Just hacking away.

It’s a failure of the management! We fail our juniors and they will quit as soon as they get the chance and they feel like they have some wind under their wings.

”It’s going to be good”

Pff. Clowns leading this company.

My current new boss is pretty awesome. When he arrived, we were a lot of juniors dev crumbling under pressure. He directly went to product team and to sales team and totally reduced our workload to something acceptable.
He values sane work environment a lot, and I think that's what make a good boss

Yet again

If foo():
return True
else:
return False

Agrrr!!11

Back when I used be a junior fresh out of school, my senior used to say, when releasing a first version or a major version of any software, app or website always implement easy to fix bugs.

End users or clients, especially the ones that tasked you with the creation of it, will look for a bug until they find one, if it isn't one you will spent hours trying to figure it out, instead give them one.
You know how to fix it and the client is satisfied they found one.

To this day, i still do that, although mostly not even aware of it. Eg: I know that's a bug but i'll fix that when (not if, when) they complain about it.

I even find myself telling the juniors, i develop with, giving them similar if not the same advice.

And that is what experience means, skill is something they teach you in school.
Experience is what makes you a senior or a junior, not your level of skill or the amount of keywords on your Linked In profile.

Ordered a takeout wok/poke this evening from a new place. The only thought after tasting - what kind of junior made this....? I hope I write code better than he cooks food.

It looks like what it's supposed to look
it smells as it should
it has all the ingredients

but the taste is just... Not right.

I takes special skill to make it so wrong!

So our team is scaling and we've been handling increased workload and I've been wanting to hire two juniors ever since. Finally narrowed down the candidates to three, but I couldn't decide between them so after some careful considerations, I've decided to hire all three. Fingers crossed I have enough time to mentor and manage the three of them and I don't fuck them up.

Sometimes it's better to burn a bridge so you don't even think about crossing it in the future.

See, I left a company some years ago because I didn't see my future in it and all management combined had a collective intelligence of a chicken.
However, I got a call from them a couple of months ago asking me if I could return. The salary was double and the working arrangement seemed fine. On paper. WFH. Flexibile hours...
Since I actually liked the project itself for its technical challenge, I accepted the return offer. What a bad idea that was.

Of course, the things that made me leave for the first time had only gotten worse. Bad leadership, idiot developers in team leader positions. Tech debt higher than Mount Everest. Bad infra that makes you want to off yourself every time you work on it. The whole circus.
Seriously, the "senior" team leader will happily merge code that includes assert(true == true), but hold up a well written MR because he has a personal vendetta with the developer.
Personally, I always check him whenever he starts being an ass. But the poor juniors are in hell. They're terrified.
Now I'm leaving again, but this time I've made sure I can't come back.

Is it normal for seniors to talk to juniors with disrespect if they made something wrong in code?
this is my first time job ever and I feel like this behavior is so weird honestly.

Fuck, they updated the internal move policy in my company from 1 year 9 months to move to another team to be at least in the same team for 2 years.

I hope I can find a way to gtfo faster because I am honestly so tired of this shit, the tasks are getting too repetitive, my boss is useless, spends her time shopping instead of working and being stuck with a bunch of juniors means you only have the internet to learn something new.

I really want to start delving more into PAAS and start working with docker and kubernetes. Oh well, guess we'll have to wait and see.

Here we go....

At our school we had different industry people come in and talk about whatever they want to.

My last presenation for the day is on 3D modelling in Game Design, and of course we have middle school kids being generally loud and obnoxious.

Some fuckers are being exceptionally obnoxious, and the teachers decided, in their infinite FUCKING wisdom, to stick them in front of a table where Juniors and Seniors are sitting, minding our own buisness.

Of course, the fuckers decided to continue being obnoxious and despite my request to keep it down, and another Senior's direct approach to tell them to shut up, they continue being disruptive.

At one point, a teacher, again using INFINITE FUCKING WISDOM, decided that instead of removing the fuckers from the room, put a Senior in between them, hoping that that would somehow keep them quiet. Yes, the fucking preschool level attempt didn't work.

Eventually a teacher concluded that the fuckers were pissing us off and removed them from the room. Thank fuck.

That feels much better, excuse me as I need to reinstall an OS on my desktop since the Universe seems to fucking hate me today.

!devrant

So today my CTO reigned, and I heard rumours that they probably will have me as the next CTO. Me personally, I'm not ready for this ... Even as a Senior Software Engineer , sometimes I have obstacles leading the my Juniors (6 of them).

Also, for the same pay, I rather maintain my current position.

I am not ready yet.

Junior, junior, junior. I'm like -junior. We want a junior with 3 years experience. How is someone supposed to get to the 3 years experience if there aren't any jobs accepting juniors will no professional experience. I can code, , albeit not professionally, that's why I want a job, to learn in a professional setting, but the junior jobs all want past experience.

Maybe one day. Maybe never. For now I'll just keep rolling on the grind in my shitty factory job. Moving boxes from one place to another with the toughest mental challenge being which way to stack said boxes.

Today while cleaning windows, came up to my mind how I miss when developers not only knew what is but also how to implement ajax requests properly....
Nowadays a framework with 10 composer packages will do the trick, and looks like black magic to juniors

The other day I went back to my college representing the company that I work for interviews of Freshers. Since I was taking interviews of my immediate juniors, I knew that every candidate’s major is Computers Applications, and we had sent out a JD ‘specifically’ mentioning that we need Devs, so tech people only.
We interviewed 40 people for first round in total out of which 12 were shortlisted for second round (we made them write some code).
Out of 12, 8 straight up refused to write the code saying they weren’t interested in coding at all (even professionally). Made me boil up so much, someone else, much more deserving and willing could have been in their place and may even have the job. But us humans are always cunts.

When our co-devs don't commit for days at a time, then commit with a message like "mondays commit" -.-

Okay. I’m upset. So the recent .NET update Microsoft put out fried SharePoint which I am currently the main point of contact for at our company. In addition, my only current projects are creating workflows.

I was publishing a workflow and got an error. I googled the error and found that it was the .NET update that caused it. Internet says to edit the web.config file for your web apps and it will be good to go. I go to our networks guy (only available supervisor) and explain what happened and ask about the recent patch and whether this could be the cause. He says that his team doesn’t actually handle the patches so I should speak with the HelpDesk lead (don’t ask).

