CS Professor: “What M word is the black hole to all productivity?”

Student: “Management”

CS Professor: “Was going to say meetings but that’s better”

Cable management goals 😀

WHEN YOU DON’T LISTEN TO THE PROGRAMMER...

We should have a NSFW category for stuff like this *nerdgasm*

When PM don't listen, no fuks was given by us devs.

Time management ! 😂

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

"Cable management'' pic of the day.

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "Yes. You're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."

"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.

"I do" replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but It's of no use to anyone."

The man below replies, "You must work in management."

"I do," replies the balloonist, "But how'd you know?"*

"Well", says the man, "you don’t know where you are or where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault."

I just helped one of our cleaners get Internet since the management whitelisted devices that can get WiFi access.

I believe that anyone, regardless of position, must have equal access to the resources in this company.

Sometimes cable management is just so beutiful

There was a previous developer who my managers has told us was terrible and toxic. Yet due to terrible planning, he had everyone work for over 13 hours last Sunday.

I contacted this previous developer to learn his side of the story and learned a lot. I realize between their two narratives is the truth, but I see all the ways we've been lied, the ways this other dev was scapegoated and all the additional work that's sure to come.

I refuse to work weekends again. I refuse to work over 40 hours. I wish I could convince everyone else to do the same. No amount of money is worth making up for bad planning and management.

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "Yes. You're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."

"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.

"I do" replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but It's of no use to anyone."

The man below replies, "You must work in management."

"I do," replies the balloonist, *"But how'd you know?"**

"Well", says the man, "you don’t know where you are or where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault."

Project manager logic, explained with babies.

9 women can have 9 babies in 9 month. We only need one baby.

Deadline is one month!

Perfect quote!!

Boss asks me to prefer deadlines over good engineering practice. Says meeting a deadline is always more important than building things the right way.

Son, when the company goes out of business due to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses due to shoddy engineering, do you want to be the one to go to the spouses of everyone who lost their job and say "your spouse lost his job because we didn't take a few more days to build the product right"?

Son, when the company's product blows up in a child's face like a Note 7 because of your shoddy engineering, do you want to go to the funeral and tell the parents "your child died because we didn't take a few more days to build the product right"?

Fuck your arbitrary deadlines. I prefer not allowing for so much grief and suffering to be on my soul.

Got annoyed by hitting f11 instead of f12.
("step into" versus "go to definition").
Solved the problem :)

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Discussion between me and my N+1
(Note : I'm in the company for 3 months)

Me : As the tech leader, shouldn't you review my code ?
N+1 : I'm not the tech leader.
Me : Wait what ?
N+1 : I wrote the app from A to Z, hence I'm the architect.
Me : That's what I mean. Being the most knowledgable dev in the company makes you de facto tech leader.
N+1 : No, I'm not the tech leader. The CEO is.
Me : But he didn't even know the tech we are using !
N+1 : .... Anyway, I won't do code reviews. I don't like that.

(2 hours later)

N+1 : You made a mistake in the code. You broke a hidden functionality. You should be more careful, or ask me if you have doubts.

This guy is collector.

So I've been screaming for months that push notifications are not reliable enough to build critical functionality on top of. Management won't listen and keep pushing ahead with making teams use it because its cheap and easy.

Been debugging an issue on/off for several weeks. Turns out someone in management asked the backend team to cut the expiration time of items down to 5 minutes to increase throughput (without telling mobile). Notifications are regularly taking +4 mins to get to the phones, leaving our users with barely any time to react. They are now complaining.

I swear if there is a single IQ point available between the whole team i've yet to see any evidence of it

When i ask for a raise -

Boss : Are u joking ? I can see u hardly working.

When I ask for a leave -

Boss : Are u joking ? Who will do your work ?

Maastricht knows how to manage their pan-erm-passwords :3

I told my TL about my aspiration of pursuing a Masters degree.
TL: "You don't seem like the sort that is suitable for academy."
Me: "You don't seem like the sort who's suitable for management but here we are..."

Disclaimer: kinda non dev related. Just working to pay the bills right now.

The other day I ran for the train to work, don't want to be fucking late, right?

Arrived and this guy asked me this: (I have a sweating/transpiration problem but I'm fully aware of that)

"hey man, ever heard of fucking showers or deodorant?!"

Yes, I was sweating my ass off and you could smell me but I can't FUCKING help that.

It was very embarrassing and humiliating to get that kinda comment in front of like 30 people but I just swallowed it and went to work.

After the first break, a woman from management came to me and pulled me aside. A few people had complained about how that guy from before said some pretty humiliating stuff to me and she said that the guy received a warning and was told to fucking learn to treat people with respect, regardless of their (health) issues/appearance. I also got an apology and a sorry and if I could keep my eyes open for such behaviour in the future.

I'm very glad that she apologized although it wasn't her fault because I know I've got this health issue and I can't do anything about it yet but it can MOTHERFUCKING hurt when someone talks shit about me when I smell and I CAN'T FUCKING HELP IT BECAUSE THIS IS THE WAY MY BODY WORKS TOO BADLY.

I felt protected and safe about my issue for the first time in my life.

Thanks management!

Last week we had a short seminar at work about 'listening skill.'

In that speaker gave an example how 'natural' leaders speak last in the meetings.

From that day we are having entirely silent meetings.

Now management is planning seminar on 'Speaking Up'

This fucktard of a 'stick that facility management up your arse' manager.

He insisted 'no cooling required. Trust me'.

While we insisted 'how dare you to asume our servers temperatures'!

We moved our servers to a new /tmp/office/ yesterday. Was quite fun, until we saw this...

Doorhandle is hot as fuck, 50 degrees air temperature, all servers in heat error state. Thank you, you damn fucktards! Take this cactus 🌵 and stick it up your arse!!

Can't work like that.

Apparently working 80+ hour weeks for a year gets you "met expectations" in your review since "shit rolls down the hill".

Arrived at a game jam in an animation school. I hope they're better at game design than they are at cable management :)

Three months down the line and I'm finally ready to admit that my first completion estimate of "this afternoon" may have been slightly overambitious

A while back a co-worker of mine fucked up by leaving some debug code and pushing to production.
He quickly repaired it, redeployed and everything was good again before the customer experienced any issues.

Later that day, management showed up by his desk to ask what happened, how it happened and stating that he was not "angry enough" about his fuck up, long after it has been repaired.

Up to this day i regret not asking in what unit of measurement we could determine if we were angry enough; decibels? gray hairs? grams of shit in my underwear?

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

Dev: we have two days until go live. We got 20 bugs, 5 stories and two people on holiday.

PM: ok so could we get these 3 stories squeezed in as well?

