TL;DR: Got a really horrible supervisor temporarily fired, maybe permanently fired, got a laptop, and realized that senior devs are amazing when they stand up for the little guys

Omg... I love my coworkers!!! So like, I'm an incredibly shy dev, like, I only managed to get my internship purely because of my familiarity with c#, Android/UWP app development (although never apple, which you can read about in my last rant lol), and the API Management framework that they were using, so, long stories short, I'm insanely shy and I get anxious quite quickly in social situations, that'll be important in a bit. Anyways​, so, in my previous rant (my first one actually, it was "that" bad...) I had a run-in with a rather unfair supervisor situation where he expected me to work on an iOS app without a Mac machine.
Yup.
So, this is currently a little bit before my shift end, where I'm anxiously trying to get a MacOS VM up and running to be able to copy paste some psudo-code so as not to get in trouble, which is when the senior dev of the team walks by and sees me tearing hair out of my head and being really sad. So what does this god amongst men do?
He comes over and asks me what I'm doing.

Now, I didn't actually notice him, so when he asked me, I was insanely jumpy and scared that my supervisor would appear and be mad at me for not having things done, so I kind of half scream half yelp when he says something, so now he knows somethings up and he acts kind of like I'm an injured deer and slowly asks what's going on.
So, of course I tell him everything that had happened and how the supervisor got really mad about me not being able to develop iOS apps due to not having a Mac, and his expectation of me to get it magically working and getting to work on my module, and the selenium portal automatization, and after a couple seconds of me rapid fire nervous squirrel-like explanation, he holds up a hand and says "He what?!!!!? God dammit, how the hell are you supposed to do that? Jesus, you were supposed to get a company laptop when you got here, where's that??? And if you don't have that then how the hell were you working on the cross platform portion? You need a Mac machine for that, so let me get this straight... You've been frantically trying to find a workaround so that AS (let's call him AS for asshat supervisor (missing an s)) doesn't get mad at you... Who the hell... And this fuckers in charge of the interns??"

He was incredibly pissed off at this point, like, REALLY pissed off... But-

This man had just spoken miracles to me.

Mother...

Fuckin...

Miracles...

So I do what any self respecting intern would do, I start cry laughing and hug said BSD for a quick second (badass senior developer), and I say yep, pretty much ;-;.

And queue AS walking into my workspace and saying
AS- "are you done with the iOS a..."

BSD- "You've got to be kidding me, shut up for a second and sit down"

AS- "?" *Sits*

Me- *hides in corner and cinches up hoodie*

BSD- "Excuse me, but what did you ask benlion to do?"

AS- "Um, I simply told him to start working on the Xamarin app"

BSD- "Yes, but according to benlion, you angrily told him to start working on the Mac portion... Let me ask you something first, why would you do that? It's rude and inappropriate to be hostile to anyone at the workplace, in fact, if he wants to pursue to matter, you can get demoted, actually, if he wants to pursue it, you're fired, and there's no way I'm letting you get a management job again"

AS -"Wow, did benlion really say that? He's obviously lying due to his dislike for me, BSD, it's rather unfair to take his word over his superv..."

BSD-"Oh you did NOT just go there. That's it, stay here. And benlion, come with me." *Points at me*

Me- *Terrified out of my mind, almost to the point of a nervous breakdown because of the argument that I had started* "O-okay o_O"

Long stories short, we come back with his supervisor and he is now relieved of his duties temporarily while this whole thing gets settled...

Oh, and I get my Apple Laptop tomorrow ^-^ so I'm really happy, albeit kind of sad that its my fault that AS doesn't have a job right now ;-;, but he did yell at me and expect incredibly impossible things of me, so, not as bad as I might feel.

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

!dev

Just went to the pet asylum to look for a cat. There was a shy black one (eh, maybe not a good first but Moar Blacker, Moar Better 😋) and a black and white one which was very open towards me.