I go to the HelpDesk lead and explain the situation, explain the solution and ask for what to do next. Keep in mind that this whole thing takes two hours because it’s Friday and everyone is out and I can’t do any of my work while I’m waiting on this. HelpDesk lead says “you have an admin account, I trust you. Go fix it” so I think uh okay.... I’m a junior and not even technically an IT person but sure. I know how to do it - but got nervous about fucking it up because our entire organization uses Sharepoint.

Nevertheless I go to my desk and look for the root directories and find that they’re on a server somewhere that I have no access to. I message the Helpdesk guy and tell him this and he says to talk to the developer supervisor. Great! He’s super nice and helpful and will totally understand! Only he’s not in. Neither is half of his team.

I go to his team and look around and find nobody but realize I may be able to catch one of the guys I know and work with in the break room. I start leaving and am stopped by a developer who is generally nice and funny. I explain the situation and he says “you... YOU need to edit a config file?” And scoffs. He demands to see what I’m talking about.

I walk him to my machine and show him what’s going on and all the research I did. I start to realize he thinks I’m overstepping and I begin to apologize and explain the details to why I was asked to do it and then I say “I really shouldn’t even be the one doing this” he says “no you should not. This isn’t getting done today. Put in a request, include your research and we will see what we can do when the supervisor gets back next week”

His tone was like I was in trouble and I know that I’m not, but it’s my goal to end up on that team and I just feel like shit about this whole situation. To top it off my boss pulled me off of two projects because of unrelated issues (and nothing to do with me) so I have basically nothing to do and I just feel very discouraged. I feel dumb and like I should have gone to the developers first. I just wanted to make it easy on everyone and do my research. I feel like I keep being put in situations above my level (I’m one of two juniors in a 16 person shop, the other one is an intern) and then “getting in trouble” for working beyond my scope.

Anyways.... fuck Microsoft

I am a junior web developer, currently working in my first job for a small company, I was hired because I have an interest in meteor and modern web dev.

When I say small I mean I am the only full time js dev.

So the project we are working (my first ever professional project from start to finish) is a travel booking web app (being a little vague, for the sake of privacy). I am the lead developer, as a new programmer of a project that is far from trivial. There are no other javascript devs in office, no sort of code review. We have an outsourced dev but as I got in a flow with one dev my boss supposedly told him to do it part time (without discussing with me), but haven't heard anything from him, so assuming he's just disappeared (probably annoyed at being treated like a commodity).

Boss has set up the stages, and forces me to move on to the next stage before that stage has been finished. I will have to go back over the whole thing to finish things off.

He will only hire cheap juniors, one front end guy with barely any experience is styling the site.

He is used to churning out WordPress and Magento sites.

Wish I had a senior I could learn off.

I want to stick at this project and see it through, but i can only see it ending in a train wreck.

At the same time I want out, I want to work under a better team with senior programmers and better code review.

I just have to do my best and see how it goes I guess

Don’t ever look down on your juniors or seniors. There is something to learn from everyone.

Ok so we have 2 useless remote contractors in our team who got hired as seniors but actually are juniors. They take weeks to deliver most basic things and never ask for help or offer help for others. They take days to fix most basic comments after review.

Today our teamlead in a call said that it's a cultural difference, these guys dont ask for help because they are very independent.

MOTHERFUCKER, I WOULD BET MY SALARY THAT THESE IDIOTS DONT WORK EVEN 10 HOURS A WEEK.

I was doing more than them when I was a mere junior.

So I just was invited to look at an internal issue at a company that has modified BEM styling rules for their website, because the website started looking very weird on some pages..

I instantly knew that someone had to have fucked with them, because theres no way margin--top-50 all of the sudden isn't working.

Looked at their git history and apparently a senior approved a juniors styles change, where he modified things like margin--bottom-0 to be 500px or block--float-left to be float: right in specific containers with an id like "#uw81hf_"

WHY DO YOU APPROVE THIS GARBAGE WITHOUT CHECKING IT?! AND HOW DID THIS PASS A SECOND CHECK?!!! WTF

Another rant reminded me:

I’ve been at the same company for almost five years now, and I’ve seen the dev teams grow: several juniors come in, and even a few that left - or more precisely, was let go. And for each of those that were let go, the root issue with them was always the same: not the lack of skills or ability to learn their trade at job, no. It was always communication issues serious enough to render working with them impossible.

So remember juniors, besides googling and problem solving, the most important skill to master in team-based dev envs is COMMUNICATION. You need to fucking be part of the team or you’re out, no matter how good you are technically. If that’s too hard, either this is the wrong line of work for you or you need to just go solo. It’s that simple, boys, girls, and everyone else on the spectrum.

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 :|

Started a new job recently and feel like I don't know anything compared to everyone else, only got a years commercial experience but feel like I should know more! Anybody else ever feel like this when they were starting out? How do you overcome it?

My manager told me that when he noticed my male colleague disturbing tasks and helping out juniors, he recommended him for a lead position then proceeded to tell how I am a great mentor and how well my year end goal items were managed.

Few weeks back, late night, busy watching online series and suddenly, junior pings me and asks for doubts related to implementation design and then implementation in nodejs (which I touched long long ago). And, me being attracted towards debugging, and kind heart to help the junior(hihi kind heart), helped to completely resolve the issue by texting and screenshot of logs sent over message.. just to mention. Time was around 2-3 am.. my most effective time period..

Passed out college this year...
Got a job too (lucky 😀)
Now all juniors are asking me how to prepare for placements... N keeps asking my resume..
And m saying everyone same stuff.. DS and algo is must.. n chk my LinkedIn for resume..
Soon, seems like m gonna tell them join devRant first and then I will say further..
Note: Placement starts in few weeks and they care now on how to prepare for it.. Folks say it's better to start late than never.. but still.. I wud love to help them but asking same questions repeatedly not gonna help them..

company lands huge enterprise project
promises client to deliver it in MIN_TIME_REQUIRED/4

No architect, no technical lead, no seniors, no designer just juniors and interns in the project.

all the project time wasted by manager making shit decisions and not giving a fuck what devs have to say about how project will be disaster if goes like this.

Now the project is officially under raging fire

Boss to dev : What happend to the project. Why are things not working?
Dev: You made decisions not us.
Boss: I don't buy it. Work 24hrs until this is done.
Dev: F*** you and this project. I am resigning.

"Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was"

I've come to love this quote. We, the engineers, are shaping the world. We have the tools, knowhow and expertise to move mountains.

I said it before years ago and I'll say it again: all the other roles are meant to assist us, not the other way around. We don't work for managers, sales dept., bosses. They can't do shit without us. Why do we need them? To buy us toys, to sell our creations and suggest us how to shape our creations to make a better sell.

