New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!

I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.

P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!

Boss: "Could you join the new DevOps team for a week or two, for some coaching?"

Me: "I'd rather watch you masturbate furiously in a corner of the office while you cry over your ex boyfriend"

Boss: "Yeah... that's why I ask you. You are the only one brave enough to watch"

Me: *Sigh* "But I don't know shit about what DevOps does, I'm a DBA. I've told you the difference a million times. Can't we just douse it in gasoline and set it on fire?"

Boss: "What?"

Me: "Not the team, the servers..."

Boss, imitating Gimli: "And my ex!"

Me: "I get why he left you"

Boss: "It's funny, he was actually better with computers than me, maybe even better than you. He hated me for starting this company, told me I was just chasing money instead of ideals. He just isn't grown up enough to see that there is more to the world than computer games, brewing beer, maker festivals and gay bars, that you need to take responsibility... Maybe it just never works out between managers and geeks..."

Me: "Indeed. The difference in competence is too large"

Boss: "Ugh. You are like straight version of him... but will you at least take a look?"

Me: "Fine, unzip your pants..."

Boss: "No, not that... you need to teach DevOps this docking thing, with the parallel stuff, and the horizontal growth"

Me: "Damn I really hope we're talking about servers now... Do you mean Docker?"

Boss: "That's it. They want to learn how to dock on the Windows servers. They reserved two 4xlarge on AWS. Is that enough for docking?"

Me: ...

Me: ...

Me: "You know what. I'm going back to hug my DB designs, and wash my brain with some queries. Then I'll return here to burn everything to the ground. There is no hope for you left"

Boss: "That's what he said"

Me: "You're using that meme wrong"

Boss: "OK. So what if you just stay on DB management, and I'll just give you the budget to recruit a new DevOps lead and pay for training?"

Me: "That would work"

Boss: "Why are you grinning?"

Me: "Because I have your ex's phone number"

I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

so i just got fired 🔥 🔥 🔥 because i wanted a 200 fucking dollars raise after 1 year of work and sacrifices and feeling like shit.
200$ because i live in the 3rd fucking world, working with a stupid motherfucking boss (you know the fat old tone deaf cunt), he's american, and he brings projects from the US from clients paying thousands of dollars, and he pays us 300$, and by the fucking way he used to pay us 100$ (we are 3 developers, a dick who does nothing but report our behavior, and a shit who does shit. we are a development company and we are the only developers and we got fired because he thought we didn't deserve the raise and that he sees no reason in giving us more money because we're already wasting the company's money and time).
So now the only people left there are the dick, the shit and the fatass boss who's in the states rn.
the funny thing is after we left by an hour or so we got calls from many other companies that we refused to work with because of our loyal-fucking-ty.
the motherfucker thinks we're conspiring against him, that we don't trust him, well of fucking course we don't, he lies about having a company in the US, well it's there but it's suspended (we looked it up), he says he's a microsoft, intel, adobe, dell, lenovo partner, and he's not.
well fuck i'm kind of happy that i left, i'm sitting with my friends in a cafe right now thinking about finishing our personal projects.
forgot something: the projects we were working on are unfinished, and there's not a single fucker to finish them, so he's ball deep in shit. hope this rant is relatable

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

Manager: Does anybody having any money saving ideas?

Dev: By switching our supplier from X to Y we could save $10,000/year and they have much better customer service.

Manager: So? I’m looking more for savings opportunities in the +$100k range. That’s a small idea, I’m looking for *BIG* ideas.

Dev: Do you have any big ideas?

Manager: No, but I really really want to save big money like that. I thought you would have something worthwhile.

Dev: $10,000 still a lot of money

Manager: I guess…. Ok we can do it. But don’t bother me with peanuts like this again.

Dev: ??? You asked me buddy

A lot of the people are complaining about working in inhumane conditions. I want to debunk some bullshit that I think is causing this.

Devs are hard to find. That makes you valuable. A good dev that actually works for 30-40 hours per week is extremely hard to find.
The relationship with your employer / client should be simple: you work, they pay. What you do NOT:
1. Do not take responsibility for other people's decisions
2. Do not internalize other people's problems (you've got your own, better stick to them)
3. Do not let ANYONE guilt trip you into anything that you're not indeed guilty of.
4. Do NOT work for an effective rate that's significantly lower than you know you can get elsewhere.

There are indeed some utterly evil assholes out there that will try to manipulate you, into thinking that you're "part of the project", or that "you're all a team". Yeah, you are, but when it comes to making money, you'll only get the salary, regardless of how successful your work will be. THEY have a motivation to stay up late, to work extra hours, etc. You DO NOT. If you do that, and don't get paid extra, you're working for free, which means that you're not a professional.

Are you a professional? Then have respect for yourself, and bill for every fucking second of your time. Don't let the assholes think they own you.

As a professional, you MUST do EXACTLY what you're paid to do. No more, no less. Well, if you're feeling good about it, then you can do slightly more. And anyone that's demanding more, basically has no respect for you, and doesn't consider you a professional. That is the plain truth. See it as it is, and handle those scumbags accordingly.

Dear websites,

Please stop fucking asking me to install your shitty mobile apps. They do the same thing your site does. I have a browser, and it's a lot better. I don't even visit you every day. But even if I did, and I wanted your crappy app, I'd open the app store and download it by myself. No need to push me.

No need to waste the little screen estate I have with crappy call-to-action sections to download that shit.

Fuck your desire for more information about me. Fuck your narcissistic enjoyment when I have your icon on my fucking home screen.

The truth is, there is a very small number of apps that really need to integrate with a phone to offer better experience.

I feel most of you feel you need to have an app just because everyone else does. And so you could show these little Android and Apple logos on your website or ads. Well, how about you just make sure your site works well on a mobile screen and don't waste your money on a half-baked mobile shit app unless it really offers something worthwhile?

And if you do have a good app and it really does something, ask me just once and fucking respect my choice. Don't just ask me again and again, on every page, with every new session, or I'll just stop visiting.

You're all not that unique, so fuck you!

So because of the sheer number of interviews I’ve been doing I’m starting to get a bit brazen with them since I’ve started to really not give a fuck about most of them and I’ve started to notice patterns in common lines of questioning resulting in this unexpected gem today:

Interviewer: So we always start our devs off on the bottom end of our salary band.

Dev: Either give me the top or I’m not interested.

Interviewer: 😡. But if we start you at the top of the salary band we’ll have nothing to give you later. 🥺.

Dev: No need, I’ll take the money up front. Companies don’t give raises these days anyway, it’s just a carrot to dangle in front of the naive.

Interviewer: 😡. Well if all you care about is money so focussed on money you’ll just leave if a better offer comes around!

Dev: All the more reason to give me the highest number possible to defend against that possibility.

Interviewer: 😡. But there are other devs on the team with similar experience that will be making less than you.

Dev: Sounds like they fell for the negging and guilt tripping you are currently attempting on me in order to save a buck. Salary is not based on your skills or experience anymore, it’s based on your ability to negotiate. Here’s mine.

Interviewer: ………………. I’ll pass you along to the hiring manager.

Dev: ???? wtf

HOW THE FUCK DID THAT ACTUALLY WORK ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME I WAS TRYING TO GET THEM TO HANG UP FOR SHITS AND GIGGLES AND NOW I’M LOOKING AT A 20K RAISE ALL BECAUSE I CONTINUALLY TOLD THEM TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES??? THIS IS ACTUALLY WHAT IT TAKES TO BE TREATED PROPERLY BY A COMPANY???

I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.

One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.

Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.

I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.

I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.

He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.

Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.

So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.

He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.

Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?

Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.

Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)

Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.

Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.

After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.

Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.

Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.

I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.

Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.

Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.

Anyway.

Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.

This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.

Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.

It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.

It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

Tldr : In my country, there is always a middleman .It is so rare to work for end client directly and it is very common to be fuck over by them, because they want milk you out as much as possible

Job description : Salary range from X to Y

Me : I expect 90% of Y $
HR : if you pass technical examination we can agree on this amount.

*Technical interview*
All correct answers, perfect match with stack etc.

HR calling next day:
HR: Great job on interview, but you need to lower your financial expectation to X (around 50% of Y)
Me: Why? We have spoken the other day and you said there would be no problem with the money. I nailed the interview, I don't understand why I should agree to lower wage.
HR: I know I know, but right now we cannot give more. Maybe later
Me: I am sorry, but I feel kinda cheated. For me this is red flag since I don't know what I can expect later if you are not sincere from the beginning. I won't take your offer, goodbye.

I usually don't work for indian clients. But when I do, they make sure I don't get paid.

Some highlights from my last project,

Client: Do you know ERPnext?

Me: No, but I am good at python.

Client: My boss wants me to find a guy who can create barcode generator for erpnext.

Me: I can use pyBarcode to do it.
This is exciting I thought. I get to learn a new framework. Start working on it. Not an hour passes by,

Client: hey can you remove this menu item?
Me: Which one?
Client: Also can you add the dashboard icons to left sidebar? Like Odoo? Do you know it? It is also python based.
Me: Then why don't you just use Odoo instead?
Client: My boss wants it. He doesn't understand computers. He is pissing mr off.
Me: Then how come he suggested erpnext?
Client: His friend told him.
*experience mindfuck*

For the next 3 days he has me working on these UI tweaks, never mentions barcode again.

But I finish the barcode stuff. Tripple check everything to make sure they work. Tell him to check so I can get paid. Guy asks his boss to check.

Boss > Client: It doesn't work
Me: What doesn't work?
Boss > Client: Everything!
Client: I actually tested everything and they work. My boss doesn't know how to use it. He is very old.

Makes me make more changes and finally when I ask for the work done so far,
Client: Boss didn't come to office today. I'll get you paid. Please try to understand my situation.

Me thinking, "mofo your boss didn't hire me,l. You did". But I keep calm and tell him I won't work until I get paid 50%.

3 days passed. No reply. Set his skype status to "Away" forever.

*spidey sense tells me I'm not getting paid, again*

U am beyond pissed and burnt out. I fucking wish there was a mafia I can request to collect my fucking money from them.

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

The state of CS is a joke and I'm contributing to it.

I'm a final year CS student and like most students, I'm not exactly overflowing with money so any income helps. Now, it's not that uncommon for students to buy their projects but I swear a good 20% of people from my course don't know how to write a function. And let me remind you, they are in their final year, about to graduate, about to get their bachelor's degree in computer science and they don't know how to write a function, let alone a class, let alone piece together something that works.

I just want to say that no, I'm not proud of myself for doing other people's projects for money and letting such imbeciles pass. I'm fucking tired of sending over someone's project, them asking me to change something and me telling them to add an if statement to which they reply with "i don't know how, pls do it".

This is why having a degree doesn't mean shit anymore and yes, I'm aware that higher education has become more available over time.

Appreciation post.

Fucking love Amazon even more now.

Story -
I created a new Aws account and they asked me to pay ₹2 (0.031$) as part of the verification process.

No big deal right?

2 days later, I got a notification saying - "Your account has been credited with ₹2.66"

Not only they returned me my money, but they also paid a certain interest with it too.

And the fact that they are taking care of their dev community (as if we are their customers) is appreciable.

Amazon - you bloody have my respect. I trust you.

No big deal

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

I'm not really one for news, but apparently (a while ago) there was some 12 year old who taught himself to code and made his own apps and whatnot. Girlfriend informed me of this.

Just got told that I'm a useless piece of shit because Im 23 and don't develop apps and I'm not rich like this kid. Fuck man. I develop mostly server side software, and I personally fucking wrote half the shit the company uses. No one really knows, so naturally in the silent developer. Don't much care about that. But fuck, being told I'm useless because a 12 year old has more money than me really made me take one straight to the balls. Now I'm sitting here, moping, downloading android studio, and just going to prove a person wrong. I can fucking code an app, it's not that hard.

Should have just said fuck off, but I don't have the strength and effort to face flying cups anymore.

Android sdk, here I come.

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.

===rant

So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.

When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.

With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.

After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.

The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.

I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.

After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.

Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.

I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.

I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.

And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.

On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).

So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.

So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.

