Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

How most recruiter emails go these days:

- Hiring multiple senior lead engineers <— That’s me
- 180k+ <— I like it.
- Must have experience with AWS, GCE, AND Azure <— Okay, you’re looking for a unicorn
- Kubernetes expert
- Experience with Rust, Node, and .NET <— What type of fucking company are you?
- Must be on call and 25% travel <— Why?
- Preferred: experience with printer repair, Raid Arrays, CAT5, and Microsoft Access <— Y’all fucked up somewhere a long time ago. I’m out.

!!pointless story

Bug report comes in from a coworker. "Cloudinary uploads aren't working. I can't sign up new customers."

"I'll look into it" I say.

I go to one of our sites, and lo! No Cloudinary image loads. Well that can't be good.

I check out mobile app -- our only customer-facing platform. None of the images load! Multiple "Oops!" snackbars from 500 errors on every screen / after every action.

"None of our Cloudinary images load, even in the mobile app," I report.

Nobody seems to notice, but they're probably busy.

I go to log into the Cloudinary site, and realize I don't have the credentials.

"What are the Cloudinary credentials, @ceo?" I ask.

I'm met with more silence. I use this opportunity to look through the logs, try different URLs/transforms directly. Oddly, everything seems fine except on our site.

I check Slack again, and see nothing's changed, so I set about trying to guess the credentials.

Let's see... the ceo is basically illiterate when it come to tech, so it's probably not his email. It's a startup, and custom emails for things cost money, and haven't been a thing here forever, so it's probably oen of the CTO's email aliases. he likes dots and full names so that narrows it down. Now for the password.... his are always crappy (so they're "easy to remember") and usually have the abbreviated company name in them. He also likes adding numbers, generally two-digit numbers, and has a thing for 7s and 9s. Mix in some caps, spaces, order...

Took me a few minutes, but I managed to figured it out.

"Nevermind, I guessed them." I reported.

After getting into Cloudinary, I couldn't find anything amiss. Everything looked great. No outage warnings, metrics looked fine, images all loaded. Ex-cto didn't revoke payment or cancel the account.

I checked our app; everything started loading -- albeit slowly.

I checked the aforementioned site; after a few minutes, everything loaded there, too.

Not sure what else to do, and with everything appearing to work, I said "Fixed!" and closed the issue.

About 20 minutes later, the original person said "thanks" -- never did hear anything from the ceo. I've heard him chatting away in the other room the entire time.

Regardless, good thing for crappy passwords, eh?

I think I've finally realized something:
my boss does not actually listen to me.

Quite often during out weekly conference calls, he asks me questions about things I had just covered. I always assumed he couldn't hear because a) i'm rather quiet, and b) freeconferencecall.com bloody sucks.

But it happens for written things, too. I type an update on something in Slack, and an hour later he asks me for an update on it. I always assumed (likely correctly) that he has nearly zero reading comprehension. He writes like a 5th grader and only remembers a few nouns and one verb from anything he reads. But I swear he actively skips reading anything I write.

Now, however, I have frigign' proof that he ignores me. We have both been trying to get ahold of {Clover contractor} via email for months. We have gotten three replies, but twice scheduling prevented setting up a meeting, and once I simply missed the email amongst the flood of log spam I haven't been allowed to address.

I have asked the boss multiple times for the guy's phone number -- in emails, in Slack, and in front of everyone during our weekly conference calls -- and he has totally ignored me every. single. time.

Here's a transcript of my seventh(!) attempt:

Boss [2:13 PM]
Have you and {Clover contractor} met yet? If not make it happen. Stop letting it not happen. GIve specific dates and times. {Clover contractor} let's talk Tuesday 2pm or Wednesday 4pm which works better for you.

Root [2:14 PM]
For the seventh and last time, give me his phone number.
Getting ahold of him via email has not worked.

Boss [2:14 PM]
I am sendning one more, from that I want you to make the meeting happen asap.

Root [2:14 PM]
if i call him, setting up a meeting will be _easy_
Give me his phone number and I will handle this.