Quit slaving if you feel you are a professional. Quit bending over to sales' and mgmt nonsense timelines and demands. Hear them out, consider their concerns and give them YOUR estimates and approaches.

WE are the power of creation. THEY work for us. Not the other way around.

Does not apply to juniors. They are still learning their way around

So, I had to listen very badly in a scrum about my poor code quality. Just because I haven't used the latest version of the library in my gradle build file, I haven't used DTO in the response of few endpoints in the controller class instead I used entity,... Etc was the mistake.

I admit that I have a long way to improve myself and there is a lot to learn, but there should be a proper way to escalate the situation rather than publicly pointing out mistakes rudely.

He is a senior with 10+ years of experience who badly told me in the scrum and not only that whenever there is a change needed in my PR he takes the screenshot and puts it in our dev team group and shows the mistakes and gives the suggestions instead of writing comments on the github PR.

Not only that, if I inform in the daily updates that I took 2 hours for this and that task, he says it should be done in 20 to 30 minutes.

Upper management has given him a lot of respect because he is knowledgeable and knows the stuff but it doesn't mean he is entitled to behave like this and demoralise other juniors.

The matter is cool now but this incident happened to me a few months back and those days were really toxic for me at work.

The university I used to study CSE, they had some OLD computers with Windows XP in them. Also, all those computers had TWO user accounts. One with the admin access and another one with normal access. Until this, it was fine.
But the browsers installed there were so old, even normal website struggles to load properly. and so many outdated apps, kept bugging us for update, but every time we click on UPDATE, they ask for the admin password, which we didn't have. So, most of the students were frustrated about this, but nobody took any action! :/
So, I hacked one of the computers' admin password. the password was "BRIGHT". I'm like, these people are never gonna set different passwords in different computers and remember them for eternity. Definitely all passwords have to be the same, and they were! Which saved my time.
So, I shared the password with everyone in my class and now they can install any apps they want. Which made me so happy!
But You know, words travel fast! Just one day after the hacking incident, the Seniors ( & the juniors ) came to me with their laptops to find their forgotten password, which made me earn some money & eat some delicious foods, also got to meet some beautiful girls of our campus ^_^
& I used to go to other classes to hack those Admin passwords for fun ^_^ But I never told them the password until they pay me or feed me something delicious! ^_^

I miss those good old days! ^_^

Took a week of PTO for a vacation because I'm pretty close to spent these days. Planning on getting in some kayaking and fishing I think, maybe some noodling on the guitar or read some Tolkien, as I really need to take a break from the computer and screens in general, and living in the latest COVID epicenter in the US I can do fuck all else.

I'm /really/ trying to force myself to ignore slack and work emails. I did all I could to leave my team prepared, and given that most are juniors who need A LOT of supervision since working remote, I fully anticipate having to fix everything and get shit back on track when I return next week. Telling myself it's inevitable so worrying about it now won't be any better than waiting till next week. LEARN TO READ CODE AND COMMIT HISTORY FUCKERS!

I know I have a full workload slated for the rest of the year and into Q1 21, so I know letting shit go for a little while is the best thing I can do for myself, and so that my family doesn't have to deal with me being a bastard all the damn time.

Was thinking of writing a blog about my recent experiences with C and Linux . Although the concepts i learnt are not so great , i searched a lot for some . Thought i would help my juniors by giving them an additional battery for their flashlight incase they get lost in the woods .

But eversince i thought of that , i am unsure where to start and how to proceed with those things i learnt . And also unsure about whether it will be useful or will it be just another piece in the internet..

Any thoughts ?

Web Juniors: “Why use a single grid element when several flex elements layered like haphazard pancakes will do the trick?”

So you know those motivating moments, when you are asked by a junior dev 'cause his task is impossible to solve and you take 3 minutes to say it's done?
Well. Juniors are still learning.
BUT WHY CANT YOU USE DOCS AND GOOGLE?????

So I am pissed on my company's polices or whatever for finding out things that I should be ethically or culturally prying in.
These people hired two JS developers (Beginner Level in front-end & JavaScript) &
Company asked me to interview them and I did but I was not satisfied with their interview and told HR about it.

But HR still decided to hired them both and asked me to mentor them.

To this extant I was OK. But I found out that both of them are being paid more than me.

How can someone with more experience and skill be treated like this. and also being asked to mentor juniors who don't event know about closure in JavaScript ?

I am going to ask my boss for a raise as per my skill, performance and responsibilities.

I really hate it when juniors tells me how to do my job. The think that throwing in an English words here and there and some acronyms that their theory is valid - when infact they are completely out of touch and short sighted.

Fuck off

You acting tough with juniors but you spit on your hotdog before eating it

Damn he still hasn't spoken to me, must be over a week now, normally he can't stop talking to me. I must have really pissed him off telling him it is company policy to not give juniors global admin access on all our servers. He's going to have a hard time in life if he keep that attitude up.

Sprint 1 of being a team leader. I wake up in the middle of the night worried about how to manage these newly arrived juniors.

Well I noticed one thing here.

You write any post regarding coding, bad management, juniors or whatever shit, this community welcomes you
But you dare to put wrong tag or category, all are like where the fuck is report button? can I dislike this post bla bla..

Why so with wrong tag

I have 2 juniors working under me that i need to assist with work. I dont mind helping at all because i was in the same boat. The problem is.. 1 of the developers asks questionsnon the last minute (a few hours before demo of weeks sprint) telling me she doesnt understand and i spend all week asking her, if shes okay, does she understand, does she need help, is the work too much, should we take a few hours to rerun through things and even while explaining things after planning, she just says "yes" and "i understand" and has the body language of "i want to get away here" ans doesnt even let me finish my sentances before interrupting mentonsau "yes" or something in that line to end the conversation. I dont know what to do because its going to start affecting my work and the ammount of work i can take for the week because i have to help her do the work on the last day and finish it just so she can look like the sprint was successful.

Any suggestions to help me help her? I really want to see her succeed but i can tell she isnt taking it as serious as she should or putting in as much as she likes because our company is very flexible woth everything and i don't want to get a project manager vibe around her

I’ve been an angry old man this week. Frustration is a bitch, especially when you can’t really pinpoint the source of it with any resemblance of certainty.

Maybe it’s that having been constantly stressing over the impending graduation and the effort required to get there with too little time and energy to actually achieve it is boiling over.

Maybe it’s the reality of having absolutely zero me time since last March playing fucking ping pong with my head.