Probably I'll get the latter, and build some food, water and litter dispenser systems for it with motors and my esp8266 boards 🙂

The lady who was volunteering there and showed me around had an interesting story though.

Apparently both of those aforementioned cats were wild cats (so they don't come from a proper household or anything). Except that black and white one which apparently came from some rather retarded people.. think average Facebook user.

According to her those previous owners came there with 2 cats including the black and white one as "extremely wild, we found them in the forest, put them in cages (because everyone carries cat cages in their car every day, right?) and brought them here". Nice excuse for average Facebook user level of retard I have to say 😜 but it's not very waterproof, you know?

But on average the people that they get there are even worse than that.. some get a great initial meeting with a cat, but then leave them there because they don't like the stripes on a paw or something stupid like that. As she put it: "you're not fitting pants in a clothing shop, are you?! 😑"
Had to try hard to not burst out in laughter from that description 😂

Point is, the average customers there are awful.. apparently she was very grateful to have a rather down-to-earth customer like me and my home supervisor (who helpfully drove me there 🙂) for once. So terrible clients.. they're everywhere!

It really taught me to be mindful of the hardships of people in any profession who deal with clients.

I've been trying to understand this guy. Maybe he's depressed or something. I just find it hard to believe that someone can remain in the industry for so long and survive from copy pasting code and not figuring things out. I've seen him fix bugs before, debug issues, etc. But now it's clear to me that his position is more functional than technical. He knows the ins and outs of the system but throw him into something foreign or more technical, he just gives up.

This is another backend guy this time. He's been here for so long and there's been some changes since almost a year ago. He couldn't keep up. Fine, you're not expected to master any of these new things but I can give him all the basic examples in the world and he still wouldn't get it. What pisses me off are the excuses, there are so many.

"I'm new to this." So am I. We're both new to this. There's no expectation that we'll learn at the same pace but come on, it's been almost a year now. You can't keep using the same excuse.

"I don't understand." I didn't either. You know what I did? Figured things out, researched, tested, etc. You can't sit in front of the computer staring at the screen and then a bulb will just suddenly light up and you instantly "get" it. This is what I don't get even from people who want to become developers. I remember having a classmate (graduated IT but ended up working in a different field) who asked me to teach him programming because he can't learn by himself, someone has to teach him. Well, if that's the case then clearly this isn't the field for you. What are you gonna do? Have an assistant/tutor beside yo all the time? Wants the dev money but doesn't want the dev work. Nice.

"I've never done this before." We've all been virgins in many areas of life and we'll always be like that in many new areas but every time you're in that situation, you try. Just fucking try. Grab that motherfucker by the cock and stroke it violently until you're blessed by the jizz gods of knowledge. Feel that brilliant cum seep into your pores and.. sorry, got carried away.

"But the example you gave me does this, mine has to do this." It's the same fucking thing, man. You just have to make adjustments based on your application. If I had to answer your question, I'd be spoonfeeding you and doing your work myself. This is exactly why I obliged taking the more complex tasks from you because you'll end up bugging me anyway and then three months later, it still wouldn't work and I had to do it. And yet here you are with your simple tasks and you can't figure things out no matter how many examples you're given because you don't even try.

Whatever. He's counting the days anyway. I hope he gets out of whatever fog he's in or find a better career somewhere else.

Non-dev *random* annoyance:

Today in leave me the fuck alone, establishments have opened but social distancing still applies so don't go around approaching me while I mind my own damn business waiting for a car.

I rarely go out unless I have to pick-up food or buy groceries but there is this place I visit once every few months. I don't loiter in the streets, at the mall, or anywhere. I get out of the apartment, go straight to a specific place, do whatever I went there for (store - buy groceries, salon - get a haircut, etc.) and then go home. In short, I limit my time outside even before this whole pandemic so people don't get a chance to talk to me about shit I don't care about.