It is now 3:00pm and I haven't gotten a response.

Either he doesn't want it to happen, wants me to fail for some reason, or he's totally fucking oblivious. Yet ofc it's me who earns all of the blame when this meeting doesn't happen, and I'm likely to get yelled at in front of everyone, fucking again.

I'm really beginning to hate this guy.

I can't wait to walk out on him and watch the company come crashing down in my absence. It'll be sad to watch, but bloody hell does he deserve it for his arrogant incompetence.

tl;dr; I've worked 117.5h/week for a month because of a project lead that doesn't understand what I do despite countless attempts at explaining

So, once a year I do this large project for a voluntary organization, it takes me about 80h (and this is of course on top of my normal work and voluntary engagement (60-80h/week))

This year, I realized I don't have as much spare time as I used to, so I emailed the project lead several months in advance like "hey, you know that I do all my work on this before the rest of you start working on it, and you know I need you to sit down for about an hour and put together the list of things I need to know to get this done properly. Could you please do that a bit earlier than usual, a week or two extra would make a big difference", they replied "absolutely, no problem!"

Time went by, and about two weeks before I wanted that info I emailed a small reminder. Shit me not, a month later, after a countless amount of reminders I finally get a half finnished version of the list I need, note that this is two weeks before I'm supposed to be done. Which is fine, it's the usual timespan, not what I hoped for as I hoped for an extra two weeks, but not too late either.

Then shit starts to happen

I reply to the list I've gotten with some requests for the project lead to complete some of the information, to which I receive multiple replies with different answers to the same questions, okay, that's fine, I'll just use the last answer.(?)

So, I finnish the thing on time, clocking out on a total of 117.5h of work per week, two weeks in a row. Still fine, it's just two weeks.

Release day!

I arrive at the release meeting, and is greeted by the project lead handing me two papers with the words "we haven't been able to look through your work yet to make sure it's like we want it, but we sat down yesterday and here's a list of how we want things to be". So I remind them that the thing is supposed to be done that day, and that it takes me 80h to redo, and those papers will require me to redo everything from scratch. To which the project lead responds "but it doesn't have to be finnished until December, right?"

That is not true, not at all, in any way.

See, there are 600 people that depend on this project, and they need, yes, need to be able to access it from the day it's launched every year. That is an absolute requirement.

So after trying to tell this project lead, for multiple years, how much time I devote to this project (for free) every year, during a short period of time, and after trying countless times to explain why it has to be done when the project is released, I became quite irritated.

So, during the two weeks that have passed since, I've been receiving about 200 emails from people wondering why the thing isn't finished yet and why they can't use it. (forwarded every single one of them to the project lead) and have been redoing it all during the past two weeks, from scratch.

I'm finally done, I released it yesterday, finally! I accompanied it with a bitter email to the project lead.

Because seriously, this is the worst respect for both my time and the people that should use the project's time in all of those years I've been doing this. This year, I've been ignored multiple times; they've shat on my work because it didn't live up to their expectations, even tough they never told me their expectations; I've been misinformed etc.

And now it's starting to get to me, this is the first weekend in a month when I've been able to shut down my laptop, sit down, drink a cup of tea, read a fricking book, chat with some friends etc, and most importantly, sleep. Signs of the stress I've had for a month now is starting to remind themselves.

And there's this little though nagging me in the back of my head: if the project lead would've worked for an hour in September I would've had to do half the job I ended up doing, on double the time. I hate realizing that they don't give a shit about my part of this, even tough I do half the work.

Then why do I continue, year after year? Because I feel that those 600 people that benefit from this really deserve it! But why does there have to be a dick project lead in the middle that makes me feel sick working on the thing I love the most!

So, as I'm not really used to ranting like this, i have to add that I really have no point with this rant. Just had to get it off my chest!

The world makes no fucking sense.

In 2013 I had a manager approve a couple days' leave coz my son was having medical issues.

He was super nice about it and told me I could take as much time as I needed. I said, a couple days is enough. I took Thursday and Friday off. I took two days.

