"full stack" means "you'll be doing everything from gathering client requirements through data architecture up to the UI design and of course implementing all of it"

"backend" means "you'll be coding everything from database through server-side code and client-side code including html and css"

"we need you on-site all day every day" means "we have no idea how and why we should use repositories with remote access despite being a company developing an internet app, and we don't trust that you would be working anyway"

"interesting challenging projects" means "the same boring crap as every other company, running on an incredibly botched and dezorganized codebase".

"competitive pay" means "actual pay is around 1.5 times the minimum allowed pay, and everything else is being siphoned off into (stupid and useless) 'benefits' like massage and fitness discount coupons"

"friendly collective having fun at numerous company events each years" means "it is mandatory for you to participate on our weekend drinking retreats but you'll only find out when we fire you because you're 'not a team player' after you refused to participate on those"

I just got emotionally attached to this laptop and that massage is like sign for all devs not to be robot and bring little bit change every once in a while.

So we hired an intern and his first task was to change a few things in email layout for our client, which is an investment bank.

I told to one of my developers to make his local database dump and setup the project for an intern. When intern completed the task, my developer thought that title "Dow Jones index crashed" was pretty funny title for a test.

What he didn't thought through enough, is that he forgot to configure fake SMTP server and he had production database dump with real email addresses.

I had really awkward 20 minutes conversation with our client. Fuck my life.

A glass of cognac, a blotter of LSD, go to the spa for a massage, turn on some Sibelius, Mahler or Tchaikovsky, and play Factorio all night.

Sometimes I also just work on my forever unfinished SciFi novel.

Or I install FL studio to realize 30 minutes later that I'm about as musically gifted as a pile of bricks.

Recently I was fed up with work and made a nice new bed for my daughter out of cherry & oak wood. Carpentry is a nice distraction from coding.

Ok so I'm trying to focus on reading docs on a game engine to do some game dev

And wife busy disturbing
wife: come do this for me
wife: come sit with me
wife: come talk to me
wife: come massage me
wife: come do this to me

Its like a stream of endless error messages

Got in trouble today during a Data integrity meeting, everyone kept talking about data massaging. "Massage this data", "massage that data table", "insert massaged data".

Finally I just blurted out, "yeah massage it all you want but how do I get a data happy ending?"

I thought it was hilarious. The other DBA and backend devs thought it was jokes, my manager... Not so much.

Apparently, I need to keep "thoughts and comments about data happy endings to myself moving forward".

Okay. 😆😆

Massage = removes stress

A new administrative assistant joined the company I work at. I presented myself and told her that I'm doing devops. After a couple of days she sent me a massage asking for my assistance. Very curious of what could that be I approached her workstation, and then she told me her mouse is not working and asked me to fix it.

Only way to stay sane as a developer reading emails:
1.) Open email
2.) Scan quickly for your name on the body of the massage
3.) If your name isn't mentioned, then close with joy.
4.) If your name is mentioned (FML), then read sort of....see what's the deal and if the email body doesn't end in a question mark, then close email and play dumb.
5.) Else, respond to the fucking email.

Holy shit. In a meeting that literally makes no sense. We're taking credit for work by claiming story points. Story points. How the hell does that work? Especially since we have told management CONSTANTLY that story points are abstract LOE shit and NOT time spent. Yet I suggest if we REALLY want to estimate who worked what we track time spent I get shot down. You can't get a concrete measurement from an abstract concept. Also, we're being encouraged to argue over who does what? What does THAT help? AND we're not even reestimating if we over or under estimating, but being forced to massage our numbers into the estimate. What the fuck?

Food and Programmers life:
Spaghetti —> My Code
Pizza —> We are spending the night working in the office
Power Drinks —> delivery date is tomorrow morning
Candy —> extra task
Coffee —> bug massage
Water —> wash your face, we have meetings in five minutes
Truffle —> fu** BlockChain
KitKat —> upgrade your phone please
Lollipop —> one more time please
Marshmallow —> do you like some Nougat?

"come work from the office! we now offer an on-site masseuse with quick massages!"
WTF? No. First of all, the office is in the wrong fucking continent. But let's focus on the bogus "masseuse" crap for now.

We are a 3000+ full-time employees company. If all were to come to the same overpriced pile of fancy rocks at the same 60 hours interval (spread over 5.5 days), it would mean 1.2 minutes per massage per person per week. So to let each person have a single 15 minute massage session per week, there would have to be at least 12.5 masseuses available at all working hours.
Let's say 10 masseuses to account of those people who would not have a weekly session.
Now, let's say each masseuse is a no-strings-attached independant contractor making USD 3000 per year on a 60hour, 5.5 days full-capacity work week without breaks, vacations, benefits or sickdays (European readers may faint, but it is not so uncommon in other parts of the globe).
So this shit costs 30k USD per year.

I would much rather have 10 more USD per year than this useless "look how young and hype we are!" startup horsecrap.

"it would actually be more like 2 USD per year" was the rebuttal to my (way more politely phrased) argument above. "there is the whole overhead costs thing, and, besides, we will only have one masseuse available at a time"
Oh. So besides all the marketing, the whole point is to let a person have like four sessions per year.

Office Perks. Are. Not. Real.

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

(Saturday morning)
Me: I've never been so long without exercising (since before this, my first winter), I should get in shape now that this God forsaken weather is finally reaching livable levels.

(some time later at the gym)
Also me: You've always been in good shape, why stop with just chest, let's do some arms and shoulders.

(48 hours later, Monday morning)
I had to turn my whole torso to look if any car was coming while walking to the library, moved like terminator because of the massive neck muscle pain, suffered through the pain of setting up all my study material to the realize (just now) I can't even fucking look down to my notebook... Can I be more stupid?