Maybe it’s me having trouble getting back to terms with a certain codebase after being assigned to other projects for the last almost 1,5 years and now trying to finish something the ex-lead started before he left.

And most certainly it’s the constant stream of brainless verbal vomit that raises the misanthropy levels through the roof.

Fucking juniors, fucking seniors, fucking Swedes, fucking C-level arseholes, fucking green dots, fucking idiots, fucking ”woke” ass social media influencers, fucking posers - Fuck You All!

I have never understood why there is so much animosity from seasoned devs in the community.

I see it in a lot of places. Stackoverflow, reddit, even devRant. In so many cases, an inexperienced dev will post to the web, only to be shot down by things like "this question is stupid" or "you all have it too easy and its apparent you never learned basic CS principles" or things of that nature. In a lot of cases, these are generally unhelpful replies and often teach new devs to be wary of seeking help.

Please help me to understand, why this is.

Is it because the community is angry at these devs trying to get a high paying job by going to a bootcamp and shortcutting the hard work it takes to understand core CS principles to become a decent developer? Then why not take a moment to provide resources or insight to these folks so they can learn to be better?

Is it because the community feels that devs from bootcamps are just watering down the pool of talent making our worth decrease? I feel this isnt really valid because seasoned, experienced architects will always be needed to build good software. And at that, why are we not ensuring that the next wave of developers is equipped to handle tasks like that?

There are a lot of good people in this community who want to help and make the net a better place for all developers (after all, many of us consider it home), but there's a lot more people out there with really shitty attitudes, and it frustrates the hell out of me that my juniors now equate arrogant, self-entitled responses and attitudes with "seasoned devs" and discourages them from even bothering to get involved in the community.

Just went through EOY reviews. I found out in my own review that someone made the questionable decision to give me a raise and a promotion I'm not sure if I deserve... however why I'm really stoked is because its the first time I've gotten to promote one of my juniors! Now *that* is a really rewarding feeling because the dude certainly went balls deep and earned it, and I have the power to validate that.

Are PRs only to help juniors? I don't think so but someone I know does.

Next week is super-efficient-daily-standup-and-monday-status-bonanza-meeting week!

The most effecient way is NOT to attend.

If you have no questions/impediments/whatever and you feel like you have velocity > whatever. Be a no-show!

I am SURE you know what is expected from you!

Hey, younglings! Some meetings are _not_ compulsary. No need to be there if you know the drill. If you are in a good work place, everyone will get it. You’re working. This is not always understood by juniors.

But, communicate what your intentions are! Don’t be quite. Communication are difficult. More is better than nothing! Just right is very difficult to obtain and will never be mastered.

And, Windows 11 really sucks…

Earlier I used to help my college batch mates and juniors in coding and development stuff. Sometimes I used to do some projects with them myself to help them learn. Sometimes I used to go beyond limits to debug their errors, even spending hours with them physically or through TeamViewer.

But now I have realised that I had been no more than just stackoverflow.com to them. They just call me when they need me and don't even care about me as a friend.

So that's it. Now I have stopped helping such people. I don't care if that's rude or arrogant. I just don't want to do this. If they still are a friend, well and good otherwise they can leave. I don't care anymore.

I cant with this company any longer.

Most of it is crap but this is too much

Retrospective meeting after 2weeks sprint.

Sprint board for the meeting, in the not good section

I just started but I'm already tired.

For some years I have worked in the industry, not a lot, I know right but I really wonder how do you deal with all "not code-related" bullshit.

IT should be a dynamic field but somehow it is stuck inside the business logic which is all about the money and that does not take care of the real matter which is "code engineering".

- Most of the projects I have seen are an utter mess.
- No real structure
- Code is literally thrown somewhere to make stuff works and fix bugs
- Features which should require X amount of time are planned and shipped earlier ignoring best practices.
- The customer changes idea every week
- Nobody wants to pay for a reasonable architecture but prefer to keep financing un-maintainable projects that only God knows where they have been made (presumably in Hell)
- Juniors devs with no real senior following them committing unreasonable stuff
- Seniors devs thinking they are but they aren't.
- Company that keeps delivering projects even if they have not the required amount of people to make it in time.

Seems like nobody wants to stop and take time to think and make the right decisions. I see people running around me like crazy ants.

But, above all, what really kills me deep inside is HR. You are looking for "dynamic" "talented" "cool" devs but you are not willing to pay them enough.

Should I talk about LinkedIn?

Oh, God... Even the worsts companies sound like they are into Fortune 500. I feel so much hypocrisy here.

I have worked for big and small IT companies.
In the end, is all about "inside politics", everything which is getting financed is not because of usefulness but because of "relationship".

I started coding when I was really young.
After ten and more years, I finally take the job of my dreams but everything is shuttering under my feet.

If you have some words of wisdom, I'm here to hear you.

PS.
I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize for any mistake.

Rant one of monday!!

Monday stand up meeting....

Reviewing jira tasks
Front end:" well, I dont think that is a priority but IM NOT TEST DRIVEN DEVELOPER SO...."

Jira task? Local env for testing in minikubes.

Ahhh the cool startup isssss sooooo cool he takes decisions about that, model the app or even estimates the deadlines of the product (the product not jira tickets)

Isnt it cool? Why not give that power to juniors? Why not tell them they dont need to learn and junior is just something they label to pay cheap for them?

Biggest interview of my entire life is coming up on Thursday. I really need this to go well - it's more than double my current salary, at a time where I'm really starting to struggle to make ends meet. There's an actual "team", and from my interactions with them over the last four interviews, I think they're cool people. It's still a little unusual, because although there's a team or cohort of seniors that I'd be joining, every senior developer is still somewhat siloed, leading their own juniors. I'd also get to be remote 75% of the time, which I think I've realized is a "must have" benefit.

I don't know if it's coincidental or just bad timing then that I've been having episodes of pretty intense vertigo and panic attacks far more frequently than normal lately - even before I had this interview lined up. I realized recently that I must have some kind of anxiety disorder. I don't know if that's from the military, or just from being fucked up via my own missteps. But I can't keep having these attacks.

Anyone who's willing to share - I don't really have anyone to ask. How do you deal with this type of thing? I went to see a shrink last year, but he just gave me pills that replaced these issues with others.

i have an idea today for find job as Junior:

First of all, startups usually hire senior devs only for two reasons:

1) is critical to their business, they need people that will ensure the project will be done no matter what, seniors usually brings that to the table.