On Monday, an emergency meeting was held with the CTO (it was a small company, it went me -> manager -> C suite). I was told that a production deployment happened on Friday that fucked up a few clients' systems and that it had cost said clients hundreds of thousands dollars and are now suing the company.

Turns out on Friday, lead developer was also given the day off for whatever reason and I was being scolded because as the next senior developer, it was my responsibility to review code and make sure shit like this doesn't happen.

I agreed (and still agree) but also explained I had already filed leave weeks prior and I wasn't informed about dev lead's absence. Sure I could've checked my messages but my kid was in the hospital and I was busy. Still I couldn't help but feel a little guilty.

Manager holds a separate meeting with me and talks me into just writing an apology note in the email chain and he'll do the rest of the talking for me and make sure I get minimal punishment. I trusted him, he was the one who found me and brought me into the company (I know, I was naive).

So I wrote the email. It was a small note. I apologized for not checking messages and explained my situation again and mentioned I would've definitely checked if I was informed that the lead dev would be away.

Another meeting was held the next day and after pleasantries the Manager started with this, "Ok so we've all seen the email and understand that this was all Angry's fault right?".

Now, we're not native English speakers and Manager doesn't really do well with grammar. I was alarmed by what he said but wasn't angry because I was pretty sure that's not what he meant. I'm sure he meant to say that "Angry feel's guilty but his actions were understandable given the circumstance" or that he forgot a "not" in there and really meant "not Angry's fault". Surely this is what he meant to say. Right?

But then the rest of the meeting went on and I was unceremoniously let go. Immediately for "failing to accomplish my tasks and costing the client 100Ks of dollars". I wasn't even given a chance to say anything else.

The meeting ended and since we were both in the office, Manager approached me with exit papers and a check (~1200 USD)--it was my month's pay. I was asked to leave that day and was told I didn't need to come back. No handovers, no knowledge transfers, not a even a documentation of open projects I was handling.

I realized I just was made the scapegoat by a management screwup that costed our clients a lot of money.

Of course, I wrote the CEO multiple emails the next couple days. I also cc'd the CTO. No response.

A couple of weeks pass, I get another job at a cool company and i promptly move on.

I write this story now because I just found out today that in 2016, Manager was let go by the company for **sexual harassment**. Apparently, he actually did it too according to friends I still had within the company.

Here's where it gets fucked up. He turns and sues the company for unlawful termination and I guess to avoid a long legal battle? the company settled. They fucking settled and handed this man 2 Million PHP (at the time about 40k USD).

2 fucking million. Life changing money around here. And he got it by being a slimy piece of shit.

The world makes no fucking sense.

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Client sends multiple emails claiming that Im delaying n work and that he has a deadline. (In 4 hours)

I checked his revised briefing and started work in hopes of finishing it under my own deadline of 3 hours.

Received another email from my client telling me that the briefing is incomplete and that he will send me the final briefing tonight -_-

What the fuck man?

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

I recently left a job after a few years of intense work and long hours. After leaving, I left a critical but fair Glassdoor review. Since then, I have received multiple emails from the CEO of my former employer asking me to remove the review and including (what I perceive to be) threats of the industry being “small” and mentioning my new manager by name.

I had seldom spoken to the CEO before these emails – a bit of small talk here and there in the office – and his notes to me contained details about personal and family struggles (as justification for poor leadership and mistreating employees?) that I thought verged on inappropriate. I had also delivered all of the feedback in my review throughout my tenure at the company – and, of course, had not received any interest from leadership in discussing my thoughts until I made them public.

What is the best way to respond here? As an attempt to diffuse the situation, I sent a kind email back acknowledging that working there was at times difficult, but also expressing my gratitude for all I learned and the opportunities I had. After that email, he again asked that I remove the review and made reference to the “small community” of the industry.

Should I remove the review? Is he really going to tell my new boss that I left a critical (but truthful) Glassdoor review? If he does, will my new boss even care, or will he see this as a weird and inappropriate overstep from my old employer?

Why is it that an issue is only critical-priority until the person who's raising the biggest fuss has to do something about it?