CEO: I've got a great idea to entice users, we increase our prices 20% and give 20% discount.

Oh god, please tell me you're not serious.

Small company (1-100 people).

The head of the company comes into the 4-man engineering department and tells the RF engineer that the wireless project will be canceled. The project timeline the RF engineer proposed the week before is not feasible for the company.

RF engineer asks, point blank, if he should pack up and leave. The guy says "no".

A few weeks later the RF engineer puts in his letter of resignation. The head of the company pulls him aside and asks why he's leaving. Wants to know what went wrong...

THE F***ING RF GUY WON'T BE DOING RF, THAT'S WHY!!!

Management at this company is so confused.

(Had to rant. I hear that's what this site is for...)

Doing Linux server management stuff via ssh with a FUCK 500ms PING IS NOT FUN AT ALL

GET OFF THE FUCKING NETWORK EVERYONE 😤😤😤😤😤

Q: WHO THE FUCK USES EXCEL FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT?
A: My Product Manager

Excel because she cant wrap her head around using Trello. WHAT THE FUCK!
Some people exist just to make things more difficult for everyone else. Fucking pain in the ass.
This person is one of the most incompetent one I have ever met.

I dont have enough words to express my rage right now.

Old. But apt.

*makes course outline*
Management: Um yeah make the outline similar to this course from earlier
Me: Hmm, so Yocto etc.. well that'll require a good amount of research because I've got no idea what Yocto is or how I'm supposed to use it.
*researches about Yocto, prepares build VM and Raspberry Pi target, thinks of how on Earth I'd make my coworker without Raspberry Pi interface with it from across the world*

2 days later..

Management: Yeah actually we don't want Yocto. Just do simple stuff like application development, GPIO etc.
Me & co-worker: Awesome mate! That'll make things a lot easier. Except for the 2 days of lost work, but we can live with that if it's just GPIO and such.

3 days later..

Management: guys your course outline sucks. Do it all over again, we want Yocto to be in it after all.

YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Why don't you behave a little bit less like a fucking client that doesn't know what they want for once?!!

That moment when your project managers think hiring 3 new developers will deliver their project 3x faster.

Don't you just love it when you're forced to write code for Linux based systems on a windows PC with no access to virtual machines and then have management get angry because it broke in production?

Project Management in a nutshell.

Every time you feel anger, instead of explosion you write a new rant and make people smile.

=> devRant is behaviouristic therapy.

Management.

Every single fucking time:

Developers: Maybe we'll do something nice for the users, like signing in with Facebook account?
Business: Nah, nobody is gonna pay for that and it sounds useless. We're good with current solutions. Just do your job!

half a year later:

Business: Hey, I just came up with the idea that we could have logging in with Facebook.
Also business: Wow, great idea!
Management: Here's your bonus for a great idea!
Developers: ...

A woman can make 4 babies with 4 different fathers in 9 months, right?

Someone decided we need a "rubber band programmer" who bounces around from project to project as needed, and that gets to be me.

So I work on 4 projects, with 3 programming languages, 4 frameworks, and with users in 4 complicated industries, none of which I have experience with.

And my boss wonders why I'm not as productive as everyone who has worked on 1 project for 5 years.

When management produces a list of priorities but every item on the list is #1 priority. So some items are in BOLD to signify their even greater priority over other priorities.

This next one is dedicated to a couple of special people at my workplace:

- The person who uploaded internal-use-only code to a personal repository on GitHub

- The network team that has blocked any and all access to GitHub

- The obscured mass of management bureaucracy that makes it pretty much impossible for anyone at my level to make any sort of appeal

This one's for you:

*ahem*

WHY?!

Although I can easily support myself through my current manual labor work, I am starting to dread going to work because I just really miss programming and server management 😞

The job isn't even that bad but idk, I just really miss devving throughout the day 😩

Close to project completion (2 years).
PM confesses he hasn't ever logged into the product.

Programming is a lot like playing video games. It challenges you to beat quests/tasks and hunt enemy bugs while providing boss levels in the form of large projects with tight deadlines and project managers who like to move the goal posts.

CEO: Ok guys, we need x feature by Friday
Me: This would normally take more than a month!
CEO: But I already told our customers we'll have this feature
Me: ...

Why the fuck does the management never consult me for timelines.

Management logic - It takes one woman nine months for a baby, so 9 women should do it in one month!

When the PM grabs my keyboard to show me how he thinks I should do the task...

every fricking time, though.

Recently, one of our passwords was accidently published on a public page for a few minutes before it was noticed and removed. Unfortunately, this password opens nearly every locked account so it's a pretty big deal.

Management was informed of this mistake and told that we should change the passwords as well as implement a few other protocols to make sure this doesn't happen again including things like unique passwords, more secure passwords, using a password manager, etc.

Their response? It wasn't online long, probably no one saw it. There will be no changes in how we handle ours or our clients' secure passwords.

Ok, I am fucking finally pissed off...

My current company, I worked for last 1.5 years, for project management they use slack.

Every Monday we have meeting, and we go over every project and talk what must be done. Every project has it’s own channel with some stupid random code name which is impossible to remember because there is hundreds of other projects with similar name.

If there is something todo for dev he just gets mentioned in in channel.

No to-do’s, so basically u have no idea what u need to do, there’s no way to follow progress. Well, of course u can go over each channel and check if u need to do sth, but it takes fucking time. Also because of that u need keep your boss informed all the time about the progress. In others words it’s messy.

To make it worse, there’s usually a few different channels for the same project (1 for devs, 1 for designers, and others for something else like ux or videos).

I brought up this concern to boss many times, and every dev agreed. So for like a month we tried to use flow app, but still everyone used slack + designers told that they don’t like it. So after trial they said we are going to keep using slack. What the fuck?

Now I don’t actually mind their decision, but there one thing that I can’t stand about current method - slack is free, so all history and files gets deleted as time goes. I can’t even count how much times I needed to re-do some work just because slack deleted some files I had put there for later. Or lost some important information about project, that we needed to discuss over and over every month...

3 fucking more weeks left in this stupid company then I quit.

Feeling productive at a Sunday evening. Let's install a DNS server and a fucking mail server on two forgotten VPS's I am still paying for.

SO A-FUCKING-PPEARANTLY, THEIR WEB MANAGEMENT PANEL IS FUCKED UP SO I CANNOT REINSTALL MY MOTHERFUCKER VPS's. HOW FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING DIFFICULT CAN IT BE.

After completing my sprint and some lingering stuff in the backlog

Me: Hey, there's this tiny feature people have really requested, I'll go build it since I got nothing else to do at the moment. It'll only take like 1h

PO: Hmm ok. Don't work on that yet, we need to check with business people and agree on the user stories and bla bla bla

Me: Ok, well there's these bugs I can take care of then, I'll get them fixed, won't be long.

