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preface: I'm fucking exhausted and angry.
Why does everyone assume I know how to do frontend?
Why am I always the design girl?
Why?
You hire me to do backend. STOP GIVING ME FRONTEND DESIGN CRAP. I HATE IT.
AND STOP GODDAMN YELLING AT ME FOR NOT MAKING SOMETHING RESPONSIVE.
I DON'T KNOW HOW.
yes i can learn, but I CAN'T FUCKING PICK UP A SKILL LIKE THAT IN A DAY. Also, I fucking hate it.
STICK IT UP YOUR (min-width: 1400px) ASS.
But seriously, I've spent 13 hours today figuring out completely new things (webpack, susy, express.js, cloudinary, responsive best practices, more webpack) because the boss is in panic-mode (his preferred state) and wants this project released last monday.
guess what? it isn't done.
because i still don't know how to do everything. and ofc there's nobody to ask because there never fucking is.
Seriously, boss-man. hire a fucking designer, and stop being an illiterate sales goon while you're at it. ffs.54 -
continued…
I'm In Canada. A woke HR lady hires an African guy despite him plagiarizing code and lying through an interview. First day he surfs soccer websites so I confront it and HR lady basically calls me a racist and to watch my back.
A second African new-hire comes into the office today and he seems quite capable in an area of specialization for our team. So I ask if we can have him on our team because he has skills. The exec decides to look at the costing for him and goes, "HOLY SHIT WHY ARE WE PAYING ANYONE THAT MUCH?" She looks at the résumé of the new guy and finds out that he is only at intermediate level in his specialization. So I say, "It could be worse. The other guy flat out lied through his interview and he got hired anyway." I forward the emails where I recommended against hiring the other guy and why.
My exec, who is a company stakeholder, opens the pricing list for recent hires. It is obvious that if you are not not white you get paid way above market value for your skill level. Exec is pissed off on a level I never knew was possible.
We make a call from the board room only to find out that the head of HR (also an executive) is driving this. My exec tells me to give her the room. The yelling was so loud everyone could hear what was said from outside the boardroom. At one point the HR lady says, "Just because we could get them cheaper doesn't mean that we should… We pay that much because it is 'the right thing to do'." My executive goes completely silent for a few seconds then in a super aggressive way says.
"…I am going to have your FUCKING head for this. Then I will make sure that you NEVER get a job in HR again for the rest of my natural life. ONLY ONE of us will survive this. YOU are the one pissing away profit. So get ready because I'm going to drown you and your team like a bag full of unwanted puppies." Then she hung up the Polycom. She came out about a minute later and kicked the office manager out of his office and sat there all day making calls and sending emails.
https://devrant.com/rants/2337768/...33 -
On the feedback form of a new app I started using, I gave several suggestions of features I'd really like to have. As a joke, number 6 was "hire me and Ill write them".
They didn't take it as a joke. Im now 3/4 of the way through their hiring process and they like me the best of all applicants.
9 -
Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.15 -
So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.
Title: Senior Software Engineer
Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build
Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!
Title: Dev Manager
Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.
Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request
Title: Product / Product Manager
Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop
Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them
Title: Program Lead / Product Owner
Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)
Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists
Title: Director of Software Engineering
Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)
Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen9 -
So... This company was in trouble. They hire me to help fix things and build this nice new stack to get rid of their old legacy monster application.
I'm there for three weeks when one of their top investors storms in. Apparently they are turning less profit than they told me during my interview. (Yeah, it is one of the things I always ask, even thought I don't always get an answer).
So this investor/shareholder guy starts on this motivation speech which is basically a veiled threat that "we" need to do better.
Obviously he doesn't know anyone in the room other than the boss. And it was apparent, at least to me, he also has 0% knowledge of anything related to software development. The boss doesn't look to happy about having to let this happen.
Then the guy turns to me. He points his finger at me and demands to know how failing so badly makes me feel...
So I answered truthfully... "I've only been here for three weeks, so I don't think I've been failing too much, yet. Now, how long did you say you've been throwing money at this failure without getting the return you wanted?" Emphasizing the "you" by pointing right back at him.
That doesn't shut the guy up, but he does bring his "motivational" speech to a rapid close.
He doesn't bother saying goodbye when he stormed out again, not even to the boss, who looks a lot happier at this point.
Apparently the guy pulled this stunt every couple of months (or weeks, if he was bored enough). After this encounter, he apparently had enough of trying to "motivate" us developers. We I didn't see him again in the 2 years I worked with the company after that.
I got a pay raise the month after. Apparently that was totally unrelated to this incident... 😙🎵11 -
This is how I feel most of my client proposal start:
* It's simple, I'd like to re-invent <the wheel>.
* All I want to do is use <rocketship engine> on <old typewriter>.
* I'm too cheap to hire a full-time < DBA, DevOps engineer, development team>. Can I pay you pennies?
* I'm poor and broke, can you do this for free?
* I'd like to <commit illegal act> and be <legal compliant standard>.