I thought it was perfect. I've been to this place a couple of times now but this time, it was different. The car pulls over in front of the salon. I get out and was walking straight towards the door when this random guy in front of the hotel nearby starts talking to me "Hey, where are you going?" Confused, I pointed out to the door in front of me then went in. After an hour, I got out, booked a car, and waited for it to arrive. Same guy approaches me and starts up the shittiest excuse of a small talk.

Guy: "Did you go there?" (points at the salon)

Me: *nods*

Guy: "Did you get a <insert random service that my brain filtered out 'cause I don't care>?"

Me: (no answer but internally, "I got a happy ending and had my balls trimmed, what do you want?")

Guy: "What are you doing here?"

Me: (polite but cold, signalling that there's nothing to talk about) "I'm waiting for a car."

Guy: "What address did you put for this place?" *moves closer and starts looking at my phone screen*

Me: "This building. It's fine. I've been here a couple of times." *walks a couple of feet away*

Guy: "Oh no, you should put this blah blah street instead because that one is on the other side."

The fuck do you mean, man? You saw my fucking pin, it's right there and like I said, I've been here before.

Me: "No, no, it's arriving." *starts ignoring every other attempt he makes to start a conversation*

Guy: *starts mumbling about how I put in the wrong street*

Car arrives, I ignore the guy and walk straight to it.

Guy: "Oh, that's you." *mumbling other shit like we're good friends parting ways*

I know some of you will say that maybe he's just trying to help and I'm being a cunt. First of all, I already told him that I've been to this place several times and I know where I'm going. Second, an old lady got out of a car at the time I said I didn't need help but I didn't see him talk to that woman once or try to help her.

You can say that maybe he's lonely and in desperate need for a conversation. I don't care. It's not my responsibility to talk to random people just because they feel lonely especially when they're hassling me and not following the social distancing rule at all.

You can go ahead and preach that I should be kind but I think I've been kind enough not to lash out and stay polite with this guy even when he was already being rude asking questions that are none of his business. I'm just so stressed out and annoyed that people in general seem to never leave me in peace. It doesn't matter if I go out or not, be on social media or not, nothing works. I just hate people in times like this and wish most of them would turn into cats.

I really dread working tomorrow. That manager and his team really have a way of demotivating me. My entire being is refusing to do even a tiny amount of work for them. I would rather work on a shitload of tasks if it's for some other team. You are the worst manager I've ever worked with so far and that's in comparison with the psycho I had in the hellhole that first introduced me to devRant back in 2018.

That one made employees cry but at least, that manager cared about her job, maybe even too much. You don't and you have your impoverished flying monkeys with slave mentality supporting you all the way. Third world mentality, am I right? You're constantly looking for developers to drag into your web of incompetence. You don't know what needs to be done and you rush and pressure someone else as soon as you're reminded of it. Dude, stop using developers as scapegoats. If I was a manager and other managers are telling me, "Please cascade this information sooner. We don't want to put unnecessary pressure on anyone." I'll take the hint that I suck, apologize, and stop dropping the names of developers as if I've given them the information a long time ago.

You fucking didn't.

I fucking hate working with you so much that even on a Sunday, I daydream of shoving your face down a deep fryer and giving you a full body massage with mercury. I've been doing all I can to improve my life and be less angry in the past few months but damn, surprise fuck-ups are the worst. I can't help but stress over the fact that this could be my life on the next months to come. I would be focusing on working for my original team and improving their process and then you'll pop out of nowhere and drag me to hell.

It's just not worth it. I'm responding to recruiters now. When I get an offer and someone tries to keep me, I'll tell them I'd stay under the condition that no one borrows me from my original team anymore. This "you have to be flexible" bullshit is just another excuse for "we have terrible managers". I really like my original team and I get excited working with them, talking to them, and discussing improvements but this manager is just too fucking much.

I read a thousand times that employees leave managers but I've never been put into a position where it's so accurate until now.

And this early Friday leave from work is brought to you by Microsoft.

(I did triggered the first one, but I forgot my laptop had a pending update so it's not totally windows fault)