During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.

The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.

I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.

I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.

Bring it on.

"You claim you are a developer and don't know what firebase is? Pfft"

Words uttered by one of my classmates flexing on some 4th semester college inmates. I don't know what's more annoying his squeaky voice, the pretentiousness of using headphones as a necklace during class or that I was just like him when I was a freshman (minus the low hanging fruit flexing).

God fucking damn, I'm not even mad at his obnoxious pampered kid semblance, it's the irony of this enlightened fago falling into the god forsaken rat race. Why?

Because he hasn't been magnanimously disappointed by one of the most corrupt systems I've ever been witness of, yeah keep talking about firebase to the teacher who just nods pretending she knows what you are talking about.

I've had this same teacher before and your nice asynchronous ES6 express nosql solution will come last compared to all the WordPress templates she'll approve because they are pretty and all the time you invested, yeah, right into the crapper, seriously it would've been more satisfying to just masturbate everyday until Christmas break. I'm not pissed at him, annoyed by his semblance maybe, but I actually pitty him because the system will take a big shit on his face and he's just smiling.

Damn it, all these careers ruined by lazy ass professors who think leaving a shitload of diagrams as homework counts as teaching. And before any quirky brother interjects with "oh maybe your University is shit", "muh University verry gut u suk", you shut the fuck up! I know my university sucks even tho is "one of the best ones" by the corrupt media's standards, I'm here to vent about issues, real fucking issues happening in real corrupt systems, I'm taking about professors sexually abusing students, not going to classes, no centralized teaching systems, fucking chaos.

I'm happy for you if you feel good about the piece of paper you hang on your wall that certifies you as Bobby the guy who not only learned a shit load about computers, he also bent his ass so far for us and payed us so much money for it, it's funny he thinks himself as smart.

I know, I know, you went to an ivy league college, have a wonderful job and owe some money, good for you, some are not so lucky and I'll make sure those lazy asses who take advantage of the system lose their jobs.

I'm so sick of this shit we call "moodern educashion"

I fucking hate toxic positivity. Every fucking corporation pushes the notion that "lifE iS aWeSomE, wE cArE abOuT pEoPle" and other such bullshit, and when you point it out, they call you a bad, toxic person.

No, you don't care about your community, let alone the whole world. You're just trying to make people believe that spyware, wage slavery and being fired by a neural network is the norm. You're making money off of those who don't have a choice.

If you account all people, not just American white rich 1%, it turns out that for the vast majority of people life is either an uphill battle or straight up nightmare. People are working in shifts and have no time or emotional resource to spend on themselves. Most of the people can't afford a house or a flat. Even those who can still suffer from mental illnesses, to the point where there are more mentally challenged people than mentally healthy ones. The word "neurotypical" meaning "mentally healthy" is wrong.

You want nothing but to sell your stuff and earn more money off of Chinese and Indian factory workers who work 16-hour shifts. Maybe your life is great, but aggressively pushing this notion is a big, wet spit in the face of humanity.

Fuck you. Fuck your space rockets. Fuck your twitter accounts. Fuck your institutionalized exploitation of the weak. Fuck your products. Fuck your "open source". Fuck your "GDPR compliance". Fuck your offshores, your hedge funds and your tax evasion. Fuck your bailouts. Fuck your ships spilling tons of crude oil, fuck your factories, fuck your slave labor, fuck your anti-suicide nets in Chinese dormitories.

One day, because of you, our planet will become unlivable. You will hop into your fancy space rocket to go to that top-1% elite Mars colony. Nice job.

But I will pray for a solar flare to hit you and turn you and your fucking rocket into radioactive ash.

(I wrote most of this as a comment in reply about Microsoft buying GitHub on another rant but decided to move it here because it is rant worthy. Also, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee nor do I have any Microsoft stock).

Microsoft buying GitHub makes sense. They contribute more to the open source community on GitHub than any other company. (Side note, they also contribute/have contributed to the Linux Kernel).

Steve Ballmer isn't running the show anymore. Because of that, we have awesome things like:

* Visual Studio Code - Completely free and powerful light weight IDE for coding in just about any script or language. This IDE is also open source, hosted on GitHub. It can be installed on Win/Mac/Linux.

* Visual Studio Community Edition: fully featured flagship IDE free for solo developers and students, can be installed on Win/Mac.

* Fully featured Sql Server running in a Docker container.

* .Net Core, which can be compiled to native binaries of Windows, MacOS AND Linux. You can't even do that with Java, you have to first have the JVM installed in order to run any kind of Java code on any of those operating systems. .Net Core is also an absolutely beautiful framework with so many features at your disposal.

...and more.

Yes, they've done bonehead things in the past but who/which company hasn't. Yes, they have Cortana. Yes, they force Bing on you when searching with Cortana (does anyone actually regularly use Cortana? Or Bing?). Yes, their operating system costs money. Yes, their malware-style Upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics were evil and they admitted such. Yes, they brought ads and other unfortunate things to Skype. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that Skype bit translating over into GitHub. BUT, the fact that so many of their employees use GitHub daily means they are dogfooding the platform, which is a positive thing.

Despite the flaws, from the perspective of a software engineer they really should be given a lot of credit for all these new directions they are moving in now. They directly aim to help and contribute to the developer community. Plus, Windows 10 is finally getting a dark theme! haha.

I think Microsoft buying GitHub makes a lot of sense. Of course do what you want about it, feel how you want about it, but casting the same ol' shade at them for anything they do seems a bit like automatic reflex more than anything else.

I'm bracing myself for the impending wave of angry hornets from the nest I just kicked. In all seriousness though, I welcome discussion on the topic even if you feel differently than I do. I'm not saying there's no reason to dislike them, just saying there are lots of new reasons to hate them less and/or appreciate what they are doing now.

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

My Girlfriend broke with me today.

We was in this relationship from two years now. we was doing very good, our relationship was not toxic, no fights, no bad words, zero problems.

One month ago she goes to travel with her evangelical aunt to the beach. Her aunt have lot of money she gets from scamming all that believers. I was happy for my ex-gf because here in out city she was having lot of problems of health, mainly because she was not very mind stable and that degraded her health.

When she goes, her physical and mental health improve a lot. i was happy she is stable now. Her aunt have some Church around the city they go, aunt started to bring her very often to the church. She started to strongly reinforce they God beliefs.

Of course im atheist, she know that from very long time ago. But of course when she started to be more devoted, feels dont fit with me. I refuse to change my mindset about that topic.

Today she says we must broke because im not a believer. This was the most painful experience in my life. I fall in cry for three hours. I truly love her. I recently wakeup and decide to write this rant. I dont have too much friends to talk apart from her. So i wish to share this here.

Im unemployed, she was my only support all this job hunting times. Now she was gone and im alone, this hurts a lot.

Im trying to dont fall deep af, to non return path.

Fuck religion. and her fanatic aunt.

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

Story of every failing tech startup (from personal experience, but a bit exaggerated):

Step 1: Come up with AMAZING idea that blows your mind!

Step 2: Run to investors to do presentation, continue to constantly repeat CLOUD, CLOUD, AI, CLOUD, MACHINE-LEARNING, MUCH WOW, MORE AI until investors are confused but mesmerized as fuck and decide to give you a shit ton of money.

Step 3: Hire all the developers you can find, a JAVA dev, a Python dev, a PHP dev, a Ruby dev, and ask them to get along with each other! I mean hey, they're adults right, they'll figure it out.

Step 4: Ask devs to launch the app, meanwhile, throw a LAUCH PARTY! HELLS YEA WE'RE ABOUT TO BE RICH BITCHES!

Step 5: Find out the hard way that no one needs a product that was launched! :/

Step 6: Pivot, and pivot next month again, and pivot again, and pivot in a middle of a pivot, and pivot pivot pivot pivot... and OH FUCK WE RAN OUT OF MONEY!

I worked at a startup. They wanted to "save" money. So they hired a relative of "Fred" named "Bubba". Bubba made a custom website. Like hand built gifs and who knows how hand crafted html. It was fine for a time. Then somebody was wondering why nobody was calling us at the company. No customers. Another relative named "George" (who was actually a business major) looked at the website. It had been hacked and replaced with Jedis fighting Sith Lords. Me and another engineer named "Zeus" said "fuck this shit" and said "we are redoing this shit".

So I logged into godaddy (I know, shitty) and installed Wordpress (kinda shitty). I proceeded to turn wordpress into a half decent page. Wiped out the shit that was there, reused images as it made sense. Created more images. Reduced images to 80% quality to take loading size from 10MB to <1MB. Then I also proceeded to do SEO work and get the website listed properly within about a month. Customers started calling all the time. I had a simple contact form that barely gets any shit on it due to captcha. The was 5 years ago. I left 3 years ago (still help them on weekends) and nobody has done shit with the website. They are still getting calls and it hasn't been hacked.

We don't talk to Bubba. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing. I wonder if he still does websites for his relatives. I honestly had no clue what I was doing, but my take on the approach was easier to maintain and even George and Zeus and the new manager "Ralph" can maintain it, kinda. Went from shitty static website to full on dynamic and interactive. Yeah, I know, "dynamic". But the manager was happy.

Sometimes you just do what you gotta do in addition to doing all the electrical and software engineering for a company.

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

I like memory hungry desktop applications.

I do not like sluggish desktop applications.

Allow me to explain (although, this may already be obvious to quite a few of you)

Memory usage is stigmatized quite a lot today, and for good reason. Not only is it an indication of poor optimization, but not too many years ago, memory was a much more scarce resource.

And something that started as a joke in that era is true in this era: free memory is wasted memory. You may argue, correctly, that free memory is not wasted; it is reserved for future potential tasks. However, if you have 16GB of free memory and don't have any plans to begin rendering a 3D animation anytime soon, that memory is wasted.

Linux understands this. Linux actually has three States for memory to be in: used, free, and available. Used and free memory are the usual. However, Linux automatically caches files that you use and places them in ram as "available" memory. Available memory can be used at any time by programs, simply dumping out whatever was previously occupying the memory.

And as you well know, ram is much faster than even an SSD. Programs which are memory heavy COULD (< important) be holding things in memory rather than having them sit on the HDD, waiting to be slowly retrieved. I much rather a web browser take up 4 GB of RAM than sit around waiting for it to read the caches image off my had drive.

Now, allow me to reiterate: unoptimized programs still piss me off. There's no need for that electron-based webcam image capture app to take three gigs of memory upon launch. But I love it when programs use the hardware I spent money on to run smoother.

Don't hate a program simply because it's at the top of task manager.

After two extensive talks with a potential employer (they lasted for hours), I decided to accept the offer, although the salary was ~25% lower than at my previous job. Everything else sounded fantastic and I needed that desperately since at the previous company everything was toxic for years.

These new guys wanted a senior php dev because they had none of them, except only wordpress and drupal people who were not skilled enough to take other types of projects (they called them "custom php"). I liked it and thought I'm gonna shine there and quickly earn a raise because the agency will start earning more by getting projects that they were unable to even bid for.

First day at work and I got assigned to a new Drupal project, although it was supposed to be a simple restful API for a simple iOS app. It could be done in a week or less, with no rushing at all. But it had to be Drupal. And I happened to be around to hear that there is a queue of Drupal projects waiting. After 2 days leaving the office late and having my brain melted by nonsense I was looking at, I quit the job.

No offense to Drupal people, I really do admire you, but I just could not stand it after 8 years "doing custom php". It felt too much like being downgraded. But more than that I was pissed off by the fact that I have been shamelessly lied to and tricked to accept something I clearly said that I dont want.

This happened a year ago. I now earn 2.5x more money than those guys offered and work in a very healthy environment. In the meantime, I heard that the other guys shut their company down.

1 "Even though we divide our developers in cells (actual word used), our company's hierarchy is very horizontal."

2 "Sometimes we have to stay until later to get the job done"

3 "Covid has taught us that we shouldn't think of life and work as two separate things. They're one and the same"

4 "You can rack up points in the company to cash in for things like headphones!"