I was notified that a website hosted in AWS went down overnight and never came back up. I was then bombarded with email after email after email while I logged into our AWS account and poked around. I'm responsible for cloud infrastructure stuff, like VMs or virtual networking or security or whatever, not the actual applications running on said infrastructure. Once I confirmed their EC2 instance was reachable and I could login with SSH, I told them they'd have to fix their application.

They told me that they had no backend developer on their development team. I'm still getting a deluge of emails from multiple people on this team and their managers and managers' managers and so on.

"Perfectly understandable," I told them, though it was anything but. "You should probably look into obtaining one."

The emails stopped immediately. I assumed they were handling it and closed my ticket and moved on. But apparently I was wrong.

Six weeks later, the site is still down, they still have no backend dev, and I'm convinced that they were lying to me when they stressed the importance of this web app because now that it's no longer my problem, not a single person seems to care that it's still broken.

Did I tell you that X third party system needed to be updated due to that pos using flash? Yes

Did you bitch about budget constraints and finding workarounds and stuff like that? Also Yes

Did I mention that X system was crucial for people and that we were not going to be able to do anything about it if we did not allocate the time to modify that before it happened? Also Yes

Did I mentioned this on multiple occasions? Yes

Was my team also pulled out from working on the alternative before this happened? Yes

Did I send multiple emails about this, talks, meetings and documentation of me saying all of the above? You betcha

Oh well 🤡

Just read a comment on rant that stated "You’d be surprised as how disgusting people are especially in the work setting.". In regard to bathrooms. This reads true, for my current place of work

I was about to reply to that, but I thought this is worthy of a rant of its own. Allow me to quote some emails...

"We have had reports of excrement being left on toilet seats, which surely could be seen by the person responsible before they left the cubicle. "

"very poor toilet hygiene in some the ladies toilets.

Firstly, someone person should I say.... has used a toilet brush to clear a blockage in the Ladies loo nearest [removed]. They obviously couldn't unblock the toilet due to the density of the blockage and therefore.. returned the brush to it's holder full of the blockage!! "

"The phantom "snot" wiper is back and is using the back of the toilet door nearest the [removed] as a tissue! Again.. the poor Cleaner has had to clean this up... "

"Toilet paper being put in the Urinal blocking the system in [removed] and faeces being left on the toilet floor in [removed]. This goes without saying that this can't go on and it's not the cleaners job to be cleaning such messes! "

Its ever worse in our other office that contains a call centre. A lady was fired for leaving shit in the stairwells on multiple instances. She had been fired from her last role for the same thing.

There were also reports of subway subs been left in the toilet bowl.

You also find the most curious items in the waste bins (they have no lid, we're not search through them - just to make that clear) everything from half eaten sandwiches to watermelon.

I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

I am working on a webservice that some other consultants upstairs are set to consume.

Last week, monday, the consultants send multiple emails and one of them comes downstairs to find out why the service isn't working correcrly. My manager tells them in email that it is still being developed and won't be ready for ten business days.

However in the meantime the service has some barebones functionality that they can try out.

And wouldn't you know it, I get emails and visits every other day along the way asking why the service is down or doesn't function.

When is the service going to be down? Why isn't this working? Hey you need to fix this

IT'S NOT DONE YET

One of my worst WFT moments was just over 2 years ago.

A former colleague had been tasked with “upgrading” our solution for handling customer specific CSS on our platform for building newsletter emails.

He had been with us for about 5 years and ported most of the front end gui over that time from classic asp to .net and C#.

This work started in November and with a pause over dec-mid jan for high season and Christmas leave he continued.

In the beginning if mars we had the first of multiple WTF on that when I realized that his solution required a lot of special CSS or rather LESS, more than the a actual HTML for the template, and all was custom less rules that was very hard to understand.

We found that he actually never really understood how LESS worked and had tried to do things in a very backward way. Another colleague jumped in and manage to clean it up a bit so it got down to manageable levels.

