HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)

My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.

Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.

PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)

Riskiest Dev choice...

Leaving a previous job, moving 1000KM (620 Miles) away with no job prospects and going absolutely broke.

This was all in the name of “I need a better job”, so what better way to force yourself to get one.

I’m currently in my second job since then and now make just over double what I was earning before.

Sometimes it takes a high risk to get out ahead.

Well, I made a choice in life.

I'm going to stay and work in America after I graduate. In spite of all the shit talking I've done about its work ethics, benefits, politics, and culture.

This place is still home.

After trying out a trip to Europe for a few weeks I can't handle the idea of being 4,500 miles away from family and what few friends I have. I figured out what was true the whole time: I wanted to run away from my past. Breakups, a failed marriage proposal, a dead end job that I put up with only because I need to graduate. I've been angry and depressed over these things, but running away won't fix it.

I need to face reality and own up to it. I'll get a job as a developer in the states through hell or high-water.

!Rant

I have the absolute greatest and nicest front-end developer in the world.

Today I was being given all kinds of praise for putting something on a site that the client loved and it seems to be getting the conversions they want. I felt really bad taking the praise because I didn't design it. The front-end developer designed it for me and gave me a picture of what she thought the client wanted and I built it. So I passed on all the compliments to her and told her that everyone was super happy with it.

She accepted the thanks but then floored me telling me that she didn't feel like she did anything and that my job was more important. We started arguing about who was more important.

"I accept that your designs do nothing without my back-end code, but without your designs no one would ever use anything I made."

She responded by sending me a list of sites with terrible designs that people use daily. And continued to tell me how much more important back-end is than front end.

If she wasn't 1500 miles away I might have kissed her. I needed to hear that today.

Had a job interview back where I want to move(2300 miles away), doing exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately it was for a senior developer, a bit over my pay grade.

First Interview: "It is above your skill level, but I like you. We will make it fit you."

Second Interview(technical): " You did super well! I will make sure to pass the good news onto the boss! I am excited to work with you soon!"

Response to my thank you email: "We decided to not persue you further for this position. We are going with someone who has more experience."

Why string me along?!?!

Continued from pervious Rant.

The Drone sends out a signal to the Headquarters. A "Rare Entity Found" alert shows up on the screen. "Quick, load the map", says the General. Map shows the current location of the Drone. "Dispatch the Team", signals the General while his forehead show signs of tension.

Further down the room, a man quickly types on his phone and hides it.

Far from all this, in a quite city where the street lights have faded away. Old buildings which look like they are about to fall and crumble. The sound of wind can be heard for miles as there is silence all around. A light from one of building's room is turned on and quickly turned off. A man, checks his phone in sleep. Awakens and pours a glass of water to drink. Quenching his thirst, he opens his laptop. Laptop's light is the only light illuminating his room. He again gives a second look at his phone. The message is still there.
"It has been found"

if a recruiter calls me one more time about an "exciting opportunity" 500 miles away, I'm gonna punch a baby in the face.

I left for lunch early to drive five miles away to an abandoned parking lot so that I could cry about an email I received... this week has been fantastic.

So, the uni hires a new CS lecturer. He is teaching 230, the second CS class in the CS major. Two weeks into the semester, he walks in and proceeds to do his usual fumbling around on the computer (with the projector on).

Then, he goes to his Google Drive, which is empty mostly, and tells us that he accidentally wrote a program that erased his entire hard drive and his internet storage drives (Google, box, etc.)...

I mean, way to build credibility, guy... Then he tells us that he has a backup of everything 500 miles away, where he moved from. He also says that he only knows C (we only had formally learned Java so far), but hasn't actually coded (correction: typed!) in 20+ years, because he had someone do that for him and he has been learning Java over the past two weeks.

The rest of the semester followed as expected: he never had any lecture material and would ramble for an hour. Every class, he would pull up a new .java file and type code that rarely ran and he had no debugging skills. We would spend 15 minutes trying to help him with syntax issues—namely (), ;— to get his program running and then there would be a logic issue, in data structures.

He knew nothing of our sequence and what we knew up until this point and would lecture about how we will be terrible programmers because we did not do something the way he wanted—though he failed to give us expectations or spend the five minutes to teach us basic things (run-time complexity, binary, pseudocode etc). His assignments were not related to the material and if they were, they were a couple of weeks off. Also, he never knew which class we were and would ask if we were 230 or 330 at the end of a lecture...

I learned relatively nothing from him (though I ended up with a B+) but thankful to be taking advanced data structures from someone who knows their stuff. He was awful. It was strange. Also, why did the uni not tell him what he needed to be teaching?