5 "We use this house as an office for our meetings. It's a big house."
----
1. That tells me you have no structure
2. Probably because you have no structure and you can't plan things out right.
3. you havin' a laugh? I'm all for not being a dick and socializing with colleagues every now and then but my free time is my own.
4. I'd rather you gave me more money.
5. Offices are a bit of a scam, but if you actually use a house as an office for a company that is supposed to have a presence in 3 different countries it makes me question how good you're doing at the moment.

---
I think I'm gonna pass if they don't ghost me.

Probably the most awkward feeling call happened to me just recently.

I was to interview a guy that's like 10 years older from me with 10y more experience in mostly unrelated tech. I was prepared to have some respect for the guy, and was a bit anxious, but that changed quickly.

The first fucking thing he says, on the fucking job Interview is essentially "I've worked in tech for 20 or so years, and I don't appreciate being tested" great start .. needless to say, I tried to reformulate all my prepared Interview questions so they sound as casual as I could while still trying to get him to tell me *anything*. Most of the time I just felt like "why are we even here dude, you clearly don't care about any of this"...

About 12 or so questions later It was finally clear that none of his experience is useful, and even the exp he has sounds like past companies kept him around as a number...

I want to try a few more edge cases, hoping to find anything we could work with, when he calls me out on it and says "Well now you're testing me, I don't like being tested" at which point I pretty much gave up on the dude and let my HR colleague talk.

Then out of nowhere the guy brings up his mortgage, and how he needs money, and how no one wants to give him a job, and that if we don't want him, we should just tell him now.

Then he starts asking how many people we're interviewing, which is obviously stuff we can't answer, I just said "normal amount" to dodge the question at first, but that just made him more closed off and he just silently remarked "so you can be picky..."

That was one of the most painful interviews I had so far. Me and ny colleague pretty much instantly agreed that he's not a good culture fit for us. Probably not a fit for any company really, not with that attitude.

PS: it was a video call, though he had his camera turned off at first, so it was only me with a camera for half the call. He turned it on just about as I had enough of him.

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

I’m so sick of the programming industry. It’s no longer fun. After 26 years, I’m utterly unable to keep up with all the new BS I’m supposed to know. I’m currently unemployed and every job description I see has a kilometer-long list of dozens of languages and protocols and technologies I’m supposed to have 10 or more years with. Utter bollocks. I’m completely unemployable according to these expectations. Nobody will even consider me for hire. Do these candidates actually exist?

Sure, I could do what everyone suggests and “go back to school”. But with what money? And only to find out that the tech bros have invented 20 new things I should have been learning during my 2-4 years getting on the new stuff. Not to mention all the time I will have lost in not being employed for going to school. And then STILL not having the “10 or more years experience”.

My wife is tapping her foot wondering when we’re gonna be able to stop eating through our savings while I dither around and try to find ways to make money. I’m starting to feel like I’ll never be employed or employable again.

Just got a call from an Indian scammer. He did the whole press Win + R shabang and I did what he said but the run box didn't appear (maybe cause I'm on a mac) I tried a few more times and then had a moment of enlightenment, I have a mac so that must be why the shortcut isn't working. He then goes on a rant saying everything is fine because he is the best technician and he can fix my mac too. He threatens to hack me and get my name and hack my computer but then goes straight back to his script and asks me to open my browser. I'm asked to go to a website which he mumbles so I don't understand and ask him to spell it for me. This of course is unacceptable and he goes no just type whatever you feel like typing, immediately changing his mind to xvideos.com instead. I say I can't visit the site since I am at work and he goes straight into trying to recruit me. Promises of infinite money and all I could ever wish for. Then he says I should work for him and he would pay me to watch porn which I politely decline. The final interaction was me letting him know I need to get back to work and to tell his call center buddies to never call me. He got super mad at me for accusing him of working at a call center whilst you can hear other calls in the background. 10/10 interaction.

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

I feel like at some point it'll become more shit than it's ever been. Partially due to the fact that it seems like EVERY school is trying to get the students into computer science at this point.

NOT EVERYBODY BELONGS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE.

I feel like some kids that are being forced to do computer science will basically be like "huh there's money in this, maybe I could do this" but they're completely shit at it, when they would have been MUCH better off doing something else.

Side rant, somewhat related actually:

I had a teacher last semester that has to teach one of the computer science classes starting this year (I was not taking her computer science class, it was an unrelated class). From what I've seen, she does not seem fit to teach the class at all.

She's supposed to be teaching some simple programming (no clue what languages, I didn't bother to take the comp sci class). And she knows that I know the stuff, so she would ask me about the simplest things. Which is 100% fine...if she wasn't teaching a computer science class.

She just does not seem fit to teach a computer science class. I'm sure that the school basically just threw her in there because they needed SOMEONE.

I'm honestly kinda scared for the students in the class that might want to go further into computer science, only having taken that class and having met the requirement for a more advanced class, but then being thrown into a class where they don't know a fucking thing.

Here's a genuine rant for you. Probably the only one I've ever made and ever will..

It's a bit depressing and covers a few topics so just read it, it's important.

*deep inhale*
So, with the help of my friend and my Nana, I was getting VR set up. (Oh, what joy.)

Now, I love everything about VR. But the thing is, I've had this damned headset since may (Dell MMR) and I haven't been able to use it. The reason for that is, something always came up that I needed to buy and this became a huge deal.

But let's start from the beginning.. I'm curentally fighting depression. I have been for months. My only income is what my Nana gives me ($150/mo) and what my friend ocasinally gives me.

Anyways, the first issue was that I couldn't afford the headset. This was find, as my friend would get it for me, and I would pay them back the following month. But, then, once I got the headset that's when the real problems started. First it was that I needed bluetooth, so I bought an adapter. Then I realized my entire CPU was incompatable, so I had to get a new tower and I went ahead and got a new GPU as well. I also got a charging kit for my headset (This ended up making me owe my Nana money). Then after all of that was settled, I learned that the evauation software lied, and my computer doesn't have USB 3, so I need that too but low and behold; both of my graphics cards cover my second pcie slot. So my options are to either try and rig up something, or to buy a cpu and psu for my third AMD PC which I had forgotten about during this whole ordeal..

This was soposed to help me with my depression and stress. Now I don't even want to get out of bed.

With all that said, I might be getting on SSI soon (I'm sure some of you are familar with that, and no I don't want to talk about it) and when that happens I might just leave behind tech (well, my PC and games) and all the stress and pain it's caused me over my life so this was all for nothing.

Honestly.. I'm just done with everything. To all the new faces around here; Hello! How are ya? To everyone else; You know me. I've been around for a while, though I'm not popular because I lurked and commented with Alice. You all probably noticed that I left a while back, and it was because I was trying to get out of tech. My reason for tech was that I was searching for something. I was always looking for the next game to sate me, or fill this gap in my life. I became a programmer because it gave me control were I lacked it otherwise. I made friends online because my anxiety prevented me from doing so in the real world.

But to what end? What have I acomplished? My twenty second birthday is next month. I've no job, I move from family member to famly member because I'm so fixated on becoming someone else to make something of myself.

I have my own ideals, but it seems that I push them aside to try (and fail to) impress others.

It's time for change. Of course, I can't do anything without money, so I'll have to wait for my SSI which I will get news on in August.

I hope this message came through how I meant it to. There is so much I want to say, but I've no words to say them. And btw, the VR thing is just one of manny issue that i've delt with (but certanly the most expensive)

Alice, Zennoe (Alexis, whom is not on devrant); I'm not giving up tech entirely. don't expect to suddenly not hear from me. I'm mostly just giving up my computer and games. More casually so for now, and them more seriously once I get on SSI. I'll still message you every/other day like I have been. <3

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

Old rant about an internship I had years ago. It still annoys me to this day, so I just had to share the story.

Basically I had no job or work experience in the field, which is a common issue in the city I live in - developer jobs are hard to come by with no experience here. The municipality tried to counter this issue by offering us (unemployed people with an interest in the field) a free 9-month course, linked with an internship program, with a "high chance" of a job after the internship period.

To lure companies to agree to this deal, the municipality offered a sum of money to companies who willing to take interns. The only requirement for the company was that they had to offer a full-time position to the interns after the internship, as long as there were no serious issues (ex. skipping work, calling in sick, doing a bad job etc.).
On paper, this deal probably makes sense.

I landed an internship fairly quickly at a well-known company in the city. The first internship period went great, and I got constant positive feedback. I even got to the point where I ran out of tasks since I worked faster than expected - which I was fairly proud of at the time.

The next internship period was a weird mix between school (the course), and being at the company. We would be at the school for the whole week, expect Wednesdays where we could do the internship at the company.

When I met at work on that first Wednesday, the company told me that it made no sense for me to meet up on those days, as I was only watching some tutorial videos during that time, while they were finding bigger tasks for me - which in turn required that they got some designs for a new project. They said that due to the requirements they got from the municipality (which I knew nothing about at the time), they couldn't ask me to work from home - and they said it would "demoralize" the other developers if I just sat there on Wednesdays to watch videos. Instead, they suggested that I called in sick on Wednesdays and just watched the videos at home - which is something I would register to the workplace, so I wouldn't get in trouble with the school. It sounded logical to me, so I did that for like 5-6 Wednesdays in a row. Looking back at this period, there's a lot of red flags - but I was super optimistic and simply didn't notice.

After this period, the final 2 months of the internship period (no school). This time I had proper tasks, and was still being praised endlessly - just like the first period.
On the last day of the internship, I got called to a meeting with my teamlead and CEO. Thinking I was to sign a full-time contract, I happily went to the meeting.. Only to be told that they had found someone with more experience.
I was fairly disappointed, and told them honestly that I would have preferred if they had told me this earlier, since I had been looking forward to this day. They apologized, but said that there was nothing they could do.

When I returned for the last school period (2 weeks), the teacher asked me to join him for a small meeting with some guy from the municipality. Both seemed fairly disappointed / angry, and told me what still makes me furious whenever I think about it.
Basically after my last internship period, the company had called the municipality, telling them that I had called in sick on those Wednesdays, and was "a lazy worker", and they would refuse to hire me because of that.
I of course told them my side of the story, which they wouldn't believe (unemployed person vs. well-known company).

Even when I landed a proper job a few months later, the office had called my old internship for a reference - and they told the same story, which nearly made them decline my application. This honestly makes me feel like it's something personal.

So basically:
Municipality: Had to pay the company as the deal / contract between them was kept.
Company: Got free money and work.
Me: Got nothing except a bad reputation - and some (fairly limited) experience..

Do I regret taking the course? .. No, it was a free course and I learned a lot - and I DID get some experience. But god, I wish I had applied at a different company.

Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.. But f*ck this company :)

Tl;dr

Longest Rant I've written so far.

How to manage a school (by out school director):

Did this student do something spezial to emphasize the school?
-No: Ignore him
-Yes: Did the student achieve this with the help of this schools staff?
-No: Take all the credit
-Yes: Hahaha, just a joke, nobody receives help from the school. Goto -No

Q: Should this class get the 5 day trip, they've been waiting for the whole year?
Director: No.
Q: But they don't even participate in other trips just to go there.
D: No
(Good thing she did not have the last word there)

Does the school director need this one week trip to india, just to talk once about stuff, you can talk about via email, to a sponsor?
D: "Of course I deserve it"

D: "We need faster internet in this school"
Network admins: "But it won't be of any use, if the network can't handle it. We'll need better pcs (and network conponents) on top of that"
D: "No, bot enough money available for that one." *browses email with IPad paid by school money*

Teacher: "I want to realize project xy with the students. We'll need around 1200€ (for 20 people)."
D: "Can place xy at our school to as advertise?"
T: "No, but it's be a valuable le-"
D: "600 at most."
(Again denied by people who aren't fcking assholes. We got 1500€, so 300€ per group)

D: So what makes you think you can teach informatics in this school"
Applicant: "Well, I'm friends with one of your teacher here. We went to university together, where I learn't nothing about informatics and I don't even understand the principles of this subject"
D: "Close enough. Hired, you can teach them all the theory stuffy. You don't have to prepare that yourself another teacher has done so. Just read it from his documents."

