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Search - "need beers"
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CS graduates that have never gone beyond "Hello World", fuck college and it's "system".
So the actual victims of the story are friends of mine, CS colleagues, but I can't help but share as the existence of code freeloaders enfuriates me.
At college in order to graduate you need to present a project in form of a thesis a side from your actual thesis, there is a shortage of pre-approved projects and everyone wants one.
A talented friend of mine who has many years of programming experience got in one with another friend of mine and a lady who I've never seen before. One Saturday night my friend and I were having some beers at a local bar and his phone didn't stop beeping so I jokingly said:
"Bro, tell your girl you need some space", he laughed and explained it was the chick from her project having some "issues" with node.
"So? Tell her to google it, it's Saturday night", he explained the girl has never coded before even though she's about to graduate so she had take it upon herself to pressure him to finish ASAP so she can graduate and get an already agreed position at the federal energy commission... As dev!
I've seen my bud in a lot of dumb calls with said chick trying to explain how you CAN'T COMPILE THE NODE WEBSERVER TO A .EXE!
It frustrated me how such an idiot can go through a CS major buying homeworks and getting low self-esteem geeks to code for her. Then I realized that as an aspiring InfoSec guy, lazy idiots coding is good for business.8 -
I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.
Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.
However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.
The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.
I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.
Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.
What a fucking asshole.
So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.4 -
New job surprise: I will inherit a 900k lines of php code from a contractor dev shop. It is the company erp web app.
It has no version control, tests, architecture or configuration management of any kind.
There are just 1800 bug ridden files with almost no comments in a directory with lots of code duplication.
Also just learned that the contractor was paid a lot monthly for over 2 years for this monster.
I will need a raise quickly. At least management understands that I will need a couple of months to get a semblance of order in this madness.
And to you contractor I have your address and i'll try to restraint myself from vandalizing your house but I can't make any promises.
And fellow developers send help or beers or come and join me to teach this bastard a lesson.5 -
It's so fucking hot today, just seriously fucking rediculous. Thinking of taking the laptop to code at the beer garden - will be the only way to get any productivity done.
Thoughts?5 -
procrastinating by getting drunk since 11:00 AM, and writing specs for my (hypothetical) language/os/platform.
feeling righteous retribution because the client made me be stressed for 3 hours due to an issue that THEY caused but for 3 hours the only info I had was "there's a critical blocker issue and we're convinced YOU caused it"
well... no... i did NOT cause the fact that you UPGRADED PHP DURING THE WEEKEND BEFORE MONDAY'S PRESENTATION TO CLIENT (while waiting for an urgent commit from me).
seriously.
also, germans. i've heard many times from other people that they're... basically racist towards us (slavic nations), thinking of us as untermensch, coal-miner peons, but I didn't realize their passive-aggressive covertly smug demanding attitude is due to this, I just assumed it's a reaction to me being incompetent.
so yesterday when we finished the call (in preparation for which I tried to switch to their "client demonstration" branch since that's where the error was, and I wanted a headstart on fixing it, ended up in a place that my today's whole-day task should be "rebuilding the DB into working condition", because there's about 10 "core" sql scripts in two different folders, which need to be run (in a very specific order, of course, which readme tells you, but what it tells you has been outdated at least for 3 months, of course), and
...THE MAIN CORE SCRIPT THAT IS THE FIRST TO RUN, THAT CREATES THE DB schema, HAS THREE SYNTAX-LEVEL typos which fail it mid-way...
...the joys of continuous deployment via scripts, I guess? I would love to challenge any person from them to screenshare to me, manual deployment of the current version from zero, and I would be willing to give the person 20% of my monthly salary if they would be able to do it within 20 minutes.
but... well...
the point is, i should be doing not entirely bullshit stuff.
but yesterday's 6 hours of being in "at full attention because it seems we fucked up" totally convinced me, that today I'm taking a break.
So I'm gonna go buy another 3 beers and continue writing the specs of my dream language/os/platform.19 -
What a week!!
Seriously exhausted. Crunch time to launch a brand new service... Pulling all nighters and stress.