Then in the end of Mars came the next bigger WTF. This is a newsletter building application. Turns out the new LESS based solution was entirely dependent on the js version of LESS and only worked when running in the browser. Guess what, the email send engine is not a browser and css classes and rules generally does not work in emails.

The new solution was impossible to integrate with the part that built and sent the emails without some very heavy rework.

Oh, and it was also completely incompatible with 12 years of old newsletters and customer templates that just did not work.

And of cause, he had not shown any of this in code reviews but rather just merged it part by part to the new version branch interleaving it with 5 months of other work.

He left the company short after.

Why isn't this ready for testing yet?

Could it be that despite multiple meetings emails and face to face conversations none of you have provided me with what I actually need?

Yes I can create you new email and SMS campaigns. But I need two little things first.
1 The template text.
2 The sign off forms from compliance

Without them I can't do shit. So stop chasing me on where we're at because I've been chasing you on this for two weeks.

This shit here is why I'm the grumpy It guy.

Had a bad day at work :( They gave me this code for some obscure streaming job and asked me to complete it. Only after 3 days did I realize that the LLD given to me was incorrect as the data model was updated. Another 2 more days, I was able to debug the code and run it successfully— I was able to parse the tables and generate the required frame but not able to stream it back to the output topic as per the LLD. That’s where I needed help but none of my emails/messages were replied to. The main guy who is pretty technical scheduled a code review session with me— I expected that I would run the code and he would spot it something I might’ve missed and why my streaming function isn’t working. Instead, what happened was that he grilled me on each and every line of the code (which had some obscure tables queried) and then got super mad at me saying “Why are we having this code review session if your code is not complete?”. I’m like bruh, you asked for it, and yes, the main parsing logic is done and I’m just having this issue in the last part. And he’s like “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”. Wtf?! I left at least 5 emails and a dozen messages. He’s like this has to go live on Monday, and I’m like Ok, I’ll work in the weekend. And he’s like “Don’t tell me all these things! You’re not doing me a favor by working on weekends! How am I to ask my colleagues to connect with you separately on Saturday/Sunday? You should have done the on the weekdays itself. What were you doing this whole week?”. Bruh, I was running the code multiple times and debugging it using print statements. All while you were ignoring my attempts to reach out to you. SMH 🤦‍♂️ I can go on and on about this whole saga.

Google terminated our Google Play Console account. Neither they give any explanation, nor they send any replies from a real human. All they send are some auto replied emails. Nothing else. No human interactions.

I mean, disabling the account for a few days is fine. But terminating permanently!! Not just that, they say that they will keep terminating accounts in the future if we create! WHAT THE FUCK! Who comes up with these shitty ideas?

Google should know, If they keep changing their policies 100 times in a month, who's gonna keep reading those bullshits over and over again?

Some of our apps got published, later got rejected for "App Description". Seriously?? For App Description?? I mean, If the app descriptions were not okay, why did you publish the app in the first place?? Not just once, but multiple times!

Should they not be a little more considerate? We developers are working hard to enrich their platform, but they don't give a fuck.

Anything we can do to get our account reactivated?

So yesterday I discussed how I am using speech to text to do approximately 50% of my rants. I am now doing a growing percentage of my outlook emails by voice as the human-computer voice interaction is pleasing and very natural. I have even named my iPhone 'little jumpshot' today.

Today I experimented with text to speech so that my rants are automatically read back to me before I send them. Some decent results.

In settings - general - accessibility you will find voice over (not recommended - be careful). Below that is Speech - speak selection or speak screen options.

Speak selection allows you to highlight text to be spoken. Too much human interaction for my purposes of walking hopefully not tripping be looking down. Using up my nine lives 😐

Below voiceover is - Speak screen - which allows you to pull down the screen with two fingers to speak what is on the screen. This will read the rant or of there are multiple rants on the screen it will read those as well.

It works but it will take a bit of getting used to. It also requires a few clicks here and there.

My goal is to interact with devRant fluidly 100% by voice. Just talking to 'little jumpshot' and him creating and posting all of my rants and reading all the other rants developers post.

For a few days experimenting I am satisfied with the progress but there is a long way to go.