* I heard it was possible to <fly 30 people to the moon> using <Ford Model-T>. Please do this for us.
* I <sold my house>, but now <I'm locked out by the new owners>. Please help.11 -
> New hire in company
> Uses white theme in IDE
> Sits next to me
> Get blind everytime when turning head left 😭13 -
Inspired by @h3ll, this is a combination of current and former coworkers:
Awkward Wizard:
This guy has the social skills of a microwaved dog turd. He is a genius, but working with him is about as uncomfortable as sticking a grill skewer in your eye and twisting it repeatedly until close of business. He laughs at inappropriate times, and every time he does, an unborn child tears its own ears off. He explains things in a way that only himself and Satan understand, then talks to you like you're a child when you don't follow his logic. He is the guy you hide when the CEO is around. His code is immaculate.
Backstab McGillacutty:
This bowl of bile is the son of a bitch that takes credit for everybody else's work. When you do something good, he was miraculously involved, but when you mess up, this twat is the dicknose that brings it up in retrospective and calls you out by name to the boss. You can usually find these guys talking shit about the CTO, until the boss quits. Then they buddy up with the CTO and become a Joel Osteen-esque evangelist for everything the CTO wants in a shitty, underhanded attempt to climb the ladder. Fuck this guy.
Professor Fuckwaffle:
This coworker used to teach Computer Science classes. Their resume is amazing, and they can speak to the most complex of design principles. This is the shitstain that you hire because of their skill and knowledge only to find out that ol' fuckwaffle can't apply the shit they spout to save their wretched lives. You'll spend more time listening to fuckwaffle lecture than you will reviewing their code (because they cant fucking write any!) You know the saying, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach? Yeah, that shit was written for Fuckwaffle.
Last but not least:
Scrumdumb:
This guy isn't even a coder. This guy is worse than the the scum you pour out of the bottom of a slow-cooker that you forgot to wash last time you made chicken. He's a non-technical PM. You know the type, right? He usually says "cloud infrastructure," "paradigm," "algorithm," "SDLC," etc but has no grasp of any of them. He often opens his dumpster to spout off something like "You can just create a new class for that" while talking about HTML. I won't waste any more breath on Scrumdumb, he already creates enough work for me.3 -
Dear Indian Companies,
Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!
6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...
A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"
I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...
Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.
So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!
Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?
And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!
When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...
And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.11 -
DO NOT let employers demoralize you into staying with the company.
I've been with this one company for about 2 years. Everything was great, despite being underpaid, and having a lot of responsibility (I was the only front-end developer maintaining 4 big eCommerce sites).
One day about 2 months ago, I got a better offer. Better pay, more freedom, and way less stress (Customers screaming in your ear vs. no customers at all).
I talked to my team lead since I wanted my company to have a fair chance to counteroffer - I was fairly comfortable after all, and I felt like it would be a nice gesture.
If my team lead had just said "No, sorry, we can't counter that offer", there's a big chance that I would have stayed with them anyway. Instead, I got a fairly uncomfortable and personal rant thrown back at me.
He basically said that I should be happy with my salary, that he didn't feel like I had much responsibility, and that "I wasn't the type of person companies would hire for that salary".
He ended by saying I might as well stay, as there was no going back if the new place didn't work out - basically trying to tempt me with job security.
I told him that I would think about it. The worst part is that I actually did, since his rant really made me feel somewhat worthless as a developer. Luckily I came to my senses, and sent my resignation the next day.
I talked to an old coworker today, and they are still unable to find a developer who wants to take the job. I see that as justice :)
tl;dr: If a company tries to make you stay by demoralizing you - Run.17 -
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.20 -
!rant
So my employer just offered me a 57% raise out of the blue!
Last Friday, I got a meeting invite from the CEO (its a small 15 person company, so he looks after most of the management stuff) titled "{{myname}} - Salary Review". No agenda there. I was fuckin scared that maybe my salary will be chopped short due to the virus and shit. They recently let go of one guy in my team, and are about to hire two new guys. Also, my last raise was this January. So I didn't think any good could come out of this meeting.
I joined the zoom and he asked if I was happy with the current salary. I said "yes" like an idiot, but added that the prices in my country are rising a lot. He made smalltalk on costs of groceries and Corona and my family, and that was it. 57%.
I was smiling like a dumbass at the end of the meeting. This guy is like the Hyman Roth of this business.15 -
Boss - so how long will this transport booking app take, native android and iOS ....plus backend, plus localization, plus live location tracking, blah blah.
Me - at least 4 months, or more
Boss - HOW can an app take MONTHS? That is totally unacceptable, it’s not gonna work this way, blah blah. I’m giving u 2 months, tops. No project should take more than 2 months.
—
Next app,
Boss - so this new e-commerce app needs to be made, u have api. How long?
Me - 2 months coz ——-
Boss - WHATTTTT!!!??? 2 months for an APP!!???? What is this? Not gonna work this way, you should make apps in a week. Other people make apps in a week.