PO: Hmmm, we need to measure the impact first. Let me get back to you on that a bit later

Me: Meh, oh. I'll refactor this bad component meanwhile then.

PO: Have you created a story for that in JIRA? Create the story first and then we'll groom it and take it in when we've time

Me in my head: Dafuq! Im trying to work on your fucking project but you keep throwing all that business bueraucracy shit at me. What am I supposed to do then? Sip coffee in the kitchen and talk about the other fucking billion failed "new business opportunities" with my peers? Fuck this circle jerk of a billion management people all trying to make themselves important. Nothing. Ever. Gets. Fucking. Done!!!

Me: Ah right, I'll do that *proceeds to the water cooler*

Beutiful

An important message:
PrOpErLy managing servers is HARD.

I get pissed off at customers with ZERO server knowledge who think they can manage their VPS. “Just get a control panel and a VPS” from some flashy provider that makes server management look way too easy.. Clicking around in their fancy control panel, until:

- they need help with their *self-managed* VPS;
- their email ends up in spam;
- they suffer from performance issues;
- they need to restore a backup;
- something breaks, because YES, things break

Way too little people are able to answer:

- when and how do you make backups?
- how do you monitor your servers and which services?
- how do you keep track of trend analysis?

Then I come by with necessary software. SNMP for trend analysis, Graphite for infrastructure health, Sensu for monitoring, Kibana, Ansible for configuration management..

Things that servers need but that customers have never even heard of.. because they can do everything in their control panel..

Until they come crying to me because it broke and they don’t even know how to get into SSH.

I think the ones to blame are VPS providers that tell the tale of how easy it is to install a control panel and never look at your server again.

Customers become responsible for something *business-critical*! Yet they don’t know how it works.

One day at a meeting I proposed a solution and explained it to everyone and everyone agreed to it. And then comes in this motherfucking Mr. shithole who starts talking about a piece of shit approach which had apparent drawbacks and everyone could see it but no one mentions. Why, becuase that bigger asshole is the boss of these smaller assholes. When I mention the drawbacks, all I get in return is, you are right but we think you should go this way. No fucking explanation why should I or any son of bitch should go that way. And every single one of those fuckers in the meeting suddenly became ok with his approach without any question or doubt. I mean WTF! What kind of developer you are if cant fucking express your views.

So accurate!

When the boss believes that adding more devs to a project in the last week of a three month stint will "get it out the door faster".

Because baking that cake at twice the temperature for half the time worked so well last time, we'll do it while the oven is rolling down a cliff.

I rant a lot about my old job and learned a lot about horrible management. Honestly, it was just one disappointment after another.

Let's observe the fact that the CEO, COO, and the newly hired CTO are all friends. Nepotism at its finest.

When re-designing the Front-End and planning new features with a hired agency, should we include the developers familiar with the current stack in the sprint?

I guess not.

When having "secret meetings" about rebranding the company, should the Marketing Manager be informed?

I guess not.

Now, I know there are mixed feelings about this, but the truth is, we have three unqualified individuals in management positions who clearly did not have the best interests and personal growth of their employees in this 14-person start-up at heart.

All of the employees have skills and experience which could easily be applicable to larger companies with better pay and benefits. But we chose to work for a small start-up because we wanted to have our voices heard and make a difference in the growth of company. When you take that liberty away, then what's the point of even working there anymore?

During my 7-months there, 9 people had resigned, including myself and the marketing manager. Should this be a red flag?

I hope so.

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "Yes. You're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."

"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.

"I do" replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but It's of no use to anyone."

The man below replies, "You must work in management."

"I do," replies the balloonist, "But how'd you know?"*

"Well", says the man, "you don’t know where you are or where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault."

That moment when your marketing manager makes technology decisions for your project and says "let's just use WordPress" ...

Always worth considering...

Management: Create [totally idiotic and complicated feature, near to impossible to create]
Me: that's close to impossible and could probably destroy some other parts of the application.
Management: well, then your application is poorly programmed.

DAFUQ? HOW DARE TO JUDGE THE QUALITY OF MY CODE WITHOUT EVEN ABLE TO READ 2 LINES OF CSS? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS THIS?

I'm really not easily offended but this sentence hit really hard.

"What we can do to get all on time? ", manager asks
"Can we have 4 more developers on the project?", dev asks
"No, that's not gonna happen. Let's be realistic", manager says
"Is it realistic to ask 3 devs to ship 20 features in a week, reviewed and tested?" dev asks
"Actually 2 of you, because our contractor goes into a vacation. But you can do overtimes, can't you?"
"I prefer not to but even in that case I can't guarantee that as it's not realistic. But at least can I leave earlier and work more from home more because there are severe delays on the train lines and if I have to commute 4 hours a day it won't help", dev says
"Well, I'm not sure if that's a good idea. You have to communicate with people, you know. We have to ship things. But we can discuss this tomorrow as I have to leave early today. I have to take my kids from school"

Really? Wtf?

Job Interview for a CTO role for a premium employer, a big law firm.

All is going well, I am telling them about my years of experience doing complex software integrations in business environments. Talking CRM/ERP, project management and development with external service providers. I tell them I want a salary of 100k and they nod in silence.

Then out of the blue one of the three stakeholders/managers leans over for a final question:
"Soo, we have this really big IT problem and if you would happen to know a solution to it, you would really prove your worth: I have these 10k+ E-Mails in my Outlook folder which doubles as an archive and Outlook keeps getting slower all the time. What can we do?"

I just blocked some of the top management from connecting to our WLAN because I was testing a verifing feature for said WiFi that kicks all devices not listed in the DB.
It happened while my boss/senior/guidance was trying to show them the advantages of a centrally managed infrastructure.
He covered my ass well and tried to sell it to them as proof of a secure solution, that unknown devices couldn't log in.
I feel like human trash right now, but that's what you get for testing in production.

My situation: I got computer,router,phone,printer etc. all at one place

Now I decided to do some cable management...
I don't really know how to do cable management so I grabbed some duct tape ... This area now looks like this

You need to answer your manager, but don't have a clue, try these randomly:

I'll circle back to you
I will run the numbers on it
Let's go back to the drawing board
Let's touch base in a bit. Ping me
I don't have the bandwidth right now
It's on my radar
Let's put this on the back-burner
I have too many balls in the air right now
I have a lot on my plate
I'll get back by close of play tomorrow
I'll have to deep dive/drill down into this and get back
I have a hard stop at X hours
Let's park that for now
It's in the pipeline

At lunch, someone asked a question about our Sunday Hack-a-thon. Our PO said it was a "Smack-a-thon." I told her, "No, don't make stupid names. Let's call things what they are. It's Management Failure Sunday." Manager was sitting across the table when I said it.