Hopefully, in the end, this may help some people. Any ideas are very welcome.

My family members don’t seem to understand that you can attach multiple photos to an email, so they send them one by one, even if that means 10 emails 🙄

A random story that just popped back into my head while reading another rant:

Long ago, we developed our own webmail platform at the request of clients. After it was finished, it was never updated and eventually turned into an outdated insecure steaming pile of crap. Up until ~2015, it looked like the first iteration of AOL Mail from the 1990s (and it functioned as such too.) Years, we decided to sunset the platform, and allotted 6-months or so to transition all the active users off the platform and over to an alternative email provider. We had to call each client multiple times and send multiple emails with a deadline detailing when the service would be shut down, and we'd explain that if they didn't transition over to a new service and transfer all their emails before that date, then the emails would be lost forever. Lo and behold, a handful of clients ignored our repeated contact attempts, and we shut down their email service (as we told them that we would.) Of course, they called screaming and panicking "OUR EMAIL IS DOWN OUR EMAIL IS DOWN WE'RE LOSING MONEY FIX IT NOW!!!!," and we told them "We attempted to contact you multiple times, and you neglected to return our numerous calls or emails. We're happy to help you transition your old email addresses to this new provider, but because you neglected to follow the cushy deadline we provided you, all of your emails are gone."

Of course, they denied having ever received our calls/emails, and we'd have to provide them with our outgoing call recordings to prove that we did in fact contact them multiple times. Then they'd blame the mishap on their secretary, who would blame it on the intern, who would blame it on the IT guy, who would blame it on the janitor, and so on and so forth.

Moral of the story: always keep outgoing call recordings when you're sunsetting a product.

I have multiple contenders ;)

Contender one:

A program used to sort emails.

We was in the process of moving from lotus notes to exchange and needed a way route emails to the right server internally.

Solution, a qmail to receive all emails, a script running by cron every minute to read the emails, check the recipient name to a list and resending to the right server. The script was written in php :P since that was the only way we at the time had to read an email into an object, it was run just like any other shell script :D

Contender two:

A multi threaded mail sender that fetch email addresses and content from a database and posted them through qmail using background execution and pipes to get the result back and then update the database, written in bash script.

Contender three:

A c program used in a similar way as in one but this time using dial up and uucp to fetch email and then drop these either into lotus notes or into a bbs for our customers to give them an email address. This was around 1993, so not to many isp’s offered email and not to many had internet anyway, dial up bbs was much more common.

Today's shit list, compiled from multiple random apps:

* Your subscription renews without an email in advance (no time to cancel)

* Your chat bot asks me twenty questions about why I want to cancel my membership, then sends me to a live agent, who asks me the same damn questions.

* Your app emails me my password in plain text

* Meeting agenda squashed by execs:
"We don't talk about _____, but we're committed to transparency."

I swear I get multiple emails every week from a person who's forgotten their password but instead insists our software is broken. "Account Broken, Can't Login!"

I've started just replying to these emails without even checking their accounts anymore -- or even opening up the system.

I'll say, "I'm sorry to hear that! I've looked into your account and it should work now."

I always get a reply back "THANKS! It works great now!"

Then I facepalm.

!rant
After a couple of depressing weeks with no progress on my projects and seeing reject emails one after the other, it feels cathartic to see some real momentum on my projects and finally scheduling telephonic interviews with multiple recruiters.
When it rains, it pours, but when it shines, you also get rainbows. :)
Fall is coming, the colors are changing.

I am not even at our office yet the PM already sent us multiple emails asking us to do trivial stuff like update excel sheets, file reports, etc... WTF!? Can't you fucking wait till I get to work!?

Life lesson learned:
Despite good intentions, don't overengineer the front-end, when time is heavily constrained and the release is scheduled and is communicated to media outlets immediately after.

A broken release just makes the client send around multiple emails per minute with tens of people in CC.

Shit happens... at least it was a bargain for them.