*In class with the mentioned teacher talking about Threads*
*Le wild code appears*
while (doStuff())
System.out.println ("Thread working...");
System.out.println ("Thread terminated");
T: "... and most importantly, when you have done all the work be sure to terminate the thread with 'System.out.println ("Thread terminated");'"

Should this teacher be allowed to participate in this seminar about burnouts?
D: "No, I can't afford paying the supplenze."

Staff: "We need to talk with the director about this."
S: "Not in her office. The cafeteria maybe"
*Not in the cafeteria either*
S: "Seems like she didn't come to achool today. Let's try tomorrow"
(^ Stuff that happens almost daily. Screw semicolons. I see her only once a month at most)

*Student send 5000 emails by accident* (Shit happens 😂😅😂😅)
D: "You gonna work here for a full afternoon"
*Student arrives for his punishment*
Staff: "Good that you're here. Do this real quick."
*10 min. Later*
Student: "Done"
Staff: "Well, we have no more work to give you, so you might as well leave"

DONE!!! Good job coming so far.

Our school is supposed to be the best, but internally it's one big meme.

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

I fucking hate holidays. Every goddamn time when it's a holiday, that's when I need to go to the store and get something, only to find out that they're closed. And what for.. holidays are - to me at least - no more than an excuse for people to not go to work for the day.

So, now I ran out of booze, and can't continue developing and testing my breathalyzer until Monday.

Then it hit me.. what if I take all my Arduino equipment (laptop, jumper wires, ...) to the café and deploy my build environment on a table there?

Eh, no no no. I don't want some idiot to come up to me saying "YOU EVIL HEKORMAN!!!" and have to explain that just like when you call a banker who's working with the money vaults a thief, it's wrong to call someone that's developing shit an evil hacker.. one should strive to not throw mindless accusations out of unknowingness. Not that I'm a good example of that though. But still.

It's probably that or some stupid bitch coming up to me asking to hack her boyfriend's Phasebuk.. that said, that could probably be an opportunity to get in her pants. But then, I don't wanna insert my meat in an idiot like that... ._.

So, no booze it is then? Thanks national holidays!

"Ok Google, remind me every day before a holiday because I really couldn't care less about them!!"

Money isn't everything.

When I graduated, I chose the job I have now because of the pay and benefits. A couple years into it, and I realize now what a mistake that was. After my first year teaching myself Apex and automating most of my team's work, I hardly spend any time as a developer because of the low number of jobs at the company that allow me to do that level of work within the first five years of employment. I've consistently asked my supervisor if I could move into a more technical space with proof of my work as reasoning to no avail. If your job pays a lot but isn't challenging, you can wind up being just as upset as if you had to work 60-70 hrs/week.

Windows 10 'App Store' Stole My Money.

So I work a 40 hour work week, sometimes more, same as anyone, on my feet, all day.

I get home, buy a little $3.99 app. Won't install. Check it again won't install. I check some guides. Follow all the standard commands, my purchase won't install. Use the tools. won't install.

Naturally I sent off what I'm good at, some hate filled invective

For fucks sake. I'm exhausted, have insomnia and want to wind down. And here microsoft is killing 32bit libraries to dispose of competing services like steam (also fuck gabe in his fat asshole) but I digress.

And they expect us to use their services? Spend our hard earned *fucking money*..and spend half an hour on their dumpster fire fucking 'walled garden' with nothing to fucking show for it?

No refund button. No chat option. Just a fucking feedback hub. Look at it some time. JUST LOOK AT IT. The motherfucking *feedback* hub *frozeup* in the process of my feedback. Microsoft is a sewer of negligent business practices and incompetence.

So I've chosen now to aim two heavy ion cannons at them and warned them too. Two twitter accounts, one with almost 10k followers and another with 15k.

Should have just offered a manual download button microsoft.

My money would have been better spent on alcohol. Cheap alcohol. It's not like it's a lot of money and I don't buy a lot online, but it's the principle. You're fucking *payment* process worked *just fucking fine*.

Anyway can anyone calculate the monetary damage a cumulative quarter million views over the course of a month will do to the reputation of the windows store in dollar amounts?

I'm betting it's going to be a lot fucking more than three fucking ninety nine.

Don't worry microsoft, I'm gonna take it out of your sweet fucking hide.

Useless feature I've built?

Too many to mention. Here's #25.

Modified an existing "Are you sure..?" dialog pop-up (Yes/No buttons) to Yes/No/Cancel. Why? Managers claimed users were "accidentally" clicking 'Yes' when they should have clicked 'No' and causing all kinds of chaos, costing the company money, etc. Managers believed giving the user two chances instead of one would make it easier to avoid the problems they caused.

The meeting:
Me: "Users can click 'No', hit the 'Esc' key, or click the close 'X' button on the window, how will an extra button make it more foolproof?"
Mgr1: "It just will. Andy accidentally deleted inventory and when I asked him if an extra button would have saved them a days worth of re-counts, he said yes."
Mgr2: "Barb accidentally credited a customer $1,500. She promised me she clicked 'No', but the system credited the account anyway. An extra button would have saved us thousands of dollars!"
Me: "Um...these sound like training issues, not an extra button issue."
MyMgr: "PaperTrail, how hard is it to add an extra button?"
Dev1: "Oh yea, adding buttons is easy."
Dev2: "I can do it 5 minutes"
Dev3: "We'll save the company thousands and thousands of dollars!"
<lots of head-knodding and smiles>
MyMgr: "That settles it. PaperTrail, add the extra button!"

Users still screwed things up, but at least they couldn't blame it on not having an extra button.

My department is focused solely on web development. Of course we are part of the major portion of I.T

The entire I.T department got acknowledged for a very important piece of software. That I wrote.
The ceremony in which we were being recognized did not listed MY department, no, they listed the ENTIRETY of I.T.

Thing is, if this product was not delivered, then I was told that the blame would be MINE (I am speaking as the head of my department) but apparently if it succeeded (which it did) it is to be attributed to people that were not even involved in the project.

My employees tried calming me down when I got upset, one of them stated that it was not even our department's effort, but mine alone. And yes, I was the one that developed the solution. By myself, with complete testing, staging, the whole works. Everything, developed by me. BUT my employees held the entire department down while I was behind close doors developing this solution.
I was fucking upset, more so because my director sent an email thanking the entire I.T department for this "win"
I asked him through or messaging service if he could point out to me who else was involved, since I did not know of anyone else that did absolutely anything in this process other than myself and my guys.

Maybe the output of my program was parsed by another I.T department and something happened from it, maybe the money generated by the application (obscene amounts of it btw) were used to add more to the infrastructure etc, who knows, but as far as I know, you cannot say "if this fails it is on you" just for them to later on thank people that were not involved in the project.

This is why I would gladly move on to a different field. I don't want to be patted on the back constantly, I know how fucking good I am at what I do. But if I do something amazing I do not want to see those efforts being given to someone else.

The dev world is usually a thankless industry, but if thanks are given, then I want the sole credit.

If I am winning or loosing I want the whole fucking credit and you can be any more gangstah than that.

It happened me a few years ago. I live in the Netherlands, but I am Hungarian. My new "friends" asked me to fix their laptop. I did it for free. It turns out, it was a huge mistake. In the next half a year I've solved several issues to them and to their family members (I don't get it, how they can ruin a well working hardware and software that fast, but it is another story). It takes a lot from my free time at the end. Then I had enough and ask some money to fix the next laptop. The price wasn't high, a bit more than a half of the repair shop's price. They tried to press me to do it for free, cos "you are our friend and you are hungarian too, we have to help each other out". I said no. It is too much. I've never seen them again...

Imagine if you will, a fictional world outside our own.

In this world, the requirement for getting a drivers licenses is 4 years of research into quantum mechanics.

- Was it interesting? Yeah.

- Did I learn it because I had to? Yup.

- Will I use the harmonic oscillation calculations of a particle when driving my car. Fuck no!

- Did it cost me an ungodly amount of money? It sure did!

- Will some dumb people still say it was useful because it is the minimum (fictional) barrier to entry for driving a car. You bet your sweet ass they will!!!

It was about as useful as any made up requirement, make-work, self-funding, circle-jerking, waste or time and money to feed the pockets of people who are too scared to do actual work so they teach, can be.

I paid all that money to be taught technology that was old when my mother was in school.

In the first year out of school, with only a $300 subscription to PluralSight some uDemy courses and hard work, I learned 100X as much as everything they put in front of me in school.

-------

School has its place.

Children who don't understand the importance of learning and need their hand help.

Adult children (some of which on on their 3rd or 4th degree) who also need their hand held.

People too afraid to enter the real world.

Doctors.

-------

I would do it again because it is the minimum requirement of entry, but thats nothing more than a bullshit make-work project.

Play their game as long as you need to. Keep your own game in mind. Don't drink the koolaid, just fake a sip. Then when the time is right, play by your own rules.

Peace

Motherfucking website style JavaScript rant ahead.

Just tried to register some travel tickets, at FlixBus. Of course alternatively I could go for a train but those would be more expensive. So yeah.

Turns out that the website loads JavaScript from 20 domains including 3 required CloudFront ones (those are the most annoying because it's not possible to tell by the domain what it would be doing). But alright, I'll take it. Web 3.0 amirite?

So I go and find myself a nice bus, add it to my cart.. oh shit it's the wrong one. Change some parameters, hit return.. well guess what. Turns out that in all their JavaScript glory they couldn't implement that much. Awesome!

Go to another site to get another ticket for my travel back, only to find out that while they couldn't implement return, their webdevs are apparently skilled enough to get a giant boner on blinking "(1) Almost ready!" in the site's title, when changing to another tab and there happens to be stuff in the cart. Do you really think I care about that shit! Don't distract me and let me get my shit done!!!

So, to all you webdevs who would pull something like this and wank on it too. Guess what motherfucker. That purchase got cancelled through the power of JavaScript wank, because there's no way I'm supporting that dystopian junk. Guess what, when people shell out money at your shitty online shop, they may want a quarter-ass decent UX too. And no notifications or any of that wank, you hear me?

But yeah fucking Web 3.0!!! Give me a fucking break.

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.

I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.

There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.

There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.

Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.

I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.

I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.

I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.

And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.

I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.

I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.

My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.

On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.

I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.

I think I'm fucked

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

TL;DR: No YouTube Music! Fuck you.

Disclaimer: I could use an Adblocker but my old one always crashed and YouTubes Ads are short and not that bad - mostly just banners in the video player.

Rant: Yes google, I AM listening to music on youtube. I am your target audience for YouTube Music. But I am NOT interested.
You see, I wouldn't listen to music on YouTube if I had the spare money for Spotify, Apple Music or some other stupid overpriced service that gives the actual artists not enough of what they charge.

And giving me the same ad over and over again just annoys the fuck out of me. I DON'T WANT FUCKING YOUTUBE MUSIC. I am not interested in a free trial. I am not interested in buying it.
The most stupid thing is that Google provides a dislike and like button for ads. I pressed dislike so often yet it still comes up. GOOD QUALITY!

Why on earth is every fucking big company lost in copying every shit that others make and that has success? Where is my loved innovative Valve?! The innovative Google? They all just crave for fucking money making stuff. As if they still needed more...

My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!

That's it, I'm done. My sincere condolences go to the poor soul that will have to maintain this complete and utter crap of code, as I have been doing the past 2 weeks.

3-4 big 4K+ lines files of completely unindented, practically undocumented, interspersed HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS! All in the same file.

All the function and variable names are complete nonsense. You might as well have smashed your head against the keyboard and let whatever came out be the names.

You took all the naming conventions that you could find and unleashed your seriously damaged imagination. lowerCamelCase, UpperCamelCase, snakecase, everything in the same fucking function name.

I really needed the money from this project. But I'm done. My mental sanity is more important that try to figure out how to make a decent and usable webpage of THIS COMPLETE DISASTER.

You, the one before me. If you wanted to make sure that no one else besides you could work with this crap, then congrats, YOU FUCKING DID IT WITH HONORS. FUCKING SUMMA CUM LAUDE. PhD and all.