Tester finds a bug in production,
management be like...

Boss: "Sooo.... How long will it take?"

Me: "Maybe we should agree on some processes and specify your wishes for the new feature first?"

Boss: "Yeah you're right.... But what do you think? Will you get it done til $deadline?"

...

Why am I even trying? Who needs project management anyway?

I'm currently reading a course in Project Management and I have yet to find an image in the course literature with a person that doesn't suffers from a headache.

Why management people thinks that a career path for any senior developer is to be a "leader" and be good in business side. Its like saying "hey you are a good programmer, let me take away that work you love to do and do stupid human resource management instead"

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

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)

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).

Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.

Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.

So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.

Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.

I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!

Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.

Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Cable Management 10/10

A woman in hot air balloon realized she is lost...

She reduced altitude & shouted to a man below: Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend to meet him an hour ago but I don't know where I am.

Man below replied: You are in hot air balloon 30 feet above the ground. You are at 41 degree North latitude & 59 degree West longitude.

Lady: You must be an engineer.

Man: How do you know?

Lady: Everything you told me is technically correct but useless & the fact is I'm still lost.

Engineer: You must be in Top Management.

Lady: Ya. How do you know?

Engineer: You don't know where you are or where you're going, you have no technical knowledge.
You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep & you expect people beneath you to solve your problems..!!
😀😀😀😀😀😀😀

Once upon a time, one or two jobs ago, a really awesome engineer specced out a distributed search application in response to a business need. This company was managed pretty oldschool and required a ton of paperwork and approvals.

The engineer spent many weeks running tests and optimizing the hell out of this app cluster. It flew, and he had the data to prove it could handle production workloads (think hundreds of terabytes of data being processed every single day)

Part of the way he achieved this was having RAID0 on all of the servers to maximize I/O throughput. He didn't care much about data loss, since the application itself was fault tolerant on a much more granular level.

Management, hearing about this, absolutely flipped their shit and demanded RAID6 instead. This despite the conclusive data that the engineer had that proved RAID6 couldn't keep up.

He more or less got told to STFU.

Even this despite the fact that a RAID restripe would actually take many times longer than rebuilding the failed node from scratch (a process that took about 30 minutes by hand, and could probably be automated to be done in less than five), causing a longer exposure to actual data loss throughout the length of the days-long array rebuild time.

The ill-thought-out requirement added about 50% to the cost of the project (*many* more hard drives now required), beyond the original budget, and the subsequent bureaucratic wrangling resulted in a late product launch.

6 months or so later, after real customers were using this product, the app was buckling under around half of its expected workload. A friend of the engineer suggested to management to try RAID0. Sure enough, that resolved the I/O bottleneck.

This rage-inducing story has a happy ending, though! Said engineer left the company not long after this incident, citing it as a reason for his departure. He was immediately hired by another company, making integer multiples of his prior salary.

The product the company botched the launch of by ignoring his spec? It died a few months later. Maybe the poor customer experience was to blame? Maybe the late launch? Maybe it was another reason entirely.

Either way, millions of dollars of hardware now sat fallow. This was a black eye on the company all the way up to the C-level.

tl;dr: Listen to your engineers. You hired them for their expertise.

Found this in my Software Project Management textbook. Seems right.

I'm going to kill management.
After a serious migration fiasco at one of our biggest costumers the platform was finally usable again (after two days instead of 10 hours) and, of course, users started to report bugs. So good old po came in ranting that we as qa did a horrible job and basically tried to fault us for a fucked up update (because we produced user pain, which of course not being able to log in didn't do). Among the issues: If the user has more than a hundred web pages the menu starts looking ugly, the translation to dutch in one string on the third submenu of a widget doesn't work and a certain functionality isn't available even if it's activated.
Short, they were either not a use case or very much minor except for that missing function. So today we've looked through the entire test code, testing lists, change logs and so on only to discover that the function was removed actively during the last major update one and a half years ago.

Now it's just waiting for the review meeting with the wonderful talking point "How could effective QA prevent something like this in the future" and throwing that shit into his face.

I mean seriously, if you fuck shit up stand by it. We all make mistakes but trying to pin it on other people is just really, really low.

I'm a backend (Java, Kotlin) developer and I mainly design & develop services and Android apps which consume these services.

My team in my current organization (I've been working here since past 2 years) just got merged with another team.

And now the new boss wants me to fix some fuck ups in their project which is written in C#, with some WCF and other stuff.

As this stuff is completely new for me, I asked for some time to get familiar with the environment. But the answer was a big NO.

As a result, "I've started looking out for a new job"
😡😠

Fuckin management screws up everything!

"adding that feature is not hard, the devs are just lazy"... or maybe... just maybe development is more complicated than you make it out to be when you vomit your middle management all over it?

Today we got a company announcement saying "Our time management tool got updated."

..still uses Flash Player.

For god's sake how is this even possible. Who did this?!

Maintainer seconds to destroy automated dependency management bot

2k18 colorized

That moment when you quit your job where you worked for the past 4 years and you have your last 5 days at work when your supervisor says that it's time to improve our documentation. Oh really? Wtf have I been saying all along? We have almost no documentation at the moment, so I expect lots and lots of confusion once I'm gone...confusion or phone calls to me.

SLOC is the shittiest metric to exist.

If you're in software management, know that any of the numbers you've ever received (from me or anyone) for SLOC count are totally worthless.

"How many lines of code do you think you'll need to write to finish those features"?

"100000000000000"

"The new platform is launching tomorrow. Get the most perfect first time user experience and registration flow. Don't leave until it's done."
Exactly one year later: "We are finally about to launch the new platform"

I'm beginning to think that it's not important to know how to code anymore, but how good you are at handling management.

Let's continue with another rant about my previous company.
You know what's not okay? Hiring a Polish company to handle your CRM. The Polish company promised our development team their CRM platform would have all of the features and APIs we need before switching over. We were skeptical, but Management decides to go ahead and sign the contract anyway because their friend works for this Polish company.

Two months later, the Polish company claims to have never agreed on having the features we needed available, API or otherwise. They also have no idea what an SPA is, most of their features are built-in iframes littered with XSS vulnerabilities, and outgoing B2B/B2C emails are not customizable beyond what their templating system gave us (colors and system fonts). I should also mention they refuse to let us meet with any members of their development team. The managements' friend? He's just a salesman.

We have had multiple meetings with their representatives, over voice calls and video conferencing, who just happened to be sales people. In the last case, every time we asked a question, this poor girl had to run back to her higher ups to get an answer as she didn't know what we were talking about.