Learning information security yet again after doing multiple information security things for company and manager is pushing to do it saying "due immediately" and they're after sending "a number of emails" (it's due in a month and they sent 1 email).
Annoying that these things must be done again and again just because someone in sales let something slip or left their journal behind like a dumb dumb. It's not like I'm never off-site with my stuff or I interact with customer(s) yet

An ex-colleague is still receiving company documents regarding his old company car and he contacted my company multiple times to correct it.

It includes 7 fines & 2 insurance documents.

And now the person responsible for fleet management is frustrated that his emails are no longer polite...🤡

I started working for a startup as Server Administrator/ System Integrator beside university to get some dollars with easy work and nice people.
((I Know two of the C*Os so I got a had feeling with this. Besides the upcoming story I'm still really happy with my position and career chances here. God bless my Department which has the most funny/rude guys, love you.))

tl;dr:
Guy fakes his Skillset and fuckup whole department, can´t do most of his basic tasks. I had my first and hopefully last interaction with this bastard.

Heres how everything started:
I was more and more involved in the leading processes and decisions.

Heard about a story where and why the whole dev-department was kicked out of his position because they were crappy developers. And cant just believe the stories they told me about the former Dev-Lead

Now I met the former "Development Lead"
I was brought in because we in the IT wondered why he would like to share his local machine password with colleges. After some questions he came out with the Reason.
He is doing home-office for some days a week now and wants his colleges to be able to start his "software". (already confused by that)

The "better IT-guy" in me offered help for automatic deployment CI/CD stuff so that they can use it as an inhouse service.

BIG OOF incoming:
"The code is not in git because I wanted to clean it up before"
"My IDE is the only place where my PHP crap work is running"
"The 'PHP-software' is to complex for this"

My Lead and I were completely speechless,
I understand the decision to kick this "dev-Lead" from the lead position down to a code monkey/ script kid.

Now I´m thinking about getting my Hands on the Lead position after my exams because if such bastards with no clue about basic stuff, no clue about leading, no clue about ci/cd, no clue about generic software stuff get the job I would easily be the "good IT-guy" with more responsibility/ skill.

Now I sit here, hate people that fake their skills and set back work of colleges for multiple months and never asked for help or advice.
And the little "Bastard Operator from Hell" in my just wants to delete all his files, emails account during a migration to completely demotivate the person who failed to be responsible for a team nor their projects.

/rambling

Arghhh!

Okay, so have just been having a play with Mailgun's webhook functionality (a client finally has a decent use for these).

I setup a test endpoint that sends a mail via Mailgun and then handles the POST data too. It emails myself the raw POST request response from Mailgun when I open the email. Mailgun fire an event their end when they detect the message has been opened.

All is good apart from Mailgun are posting multiple requests for each event, which is annoying.

After an hour messing around and getting annoyed I have a complete face palm moment.

In my test script Mailgun is called is send my notification email! So I'm creating multiple events for the same test message.

i.e. send original message, receive post back from Mailgun to my endpoint, my script then emails me the result using Mailgun. The latter itself generates its own events again.

Sooooo stupid of me to not notice something so obvious :(

So I found a bug in Azure's alerting platform that means we cannot use response time as a condition.
A month down the line after having raised a support ticket, recreated the bug multiple times in different resources, being told a fix had been made, bouncing emails around to supervisors and having the case moved to other people they finally have come back to me saying they have the real fix.

Done with it

Bought fucking nvidia gpu to test speed of some fucking machine learning models that generate speech.

6 hours wasted already for installing fucking dependencies
cuda, fucking tensorflow gpu, bezel and other shit

Fucking resetting password to download deb with cudnn,

really ??????? fucking emails are not delivered to my fucking mailbox

After mass click of send email and multiple account ban and unban I figured out I should login to nvidia website and then allow access to fucking developer every time I want to log in there - fuck shit

Uninstalling everything now looking for fucking compatible versions between software.

10 years in this business still fucking installation of dependencies is most difficult part

Fucking corporate business and their shitty installation instructions to fuck up peoples lives and switch them to the cloud.

Same was with fucking kubernetes

Fucking software dependency hell

It’s worse then ever before.

Fuck ....