End rant.

Can you be here Monday?

- It was Thursday
- I lived 650 miles away, and had to move
- I did it anyway

I only went and left my god damn bag on the train with my work laptop in it (2016 Macbook Pro, started this job 2months ago...). Now I have to get up at 5 fucking 30 am to make a 5 hour round trip to collect it while making up a BS excuse to WFH, or more accurately - work from some cafe in a random city 200 miles away. FML

The reporting department had a freak out because they couldn’t print to PDFs. Whole reporting nightmare and on fire.
Turns out it was printer unplugged a thousand miles away where someone fifteen years ago put a check in to ensure that a specific printer was connected before allowing physical print jobs.

*packing for a school-hosted graduation celebration with friends*
let's see, first rule of packing for a trip, count on every slim chance happening...

List of things now in backpack:
3 changes of clothes (1-night trip for an all night party in <100-MILE-AWAY MAJOR CITY>)
Laptop
3DS
3x 4-port USB Hubs
10-port power strip (not fully in bag, but mostly so.)
Extra pair of shoes
3.5" external floppy drive
First aid kit
SAK
precision driver set
soldering set
multitool
pliers (1x farmer's, 1x bent needlenose)
multimeter
empty laptop HDD (250GB)
magnet in Altoids tin (can't have it trashing the HDD!)
VGA to RGB (Composite ends) adapter
Composite/S-VIDEO USB capture card
Portable USB chargers (1x 30k mAh 2-port, 1x superslim 3k mAh 1-port)
Enough phone chargers to replace all chargers within 30 miles
Smelling salts
2x 16GB thumbdrives
Boot disc set
$200
School IDs (for bag's ID slot)
3 pairs of decent earbuds (no el cheapo $1 ones because they break trying to get them out of the package)
Serial to USB adapter
Rehydration salts
Magnesium fire striker
Plenty of pens and pencils
Emergency radio locator beacon
Emergency cellular locator beacon
SD/eMMC/CF/TF/MCP(D) USB reader
external HDD reader (2.5" IDE/3.5" IDE/SATA, external power)

am i missing anything?

my day went to shit immediately... long night, got to sleep at 4AM, poked awake at 8AM, "hey wake up we gotta go to a town 200 miles away, dress like you're rich, we gotta go find a place to live for my new job" ugh, fine, got another 30 minutes or so of sleep in the car. We get there, the guy shows us a place that I physically can't fully stand up in and is like 600-some square feet for $750/month. Fuck that. We get halfway back home, "hey i forgot, we just finished renovating a new unit, come look!" goddammit gotta go BACK to the city... get there, it's a 2-floor 1200 square foot place for $675, a hell of a lot better. We leave to go see relatives in town, get a call, "hey hurry home your grandfather's hallucinating" we get there before an ambulance (we traveled 120 miles in less time than an ambulance took to drive 50 miles...) and my grandfather's hauled (by us, as the ambulance refuses to take him to the right hospital, they want to take him OUT OF STATE in an ambulance and he's not actively dying) to the VA in the city we were just in... he's immediately screened and his dementia has progressed to the point he needs to be in a nursing home in 12 hours somehow. I have no idea either. Anyways, we're about 3/4 of the way back home and it's now 2:40AM. My dad's been driving for 18 hours pretty much straight. I'm still awake, he's wired (the worst possible state to be in while driving) and family drama has happened as family members are already trying to take the land my grandpa lived on AND HE'S LITERALLY ONLY BEEN GONE FOR 6 HOURS.

so how was your day?

I like model railways. I also like embedded electronics.

I therefore enjoy combining the two in my free time quite a bit - putting arm processors on trains and getting them to do cool stuff. I'm also happy to dish out electronics advice to other model railway guys, a lot of whom are older and have literally no clue (but will create stunningly realistic scenes that are a million miles away from my lowly efforts.)

But bloody hell - is it hard to do so without being drowned out by incompetent sods who think they know it all because... reasons. I think I may just stop attempting to help beyond this point. This is the latest nugget I've had to contend against - I guess he's heard about skin effect, but since DCC works at around 8Khz and using anything more than 1.5mm core cable is ridiculous for a model railway, even that is complete baloney.

Other electrical nuggets I've heard from this group include "only washing machines run on AC, everything else is DC", "the colour of the wire matters otherwise it could short circuit", and "driving your old trains with a DCC signal will make them run better, because it's more modern". 😬

One word rants really .. just piss me off ... like omg ... you can't take the time out to actually have an opinion !

Eclipse ... no that not a rant it's a hateful pies of sh1t which supplies you a default view of code which makes you feel like you are a pirate looking though a portal to an island 10 miles away ..