Let's not forget about the language barrier. I don't speak Polish, management doesn't speak Polish. Nobody in my previous company spoke Polish. Why was this a good idea again?

I had another correspondence with the Polish company through E-mail. We had wanted to implement a third-party tracking code in our newsletter sign up (which is handled by the Polish CRM company). I asked a representative through E-mail if this was possible. In broken English, I received confirmation it was possible. Great, I asked how? In broken English, I received an explanation which I had already tried and did not work. I replied saying so. Third e-mail I receive mostly in Polish saying, "Why would you want to use your anybody else's tracking code but ours?"
Maybe because the features you promised previously were never delivered and now we need to accommodate? But also because we have our own list of affiliates and sponsors.

Six months later, the third-party tracking code still isn't implemented.

Also, I did report those XSS vulnerabilities on their platform and lack of error handling in their JS library. These have still not been fixed.

I think I just got rescued from ending up in management. I would miss the code too much.

Time management tips one must follow to be successful:-

1. Remove distractions:- Phone, Whatsapp, Instagram, FB, etc. All away from you during work.

2. Remove clutters: Get rid of not required things.

3. Eliminate redundancy

4. Emulate others: (My favourite) If someone has spend time and done some work. Do not reinvent the same work done just replicate that work and continue from that point.

5. Share burden: Team work and depending on others is not bad.

6. Make work fun: Most important if you enjoy your work you will give your best.

When you resign, then they realise a potential developer. Before that you were just an Hooman resource.

If you fail at management, start speaking on conferences about "agile"

Building a pull request on our Build Server takes 14 hours, it can do about 10 builds at a time and there are already 26 builds in the queue and it isn't even 10am.

I've been waiting for a build since I queued it on Friday - because the queue is actually a stack.

And management / senior developers are like...

If there are too many fries on the plate then the value of each fry goes down.
That's what is happening with the dev community right now. There are so many devs that the upper management doesn't care so much for us. Also, what infuriates me the most is those devs who don't value development work as much. They either don't think very highly of programming/computers or don't love their job. Both these kinds of devs and the upper management make me sick to the core.

Hence, I appeal to all the developers out there:
If you are doing dev work, please do it with all your heart and passion and show the upper management that we are indispensable. Do not forget the spirit of a developer to solve problems and create amazing things.

Coming up to (very) tight deadline..

Manager - "Stick in a temporary fix, if the data is mocked out it will do for the demo. We really want to show this feature."
Me - "Okay, I"ll pick up the technical debt after the demo."

*Changes are coded and rolled out*

Manager calls me over to his desk..

Manager - "This feature isn't bringing back real data."

Do these kind of people exist in all companies?

How do working professionals find time to learn new tech? Work all weekdays... Shit tired on weekends this happens for few months and suddenly kids are b building ai and stuff and u just feel dumb.. how do you guys do it? How do you stay on top of the game?

In knew it was bad at the time, but holy shit have I realised how shitty my last job was!

Underpaid (though still not doing too badly), underappreciated, and no promotion or raise despite promises of one for over a year. Of course the minute I handed in my notice, they immediately offered me a 15k raise and "oh, we can get you involved in the management side in 6 months".

Guess what bitches, my new job * is * being a manager, and I get a 20k pay rise. 2 weeks in and I'm loving it, wish I'd switched sooner!

The catch is, I'm now a manager. Does this make me the future bad guy?

The concept of manhours in our company.
A project that is estimated to take 400 manhours can not be finished by 50 people on 4 hours.

When management says we don't want open source...because there is no support, and we can't afford Enterprise licence because it eats away the profit, and shit needs to be done in lightening fast way...FUCK!!!

seagull management
| ˈsēˌɡəl manijmənt | noun

When managers are totally uninvolved in the work, but they just swoop down once in a while to shit all over everything. “This is wrong, and this, and this looks bad,” etc., before flying away again.

Our company is cheap, cheap as fuck. We have to use some third-party platforms and every year they choose something that is slightly cheaper than the other. (like a few $ per annual), they do not know that we have to refactor our code at the backend because the changes of the platform.

It doesn't end there, they even look for devs from third world countries to work for them remotely instead of hiring permanent staff (I understand it is cheaper because of currency difference and etc), but what about the training period or to let them become comfortable with the existing system, even when he/she is a genius... it takes time to be productive at work.

The worst part is they dont give a shit, they think devs can be replaced easily just like some construction workers carrying stuffs on site (no offence to them), management treating people like shit and doesn't care when they leave.

Fuck the IT guy

I was asked to fix a critical issue which had high visibility among the higher ups and were blocking QA from testing.

My dev lead (who was more like a dev manager) was having one of his insecure moments of “I need to get credit for helping fix this”, probably because he steals the oxygen from those who actually deserve to be alive and he knows he should be fired, slowly...over a BBQ.

For the next few days, I was bombarded with requests for status updates. Idea after idea of what I could do to fix the issue was hurled at me when all I needed was time to make the fix.

Dev Lead: “Dev X says he knows what the problem is and it’s a simple code fix and should be quick.” (Dev X is in the room as well)

Me: “Tell me, have you actually looked into the issue? Then you know that there are several race conditions causing this issue and the error only manifests itself during a Jenkins build and not locally. In order to know if you’ve fixed it, you have to run the Jenkins job each time which is a lengthy process.”

Dev X: “I don’t know how to access Jenkins.”

And so it continued. Just so you know, I’ve worked at controlling my anger over the years, usually triggered by asinine comments and decisions. I trained for many years with Buddhist monks atop remote mountain ranges, meditated for days under waterfalls, contemplated life in solitude as I crossed the desert, and spent many phone calls talking to Microsoft enterprise support while smiling.

But the next day, I lost my shit.

I had been working out quite a bit too so I could have probably flipped around ten large tables before I got tired. And I’m talking long tables you’d need two people to move.

For context, unresolved comments in our pull request process block the ability to merge. My code was ready and I had two other devs review and approve my code already, but my dev lead, who has never seen the code base, gave up trying to learn how to build the app, and hasn’t coded in years, decided to comment on my pull request that upper management has been waiting on and that he himself has been hounding me about.

Two stood out to me. I read them slowly.

“I think you should name this unit test better” (That unit test existed before my PR)

“This function was deleted and moved to this other file, just so people know”

A devil greeted me when I entered hell. He was quite understanding. It turns out he was also a dev.

Just a long rant here..

Im a bit of fed up with the "management" for this company.