So today I realized that Im not happy.

When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.

I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.

After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.

However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.

At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..

Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).

Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.

Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?

The best decision I ever made was moving from a big company to a very small one.

I used to work for a large international consulting firm in the model development team. Everything moved so slowly, there were huge amounts of pointless meetings and other time-sinks, we were surrounded by people who were being paid a lot of money but added little or no value, and the general atmosphere of the company was quite depressing. We spent more time having to make PowerPoint presentations for senior management trying to explain why you can't just hire 100 devs and have a product 100 times faster than we actually did developing a product.

I took a bit of a risk and moved to become the fourth person (and second developer) at a niche software producer to take over product innovation and lead product development. Immediately I felt so much happier and realised how much the previous company had worn me down. Everyone works hard and efficiently because your individual output is so much more important to the success of the company and the work you put in comes back to you financially without being syphoned by layers of valueless management levels or time-wasters.

Having responsibility, seeing the impact of your own work and being rewarded accordingly is so important for your sense of well-being. I urge you all to try it if you're stuck in a big company that's wearing you down. And if you're considering moving from a small company to a big one: don't.

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

Had a talk with my mentor and the CTO today.
They made very clear that they'd want to keep me employed after I finished my bachelor and briefly asked about my plans.
I am happy and this kind of gave me some more peace of mind concerning job security.

Thing is though, I don't know yet what I want to do in two years from now. There are some possibilities and of course I don't know how my private life will develop.

If I stay there, I could finish my bachelor and then do a master halftime, like I do now with my bachelor - or I could stop at my bachelor and start working full-time again.
I rather want to stay there - though I strongly dislike the 9 to 5 job model, the work would be in a field I'm interested in. My colleagues are a nice bunch of people and I respect them a lot, especially the team I work with.

On the other hand, I always thought about freelancing and was researching possibilities during the last year. My skills are not so easy to translate into a freelancing job, though, if I don't want to do at least 50% software development.

Or I could get a job somewhere else which would have the charms of starting from scratch. Many new experience, much new things, wow.
Maybe also a better salary though if I'd be doing the job for the money only, I'd probably have worked elsewhere.

...

I'm usually quite relaxed about my future plans but some of these things were on my mind for some time now, also, I'm not sure whether I can "define" my future just yet.

Also, I'm overthinking it, yes.

I will have another talk in about a month.
No pressure, right?

I'm the only developer in my company. I am a "junior dev" who started working like 6 months ago. Safe to say I am not well experienced and have a lot to learn in this journey. Due to this pandemic, my bosses who have been flaunting their wealth have started making losses and now needs to find another way to get money. Mind you, the company I work with is a marketing firm.
So what the bosses thought of doing was creating a delivery service due to the current situation. It is not their field but since they still need to show people they are the rich people, they need money either way. Since I'm the only developer in the company I've to make this application. I've to make an Android and iOS app with a back-end and an admin portal all in 1 month. My pay is shit and by shit I mean less than even 700 USD. I've not done a project like this before so there would be a learning curve as well. And there is no one to guide me either.
They think just because they have hired one developer anything development related is settled and I will do everything no matter how big or complicated or how shitty my salary is.
The feature list is a whole system, like it is so complicated that someone could really make their own company just to work on that application. It's HUGE.

I'm thinking of saying no I can't do this shit. But just wanted to see what some more experienced devs say about this. I've attached the features list in the rant.

a message to code.org

- the fact that you have celebrities back your organization does not mean your content is good

- making highschoolers (>14 years old) ask yes or no questions for a week is NOT helping them 'understand' binary, ITS JUST FUCKING DEGRADING

- all of your curriculum is useless. fucking useless. you're and 'organization' dedicated to getting children into programming. SO WHY THE FUCK DO YOU GO OUT OF YOUR WAY TO MAKE EVERYTHING WE'RE TAUGHT USELESS. the app lab is js but NOT ON A WEBPAGE, it just instructions for a fucking character that you paid shit loads of money to, and not to mention slower than my commodore 64 mining a bitcoin. if I'm going to learn js, I want to make a webpage. how many fucking js recruiters are going to ask if you can make an app code.org's app lab??? fucking none. if we're going to learn how pictures are encoded, CAN WE ENCODE A FUCKING PICTURE? jpg, png, bmp, I DON'T CARE. but the fact that we have to set a delimeter and then type a 64x64 image in binary makes me want to die, but it's also USELESS.

- in the entire networking unit, they focused more on their goddamn animations over their actual EXPLANATIONS

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

Tesla lost $879M in 2020. Tesla is not profitable.

In USA, gas cars automakers are legally required to give money to EV makers, like Tesla, that has 100% EV fleet. Tesla reported making $727M in 2020. But, other automakers gave it $1.6B. Tesla lost money. They lost $879M.

Tesla manages to lose money even without competition and with all that dotations. Imagine what happens when the competition in EV arises from other automakers? Then, dotations will stop. Tesla had no competition and had dotations. They're not gonna get any dotations anymore, and they will have rising competition.

They're gonna die.

In 2020, in Europe, VW sold more ELECTRIC cars than Tesla. And then you ask why I don't buy Tesla stocks. That's why.

My life didnt go as smooth as i expected. Everything happened as expected, i knew what going to the uni requires, i knew everything...
But i didnt accounted for my mental health. Since forever i have thought that im lazy or something like that, that i can do everything i just have to do it. Oh how wrong was I. It went from my projects being frozen for a long time due to lack of motivation to neglecting important living activies. Even my health suffered a bit. Everytime i failed, even the simplest task no matter why i always felt even worse. Even the most basic tasks were unimportant for me. Even some minor tasks that i failed gave me huge guilt. Not to mention that my family wont help me with my mental health at all, (they cant see what is realy happening they always think im lazy) (but maybe they could fucking figure out that being sad liteary for years is bad). My contact with friends is limited, im always scared to go or more often scared to ask is they have time to meet because they are ALWAYS busy...
So that was my life, alone, against people who were demanding (and my mother who thought that her hard work was everything i needed, but no. Money, food and clean house isnt everything that human requires to propely function!). Now I have scheduled a meeting with the specialist, i hope the uni has better ones than the other ones i had. I hope he will help me and i will get out that life downwards spiral.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

I just got offered my first position for a Junior developer gig. they are offering me more money than I expected and otherwise I'm super amped to take it.

what makes me nervous is its my first programming position. I have an IT/Programming bachelor's but not a pure Computer Science degree.

I was asked no technical questions and I don't know if it was clear that I'm very much looking for entry-level work. I guess the fear of failure is creeping up on me.

My company has two offices in separate cities but they treat each the devs of each location very very differently.

In one office the devs get full power to experiment with whatever tech they want, they just stomp their feet and management gives em whatever they ask for, freedom of choice regarding anything they are working on, to be allowed to do greenfield work or experimental stuff

But in my office we are forced to do ONLY. Bug fixing and refactoring shitty code from over a decade a go, our tech is ancient and we are not allowed to to
Shit , anything we ask for is denied
And improvements to our process is shut down with the reasoning that whatever we got works so why meddle ??

For us , management is solely focussed on making sure we respond to support calls , deployments , configurations and little bug fixing. Basically they only care that we manage to finish for out next delivery.
No new work whatsoever!
If there is any hint of something new to to
Implemented the golden boys from the other office just stopm their feet tillmthey get it or just go off and start working on it then seek permission afterwards, with their much larger team they obviously get further than we do by the time management hears about it so they end up taking over the work since they already have more done already

My manager decided to push us to attend a company devCon to share ideas with our devs from our other location. This rapidly turned into a sour experience

Basically we do all shitty boring work which puts money on the table which goes straight to those idiots to play with...

They have the guts to laugh when we mentioned that we never get anything interesting to work on

Never seen so many of our devs looking up job sites on the bus back...
This is gonna blow up in management's face...

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

So, I'm trying to process the feelings from not getting accepted for the PhD project I applied for a while back. And it's just unfair. They've recruited people with no publication and less GPA than me. I also doubt any of them would be field-wise more relevant than me tbh. (Wouldn't be surprised if they hired MBA grads) I have all the relevant qualifications that even people working on that project do not have. I could easily get this project going beyond what they are doing with it rn. It's unfair. But it's life. And life goes on.

Am I angry? Yes. Am I disappointed, also yes. They didn't give me any alternative offers either. So I am going to steal the project and finish it so they have to throw all the money they've invested in the toilet.

... If only I wasn't depressed and could bring myself to apply elsewhere again. 🙄

Me: So you have no work experience, and majored in liberal arts, but you did go through a 6 months bootcamp, right?
Candidate: Yeah.
Me: sounds good, we will have to work together with you for a long while until you become independent, but I think you can definitely do this. What are you salary expectations?
Candidate: I'm thinking of 5000.
Me: Aight, thanks for your time! We'll send you more details later

Around here, 5000 (arbitrary made up number) is what you pay someone with around 3 years of experience at least. It's always these pampered fucks from rich countries that want to earn a shitton of money for the grand effort of going to a goddamn bootcamp for some months. That is their definition of effort and hard work, because it seems they've never once in their lives had any sort of hardship or struggle beyond crying that dad got them an Android instead of an iPhone. If you leave them alone they can't do jack shit because they've never worked in real, big projects, so you gotta invest a lot of time in them. Which is fine, everyone starts from somewhere. But what kinda balls do you have to demand a mid level salary when you have done basically nothing so far, and your knowledge is superficial at best?

I know that a lot of jobs and recruiters give bottom of the barrel shit, but I swear some candidates are insane. Unpopular rant I assume but I just needed to scream a bit.

Client: "We're not ready to be finished with the project but I don't want to pay you any more money to meet the terms of the contract we both signed, even though all my must-have changes led to more costs just like you had warned me they would."

Me: "Don't make any more changes, plez."

Client: "Imma make another change."

Me: "No. Stahp. Don't."

Client: "I added four new fields and probably a ton more business rules I don't care to understand."

Me: "Kill me. Just put this gun to my head and kill me."

Client: "That's not in our contract!"

First rant here, and it's going to be a query to the more professional and experienced members of society (most of you).

I am currently a Sys Admin for a major company, and I develop at night. My primary employment at the moment is the sys admin job (and I code for extra money at nights).

I wanted to start a development department at the company that I am working at, but it was turned turned down. It was stated that we are not branching in development, and that we should stick to our server implementation and support. This was a prompt to me wanting to start studying officially (I wanted to get qualified in JAVA, so that I had some paper behind my name when I looked for another job). HR and my directors outright denied me the ability to study through them (they pay for studies for employees) and I was more than fine with this.

I took a loan and paid for the studies myself. Can't crush a dream, you know?

The director caught wind of me studying, and now has demanded that I develop him a mobile application for the company. I told him that I am not a mobile developer, and that it didn't fall into my key performance areas.

Note, I do my coding on own time, on my own device, and never at work. It's fully my intellectual property. It also in no way interferes with my work during the day, and has NO conflict with my contract this side.

He sent an email yesterday, this is after two months. He is now stating that I WILL do the application, and he has CCd HR and two directors.

I don't want to do the app for this company, I spoke to HR previously about this, and she said that I should try and quote it under my own company name (which I did, but it was denied as it was "too expensive").

Now I am being forced to do something that is COMPLETELY out of my roles and responsibilities, something that this company has ABSOLUTELY no desire to go into further on, and he is basically letting me know that if I don't do it, he is going to start messing with my pay.

I really don't want to do this, and I cannot afford to make my secondary job my primary at the moment. The problem is, too, that I don't have the time during the day to develop AND do my sys admin tasks (I manage more than 300 servers, and 5000 devices).

What can I do in this instance? Or what would you guys recommend, in your experience?

Sorry for the noob question, but I don't know what to do.

All I want is a another DVI cable so I can connect my secondary monitor digitally instead of by VGA. From their reaction, you could think I had instead asked for a gold-plated desk. Was it really nescessary to have three guys check (non-technical people, too) if *they* could see a difference between my monitors? My primary one is DVI, and *I* can see that the monitor connected by VGA is blurrier. Who connects a flat panel monitor by VGA anyway? Just the idea of an unnescessary pair of analogue-to-digital/digital-to-analogue conveters in the middle of what should be a straight digital connection should be an affront to any sensible technical person. So of course, no extra DVI cable for me.