Soap ... that just the annoying mechanism you will use and and swear at and every time you use it it's different ...

Sql ... that's just something you should learn ... learn it .. it's useful ..

n-

N A N I ? ? ? ? ?

my dad just upgraded our phone plan from like 100 miles away out of nowhere.

turns out with some weird discount it's only $20 more for unlimited than our old holdover-from-2012 plan of "8GB pool for all lines, but the last 4GB is 3G speeds"

shit

time to start theorycrafting a way to get around the "one device streaming at a time" limit

Hi FuLlStAcKcLoWn,

I fOuNd A fEw ErRoRs On YoUr SiTe.

MaY i SeNd OvEr SoMe Of ThOsE eRrOrS aNd AuDiT rEpOrT wItH pRiCeS?

i’m LoOkInG fOrWaRd To YoUr RePlY

bEsT rEgArDs

god this is getting repetitive, how can we spam the spammers? wasn't there a site like "send your enemies glitter"? classic!

i guess this is what I get for putting my company email public

but really, what happened to gmail's spam filter? should spot ones like these from miles away

When it was "bring your children" day at my mums work she took me to London, I used to draw houses with paint on her work PC and sending them via fax to my grandma miles away. It was pretty magical to me.

LIRR system rant 2 - there is a thing called a sensor. Can you please paste them on your trains so we know on a real-time map where the train is. If it's 8 miles away when supposedly 'on time' we don't have to freeze on the platform. It's 2016 not 2007.

Today a company we work together to provide a service for a government sent us an update about the installation of the successor of the most hideous Data storage I had ever worked with. The successor comes from the same company and provided the previous one. Anyways, went like this:

"Even after a full day of installing/migrating the software, we could not complete the task.

The installation failed multiple times due to errors from the installer, as well as missing, undocumented dependencies.

According to our developers the installation process is miles away from a normal installation process for this day and age. Our developers often have to research errors on their own or ask the provider for assistance.

We cannot estimate when we will be able to complete the installation."

I've felt pain and sadness while reading that...

Parking here fucking sucks.

I just made a url shortcut for finding parking, it redirects to the site of a parking lot 15 miles away, because if you get here after 8am, there is no parking. If you want me to work, then give me a place to park my car. Spend some of that executive bonus on building a new parking garage you dog rocket sucking suits.

I think my next remote job is going to be at least 500 miles or a minimum of four states away to make it harder for someone to spring a “everyone local to the office has to come in for this day of corporate training and indoctrination” on me at the last minute.

“Oh sure I can come in. I’ll be on the lookout for my flight tickets and itinerary”.

Usually makes them scurry off.

I love when recruiters ring me up telling me all about the fantastic opportunity they have for a junior php Dev role a hundred miles away, offering 13k a year. These guys obviously don't read cv's

Why is it so fucking difficult for mobile OSs (Android/iOS) to revert to mobile data when the WiFi is clearly not working? It’s so annoying when my phone connects to some AP 10 fucking nautical miles away and tries desperately to get a connection to the internet when I have a data plan that works just fine. The solution would be so fucking simple: before the phone switches to WiFi connection it should simply probe the internet. Login required? Ask me if I want to proceed before showing me the fucking login portal. No response at all? Then don’t even bother going any further with it.

Sooooo our department boss (the CTO) just announced his resignation, handing over his responsibilities to the lapdog of the CEO (who is very fickle on process micromanagement). Seeing as our offshore team was the CTO's idea, we're kinda expecting retrenchment to hit us in a few months once said lapdog starts throwing out our (soon-to-be-former) CTO's initiatives and projects for her own...

Quite frankly, I wish we'd get redundated now instead of later. I'm starting to hate my job (an increase from before, when I simply began to dislike it) because of my team lead's incompetence (she can't even attend a meeting without hijacking it for some other unrelated topic/issue) and lack of transparency (she never shares everything, keeps a lot of critical knowledge to herself). You can smell her lack of trust from miles away.

Anyways, yeah, I'd like to get retrenched/redundated please. I could use the money, honestly.

Windows users be like "Oh, it's fine. Our tent comfortably fits all my family and it's cold there for only half a year, but not too cold, just wear a coat while you're inside and you'll be fine. Clean water is only two miles away, walking is healthy after all. Yes, agents come every week and rape my wife but it only happens to newbs and honestly I respect that ritual, this is how life works. You only have to send three papers to them to ask them please not to rape us this week and they don't come for a whole week! I ain't stupid, I always carry my gun with me to shoot thugs"

Living with MacOS is just living. You pay the fee and they let you in.