- - - - -
There is a new guy joining the company which is being as "technical lead" a.k.a my new boss. His experience is a OracleDB expert. Anything related to oracle, just name it, he can do it.
But.. on other matter, he just dumb af. all his life only know "oracle", for that.. im really having a complex issue with him. There is a new project coming involving MariaDB, and the project is really complicated. This project is handled by me & him. So, since im not an expert guy, im doing lab test as much as i could, so that i get the knowledge and gist of it. But right now im stuck with my lab test, the project is just around the corner. I ask him to teach or look on his lab test or anything, but really waste my time. He doesnt even do anything about this, not even care. He just sitting, keep himself busy and everyday ask me either my lab test is working or not. I raise a concern that if im doing this alone, the company could facing serious issue, coz im stuck. He even said to me this project is complex af, even himself doesnt know what to do. but.. im not sure what he said is a joke or not but it seems pretty real for me. He just chilling, asking for update everyday..

For clarification : our company have ton of ESX / HyperV / RedHat Virtualization. U can create anything you want with any complex networking as you wish.

I did ask him once, really nicely, :"did you know how to setup the project environment?- out of curiosity"
His asnwer was :"by looking at the guide on the net, i can say MariaDB is really straight forward, really easy and for the load balancer part is really complex because not in the net at all"..
Then i ask :"did u do any labtest or what on this "complex part"?"..
He said :"no, im just reading the guide & my laptop couldnt handle this massive environment, its not supported"...
Me :"Our company have ton of virtual server, u know right?"......
Him :"I know"..
Me :"................."

Wtf im doing here man, im dead.. for sure, if this project went down, im the one will get blamed here. Added, this project is for BANK. Im not comfortable to drag him along, by the look of his ugly face + me blaming him.. I dont want him to feel pure loser. Im not that kind of evil..

Ugly face + loser at work = not a good combination right.
So.. i feel really bad.. idk what to do..

Then, i take another path to learn..
I ask for "MariaDB Training" since we both is dead meat.

now its been a month without any improvement.
Thats it..

I did raise my concern to our upper management,
Got no replied & wont even care. Dead. MoneyTalks.

Im starting to update my resume again..

Thanks for devRant.

During my last days at my nightmare company, I asked the management how the replacement hunt for a developer was going over lunch.

COO: Great! We've received lots of applications. Lots of potential there. One guy was even a rocket scientist.

Me: So why does he want to be a web developer? Did the rocket factory around the corner not work out? Or did he realize Finland's main exports are Moomins and not rockets?

Being smart but not applying yourself is the same as being stupid.
I've been having a rough semester , as I sat around and played video games for the first few weeks.
Ever since I stopped gaming I started doing more code stuff, and getting things done.
In hindsight, I probably shouldve stopped gaming when the semester started.
What are your guys experience with this? What stratergies do you use for time management?

Never underestimate the capacity to be misunderstood...

A little ashamed about my cable situation

When you estimate development time for a feature and management asks: "But aren't there widgets or sth that you can... [you raise an eyebrow] like... drag and drop or something...?"

What managers fail to realize is us developers and designers work close. We talk about things, we bicker, we find related problems that we have in our workplace. We band together and we form efforts. They are few and we are many. A project managers job is to be a servant to who they manage. If you cannot be straight forward and well respected At the same tome then it is not the job for you.

‪Many years ago I was told by a senior dev that caching is one of the hardest things I'll ever come across. At the time I didn't know what he meant, but these past few days I'm starting to understand‬ what he meant. It's not using the cache itself, it's the cache management that is hard. Determining what needs to be cached, when a cache should be invalidated, how long should something be cached etc. It's pretty insane when you start having to compare it with the requirements.

So I work for a company that does outsource, this company is pretty nice, but I don't get to see it too often. The one where I'm outsourcing though is the one where I spend all of my time.

Now, this company is a kind of a startup working with AI and Deep Learning (but not if statements :o ), but I came here as a full stack python developer that should implement their AI modules into real apps (mainly web apps).

Everything sounds good untill now, I learn lots and I'm doing what I wanted: python development. The problem is: management + one kiss ass guy.

The amount of work that should be done and the deadlines that should be kept are so messed up that I end up working extra hours, sometimes even in weekend, just to get it done. I'm the only apps developer there, so passing my tasks is not an option. I tried to talk about this, but I was met with a "loser can't keep up even with these few tasks..." kind of attitude.

Moreover, there is a guy that would do anything for the boss's attention, so he speaks everyone there behind their backs (and we all know it, but he's the favorite and he actually knows his stuff so we can't do much about him).

Now the question: what should I do? I only have 5 months here (so leaving would put a hole in my CV, I don't even know what to answer at this interview question "why are you leaving"), plus that the managers from these two companies are highschool friends which means that if I go and ask for a different project, the atmosphere at work will change (maybe this is overthinking already, but I can't help it). Also, last week I could barely get through the days without crying from stress.

TL;DR: I learn a lot from this company, but the deadlines are killing me and my stress level is at an all time high. I want to leave, but I kind of can't because I want my CV to look good.

So yeah, this is my first real rant, feels good to put it out there

Telling my mom how to do computer stuff is like programming, I need to outline every fucking step. Yes this includes file management.

I've learned over the years that there's no such thing as a Proof of Concept app. You might as well call them beta versions since some salesperson or manager will see it and immediately tell clients about it who will buy it and then you have to support and expand it.

"If we need to deprioritize something that's fine, as long as it all still gets done by the time we agreed on."

Gotta love product management types.

I worked all weekend to reach a deadline monday for testing, fixed all issues detected and made the release document, change elements, everything required by end of tuesday. And sent it to release manager. He calls me back immediately and tells me the release Windows was closed monday and it will have to wait until next month. Noone told me the deadline for release changed, and the users are invited to a training and release event next week. Gotta love working for a huge company and being the little guy noone keeps informed. #releaseblocked

-Management puts unrealistic deadline as usual-

_Tries his best but fails to deliver on time_

*Puts a clearly visible bug in code*

~Tester finds it and creates a issue~

*Solves the issue, wraps up the remaining things and closes the issue*

**Wakes up from dream, cuz he is the tester as well**

What would you do in this situation...

So around 13PM last Thursday I got pulled aside off the project I was working on (I've been working on mobile apps for the last year for the majority of time) and told to work on a website that will go live at 10AM the next day.

The reason being that the main Dev who was working on the site got fired for poor performance that same day, so they needed someone else to work on the website.

Turns out it's not just the simple "pre flight" stuff you'd typically do before launching a site, it was a lot of work that needed doing - cross browser testing & responsiveness, tweaking advanced JavaScript functionality and then all the pre & post flight stuff like ensuring all pages are SEO optimised, images are compressed etc etc.

Needless to say I worked my ass off Thursday and Friday to try and get the site live in as best position as possible, did a full test on desktop, a full test on mobile (minus payment gateway integration) and everything seemed okay for the most part.