2) The startups that raise some founding, usually have 100k+ raised, that money is basically enough for hire Seniors for some time without troubles, taking into account they will usually be highly profitable in the mid term, it is not a big deal to take the risk

Today startups, at least the most interesting ones, play the game in God Mode due to that founds raising, it is like having a max level character in some MMO with insane amounts of gold, you will buy only the best gear with that gold, not the low level gear, why you want to buy low level stuff, if you can buy the best of the best? that is why Juniors are not likely to have a place in startups, they can pay the Seniors.

But, there a situation in what an startup will wish to hire some Juniors, this is situation is, when they have never raised founds, they have no Cheat Mode, this ones are usually startups that have just few weeks or months of being created, and they need the MVP ASAP, this startups usually already have one or two Mid/Senior level engineers, but they have a very highly benefit from having a Junior in their team, this guy will no take any part in the Cake, will only work for lot less money and will discharge some stuff from the Seniors (Taking into account that is a minimum competent Junior).

Here is where Juniors can get jobs, at least for start their careers, and taking into account that thousands of new startups are created every year, this is a major market.

Ok, i already test that this approach if viable, i send requests to 5 startups that meets the conditions, and got response from 4! still not make a deal, but this is a lot more than 0 response after 2 dozen of applications to more stablished startups.

What you think about this? maybe this is just the jobless syndrome attacking me fuck

Junior asks me to help him with his Microprocessors project. I was like cool mail it to me I'll check it out. He sends me a .s assembly file and tells me this is machine generated code, can you make it look like it's written by a human. I was like wtf dude -_-.

My Senior posts on LinkedIn about fostering a good work environment, but nobody in our office talks to each other and every time he comes in I get 45 trello cards about what I’ve not done right. Not a single time have I got a ‘well done, you’ve really taken initiative, you’ve managed to do something new without any guidance’

What’s the point in being on a juniors salary if I’m not being taught anything?

i like getting drunk and shitting on all the overly smug idiots on hackernews. sure, they may earn 100x what i do, but it's painfully clear most of them are juniors and have never owned or operated on a large production tech stack in their lives

OOHHHH WOWWWW SVELTE!!!! LOOK!!! WOWWWW!! OMG VUEEEEEEE

its the same over and over again until we all die

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

being a senior dev is boring. whatever you try, works -_- whatever problem you face in a new tech, gets fixed within a few minutes -_- old problem solutions are either in a repository you remember or in a browser bookmark -_- juniors come to you for solutions instead of googling -_-
there is absolutely no excitement in work life -_- dont be a senior dev -_-

Long story short I joined this company as a junior after 1.5 years of a break from development. Before that I worked for almost 3 years in the required stack. We agreed that if I do well after 3 months probation period I can ask for a raise.

It turned out that Im doing better than half of my team so 1 week before probation was about to end, I put in my raise request. Got nothing but strong feedback, even managed to burn myself out a couple times.

Now since the request 11 weeks passed. Our HQ which has the final say about the raise is overseas. Im getting excuses about summer: allegedly because of summer some people in the appproval chain have vacations so this process is taking a long time. This is the excuse they are giving to me.

Right now Im getting really pissed off and resentful because this drag is becoming unnacceptable. Also being in a new scrum team filled with total juniors complicates everything a lot. Im not having the best time here. But at the same time I dont have any savings actually am in debts and currenty barely am able to survive paycheck to paycheck to I cant just quit on the spot.

Had I known that they will drag this out that much, I would have applied to other places and presented them a counter offer. Or at least bluffed from the start in order to speed the raise proccess up.

Should I give ultimatum to my manager?

Im hesitant to do that because up until now we had a decent relationship and he seems like a nice guy so I dont want to rock the boat.

Or should I bluff about having a counter offer, so he would speed things up? But what happens if he asks me to forward him evidence of my received offer?

Tru-lyfe CTO (CTC) stories:

I spelled a juniors name wrong in a commit message...

Am I an asshole?

P.S.: it was 100% fully NOT on purpose, it's just an alternate spelling of the name, i.e. Jakob instead of Jacob (not the name of course, for privacy purposes, just an example)

I am supposed to conduct an Angular2 workshop for my juniors. Just found out that their subjects had changed and they don't know HTML or js, only C.
Why do they do it? How am I supposed to teach them Typescript,Object oriented,HTML, basic Nodejs, Angular in 4 hrs...

I'm currently the only dev that works with a client's dev team. That's not really how we usually work, usually it's a whole team of ours.

Three aspects why this sucks:

1) the client's dev team is made up of juniors and junior to intermediate devs. All of them are new to scrum. I therefore have to constantly support (dev & agile workflow), check all the PRs and have to think of everything in Refinement meetings.

2) the client's based in another timezone and the PO is super busy because we're the only agile team in their company. Therefore this is going to be the third Friday in a row where I have meetings until 6pm.

3) I also have a specific time frame I have to start working for my company, so I constantly work extra hours due to the time difference.

I'm just tired.

The fog of war over all that happened with my change of team is starting to dissipate.
3 people were involved and there were 4 different versions of the whole situtations, but from what I've been able to collect it looks like the company is expanding and one of the mail KPI for the current team leaders is how good they are at creating a NEW generation of team leaders, to take care of the new entries.
My previous team leader told me about all these new growth perspectives and the junior entries I could manage, knowing very well of the desire I have previously expressed of being a senior dev with my small group of juniors to teach.

I declined the offer, stating that this whole year has been exhausting. Every single time I've tried anything (using modules for new components on our old web client, tsdoc to document our types, suggesting technologies like ANYTHING BUT ANGULAR AND MONGO, telling how removing down migrations was a retarded move) my suggestions were either shrugged off or flat out refused. Let alone how every time I was proven right, except for angular but give it time and that will bite their tail as well.
Don't get me wrong: they are well withing their right when they take all those decisions, and more. But I DO NOT PLAN on selling a plethora of bad decisions to a new stack of devs as if they were the gold standard.
"I understand your reasons; you, as a company, need a well coordinated team all running towards a goal; loose cannons are harmful.
But now I need you to understand me: I do not agree with your technical direction. I never lied before and I will not start now. Promotions don't matter nearly as much as my integrity, and integrity in my world means speaking up about problems. Your position is perfectly valid, but mine is as well and they can't be reconciled. If I were you I'd make myself a favor and make sure IHateForALiving doesn't become a team leader; given your direction, I'm not the man you want right now".