Living with Linux can be just living too, but it can be much more, your skill and willingness to learn are always rewarded. I've been there, I used Arch.

But living with windows is always survival.

Please take me to a place where the computers feel so close and people seem so far.

On today's episode of... The shit people will try to pull off to get you work longer hours.

Guilt tripping.

I mean, seriously? That one can be smelled from miles away and it is obviously a clear red flag that you're a manipulative person.

Why would you even try it? Have some respect for yourself.

Fucking windows updates...

Went to do a job on a tank in 18 deg F Weather with snow on the ground. One guy brought an ice fishing tent (very nice). This is next to petroleum tank. We got guys on top of tank waiting for me to get data using a Windows 10 lappy.

Lappy comes up and tries to get into bios to do a firmware update. WTF! I reboot and it does it again! Go to look for power adapter as it wont do update without power. Not in bag. It has to have power to do update.

So I drive back to shop (with guys waiting on top of tank) which is 5 miles away. I am pissed. Its snowing and I have to drive slow. I find that adapter. I get back to the tank and plug it in. The AC source (battery based) starts alarming as the lappy takes too much power. Fuck! But somehow it boots Windows without doing firmware update. Fuck you Windows!

I get my job done, but don't fucking trust windows at all. Had this been a field tech he would be pissing his pants. Useless shitty software you have zero control over. Now considering changing their OS to Linux for field work. I am rewriting their software anyway with something can run Windows or Linux.

Got an email at work today that says that we will no longer be able to join the audio portion of our WebEx meetings, but will have to dial in on our phones. I can participate interactively in a conference over 1000 miles away, but I can't do that in the same building? Are we using 10base T? Or because they put every freaking thing on virtual servers? Yikes!

I am sitting here fixing some asshole's fuck up (he went and fucked around with the certificates on the Sonic Wall - now DPI SSL doesn't work anymore and people are wondering why things aren't working as they used to).

I have been offered an opportunity to work in a place that is about 1000 miles from where I currently work. The pay is a bit better, and I get benefits (like health, pension, etc - where here I don't get shit).

The issue is that my family and what not are this side. They are begging me not to leave. They don't know that I have been considered for the job.

Not going to lie, the last time I moved away, I nearly died because I have a family to support, and I was porting all my funds back to them (yeah - the one who cheated).

I am anxious as fuck, and today I have an interview.

I don't know if going is the right thing to do. There is so much opportunity, and I might stuggle for about a year - but is the struggle worth it.

I cannot take it where I am now. They appointed a new guy, and he is monumentally fucking everything up. He also doesn't shut up. Even if you ignore him, or tell him that you are busy - he just goes on and on talking. Fuck my life.

Anyways, will see how things go - I don't know what is right - perhaps it will come to me.

I'll let you guys know what happens, not that anyone might directly care - which is fine.

Time to go fix CA, and then code until I die.

Is it normal for US based companies to lowball EU based remote senior hires that much?

Just had this weird experience:

Applied to a US based company as a remote senior android dev.

Told them my rate was 55usd/hour.

Their internal recruiter who is based in Poland told me that their budget is max 45 usd/hour max for a senior role.

I was like ok maybe its worth a shot.

Passed the initial interview, did the technical interview, seemed like I did really great.

Today I receive an offer from that recruiter of 30 usd/hour. Feedback was that Im senior in some areas but in most of them Im a "really strong mid level" so they cant offer senior rate for me. Right now Im thinking of how to respond to that.

What is this? Seniors are expected to know everything 100 percent? Every senior I worked with usually specializes in 2-3 areas and looks up others as he goes. I guess shes trying to lowball me or something.

To be honest this is hilarious for me. If I wanted I could land a contracting gig with same 30usd/hour in my city 5 miles away from my home (Im based in Latvia, capital city Riga). But this is US based company so what the heck? Am I being gaslighted? Or is this rate the new normal?

Maybe Im being delusional here, should I manage my expectations or something?

Can you share your experiences with negotiating hourly rates as a senior dev and what rates you guys charge for EU/US B2B contracts?

Wanted to delete cache for a project. By mistake I deleted cache and vital settings.

The good news is that I make weekly backups, the bad news is that my latest backup is 4500 miles away from here 😓

Searching for a solution to an issue related to FFMPEG and all the Stackoverflow related questions have 1 or 2 answers that are completely miles away from solving the issue. Superuser, not helping also.

I am going back to the farm for sure.

Spent two days setting up software remotely through windows rdp through teamviewer several hundred miles away. Today found a malware replacing some exe causing web app to fail. Local partner seems to be blaming us.