Call me stupid, but I think it has probably cost the company more money from lost productivity having three people look at my monitors instead of just buying me another DVI cable like I asked for nicely.

New meeting with the CEO and Chairman of Middle Company.

As the last week shit hit the fan hard, today they wanted to have an appeased relationship until my departure. They praised my job and what I accomplished in two years. And started a really well-executed blowjob (figuratively!).

They continued with the really fucking bad situation they are in and asked if I would help them. And I answer "Yes, I'll help you as much as possible."

And they asked if I could stay a little more. And I answered, "No, I can't".
They said that they are willing to double my pay for the next six months if I stayed. And I answered, " That's nice, but I can't".

They asked if I could convince some of the middle management (IT) to withdraw their resignation. And I answered, "No, I can't". Once again, they offered some money. This time I told them it wasn't a money problem.

They asked how could I tell that I was willing to help them if I refused everything they asked.

I simply replied " By doing my job!"

I think they got my "screw you, I'm going home!"

Applying for jobs

Apply for anything that looks like I have any kind of shot

Get reply from one company

"Hi. What is your salary expectation?"

"x"

Nothing for 6 days

Reach out again "Hi. I'm guessing you've gone with someone else as I've heard nothing back"

"No your salary expectation was a bit high"

"Okay well, what are you offering"

"47% of X as this is a junior position"

Like...
Firstly, X is what I was making at my last job
Secondly, you can see how much experience I have. You know I'm gonna be asking for 2-3 year money not intern money.
Thirdly, all they had to do after my first email was reply with "That's bit much, here's what we can offer, are you still interested?"

So yea, in general, I hate the salary expectation question. I don't want to sell myself short but I'm also currently in the take what I get position. So if you ask me, I'm gonna tell you what I was last making. I think that was a reasonable number and I know everyone has been hit by the pandemic so I'm not asking for more.

Just advertise jobs with a damn salary range.

You know which jobs do have a salary range? The senior positions. You know who does know how to negotiate? Seniors

Heading to japan on the 12th, my first solo trip ever. I always wanted to visit it, but now because of my developer paycheck and me being annoyed because no one ever has the money and/or time I am heading there alone.

I think it will be a very enriching experience. I always felt like I'm often dependent on others so I am trying to take more steps to improve that.

I just told my director that the solution for a particular problem that we have involves Machine Learning. For which I had already applied a VERY small app to make sense of an old database to make a NEW one since the old one broke every notion of how a db is supposed to be set (meaning that I recreated the project from scratch)

And on the same message I told him that I was not willing to do it using M.L since I was not paid enough to bring this level of heat to the institution.

Normalize telling mfkers that your skills are worth more.

I am paid well, but not enough to out of the blue tell mfkers that my ml based algo can save them./

Fuck em, fuck em hard, fuck em good, fuck em without even using spit.

I don't do this shit because I am paSSiOnate, since there lies the trap: "I mean, I love it so I guess I can do it, I do this on my free time either way" <---- no bitch, shit is expensive on the real world, don't do that wtf is the matter with you? *slaps* companies don't see it as a: "oh shit, employee X can do this! value!" they see it as "greaaaaat, I can save money on this", so fuck em.

Normalize it, y'all are wizards, advisors of kings, no company today survives without I.T. About motherfucking time y'all bitches take this shit by the horns and do with it what you want.

People form third world countries that need work: shit don't apply to you, currently, but we will make it apply to you on the rising, my kings, stay strong.

It’s still to easy.
I hope one day software will get so complicated no one will be able to fix it.

Somewhere in future :
- government established law that new AI system is only one that can accept new law
- every financial operation is monitored by government supervision AI
- we developed robots that are taking care of us
- everyone is happy cause work for money, shelter and food is now optional
- education is fully digital and managed by AI
- whole knowledge is based on asking questions, we don’t need to write and read anymore
- we use one common language and our knowledge specialization increased

A little more time passed by in this utopia.
- after power loss most of data got corrupted
- last man who knew how to restore backup died last night ( R.I.P. admin we will not forget you )
- people trying to save knowledge base to rebuild part of this civilization but no one knows how to make a paper because it haven’t been used for ages
- we decided to put what is left from knowledge on stone but we forgot how to write since everything is audio or video and most of time we were spending in VR
- someone decided that we draw some pictures
- all of use are now drawing animal heads like we remember ourselves from VR, let people know our tech is good
- some people love cats so they try to make cats from stones
- volcano eruptions destroyed most of stones that we made

Starving waiting for another respawn of my DNA sequence. I hope we manage to survive this time.

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.

Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.

This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.

She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".

You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.

A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.

The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.

That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.

She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.

After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.

Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...

At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.

After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.

Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.

FUCK!

So I found this consulting job a while ago thinking that some extra cash while studying would be nice to have.

I meet with the guy, a researcher trying to start a business up, good for him I think, maybe we'll hit it off, continue working, why not? Except he has no clue how to write working code, all he ever did was writing matlab scripts he says, thats why he hired me he says.
Okay, fine, you do your job I do mine.

He hands me the contract, its about comparing two libraries, finding out which one is better suited for his job, cool, plots and graphs everywhere.

Except this is an unpaid job. YOU WHAT?! It's a test job. FINE. At least it'll look good on my resume.

We talk about the paid part where I'm supposed to scale the two libraries, looks good, as expected from an ML engineering perspective. It comes to payment. The dude has no idea how taxes work, says he has a set amount to pay and not a penny more. I explain with examples how taxes are paid, how you get reimbursed for them and so on. Won't budge. Screws me over.

Opens the door for other jobs I think, he'll learn next time I think and take the job.

Fast forward a month, 90% of the job done, he adds a third thing to compare. Gives a github link to a repo with 2 authors, last commit a year ago. There are links to a 404, claiming compiled jars. Fuck.

Not my first rodeo, git clone that shit, make compile, the works. The thing uses libs that ain't in no repo, that would be too easy. Run, error, find lib, remake all the things, rinse repeat.

The scripts they got have hardcoded paths and filenames for 2 year old binaries, remake that shit.

It works, at least I get a prompt now. Try the example files they got, no luck, some missing unlinked binary somewhere, but not a name mentioned. Cross reference the shit outta the libs mentioned on readme, find the missing shit, down it.

Available versions are too new, THE MOLDING NUTCRACKER uses some bug in an old version of the lib.

I give up. Fuck this. This ain't worth the money OR time. Wanker...

Apple... Isn't it obvious?

They once built machines and software that were tested and ready for customers but they went into a direction where saving money and generating more income has the highest priority.
The more recent the version (hard- and software) the more unstable it became. On top of that the crap they produce gets more expensive each iteration. I do own a 2015 MB Pro, that's it. I used to own:
- iPhone X
- MB Pro 2017
- Apple Watch
- Apple TV
- iPad Pro
... All at the same time ... But I sold everything and switched (back) to Android and Linux and no tablet at all. The MB Pro I own is just my travel notebook because of battery life.
I'm very disappointed of Apple's strategical direction and that's why I'm boycotting it as good as I can.

My ex boss wants me to finish some stuff stuff for his company, which means month or two or more without getting paid, while my current job pays me 5 times more then my previous job.. No way I'll make my priority something that doesn't even give some money. Yes I'm young, yes I learned a lot in your company,but I am paying my bills, I have to eat something, and there is no fucking way I'm going to spend that much time in something that gives me nothing.

I actually do have one. 2 years ago I found myself in a stressful situation. It lasted for an hour or so but all ended well. Ever since that incident I was wondering what should be different so that situations like these could be avoided. I had an idea. I began making sketches, sorting out the architecture I'd need and then it hit me. Shit, I could reuse this very principle for a MUCH larger scale! And in fact there's noone in the market offering this yet! There are similar products, products that offer a tiny part of my idea's functionality, but none of them are even close to what I have in mind!

And so the coding began. I was still a student back then. And employed 12hrs/day. And married. Needless to say I did not have much time for coding. Now I'm also a father (although not a student any more!) which makes my schedule even worse.

All in all I've made quite a few widely reusable libraries by now which have saved me 10s of thousands of lines typing, had yet another idea on alternative TLS which seems impossible to crack (well okay, possible. But there's a twist - cracker will not be able to know he cracked the algo :) ). Now I'm close to 100k LOC of my main project and struggling with a fucking FE (since I'm more of a bkend guy). FE's already taken a few months from me and I'm still in a square 1 :/ But I'm moving forward. Slowly, but moving. Frustrated af, but not giving up.

I had a sort of a dream to start my project before I'm 30. I have less than a year left. Still doable. This project, if it's sucessful, has a potential to become extremely popular as it offers solutions to multiple problems we have today. This project should save me from 9-to-5 work every day where, no matter how great the environment is, I feel trapped. But I need money to survive in this city . With my family.
This project should be a solution to all of my problems and probably something great the world could enjoy.

I wish I could make it. I really do. I don't want to be 9-5 any more. I don't want to be dictated what's my schedule, what's that I have to do now. what to think. I want to be free of all of this. Have enough time to live. To travel, see the world. Live in a house (God I miss living in a house....). Spend time with my family. Show my lil boy what a wonderful thing the World is!

I really want this to work. I want to be free again. And I wish I hadn't to deal with FrontEnd.

Allright, enough wabbling. Time for a nice cup of tea and back to coding. "The next big thing" is not going to create itself while I'm ranting, right?

I’ve had enough of shitty ISPs. Time to shame them 😈

Here in the UK, we have a company called TalkTalk who treat their customers as whores by not giving a shit and taking all their money.

I have had an ongoing issue for about 9 months now where our internet is more unstable, but also slower. We pay for 72Mbps at which we used to get, but now our internet tops out at 30Mbps if we are lucky. It can be 20Mbps one minute and 7Mbps the next, and I’ve had it drop below 1Mbps for no goddam reason.

I’ve spoken (well, argued) argued to their so called customer service department over phone and live chat explaining the situation and all they’ve done is said “restart your router”, or “we’ll send out a new router, it’s probably a WiFi issue”, or some bullshit like “I’ve ‘changed’ something on my end”. On one conversation with a so called technician, I had to explain how networking actually worded, and and even called a 7Mbps acceptable when we were paying for 10x that!!!!!

The thing that makes it worse is they actually have systems that detect any issues with customers internet lines, but they only alert the customer to the issue through an online portal, telling the customer to call up and get it dealt with rather than passing the info to a tech department and having issues fixed without the customer knowing unless it’s absolutely necessary.

So 9 months in and I still have a fluctuating, unstable internet connection which is slow and overpriced with no tunnel in sight. GIVE ME BACK MY GODDAMN MONEY YOU FUCKING THIEVING BASTARDS.

Sooo...
Got Fired...
By the same fucking company who is responsible for my burn out.
Should I be Happy or Sad? No matter how I loved the company I can only expect more abuses... On the other hand, If I made a few complaints, I couldn't get fired now...
Anyhow...
This weekend (can't remember the day, It was the day I took two victans, 20's beers and the same join I would smoke in a whole week ... (It worked, so...) I posted lots of really bad shit on facebook about the company... true Shit, but you know... Truth doesn't matter.
Today got a letter ending my contract on the term of the current one... less than one month from now.
So.... Lets See...
At least this pushes the time I have to start making Apps to get some money.
Just lacking the energy and will...

An uncle of mine, owns an NFT/Betting startup (early 30s, so no veteran and no doesn't know much coding).
Got 3-4m USD as investments.

It's an utter garbage "app" that he knows will die in an year, and he's drawing big salary and buying properties from the funding until he has the "runway" of funds remaining while app/company works in the background

What bugs me isn't that he's feasting on some random investors' petty change, but that such "ideas" get money thrown at them while ive seen 100s of more fun ideas/apps back in uni-days that died in obscurity when people graduated and retired them as projects, being talked about in 1 liner in their CVs.

This world ain't right :v

long rant;

How did I got into CS?