As mentioned, one of the KPI for team leaders is how succesfull they are in finding new team leaders, and trying to turn me into one didn't end well; I love sharing knowledge, but being honest to myself is far more important to me. So this meant my previous team leader failed in a very big task, and thus was demoted? At the same time, I've been there for 2 years now so they're not really eager to replace me, but I'm under strict examination too as of now.

Don't people learn the basics of how things work anymore ?!

I am cleaning this project, where some juniors have implemente a lot of the code.

Apparently, the way of deleting an entity from the database is:

1) SELECT the entire row and cast it to a model class

2) CONVERT that model class to a DTO class

3) READ the Id property from the DTO class

4) SELECT the entire row, again, and this time cast it to a DTO class

5) CONVERT that DTO class to a model class

6) Use you pancy-pants ORM delete method using the entire model class as input argument..

FUCK YOU !

inb4 what about reference checks ?
- Nope. That is done separately using only the Id

inb4 what about checking if someone else has altered it before deleting
- Nope, the entire entity is not used for that either.

I hate working with sh*tty Devs

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

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

Have u guys ever wonder, all those devs we rant about (mostly senior developer), how it feels like to be them? Today I realized, I am most probably becoming like one.
I joined devops 7 month back(around one and half year in industry). Right now, I am 2nd senior member in project. I have done deployment on multiple environments more than 100 times. But till today, I never knew how the deployment is being done. I knew to trigger job but I never knew how it worked. Today when a junior asked me, then I learn ansible, then I understand whole deployment process.(and remember I am 2nd senior most with 7 month in project)
Sometime I wonder, till now I always had good rating and most responsible title. But how much is that because of my technical knowledge? Sometime it feels like I have very good luck. But man, it's very depressing. Sometime it feels like my junior don't get enough limelight because I am in their way although they have good knowledge but they lack the though process for now. Most of the time my senior present me as role model to juniors, and it's very embarrassing for me(this will not continue on as I talked to my seniors) . I did work on good projects from time I joined company. And never had any issue and always deliver what needed. But I still can't write code in Java to take input or do for each on array in javascript without seeing stackoverflow once.
Now I fear that someday I will write piece shit of code and whole efficiency of project will go down cause of me. Atleast, the person who will get to fix it will get a chance to have good rant here. I tried open source projects to understand how to write good code but I always have hard time understanding new-projects which I never worked on.
Then there is reputation on Indian devs. This is my another Fear. That someday cause of me, my fellow devs will get bad reputation as well.
This coming year, my goal is to fill up all the holes but I don't know why my fingers are crossed.
Sorry, I had to bring this out somewhere. And please ignore my grammatical mistakes.

In recent years there has been a massive shift in dev positions and their responsibilities. At least in all the companies, I've worked with.

Interns are now treated like Juniors.
Juniors are now treated like Mids.
Mids are now treated like Seniors.
Seniors are now treated like Architects.

I think some devs(now seniors) forgot how much easier it was to get into this field years ago and how little they had to know to start.

Sad reality.

Am I unlucky or perhaps in the wrong place if I’m always stressed as a junior dev coz too much pressure and they give you super tight deadlines and do languages that you never done before?

Or is what most people go through when they were juniors

I use version control as a glorified backup. Only recently did we start branching at work.

This is why I need to be part of a proper team where I can learn instead of being a team of 2 juniors and no one else 😂

One of my minions (erm, I mean, "a valued junior member of my team") asked to be assigned to tasks more "data science related".
Regardless of the very last-decade sounding request, I tried to explain to the Jr that there is more to "data science" than distilling custom llms and downloading pytorch models. There are several entire fields of study. And those are all sciences. In this context, science equals math.
But they said they were not scared of math.
I've seen them using their phones to calculate freaking tips. If you can't do 15% of a lunch bill in your head, hypothesis tests might be a bit more than challenging.
But, ok then. Here we go.

So I had them do some semi-supervisioned clustering. On a database as raw as dirt, but with barely 5Gb, few dimensions and regarding subjects with easily available experts.
Even better, we had hundreds of manually classified training and test cases.
The Jr came back a month later with some convoluted mess of convoluted networks; just the serialized weights of the poor thing were about as large as the database itself.
And when I tried it on some other manually classified test datasets... Freaking 41% error rate, for something that should be a slam dunk. Little better than a coin toss.
One month of their time wasted on an overfitted unusable mess.

I had to re-assign the task to someone else, more experienced, last friday. It was monday when they came up with an iterative KNN approach giving error rates for several values of K... some of them with less than 15% error on the test dataset.

WTF are schools teaching and calling "data science" nowadays?!?!?
I reeeeally need to watch those juniors more closely. Maybe ask for middle-sprint demonstrations. But those are soooo boring and waste so much time from people who know what they are doing...
Does anyone have a better idea to prevent this type of off-track deviation? Without being a total bore, that is.

And... should I start asking people "gotcha" data analysis questions before giving them free reign on this type of tasks? Or is it an asshole boss move? I would hate someone giving me a pop quizz before letting me work... But I got no other ideas.

Hey, so I'm making this just to be able to create and avatar but I want to bring something up - why is there so much elitism/gatekeeping in programming in general? Why aren't devs more open to helping interns/juniors out?

I’m from the UK, should I go freelance?

Last few weeks I’ve been feeling really bored with my job. Like mega fucking bored. It’s basically just meetings 7 hours a day, 4 hours planning and then 3 hours of talking about how everything didn’t get finish (I know. I keep saying it’s the fucking 7 hour fucking meetings).

Pay is pretty decent, we have a few juniors, not exactly great code base, kinda cool idea, pretty unique, business will defo work or be sold by corporate owners. (Start up owned by corporate)

I just feel really flat and bored. Mega bored. Keep wondering about going solo and being more of a consultancy or my own little agency? I’ve tried before but I suck at marketing and freelancer and similar sites never provided enough income.

I guess my questions are (if anyone wants to answer):
- What’s this new IR35 or whatever? Is it now pointless to be self employed?
- how would I boost my leads?
- should I do a bit of contracting to get used to it maybe?
- should I just stay where I am and deal with the feeling of not really feeling like I was hired to do anything?

I do also have a little side business I started that I could also work on whenever I have free time, it’s not taking any money at the moment though, early years I suppose?