After the site went live (I guess I should explain that another company manages their DNS so I couldn't delay the launch as I didn't have access to their DNS account) as I didn't get to the SEO point yet, so I started to minify the JavaScript and stylesheets, the usual stuff - everything looked fine at first glance.

So I get in to work on Monday, to be pulled aside by the project manager, who happens to be our HR manager too. (who I should also note has been known to do things very last minute in terms of getting work pushed in a few days, sometimes hours before client meetings) and pulls me aside and basically asks me I've tested mobiles, as some functionality isn't working on the homepage for mobile devices (was something to do with the minified CSS that broke it) but to which I said yes, as I did the majority of the testing before I minified everything. Which I'll admit I should've probably done a full test, but at the same time was very limited for time.

Now the main reason I'm writing this is that I was thinking about applying to become the line manager for the back-end department, and she somehow managed to turn it around and play on that by saying that she bought by giving me this responsibility would've been a good test to see what I can do in situations like this - when I see it as purely her dumping her workload on someone else so she doesn't have to worry about it - but she made it seem like I don't care about the project or made it seem like I think working on websites is below me or something.

Again I ended working for a company where people love to pride themselves because they're 'agile'.
Basically they bought A JIRA license, that's all.

The CTO decides the estimates privately.
He assign the stories.
No idea what's a retrospective.
The sprint ends whenever he wants.
No CI.
New stories continuosly added to the active sprint.

That's the risk of agile, unchecked power.

I was reading a book and came across this :
"
What if you were a doctor and had a patient who demanded that you stop all the silly hand-washing in preparation for surgery because it was taking too much time? Clearly the patient is the boss; and yet the doctor should absolutely refuse to comply. Why? Because the doctor knows more than the patient about the risks of disease and infection. It would be unprofessional (never mind criminal) for the doctor to comply with the patient. So too it is unprofessional for programmers to bend to the will of managers who don’t understand the risks of making messes.
"
It's fair point but at the same time we have to comply with the manager in order to have a raise/promotion. What do you think guys ?

Picture a small product team, the dev side of it has 1 tech lead, 1 recently promoted senior dev, 1 junior dev.

1 - Offer your tech lead a severance package
2 - Hire a mid-level and a junior dev
3 - Give the product lead role to someone in their mid-20s that has no tech or project management background
4 - ???

The next 6 months are going to be interesting ones...

Just started my first "management" role after 12 years as a developer, first thing I learnt is its just like my last role only I don't have to do any of the hard work.
Worried they'll figure out I'm doing almost nothing soon, any tips? Should I just start scheduling meetings to discuss meetings?

I hate it when a manager tries to be friendly with the employees. It feels forced. Is it wrong that I want to keep my work relationships strictly professional?

Yesterday all management was sick or away on vacation or training.
All work continued as normal. Everyone is an adult and knows what to do.
Made me question if we actually need to have soooo many people in management positions.
Funny to think that they get paid more.
Ironically when a developer is sick, real money is lost and progress stops in a particular area.
🤔

project deadline already set in stone, but you still ask how long it's going to take?

"How long will it take to finish by Friday?"

fml.

Cable management level 100.

Took my PC to a good repair shop because there was an issue with the motherboard. They complete ruined my cable management while installing the new motherboard I have a glass side panel. Fml.

!rant

how long do you guys code per day?

being a student i have now extreme difficulties in time management😐

need some advice...

We are forced to work on weekends because the management and the project manager loves to kiss the ass of our clients. I was even scolded by working from home.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.

ITS NOT FUCKING FAIR THAT WE HAVE TO SUFFER AND SHOULDER THEIR INCOMPETENCE IN MANAGING THIS FUCKING PROJECT.

Damnit. God Damnit.

Why the fuck management keep outsourcing entire platforms for in-house use if we have a fucking dev team...

Those platforms are constantly having contract issues and one we recently rewrote from scratch and is waaay better than the one they fucking paid another company to do....

Who thinks a VR Cable Management Sandbox game would sell really well?

Maybe I need some cable management here...

Why do I have to "grow" into a managerial role? I like doing what I am doing and would like to do it more. Anyone with some serious advice on how to stay relevant in software development with greying hair and without growing into people management?

Told department lead several of us devs are considering quitting due to low wage and insane workload.
Result: Team spirit questionaires and team building gathering.
No extra pay and now even less time to get work done.

Is it common practise to get entirely shafted but management?

Every single time anyone from management or anyone senior and non-technical is in a meeting with a client they completely take over and monopolise everything, even dev related stuff. With literally no expertise, skill or experience of the field...

In what possible metric are they the person qualified to be doing that?

If I've agreed a design and everything with a client, we get on well and we've generally come to the same conclusion about a lot of stuff. A nosy manager coming in and spewing a ton of crap up doesn't fucking help.

It makes everything a million times worse. Can they just fuck off please?

Let's schedule our weekly sprint planning meeting for 10AM on Fridays. And let's chastise those who happen to be 5 minutes late (literally). It's the perfect plan, since everyone is normally expected to come to work between 10AM and 11AM. Makes. Total. Fucking. Sense.

Started using Trello to track project detail and overall whiteboard my project list. Made a list called "Top 5" and shared the board with my boss so her could keep track with me. After our first meeting using Trello, I walked out with 7 items in my top 5. Here's to hoping there visual aid will help him realize there's a problem.

If you have an employee engagement survey that reveals that employees are not happy, don't dismiss and mock the employees when presenting the results.

It might very well be that it actually does not improve the situation.

Today at 'Derp & Co' is the end of the last sprint, no one have close all the task asigned. Myself included.

- that sucks...

Because there are task from previos sprints still in TODO that block other tasks.

- oof

But there is more... Yesterday was the deadline of the project. From today and onwards the client get discount.

- oof (but fair to the client)

Management have in mind AT LEAST 4 more weeks of development.

- But... how... wtf?

In 2 weeks part of the hardware we need for the project will return to the client.

- <smash the door and leave>

Management still is asking if we can do it on time...

- yeah... just call the Doctor, we need a TARDIS ASAP

Am I the only one who thinks studying these types of shit is useless?

I know that you two guys don't get together well. Shall we(the management team) send you guys for some team bonding training sessions? Whatttt?? 🙄🙄🙄

My university provides advanced education courses and you'll get certified if you pass them. I'm really interested but I don't have so much time, so which one should I pick?
List of courses I'm interested in:

SQL
IT-Security
Project Management
PHP

I'm curious about your suggestions ;)

Why oh why do companies scrimp on hardware and tools for devs. It's a constant battle to even use my machine let alone make progress. I cost 1k a day a decent machine 2k maximum. I have spent the last two days fighting hardware issues.