Looking forward to having many beers with the boss to celebrate once it's a done and dusted. -
How resource calculations for software services like code analysis, monitoring, etc are done:
Opening fridge, putting all the beer one can find in it.
Opening the necessary tools, e.g Excel, Accounting software, ....
Drinking the first beer.
Starting to aggregate the monthly costs - cause you can never trust the reports written by someone else...
First beer poof.
Looking at the monthly cost, adding columns "Intended use", "Actual usage pattern", "Usage factor"...
Opening next beer...
Usage factor is btw a factor of 0.1 ... 1.0 - to give an estimate how much the products feature are actually used, for further analysis if the invest is justified or not...
Oh. Another half bottle gone...
Filling in the columns...
Oh. Bottle empty and the next one toooooooooooooooo...
*burping*
*cracking finger joints*
Now let's get to the sad part...
Next worksheet, adding infrastructure costs...
Cost and description as columns.
Hehe. Column sounds like gollum.
Another beer...
Ugh. Need the paper reports, manually typing off things for stuff that was e.g. tax deductible.
Many beers die during this task. Poor little beers, dying for such an boring and mundane task...
SUM is a real useful function. I don't think I can add numbers anymore.
Now we can add another sheet.
Hehe. Sheet sounds like shit. And yes, everything in this file is shit.
Summing up costs from both sheets and including the cost factor from 1
... Beeeeeeeer Beeeeer beer we need more beer here... Beer beer beer...
Where was I. Oh yeah. Cost factorization total vs effective.
Why do I want to get even more drunk.
Oh yeah. Most software is completely underused and the costs aren't justified.
Let's add some colored highlighting ...
Uuuuh. ,Too much red. Better change the highlights.
Too much red.
More beer.
Don't give a fuck.
Hm.
Time for some whiskey.
What else is there to do....
Oh yeah.
Diagrams.
The bloody wankers from accounting need diagrams as numbers are too boring.
Not that everything in accounting is boring, no matter how much you paint colors on it... *sigh*
Hm. More whiskey...
Hehe. Whiskey rhymes with frisky.
Uff. Now just need to write mail. Mail mail mail....
"Copy paste the last mail from last month"
Hm.
Ah.
*sipping whiskey*
Spell check extension - to the rescue.
Thesaurus *burps*.
Let's change a few words here and there... Maybe another paragraph there.
Uh....
Trying to attach file...
*fucking mouse is pretty constantly crashing into empty beer bottles*
Done.
Damn.
Need to press send button.
*Creating mess on the desk by just randomly crashing the beer bottles*
Done.
*Pressing computers power button*
Mwahahahaha. No mouse needed.
*regretting to stand up too quickly, nearly barfing on the floor*
Couch ... Where Couch...
After hitting several doors, frames and other stuff, the glorious mission ended successfully with a most graciously executed gut buster on the couch.
(Regretting next morning to have emptied two 6 packs and a few glasses of whiskey) -
!Rant
Tldr: great spike to solve deployment problem may be a wasted effort.
Deployments of an ancient electron application need to be done in CodeDeploy to deploy the latest build. Customer hour restrictions cause this to be done only after midnight, and manually checked.
The whole team knows this is the wrong method of deployment and that there are many other operational problems with the project.
A few other senior team members get together and decide to spike out a way to use electron auto-deployment to accomplish this without using code-deploy at all.
After a shallow dive into this subject, we all get pulled aside to handle a change in another part of the software ecosystem. It happens. We leave the spike behind.
A junior-intermediate developer on the team pics the project up and gets a good spike going in a day and a half! We are all high fives and beers. This is Friday.
By Monday there is a pull request in for code review and it looks solid. Seems like it will make deployments a lot better.
Preparing the last deployment (hopefully) with CodeDeploy ever...
Marketing team members inform us that they are running an add system on the customer devices and to do it they are using Linux.
The current application being deployed is using Windows 10 (yeah, another problem).
They say they have made plans to move our application over to Linux. This means we may not be able to launch the junior devs great spike and the old deployment method may stay for the time being.
Meetings soon to find out how all of this will hash out.
End of rant. I hope I'm doing this right