I’m really sorry if anyone feels offended to read that I’m fucking bored and don’t have a clue what to do with myself. Please don’t reply with some sarccy comment. I really cba to have an internet keyboard troll fight about some stupid opinion we’ll all forget about in a few days. This now counts as a rant. So fuck you. It’s a rant. And I’m rant about the possibility you might comment on my post not bring a rant coz I can’t tell what category I’m posting on. I live in the 5th dimension. Deal. With. It. Or just ignore and scroll on 👍🏼

I'm just fed up with the industry. There are so much stupidity and so much arrogance.
My professional experience comes mainly from the frontend and I feel like it's not as bad on the backend but I'm still convinced it's not really different:

I'm now about to start my 3rd job. It's always the same. The frontend codebase is complete shit. It's not because some juniors messed up not at all. It's always some highly paid self-proclaimed full-stack developer that didn't really care somehow hacked together most of the codebase.
That person got a rediculous salary considering the actual skill and effort that went into the code, at some point things became difficult, issues started to occur and that person left. If I search for that person I find next to the worst code via gitlens on Linkedin it's somebody that has changed companies at least two times after leaving and works now for a lot of money as tech-lead at some company.

There's never any tests. At the same time the company takes pride in having decent test coverage on the backend. In the end this only results in pushing a lot of business logic to the frontend because it would just take way to long to implement it on the backend.

Most of the time I'm getting told on my first day that the code quality is really high or some bullshit.

It's always a redux app written by people, that just connect everything to the store and never tried to reflect about their use of redux.
Usually it's people, that never even considered or tried not using redux, even if it's just to learn and experiment.

At the same time you could have the most awesome projects on github but people look at your CV, sum up the years and if you invested a lot of time, worked way harder to be better than other developers with the same amount of experience, it's totally irrelevant.
At the same time all companies are just the worst crybabies about not being able to find enough developers.

HR and recruiters are generally happy to invite somebody for an interview, even if that person does not have any code available to the public, as long as that person somehow was in some way employed in the industry for a couple of years. At the same time they wouldn't even notice if you're core contributor for some major open-source product if you do not have the necessary number of years in the industry.

I'm just fed up.
By the way, I got my first real job about two years ago. Now I'm about to start my third position because my last job died because of the corona crisis. I didn't complain for some time because I didn't want to look like I'm just complaining about my own situation. With every new job I made more money, now I'm starting for the first time at a position that is labeled "lead" in the contract.
So I did okay. But I know that lots of talented people that worked hard gave up at some point and even those that made it had to deal with way too much rejection.
At the same time there are so many "senior" people in the industry, that don't care, don't even try to get better, that get a lot of money for nothing.

It's ridiculously hard to get a food in the door if you don't have any experience.
But that's not because juniors are actually useless. It's because the code written by many seniors is so low quality, that you need multiple years of experience just to deal with all the traps.
Furthermore those seniors are so busy trying to put out the fires they are responsible for to actually put time into mentoring juniors.

It's just so fucked up.

I’ve now discovered that management actually decides for themselves what software engineering is. 🧐

It is getting increasingly common that in different architectural groups the decision has already been made… by management…without actually passing through our review… as a little more senior blokes and gals.

Not even a discussion? On the fit?

That leads me to the conclusion, since I consider the management (at least the two or three closest layers) are morons, good at talking but not really knowing anything about what we do (we kind of take stuff and make other stuff from it by using energy and other stuff in HUGE FUCKING FACILITIES AROUND THE PLANET), that even they did not make the decision. It was forced upon them. They did not decide either! Because they can’t! Because they are idiots all of them!

I have not investigated this issue but this is the logical conclusion. Or not.

Recently, for instance, decisions were made to route information flows by some tech. Some new tech. At some place in our eco-system. At a certain time. And, if we were to have reviewed this initiative in our process we would have said:

”Well, I hear you! But we are not going to do that right now because WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING HUGE GLOBAL PROJECT THAT CHANGES PRETTY MUCH FUCKING EVERYTHING AND WE CAN NOT JUST IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING EXECUTION PROCESS OF THE PROJECT CHANGE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MESSAGE ROUTING BECAUSE WE LACK THE NUMBER OF HUMANS TO DO THE FUCKING JOB. So, we need to take a look at this and to get a better understanding when we can make this happen.”

What is the point of having this step in our organization if it is just pass-through? What is the point? Meetings? Just having meetings? Spending time mastering the organizational skill of administrating meetings? Feeling important? Using big words (holistic being my favourite)?

Below, juniors devs are being hired doing stupid stuff that does not need doing. For months and months.

I believe now that half of the dev staff does not need to be there and three quarters of the team, service, delivery (etc) managers are unnecessary. I mean, the good juniors are going to change jobs soon either way and we are stuck in this vicious cycle where we are not being allowed to be innovative in software engineering. Stability is of the essence here but the rate of our releases are just silly slow. I would say that we are far, far away from any track that leads us to where we want to be. Agile. Innovative. Close to business. Learning. Teaching. Faster. Stability despite response to implementing changing business needs.

And then there are the consultants…

*sigh*

I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.

But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.

Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.

I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).

Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.

And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.

Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.

There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.

Fuck you juniors for not responding to my DM's asking if you downloaded the app for the conference I got you tickets to! Going to make some gitlab contraints so you can no longer push your shitty ass code!

WTF!

As a tech lead i sometimes find it very hard to defend developers for no fault of theirs.

Management is completely incapable of noticing hard data like git logs or action items updated on an excel and seems to have an idea that the devs are incompetent , but the ba that sets impossible goals and crap business documentation is competent.

Should i just let the project and juniors burn.

I'm kind of surprised people haven't tried using devRant as a job board yet. There's a lot of raw talent here, both seniors, and juniors experimenting with everything.

May as well start. We have ping pong!

//Week 33 - Worst Part
$worst = "";
$worst .= "Not knowing the project start date";
$worst .= "Not knowing the deadline";
$worst .= "Not getting the design and sitemap on time";
$worst .= "Teaching juniors developers coding where as they have Degree in Computer Science and me didn't went to college";
$worst .= "After junior developers learn coding, they move to another big company for more pay then me";

//Week 33 - Best Part
$best = "";
$best .= "I learnt a lot last year";
$best .= "I also learnt how to motivate myself for side projects (Not Working)";
$best .= "I learnt how to put myself upto challenge on any development work";
$best .= "I don't have yell at my General Manager or Project Manager because I got devRant now (Fuck Them)";

Programming Lesson #7
TLDR: Beating deadlines is difficult
Long version:
There is no easy way to give an estimation or deadline for a particular development task. Sometimes it takes a lot less or often a lot more time to finish a task than estimated deadlines and that's totally fine. Just make sure you have a manager/senior mentor who is well aware of this fact and doesn't scrutinize you regularly for missing deadlines.
I am going to make sure that when I get into a senior management position, I would show understanding and empathy towards my juniors similar to how my seniors show to me currently when I miss deadlines.