When I first got my laptop, I put on a password and forgot it. Nobody knew those things at that time around me (most of them, still don't) so I had to pay ₹350 (~$5) for formatting (OS reinstallation).
After a week, I again forgot the password and had no guts to ask more money from my family, because of the fear of getting scolded.

So, I took out the manuals that had shipped with the laptop, read them all. Found nothing.
But, on a very small page, a single line was written, "Insert the disc. Press F12 after pressing the power button".
I intuitively tried it and it worked (I had the OS DVD and no internet).

And I spent the next year experimenting with the windows OS (Vista).
Then tried all the other OSs.

Those were some times..2008..I guess.
Learnt OS without the internet. Nowadays people can't do it even with it.

What's your story?

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

So, i live in Venezuela, a country with a lot of economical and political issues. Back in December I talked to my boss an ask for a pay raise, he talked me a lot of shit about economical issues his has been having with the Enterprise and give my a raise plan til July (starting in December).

Now he comes to me and tell me he can't afford to pay me the rest of the raise, because he's now in difficult times. The funny thing is I've talked to him many times to point it out some things that are bad and will cause him money loss.

I really don't want to go because I love the people I'm working with (they have the same problem that I) but is fucking frustrating when all is going wrong and you have some ideas to solve it, ideas you have searched a lot and came with a plan after a bunch of investigation, you come up with the plan everybody seems to love it but after that nobody applies it.

I think there is no much more I can do

Imagine asking your friends to help you rate your app on the google play store and instead of saying NO I DONT WANT TO RATE YOUR APPLICATION no... they decide to fuck with your mind.

1)
I will rate it tomorrow. (she never rated it tomorrow nor the next couple of weeks later)

2)
I will keep it in mind and rate it later :). (she never rated it later)

3)
I rated it haha (less than 30 seconds later they deleted the rating)

4)
Send me a link and I'll rate it (i send the link, they never respond or read my message again)

5)
I dont have memory on my phone :) (because 13MB of memory is a lot of storage requirements but taking 1 million selfies of up to 25GB is completely fine)

6)
I dont have memory on my phone what dont you understand :) x2 (this is the second girl)

7)
Your trying to give me a virus?? No (i got blocked multiple times)

8)
You want to hack me by making me install this application from the link that you sent me that leads to google play store? No (blocked)

9)
Rate your app? Haha i dont care about it because it doesnt bring me any benefit only the fat cocks that fill my pussy up satisfy me and not ur app haha

10)
Haha send me a link ill rate it (i send link, 8 hours later no reply or reading my message, i text her back if she had done it and im still put on ignore)

...

N)
more

----

Notice how none of these people have said the 2 letter word: "no".

All of these 10 examples are based on a true story.

All of these 10 examples are different people.

---

How hard
Can it be
To just
Write

no

---

.

---

For all of you who are about to trash talk saying i am desperately trying to beg people to rate my app:

i know all of those people for a long time. But when it comes to asking (and not forcing) someone to do you a favor for free that takes no more than 30 seconds, no one seems to have 30 seconds of their free time. Dont get me wrong, some of my friends did politely rate it and left a review, even the people who i barely knew left a review and rated it, but the people with whom I was closer by, didnt.

---

In the beginning i used to not care about this at all. Then i started falling into depression because of it. I fell then into deep depression. Then i sunk so deep that i couldn't feel any emotions anymore so i laughed as an anti depressive mechanism whenever something depressing happened. Now i cant even laugh because i have no more energy. Now i actually leave man tears

---

The only thing more valuable than people, any materialistic thing, animals, coding and even money - is time....

----

why do you waste my time

if i ask you to do something that takes 30 seconds and you dont want to do it

why cant you just say no

why do you drag me

why do you say you're going to do it when you know you wont do it

what do you gain by unnecessarily lying to someone for such a small thing?

to someone who has been a good person to you?

do you feel superior?

is your ego bigger?

----

This experience has taught me that not even a human from the same blood can be trusted.

All of your are fucked up in the head in your own style and i am guilty of it too, all of us are.

But i have never seen the human evolution went from simplicity to overengineered complexitory bULLSHit where you have to lie to someone and waste hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes years of his time just because you dont want to say a 2 letter word, no.

But when that person becomes more successful than you and achieves higher status, Theen you have those 30 seconds of free time. All of you are fucking cynics. and i am so much overly disgusted by all of this fucking bullshit....

-----

This experience has proven to me to simply focus on investing into myself and learn and improve myself and no one else. To not even bother asking even for a small kind of help, a feedback from my work because people don't have 30 seconds of their free time. That is all.

By constantly fucking around with things that interest me. If a topic fascinates me i will either lool for shit around youtube, read proper documentacion or buy specialized books for it.

Most recently it has been compiler design. I wanna write my own language, for testing and learning more than anything.

I dunno, it keeps shit fun and interesting. Now, much of that shit ain't applied to what I do in web. But it does help to keep the mind fresh as well as giving me the chance to eventually invent my own language. Write a large system with it, use it at the institution and have them pay me obscene ammounts of money to maintain it.

It will be like VB6 or VbScript, but with {}s, immutable values by default and no looping, cuz I am evil AF

!dev

So one of our project allows paying in money in different currenceis, and we have few bank accounts that are "outter shell" that are monitored and properly titled wire transfer will work for paying in for certain customer. Simple. So far.

We also have +- 20-30 different bank accounts for different purposes, I dont rly know why. Im just a programmer here. Anyway, I have no idea how and why but apparently one of our partners somehow put his hands on list of our bank acc's. Welp, i should be allright, what can possibly go wronggg.... wait... what?

He had this brilliant idea to streamline more process of "go to app, press button, you will be presented with proper bank acc for you". So he did. He sent mass email to all his customers that here are all bank acc's, use wahtever to pay in. Most of acc's are unmonitored.

This went wrong and we figured out becouse mail of pissed customer....

Congratulations, my friend. You earned "I am idiot" tatoo on forehead. Visit me to redeem your reward.

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

!shortRant

You all complaining about shit code from coworkers and about fucking WordPress. Looks different, but know what? Answer is the same.
Money.
Let me explain.
For example, you were born in USA. You can choose any profession, and if you became pro - you will be payed great. Looks nice, isn't it?
But if you were born in Russia, India, somewhere in Africa, whatever, you can be businessman, coder or you can suck a dick to the end of you life.
Not that great, yeah?
You are looking around and see great people with their own dreams and talents. But then you ask them "to which faculty are you going?" Answer is obvious. And that's how shitcoders are born.
And yeah, about WordPress. I'm mobile developer, I just can't understand how awful it is (or not, idunno). The only thing I know - if I were PHP developer, I could earn twice more than now. But why I didn't choose that way? Because I REALLY LOVE MY WORK. Everyday is good, I'm working at weekends often, because I want.
So please, shut up. You could never work with WordPress, but you motherfucker CHOOSE IT. You could switch to node, go, Java. Why the flying fuck you didn't? Oh yeah, MONEY. So please, shut up.

Devrant isn't for crying girls complaining about shit they did themselves. (No sexism, just metaphor, sorry girls)

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

No need to think small when you have eternity to work with. Right now I am building a network operating system, something I've started around 2 years ago. I expect to have an installable and more or less usable system in maybe a few more years.

When I would have an eternity to work with, I'd first look to make our planet redundant. It's insane to imagine that we only have this blue marble to work with, while we have a fireball of hell as a neighbor in our cosmic neighborhood. What even happened there? I'd like to find out. Granted Musk is already figuring out Mars, and he has the money for it while I don't. I don't like the man all that much (too much marketing wank) but hey, at least he's got us covered there.

Maybe one day we could live forever. Maybe we could map and upload our minds. Maybe we could replace our entire body with synthetic components when the frail meat-based components inevitably fail. Perhaps it could even happen in our lifetime, at the pace technology is progressing at. If and when that happens, sign me up!

Official declaration: I am a fucking moron.

Last year, I acted stupid (as suual) and didn't invest enough money into some tax saving instruments.

I also picked the wrong taxation method and ended up paying more than double taxes.

Thankfully my country has an option where you can claim a refund by filing a return form.

And so I go ahead and I hire a finance guy who can help me do my taxes.

We sit at the table and do the math. It turns out my savings mindset prevented me from not investing enough and now it is difficult to claim the tax as refund.

I legit had no issues in investing more. Rather I was looking for ways to do so but I didn't. If I had done it, I'd would be paying zero taxes as my earnings would fall below a certain threshold.

Only trick is to evade by unethical means. Should I be the Jeff Bezos of my country and save my hard earned money from going to corrupt politicians?

Either way, I am a moron. Fucking hate my stupid decision.

!dev

I will never understand the need for weeding bs. I am ok with marriage, and doing whatever religious festivity you want to whatever deity you follow. I respect that stuff enough to not go all anti-religious or what not. But I just cannot fathom making a party that benefits the attendee (food whatnot) more than the people starting a life together. Gifts? a popularity contest? I don't get it. My weeding was simple, did not invite a bunch of people, shit burned bridges, but our families were there and that to me was more than enough. Anyone else that got offended, well, they can get offended whenever they pay one of my fucking bills.

But I just cannot get the need to have such a ceremony, AND then to have the audacity to get upset or call out people that cannot make it. Make it for fucking what? the bridge and groom are going to be so fucking distracted with everyone that at most your presence gets an "ah glad you came!"

AND some people even do it in different cities, fucking why? it is a burden as an adult to make time for such minute events, even more to take the time, and the fucking money to go to your fucking party on another city. Bonus points if I need to buy a fucking airplane ticket, no fucking thanks.

I am currently doing something big in my life that only my wife can help me with, because of my situation, my family can't help me, so i am all by myself and wife, and some people told me to put it on hold.....to go to a fucking party. WHY? Why in the sweet holy Mexican baby Ritchie would I go ahead and fucking do that? you are not going to help me afterwards when I get back, shit, you will be out on fucking vacation after the party, for 2 fucking weeks (talk about privilege) and you still want me to put my shit on hold to go...to a fucking party?

Fuck, sometimes I feel that I am toooo fucking egotistical to put my time before others, but man, you really get shit out of this. 2 weedings happening this month, one requires a ticket, the other is a drive away (4 fucking hours) but still, I really don't feel that I should waste my VL that I would much rather spend with my wife and child on some fucking obnoxious ego-inflated party.

I feel like I beat "the man"

Dunno if any of you guys have picked up on this, but the Microsoft Docs (for asp.net) are basically one big fucking jumbotron advertisement for IdentityServer

The very same IdentityServer who dropped their free, open-source project and turned into an -aaS

It really seems like MS is frothing at the fucking mouth to have you use IdentityServer and offers no real alternatives whatsoever besides something like Facebook or Twitter login.

But I did my studies

Read my articles

And implemented proper Jwt tokens with rolling refresh tokens.

Simpler, more efficient, and compromises nothing. And I didn't pass my money off to some company to do it for me.

Fuck you, Microsoft, and the IdentityHorse you were paid to ride in on.

Product and Design have a common enemy. Yes, you guessed it right, Engineering.

The former aim to solve user problems and focus heavily on aesthetics most of the time. While the latter actually does it.

As a Product guy, I admit that I absolutely hate the role these days because all that are asked to focus on is engagement retention conversion and other fancy metrics. Community has missed the entire point of why the fucking role exist.

On the other hand, engineering always asks the best questions. Focuses on performance and scale while periodically checking on tech debt. Yes, they suck at business or sales but when the solution works, things automatically make money.

I DON'T FUCKING CARE HOW BEAUTIFUL YOUR APP IS, IF IT DOESN'T SOLVE MY PROBLEM THEN IT'S RUBBISH.

Functionality and UX matters to more than colour scheme or fonts. Reason why Amazon is a huge. They are functionally solving a great problem while constantly improvising UX and not giving a rat's ass on UI.

Another down side to your fancy design is that the UI elements make things heavier. No wonder engineers have always been the best problem solver.

We lost our way. Tech world needs to go back a decade or two to fix the tech debt.