HOLY SHIT. short story, just dodged a bullet. Using the Samuel L Ipsum generator and not thinking. I then use this copy to test the notification system with the following text. luckily the system email only went to me!

"Look, just because I don't be givin' no man a foot massage don't make it right for Marsellus to throw Antwone into a glass motherfuckin' house, fuckin' up the way the nigger talks. Motherfucker do that shit to me, he better paralyze my ass, 'cause I'll kill the motherfucker, know what I'm sayin'?

Well, the way they make shows is, they make one show. That show's called a pilot. Then they show that show to the people who make shows, and on the strength of that one show they decide if they're going to make more shows. Some pilots get picked and become television programs. Some don't, become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing."

Spending all day sitting in a chair takes its toll on my back. Lumbar and intra-scapular areas are ssssoooooo sore that I can't even stretch them out properly any more (I'm quite a flexible person).

Thanks to my closest shopping centre for this double foam-ball. It's the best investment I've made in years and it only cost me 4€.

Whenever I lay and roll on it slowly I usually drift into sleep out of pleasure.

It's not an ad or anything, just a recommendation to my fellow IT guys and gals suffering back pains from sitting all day long.

When the anti-tech departments pretend that remote work don't exist and annoy people about things that really don't matter, specially when you are not in the office. Like massage chairs or birthday cakes for someone you never/hardly ever met.

(bullshit departments like celebrations, facilities, marketing, culture, I swear I'm not making those up)

Spring is not just framework but also provide spa and massage service as well.

I just bought a massage chair... At $1200, it's cheaper than an iPhone/Samsung phone or a gaming laptop/desktop

Interviewing with three companies. First one extended an offer. I'm expecting an offer from at least one, possibly both, of the others (On-site with Second was yesterday and expecting an offer tomorrow or Mon, phone tech interview (they also had a tech screen) with Three was today and I /rocked/ it, expecting an onsite invite for next week).

The problem with being a badass is that the choice paralysis is SO OVERWHELMING. All three have features that I like and how do I choose.

I think I'm being overly influenced by the weekly massage, onsite barista, free nice breakfast/lunch, and ideal location of Second (the domain is finance, they have $$$). Oh and fucking 25 vacation days and amazing 401k matching. I mean how would I say no to an offer? But what if the work is actually beyond me? But they have seriously cranked their benefits package up to 11.

First is an in house product with external clients. The domain I don't find super interesting, but it has amazing Glassdoor reviews, seems like a decent environment, and really seems like a place to progress and grow as a professional. It is also the lowest salary of the three (both others are through Hired, so I know what they are offering).

Third is a consultancy where I'd really get to keep my skills relevant. Seems mad fast paced, which is a bit intimidating, and I don't know how well I'd handle the context switching of being on multiple projects at a time.

I mean, all of this is counting my chickens before they hatch. But I have a really good feeling about my chsnces with Second, though I suppose I still have a chance to botch my onsite with Third.

Ahhhh. Dev Rant, how did you go about choosing between offers that can't be evaluated on a single axis?

What's wrong with Stack Overflow? Honestly, somebody asked how to do something that should in most practical cases be avoided. I provided an answer and here comes the downvote army for no reason. I explicitly said it should be avoided but for the sake of experiment I posted the solution because I think people should explore what they can do with the language instead of feeling constricted to a set of standard recipes.
I don't buy into claims that this irrational elitist moderation is necessary for SO to be useful.
In the end, even their search sucks and most of us find it easier to search SO using Google instead of their native search.
I remember when I was a student at a programme which admitted both people with linguistic and computational background how hard it was for the linguists to even start writing code and I would always try to help them and relieve the frustration.
For me, it took years to start writing a high quality code and more than 6 years to become productive while writing quality code.
Do we forget we all began somewhere? I honestly don't care about building an immense "objective" problem solving tool for someone else to earn money at the expense of treating people the way SO community does.
I think it would be way better if SO managed to distribute questions in a more relevant manner and stopped holding onto their "objectivism", which is in itself a questionable concept.
Even simply separating questions into how popular they are could move the useful ones forward without radically cancelling and hurting new people.
I like to see people thinking differently and see their questions reveal what they know and what they don't. There's nothing wrong with pointing people to already answered questions, correcting them etc. And I get that there are many people being annoying when asking, but I never forget there is a person on the other side and I would never want to destroy their potential just to massage my ego and "reputation". And heck who cares about their reputation? Show your Github, CV, talk smart in an interview and you'll get the job. And in the end, wouldn't you feel greater inner joy from helping a person grow instead of seeing only your reputation?

So i decided to hit the gym last night because why not? Now i haven't gone to a gym in a long time, so my stupid self thought why not lift some weights, and rather than starting with something light and gradually increasing the weight i went for the heaviest dumbbells, guess who's lying in the bed now, not even able to lift his hands to code? This fucking sucks i can't even lift a damn spoon without having cramps, i tried rubbing some massage gel but it doesn't seem to do any difference, do you guys have any advice? Thanks :)

Me: Searches youtube
“I asked her out and her response all the time is ‘No’, what should I do”

{{Premium ads popped up for the 1000th time}}

Would you like to subscribe for premium? You get free sandwich everyday, a back massage, free medicure and pedicure, unlimited everything.

Me: clicks “No”

Youtube:

when you get the same error massage for 9 hours

well i'll just go fuck myself then

How should I name NPM package which works as console log for errors, but throws user to stack overflow page with error massage included in the link?

Found a meme here at DevRant in which this idea was presented, haha.

Rexx scripting language as a junior programmer at a financial company. It was used to massage data scraped from multiple data sources. There scripts that were calling other scripts to the tune of 6 and 7 scripts deep. It was a horrible scriptception.