My colleague actually uses multiple email addresses that has different purposes. E.g. one email for travels, one email for work, one email for family, one email for other projects, one email for payments, etc.

I've yet to show him how emails nowadays can help label and sort them by nature.

Client says I'm hard to get ahold of.

I left three messages and multiple emails. Fucking answer your gah damned phone so I can tell you how hard it was to get ahold of you!

I swear, if it wasn't for devRant, I'd lose my shit today. Thank you, @dfox.

What my ADHD brain looks like to an outsider:

My media player doesn't support ordered chapters, so now I have FreshRSS running on my VPS.

The actual mental process:

> MPC-BE doesn't support ordered chapters with the built-in filters
> I should install the third-party LAV Filters
> Not available on Scoop and I'm never touching Chocolatey again
> I wish I had Linux on this PC instead of Windows, so I could have a proper package manager to handle updates, but I digress
> Sure would be nice if I could find a way to know when this updates.
> Actually, tracking versions for multiple GitHub repos would be really nice.
> I would just subscribe but my email inbox is a mess already and I'd probably fail to see the emails
> GitHub Release pages have their own Atom feeds!
> I don't currently use any feed readers
> Maybe I should self-host a feed reader
> Set up FreshRSS Docker container on my server
> Actually installed the LAV Filters to solve the original problem.

What email service are you using for your domains? I used zoho for a while, but those assholes keep randomly locking my accounts (an email always activates those again, but fuck knows how much emails I missed during not noticing it) - thought about going with the general hype of Tutanota around here, but it seems like it doesn't really support multiple custom domain mailboxes? Also tried just now msgsafe.io - it seems fine, but the way it handles multiple domain mailboxes is just disgusting, because it just throws them all together and you have to "filter" to get mails from only one domain.

When sales throws you under a bus because you never answer emails promptly about their pet project, yet multiple emails to them asking for a specification for that project go unanswered. When I mentioned the multiple emails the vp of company advised that they do not have the time for trivial stuff such as emails.

How do you deal with multiple git identities?

Im working fulltime + freelancing + working on my own projects and all of them are on different gitlab emails. It was very annoying to keep remembering to set my git email to a proper one each time I switch to work on another project.

Right now I came up with something easier:

I started using just 1 gitlab profile (personal one) and added my both company e-mails as secondary emails to my personal gitlab profile.

This way I can keep my git identity the same (personal e-mail address) and if I push to company1 repo or company2 repo the commit author e-mail addres is shown email@company1.com and email@company2.com as these emails are given access to private repos and they are added to my personal gitlab account.

Just wondering if these companies will see my commits to other repos by viewing my personal gitlab profile or no? Or if there is an easier way to handle multiple git identities without having to switch between them each time I open another project and want to push some commits.

Hey, anyone have experience with email with encryption?

I need to setup TLS for emails for all devices on premises. The printer and other devices does not support TLS.

I'm thinking i could use local exchange server that forwards to our office 365, as we use outlook for the domain. But i would rather use some linux solution.

We have multiple ip's we might send from.

!rant

Someone posted a link to a 30-day-security-challenge here on devRant some time ago and I just thought well, why not try to migrate away from the big companies - I've been using OneDrive as my only cloudstorage since the time when it was called SkyDrive and I've been hosting my Emails at outlook (via Live Custom Domains, a service that does not even exist anymore) for about 8 years now. Since I've always been lazy and since exchange activesync is a great feature if you have multiple calendars and want to sync them and your contacts to several devices I never tried to switch but now I am half done with migrating my data to my own nextcloud installation and my emails to my own mail server - since I don't want to loose the exchange functionality I am also setting up Z-Push and oh boy, this thing is bitching around but my webmail is already nicely integrated into nextcloud, IMAP / SMTP is up, configured and secured (still have to mess around with spamassassin as this email adress is floating around the web for about 10 years now). The only things to do is to get Z-Push work with STARTTLS and the card/caldav backend running and then the basic setup should be done.

I am just wondering if someone could hand me over a guide on how to sign / encrypt emails (GPG?)