On your standard epitome of being a geek, I started to show my coworkers how to play Cardfight Vanguard, a TCG since we all love TCG's (we play Magic, Pokemon and a few others) and we had made Friday our official "TCG or Board Game" day.

List of games we have played:
Star Wars CCG (dear lord this game is BEAUTIFUL shame it is no longer being published)

Magic the Gathering, we have a love hate relationship with this game, mana plays a big reason as to why we do not fully love it, it sucks getting stuck with no possibility of drawing proper mana.

Pokemon - Easy to get into, easy to play, there is nt much more to say, by far, our favorite in terms of how much money we can make out of selling rare cards that we do not use.

Dice Masters - My Personal favorite, and I am also the undisputed champion of our group

Cardfight Vanguard is my current favorite, very tactical in a lot of ways, luck of the draw hits in a funny way, I feel it is properly balanced, not much bullshit ass rules or mana issues. Reminds me of Duel Masters, I used to LOVE that Game, but Wizards of the Coast and the anime fucked it up so well....

Anyone here likes playing card games?

I'm buried in projects that I never get time to work on. My boss took the week off, and I'm getting emails from users asking about adding more projects to the board. I'm a single dev at my company. Normally, I have enough patience to get through the day, but today my CIO decided it would be a good time tell my coworker to let me know that the company dumped a third party we used for tons of report automation, and that I need to get these reports hand rolled in house asap. When I sent him a message asking for any kind of details on what this would involve, I found out he left early for the day.

I'm already stressed and putting in extra hours (salaried, so no extra pay) and am having trouble meeting deadlines for projects as it is because I'm constantly pulled away from my dev work to do non-dev work.

I just landed this dev position six months ago and haven't had a chance to build my resume. I'm getting "OK" money considering this is my first full-time dev job. Should I be looking to get out? Suck it up and get the experience? I know we all have crazy expectations on us and frustrating PMs, but after chats with other devs, I get the feeling that my situation is beyond fucked.

We are a small company, and our CEO and CTO attends our daily standups(not sure why)

At the end our CTO, after a little discission with our PM, goes: “This” is more importent and should be gone first - its money to the company.

Pm: Fine but then “that” wont be worked on for now.
Cto: ohh okay, but “this” is really importent, so do it first.

Standup done, people returns to work.
1 minut later, Cto comes into the dev room.

Cto: “something else” is also really really importent.
Pm: ok, so then we do “something else” instead and we will put “this” on standby for now.
Cto: and remember “operation” has the highest priority of all.

For fuck sake... just pick one or decide what it is you want....

Cto has no clue to what he is doing. Does not have a long term plan, other then get money into the company based on really short term goals.

Easy to say im not his biggest fan, and I am a 100% sure he knows this.

Why apple is a peice of shit..? Why even people love it.. It makes apple to grow more.. Although they don't deserve it.. They don't deserve the trillion dollars.. Why don't they fuck them self..
In a year they release a peice of shit and people are like applauding on it.
Are you fucking serious people?
The people who called as "apple fanboy" please go fuck yourself.. Tell me one reason to love apple..
I am not talking about the price issue. I am talking about they think that they are the best.. But no they are not. They are a bunch of asshole who are working to make money.. They don't need to respect.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

[SERIOUS ADVICE NEEDED, PLZ HELP]

I am going to school again for like 4 days from tomorrow (don't ask me why, blame the government) and I feel a bit depressed. I just don't know what I have done in the last 2 years.

What I learned:
- Bunch of stupid facts from devRant
- C# stuffs
- Games are expensive
- Music production

And.... that's it, tbh

I don't really have "PERSONAL PROJECTS" that everyone is bragging about, I just have bunch of empty projects with a cool name but just Program.cs in it.....

I am worried of what to do now.

I just feel I made the wrong choice going with C#.

I just feel I should have went with JS.
With JS, you can do
- React Native + Cordova + Titanium + etc and make native android/ios/wp apps
- The WWW stuffs
- Electron --> Cross platform desktop apps (win/mac/linux)
- UnityScript (deprecated, but whatever) --> Games

So, what I am seeing now is a thick fog in the way to my future + career etc.....

I am stuck rn.

Please help.

Should I continue with my pace and learn more C# and the things I do rn, or change the language and start from scratch, or as a last resort, leave the "make stuff by coding" industry and go to music industry, or just go to the airport and do planespotting and upload in youtube to earn money?

Serious advice please, and no jokes about C# and JS. These languages may suck, but YOUR language may suck more.

I have a dev job and I earn good. More than enough at this age when I'm single.

My brother lost his business and has been sitting idle for more than 3 months now. Family gets cash but brother has nothing to do. He's into business and I don't even know what's going on in his life. I can help him with money and all but no idea how to ask, I'm younger and it will require a lot amount of guts for me to him, even when I ask I don't think he will tell me straight.

I'm fucking tired of putting my efforts into bug fixes.

5 years of web. I never had a client that likes to keep it's crappy slow piece of shit product on the market in the exact same way it is.

If they didn't sell it to state employees (and good luck for them if they do not use it) their product would be dead.

That's the only way they get money: bids. And the minimum a state pays is 15 MILLION.

And they don't have 90K to pay another dev to help creating a new product.

Their CEO fucking REJECTS anything that's not a bug fix. Once he said to our PM:

"It's pretty and more fast, but wasn't this way that made me rich"

I'm thinking I'm getting another client, seriously. Everyday the same thing breaks and they already know the fucking answer:

WE NEED TO FUCKING REFACT

CREATE A NEW FUCKING PROJECT

This shit is making crazy. I can't sleep. I can't eat and I'm always fucking tired, no matter what I do.

I need to stop working for Brazilians.
I'll try US, Canada or somewhere in Europe.

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

I'm very short tempered at the moment.

A lot like Dr Cox in Scrubs.

And really ... You mother fucking stupid idiotic developers with your tendency to discuss absolutely everything just to not have to work for a dozen more minutes...

But ok. Let's discuss.

But even that seems to be absolutely impossible for you little shitheads.

Instead of discussing solutions, nooooooooo....

We're grown up developers so we discuss how the baddy manager hurt our lil feelings by saying that we're morons for wasting all the fucking time without coming up with a solution.

Now my lil cry babies, once the baddy manager got your pacifiers so at least once in an hour my migraine finally calms down for not hearing your bitching pathetic lil whiny noises...

Face it. Over the years you collected a huge ton of mother fucking tech debt because no one of you actually took a bit of time to use that empty space in your head to think at least a mu further than the dumb jira task you were given.

And yes. That ends badly.

And yes. As it is now in a state of cluster fuck, guess what. You have to work. You get money for it, remember?

And yes. if you would stop moping and bitching and crying and being a pathetic lil piece of shit, you'd realize we could come up with solutions very fast.

But nooo... Let's talk about our feelings.

And how we are over worked.

And how nothing works.

Cause yes. That will be the hail mary that saves us all.

Let me give u a hint: it's a mother fucking waste of time bitches.

I think it's time I put a pacifier not only in your mouth, but arse too. Maybe it helps overcoming the anal and oral phase of childhood so we can at least have something close to adult talk.

*breathes in*

Gooozfraba.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

TL;DR: I don't like working with 'most' Indian people. And some stories supporting that written below:

=====================================
A client calls me directly to get features/fixes done on their site. No middle management shit at the company I was working at, at the time.

So I quit the company, but the client has my phone number. So he starts texting me to get more work done. I tell him "I work for money, if you can pay me that, I'll do all the work you ask of me".

They praise my blunt-ness and say they will discuss it. And I never heard from them ever again!

=====================================
Client reaches out to me and gets me to work for them for 2 hours/day and pays me INR 8,000 (about 95 USD) a month. I say fine, I'll do the work.

I do the tasks as they say for 3 months then I ask for a raise to INR 10,000.

They start pointing out mistakes in my work, and they say they're not seeing the "dedication" in me. Only when I asked for the raise. Not before that, mind you.

=====================================
Vice President of the company tells me that he saw me in his dream the night before.

I've told this one before so I just threw that in.

=====================================

At the end, I do like some Indians that I work with. It's just that most of them try to massively underpay you, or want to get the most work out of you as fast as possible and sometimes both.

After spending my entire holiday vacation fucking around with the one language that really digs with my state of mind (Ruby) when developing and having to do some quick troubleshooting on 2 of our applications (Java and PHP respectively) I can honestly say: I legit don't want to go back to that ever again.

But money means more to me than my own personal biases. I have delved in some of the most HATED platforms that developers could normally ask for in terms of work. And have only done some very basic (fucking obnoxiously basic) consulting in terms of Rails, to the point that it might not be even worth putting on a cv. But fuck me man, if I could just fuck around building rails solutions for a living, from the frontend to the backend, I think I would for once be happy with the things that I work with with things more than monetary pleasure.

Y'all know your boy, I ain't no neckbeard, but I fuck with things that a lot of others don't, to me Lisp dialects and Smalltalk are gifts from dev heaven, and I have thrown out Clojure in production (my app is still chugging along just fine at work thank you very mucho) but in terms of pure web development, I have never been happier than when I generate a rails project and start tinkering around.

Sigh.......here is to hoping that maybe I will eventually open my own rails shop.

!rant
How to earn a lot of money as a programmer?

So this question might sound a little naive and too simple, but earning a lot of money is what we all want after all right? Collecting experiences from people in the business should be a good idea.

So this is the position I am in:
I am a German student in my 13th year of school (which means I will graduate this summer) and I am very interested in information technology. I know C++ pretty well by now and I have built a rendering engine for a game I want to make using openGL already, which I am very proud of.
I would love to turn this passion into my profession and thats why I plan to attend a dual course of computer science next year (dual means that I will be employed at a company (or similar) in parallel to the studying course).

But what direction should I be going in if I want to make big money later on? I am ready to spend a lot of time and work on this life project but I don't know which directions are the most promising. I hate being a tiny gear in a huge machine that just has to keep spinning to keep the machine alive, I want to be part of a real project (like most people probably) and possibly sell a product (because I think that is how you really make money).

Now I know there is no magic answer to this, but I bet many people here have made experiences they can share and this could help a lot of people directing their path in a more success oriented way.

I personally am especially interested in fields which are relatively low-level and close to memory (C++), go hand in hand with physics and 3D simulation and are somewhat creative and allow new solutions. (These are no hard lines, I just thought I should give a little direction to what I know already and what I am interested in)

But really, I am interested in any work you are likely to earn a lot of money with.

Tired of dealing with shitcode, that's all I always inherit. Maybe I picked the wrong career? or maybe I shouldn't have even read about things like SOLID or picked up Clean Code.

Then again if I hadn't, I wouldn't be where I am. But I'm unhappy. Why do I always get these projects where the poeple who wrote them (and dissappeared) clearly had no proefficiency on the used tech stack.

Am I ever gonna be part of a project with an actual lead/architect, who strives for the code not to rot?

Maybe I'm just being a little bitch whinning over this?

Halp!! the more I code, the more I hate it. It wasn't like this when I was the architect. But I didn't make as much money as I do now...

What do I do

I quit my first dev job of less than 6 months. Nothing lined up but it was not what I wanted and I was burning out quickly. Felt like a zombie, thinking of my work after work, and unable to get anything into my head, isolated and other needs not met for an entry level developer.

I luckily have money saved up for a year and hitting leetcode and everything else. Will I find a job right away? Probably not. However, I took the first position within a month of interviews during the pandemic and regret that I stopped applying even when I saw the red signs.

I’m scared but I didn’t beat my head against the wall at school to be taken advantage of like this (imo they need a senior).

2020 was trash as a fresh grad but maybe this year will be different. I know more than before and I especially know what I don’t want.

Here we go again, no looking back now.

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

In the Netherlands they have a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" culture around wages, how is this in other countries?

You ask for what you think you're worth (and are happy to work for) and if the company agrees they pay you.

There's no guarantee you'll be paid the same as your colleagues working the same job because they might just have the confidence to ask for more money.

I have no idea how my wages compare with my colleagues but as I am happy with what I earn it doesn't matter. Seems to solve a lot of the dick waving issues that stem from everyone comparing salaries.

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)