I have never yelled at my co-workers in the office. I hate to work with some of them, but I don’t have to bastardise myself yelling at them. There’s always incompetence or ineptitude, but that doesn’t mean I have any right to be incoherently rude. I rather have them embarrass themselves than yell at them.

Even though some of them are an infinite arsehole. I believe that keeping my temperament as gentle as possibly can gain me some respect from my juniors.

Keeping your cool is a BOSS move AF.

Best: working with F#, hands down the best development experience ever for me!

Worst: this is a little harder, but I’d give the questionable honor for any experience working with one of our juniors on JS... or just working with SwiftUI - mobile development hasn’t been a good experience for me by any means so far, but working with SwiftUI has been the worst of them.

// EDIT: I just remembered it was this year when I needed to do stuff with Python. EASILY the worst development experience...

Once I had a junior who was the child of the boss, whom would refuse to listen because they thought they knew better. That junior was ambitious and always wanted harder tasks even though at the end of the day, someone would need to “pair” with them (aka go and do the task for them).

I left that place. Now I have a junior who knows so little that if they came and told me they don’t know how to turn on a computer, I wouldn’t be surprised (yes, unfortunately the bar went down incredibly fast).

I feel sorry for the new junior. I don’t have bandwidth for all of this. Nobody in the team has.

I do think it sucks that companies in general are so against juniors, but I wish at least that the ones who still make the cut were a little bit more prepared.

So-called 'Senior -level' don't even know how the Gradle and cocoapod works. Bro if you can't understand the basics, how the f are you the senior? How the f are you going to lead and guide the juniors?

oh my mother f**king god. smh

I said this as a senior.

Other guy on a project (in college), let's call him piece of shit or pos for short.

For 2 months pos has done nothing. Absolutely nothing. When I asked, he said he had some exam. Or some other exam. Or some other bullshit. (I have acads too, and juniors have more than us - college is taking its covid frustration out on them)

Yesterday I asked again, to make a presentation to be given today. I worked on this presentation for 3 days but it didn't turn out good, so deleted my work and asked pos to do it (fresh perspective etc). Meanwhile I'm working a second project (which has a different story).

Pos does nothing yesterday. At 1 AM I tell him to send me the presentation if he's done. Pos says he'll pull it off during the night. He doesn't.

A few minutes ago he pings our juniors to give him screenshots. Basically demanding them. When someone responds with emojis, "Don't give me this (emojis), give me screenshots asap". He's done close to nothing for the juniors overall.

How do I get someone like this to work and treat the other members with some respect?

I miss when I was a junior sometimes. Just hammer out some code and go home at 5pm...

Main company: 3 juniors and me
3 daughter companies (acquired in the past 2 years)

CEO: "I want to make the best brandportal in the Netherlands."

Our main webshop: held together with ducttape and prayers, no brand management tools
Daughter companies got their own webshops.

There is no technical leader in the company.

We're migrating to another ERP somewhere this year and these airheads can't decide whether to keep existing products or not, let alone anything substential.
They want to outsource the connection between the shop and the ERP, despite that being the current situation and going horrible, but because in the new ERP some things cant be done we are introducing yet another management pane. Yay!

No sensible roadmap, got shot down when I asked being interim techlead/software/solution architect until we find someone...

My current manager literally dropped all her responsibilities onto a PM who doesnt know what the fuck to do either.

I'm sitting here pulling through because it'd look bad on my cv to quit another company so soon again despite the company having no future nor growth opportunities for me.

I seeth everyday, yet know if I drop out they'll have to crawl back to the external software dev company we inherited the shitshow from. Because you just need a few devs to have a dev team right?!

CEO actively boast about us saying they told her that it can't be done while our product crumbles bit by bit from architectural problems. It wasnt even designed as an webshop let alone a brand management tool..

One of these days I'll just go into consulting, it'll be just as soul crushing but atleast I get to keep a slightly larger slice of the pie and be able to say no to shit customers sometimes.

How do you deal with your juniors when they do any mistakes? Do you praise them when they overcome any challenges they were facing? Do you blame them rather correcting them? Do you balance both praise and blame to them? Just curious. 😅

I am the technical lead in a project which uses a C# based framework. It's a lot of drag and drop, and C# scripts can be embedded for fancy stuff.

Scripts in general are not hard to do, it's harder to understand the business rules rather than the code itself.

I got hired as a junior to build this project from scratch as an MVP, and we need another junior to add enhancements and minor changes required from our end users. Since management wants me to move on working on more mid-senior development stuff, I'm supposed to be only supervising the juniors work (in the hopes that one day they'll be able to work on their own).

We've had bad luck filling this position. Our last hire is a guy like 17 years older than me, supposedly with experience in said framework but OH DEAR GOD.

Fucktard can't understand requirements and corrections, isn't able to deliver a 20 line script without fucking up. I give him a list with 3 mistakes to fix and only fixes two, crap like that.

Now, hear me out, the mistakes are stuff like:

- Unused variables
- Confusing error messages
- Error messages written in spanglish (mix between Spanish and English, we're located in Latin America)
- Untested features, this is the worst of all.

You may say "but he's a junior", sure. But as I said, he supposedly has experience, more years in IT than me, and fine, you're allowed to fuck up a few times on your first tasks but not make the same mistakes over and over, specially since we've already sat down and addressed these issues in presence of the CTO.

Fuck this guy. I genuinely dislike him as a person also, he is from another latin country and we have some serious cultural differences. For instance, he insists on sucking your ass constantly, being overly well manered (we already saluted with the whole team at the daily stand up, stop saying hello, good day, regards in each of your fucking chat messages or task submissions), and other mannerisms that are hard to translate, but whatever, all of these attitudes are frowned upon here. They're not necessary, we just want to keep it simple, cordial and casual and see you deliver the crap that you're being paid for with a decent level of quality.

On Monday the CTO comes back from vacation, I'm looking forward to that meeting, gonna report his ass, there is evidence everywhere on our issue tracker.

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Any senior dev who get less paid in terms of his juniors or am I the only one?

If anyone who is in same shoes like me please suggest how to cope with the feeling of unrest and feel less miserable.

Why? As a senior, you won't give some time to review my code, will let me merge my code to a branch, then blame us when it will produce the bug in production? why? 😐 Won't even arrange a code review/knowledge sharing session so that juniors can learn at least something. Even you won't encourage us write test cases. If seniors don't follow, are the juniors to blame? 🙂