Daily updates my ass

oldie but goodie

Last Month I was working at a place as a intern and also working at another place as a Tech Consultant/Proj manager, managing interns at the same time.
What a emotional rollercoaster it was..............

when the project is "almost done" when you join in, but you discover that nothing is working properly and there's placeholder text in the whole database.

Management: Let's roll back this bug fix so we don't have to tell the client and have an extensive talk about this bug

Oh geez.

Having a director who only got his position because the industry is so young and he was able to register domain names so seen as an expert by non-technical people. As few people do this role where I live he was able to move from role to role and rise up the ranks. Everyone in the company knows he's useless except a couple of older directors who are scared of technology so think he's knowledgeable.

He has no ability to plan, everything he says to clients is 'yes, asap' without getting proper requirements, then pulls the devs off one project mid progress to work on another. He also needs basic concepts explained to him many, many times. When pitching for work I end up writing most of his stuff for him and he also starts with the previous version of a document that I have proof read and corrected about ten times.

The frustrating part is I only have to deal with him due to a merger of two companies.

Today I had sort of a meltdown when I found out that the small, 20-something company where I work and where we should all 'trust each other' is working to stealthily enable SSL Inspection.

I'm done with doing anything other than what is stipulated in my contract such as helping out in other areas out of my own volition.

Management got control hungry and mad once they got their hands on a Deep Inspection Firewall.

Well, I'm not feeling sorry for the uproar they'll have to endure once colleagues find out they are doing this stealthily.

Serves them right and after this and other similar experiences my trust in this company is right through the floor.

Me: "when do you need this for?"
Them: "yesterday!hahahahahahhah"
Me: " :| Never heard that one before"

Project management 101:

1) For a new project, pretend it is similar to a project in currently in development
2) Proudly state that everything can be copied from the older project, so the schedule of the new can be tightened
3) Calculate the new schedule based on the "just copy and paste" effort.
4) Now the new project will be finished before the older project
5) Enjoy the applause from upper management for the successful project that hasn't even begun yet.

No, this does not belong in the joke category.

That's gonna be fun...

When managements' response is repeatedly, "we are working on it" - don't count on it anytime soon.

- have a look at the project
- brake it down into smaller stories
- estimate the time
- multipy it with 1.5
- add 1-3 days of testing
- add 15% project management
- add a 2 days buffer

= be happy with being done in 2 weeks, present it in 4

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

sigh, managers and their sand castle empires

My university has "Economics and Technic" on its name and it straight up fails on the technical side.

We don't have proper wifi because nobody from the management wants to be responsible for whatever the fuck students do, so they borrow the public (not secure/shitty) wifi from the state for us. Great. We could also use Eduroam, except it only works OUTSIDE of the university for some fujing reason.

Also, our classrooms don't have plugs to charge our notebooks so that's not an option, I guess they just think: "well if they can't use their notebooks they might as well not use any internet at all".

With the heatwave in Europe the servers almost fried bcs management was not sure if they should turn it off or not. We got no server a day.

To top it off, for some reason, every time I access the Intranet from the university it won't login and it literally blocks my dns requests. FANTASTICAL. I even tried restoring my computer and it does the same shit, so I just gave up on it entirely.

TL;DR: My university has shitty IT-Infrastructure and I need to rant about it.

Thank you for sharing ze pain™

When you have to build a startup product using enterprise project management methodologies, and corporate practices.

R.I.P Agile

I think I have little bit problem with tab management.

Please note tiny grey dots above some tabs on left side, those are tab groups...

A few days ago our server was compromised due to an outdated Jenkins version. The malicious user installed a crypto miner on the server... The same day that it was found I told management that I'm interested in helping out with the server. Since then, nothing happened... No updates, no security measures, no nothing (except for the removed crypto miner and updated Jenkins software)

Oh well only a matter of time before another hack...

Question to some (who work way way way longer than me) med - seniors, should I make a big deal out of this? And keep pressure on it. Or should I just leave it be and wait for the next comprised server? I know devrant is not a Q&A service, but some dev to dev advice is much appreciated.

- incognito

Management in big corp I collaborate with has decided they want intermediate releases every 4 weeks. That's kinda OK, we work in two week Scrum sprints.

However, not this sprint. Because of Easter it's three weeks. And because the 4 weeks rule is absolute, the one after that is only one week. Which implies we do the whole review-presentation-planning ceremony twice in a row. That's fucking absurd. But when management agrees on a plan, it's reality that needs to comply, right? Argh.

Around three months ago in a meeting regarding a new end2end test for a product :
PO: We have a full feature stop, only bug fixes are coming until we can unify all products.
Me : So I can use any selectors without worrying the whole thing breaks with the next update?
PO: Sure.

Last Thursday :
PO: Yeah, we gonna overhaul the entire UI with the next release to get better UX.

Why would any sane person reinvent an entire product thats already scheduled for discontinuation in 2018? And how is it possible that a few months ago nobody knew anything about it? Are they using fucking tatot cards for management decisions?

Am I the only one who is working on a different project every day? And they're not small projects. All medium sized e-commerce sites (Magento 1&2) with tons of custom made functionality.

Soooo counter productive...

For some reason our PM's think it's the most efficient way to do it this way, even though we said numerous times it causes the opposite result. Having to switch to a different project every day and constantly picking up where you left a week ago is so frustrating...

The awkward moment you set a new password and don't remember it anymore on the next day.

When you have to manage a team of n00bs.

Dev: *completes tasks, pushes to UAT and assigns to PM in Jira for testing*

PM: *receives notifications and immediately bulk change on all taks and assigns to client without testing*

So what is it you do here...?

After a management meeting about the companies first e-commerce initiative which I proposed and protocol-typed with assistance from internal and 3rd party resources, I returned with my boss to her office feeling on cloud nine as everything had been accepted / approved and the project was green lit!!!

She turns to me and says “I’m going down to the local sex shop and buying the largest dildo, strap it on, and then they will listen to me too”... I just sat, staring at the floor ...

Queue the crickets...

How do you guys manage your time? Do programmers really have a life?

So this Just happened, we were in a Meeting when Manager Tells us about "Time Management" and asked us Whatsapp we could Code for him,
I suggested that we use those Chips to track us and the employees, because we always use them to unlock Doors and Stuff,
Another Suggestion from another Person was:
To use Paper...
I was Like "WTF dude Pen and Paper? Didn't you listen?"

We now use Pen and Paper to weite our working Times Down...

My boss just upgraded our customer support level with a company we depend on, but I'm not allowed to use any of our 40 allotted phone support hours for "code questions" because "we might need them for something later on".