[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

TLDR someone in my team took credit for work he didnt do;

I know teamwork is a good thing and when everyone does their share of the work, it is.

I submitted a computer science project to an event in the UK called the Big Bang fair, I was in a group of 3. We had been meeting every week after for the past 10 months. During these sessions me and uke have been meeting for 1h 30m where as oon could only meet for 1h because "he had stuff to do" and he never saw the point in staying longer. Oon had also been a massive distraction whilst the time he was there as he did no work and messed around on cookie clicker.

Anyway we found out last week that the Big Bang fair was coming very soon and we had not written a write up or done any preparation for the presentation we had to do. Me and uke set up a google doc and started adding stuff to it (as we only had a few days left at this point). Whereas oon did nothing.

I ended up staying up till 3am in the morning finalising the write up over the weekend with uke helping. We asked oon to help but he said he didnt want to stay up late so didnt help.

Then the most stressful 2 days come round. I devoted all of my free time towards the project, uke devoted most of his time and oon devoted 1 hour after school on one day. He said that he couldn't do one lunchtime but I found him in the ICT room playing games :/.

This didn't matter THAT much but what pissed me off is that he started boasting to all his friends about all the work I did and credited it as his own. At the actual event he said nothing during the presentation because he knew nothing about the project. HE DIDNT EITHER BOTHER TO READ THE WRITE UP HE WAS BOASTING ABOUT. What do people get out of taking credit for work other people did.

We didn't win anything and I wonder why

wow thanks for reading all this you deserve a sticker

Note to my past self:

Thank you for taking care of me and assuming that out of no fucking sudden authorization token will be required to perform an API call!
You saved me so much refactoring and modifications with your tiny little assumption of how fuckups will think :)

I am a Technical Lead in the department in my company that writes code for our clients that have money but doesn't have the technical expertise to handle the complexities of our own software.

Part of my tasks involve taking care of a few projects written by employees that have left after using third-party tools rather than using our own software. No one else in this department knows these third-party tools, they only know our own, and my *still limited* web development experience means I get dumped these things in my lap.

And I'm SO pissed at these projects and their authors and the manager that let these ex-employees write these things. There is this one project that was managed by two different "developers" (I don't know they deserve this title) at two different times, and it is so riddled with different technologies it makes me want to throw up almost daily.

Don't believe me? Here is a complete list of the dependencies listed in the package.json of this project: babel-polyfill, body-parser, cookie-parser, debug, edge, edge-sql, excel-to-json, exceljs, express, html-inline, jade, morgan, mssql, mysql, pug, ramda, request, rotating-file-stream, serve-favicon, webpack, xlsx, xml2js

What this doesn't even show, is that one part of this project (literally one page) is made using react, react-dom, react-redux, and jade. The other part (again literally one page) is made using Angular and Pug. In case you missed it while picking up your jaw, there's also mssql, mysql, edge and edge-sql. excel-to-json, exceljs, xlsx.

Oh you want *more* juicy details? This project takes the entire data object used by the front-end, stringifies it into JSON, and shoves it into the database *as a single field*. And instead of doing WHERE clauses in the SQL queries, it grabs the entire table, loops, parses the json, and does a condition on it. If even one of those JSON entries gets corrupted, the entire solution breaks because these "developers" don't know what try/catch is.

The client asked for a very simple change in their app, which was to add a button that queries the back-end for a URL, shows it in a modal dialog, after which a button is clicked to verify the link by doing a second query to the back-end before modifying a couple of fields in the page.

This. Took. Me. Two. Months*. Save me. Please, save me.

*between constant context switches between this and other projects that were continuously failing because of their mistakes.