TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

Stories from Gary #000

Short background info:
So I'm working as a game dev for 3 years now and by now I can say that I've seen some shit. Mostly because of one of our game designers, let's call him Gary.

So Gary, from here on called GDG (Game Designer Gary), is a regular game designer (GD). His job is to come up with new game ideas, commission the assets, make sure that translations are done, etc. - simply put, he has to get a lot of shit together before we can start working on a new game.

Would be no problem at all if GDG wasn't lazy as shit and would work for once in his life. No dev really wants to work with him anymore, since he's known for calling a game or any issue "ready for development" even if half the assets or specs are still missing.

Let's move on to a particular situation that happened a couple of months ago.

I had an issue assigned to me, which was about implementing the translations for a new game. As I read the issue and checked if everything I needed was given, I noticed that the most important part was in fact missing - the keywords for the translations.

-.-

So, I called GDG and asked where I could find the keywords, to which he responded "Oh, I'm working on them right now... and by the way I got a weird bug with the translation program. Can you come check it out?". Sigh. I went over to his office, rambling about how I should be able to help him with a program I rarely use and which was written ages ago.
As soon as GDG saw me coming roundbthe corner, he started explaining how the keywords aren't ready yet, since the program to create translations and their keywords won't let him name a translation.

"I can create new translations, but I can't assign a keyword to them."
"Okay, show me what you did", I told him, eager to leave.
He started to type the keyword, which turned out to be huge ass long and immediately I noticed a little counter, like "x/50", directly beneath the text field started to count up with every new character GDG typed. See where I'm going with this? HE WASNT ABLE TO RENAME A TRANSLATION BECAUSE HE WAS TOO LAZY TO FUCKING READ AND CONCENTRATE FOR ONCE. Sorry for that, but even thinking about it gets me angry again.

To some this might sound like nothing, but it really got to me at this point. Maybe it will become more understandable as I post more GDG stories.

tl;dr: A 40 something year old man, who's been working in his job for over 10 years wasn't able to use a program which he daily uses and asks me for help, only to find out he's a complete dipshit.

So about two months ago in my consulting firm I was asked to replace a colleague on a project (node and Angular). The project is only a few months old but it’s already a total clusterfuck. DB is very poorly designed. It’s supposed to be a relational database but there’s not a trace of a foreign key or any key for that matter and I’ve seen joins like tableA.name = tableB.description (seriously, that’s your relation??). The code is a mess with entire blocks of code copied from another project and many parts of the code aren’t even used. He didn’t even bother renaming variables so they would make sense in the context they were shamelessly thrown into. The code is at best poorly typed if not typed at all.

During our dailies I sometimes express my frustration with my other colleagues as I very politely allude to my predecessor’s code as being hard to work with. (They are all “good friends" with him). I always get the same response from my colleagues: "yeah but you’ve gotta understand Billybob was under a lot of pressure. The user stories were not well defined. He didn’t have time to do a proper job". That type of response just makes me boil inside.

Because you think I have time to deal with this shit? You don’t think I’m working with the same client and his user stories that are barely intelligible? How long does it take to write type definitions for parameters going into a function? That’s right, 30 seconds at most? Maybe a minute if it’s a more elaborate object? How much time do you think you’ll save yourself with a properly typed function or better yet an interface? Hard to tell but certainly A LOT MORE than those 30 seconds you lost (no, the 30 seconds you INVESTED) in writing that interface!!!

FUCK people with their excuses! Never tell me you don’t have time to do a proper job! You’ve wasted HOURS of my time just because you were too fucking lazy to type your functions, too lazy to put just a little more thought into designing your tables, too lazy to rename a variable so that it’s name actually makes sense where it’s being used. It’s not because you were short on time. You’re just lazy!
FUCK!!!!!!

My worst experience with a designer was when one forgot to design the website mock up for 2 weeks... so I just did it myself. Thankfully I have a degree in both development & design and bullshited my way through it. We were swamped at the time so I wasnt too thrilled to be doing his job. He somehow still has a job here, even though he's lazy and his mockups suck. 🤐😵👎

!dev

So my (public) health insurance should cover a test I'd like to make. But if I don't want to call a bunch of clinics every week for months only to get an appointment a year later eventually I'll have to pay myself (to get an appointment in a few months instead).