Then fucking hire those other people. Lol.6 -
Got fired earlier today.... I had a feeling it was coming but was hoping it wouldn’t.
I really liked the job and the work. It was difficult for me at times because the job demanded medium to advanced linux skills and knowledge for just about every issue. And I’m still a complete newbie to Linux. But I was learning new things constantly because it was a challenge.
But they said that my skills weren’t up to snuff for them or their clients, so instead of investing in training they let me go. I’m sure there’s big company politics at play and someone (or multiple people) higher up would probably rather just hire someone that already had the skillset they were looking for than invest time and money into training.
I don’t wish them any ill will. Even though I’m thoroughly pissed at the situation I’m in now.
I believe that I was a really engaged employee and driven to learn and strived to be better than I was, but I guess that didn’t matter. Or maybe it just didn’t matter enough...14 -
New hire commit:
Message: Visual update
Gitlab: Showing 27 changed files with 21628 additions and 12296 deletions
Do I kill him before or after teaching him?15 -
The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.
*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"
Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.4 -
I realize now I probably shouldn't have called out my manger's bullshit if I wanted to keep my job. We were told to work a Sunday and our PO called it a "Smack-a-thon."
I said, "No let's not use stupid names. Let's call things what they are. This is a management failure Sunday."
That was during new hire lunch, in front of my manager.
I worked the first Sunday. I refused to work the second one. I've also been refusing to work over 45 hours a week.
So I guess I could have seen it coming. My manager didn't even have the gums to do it himself. He had the HR lady do it, while I was working remote from home. She told me it wasn't a 9 to 5 shop and that people there are expected to work long hours (People on my team are working 80+ a week for several months).
I took the train in to get my stuff. No one was there. My computer already gone. Couldn't even say "Go fuck yourself to anybody."
So I feel better now. I haven't taken a day of since I started in February, so it's time for some vacation and an unemployment check.
It was a really terrible job, and terribly mismanaged. I'm glad I stood my ground and knew what I was worth. I wish my co-workers had done the same.
I should have tried to start a union.8 -
Friday morning, taking a sip of coffee reading mails. (nb: I started the job on Monday, and this is my very first job excepted internship)
*wild manager appears* : come with with me a second.
Me: wtf is that
Him: close the door
Me: shit what did I do
Him: so we're closing this really big deal with a big client/investor
Me: ok cool, what is the point to tell me that ?
Him: remember when we discussed your salary and we couldn't afford to hire you as high as you wanted ?
Me:... Yes ?
Him: well now we can
Me, starting to understand: ... And ?
Him: well your new salary is higher than what you asked in interview
And that's how I got a 8% raise after 4 days at my first job :')6 -
I was recently hired as a lead devops to a giant shit show. The CTO said he needs someone to do things correctly instead of quickly. This is a conversation I just had this morning
HR: We want you to interview a potential new DevOps engineer
ME: okay, when?
HR: Tomorrow
ME: I won't be able to create interview tests and materials for tomorrow. How's next week
HR: This hire is urgent! It has to be tomorrow
ME: Then you'll have to do the interview without me
HR: We need you to interview them because we've had a few bad hires in the past that we don't want to repeat
ME: The best way to filter out bad hires is with technical tests, which will take time to develop. I can be ready by next week.
HR: We can't give you a weeks notice for each hire, we are in urgent need for more devops.
ME: ...14 -
Hi everyone, I'm new here but I liked the posts so I thought I'd chip in. Here's a picture of my home office.
I'm currently brushing up on SQL and Java in my internship while I await graduation at the end of the year. Java>C# IMO. C++ is my first love but nobody wants to hire for it anymore.
To everyone who's worked in Java, Eclipse or Intellij IDEA and why? (I mostly use Eclipse because the internship requires it).
I hope to have fun here, so please give me a warm welcome or a rant.
22 -
So I'm a entry level female Developer and I started a contract to hire position in July. Its my first job as a developer and I love almost everything about it. Except this..., there is a Senior Female Developer on my team who hates me and isn't shy about it. She goes for the throat man! She magnifies any mistake I make, hell she calls me out on things that people would consider positive. In sprint planning this week she got mad at me for pulling tasks from the backlog after finishing mine early. I've tried to do everything I could to make her like me. I patiently listen when she goes on and on about her damn cats, kids, sports, ah everything, and she is a non stop talker.
Her main problem with me, so she tells the head of engineering, is that I bug her too much. I almost laughed when I heard this was her main issue with me! Sure, I asked her the normal amount of newbie questions but it's not like I don't know how to read code or google! In fact I started avoiding talking to her about a month ago because she was so rude to me. Now getting hired on full time comes down to whether or not she can stand me still if I am working on another team. I'm so frustrated because it's impossible to prove my worth to this company with this crazy lady making me look bad. I have no problems with anyone else at work. In fact a lot of us have become good friends. No one understands why she hates me so much. It feels like middle school all over again.
On top of that there is an even newer hire who she is supposed to help bring on to the team, but because of her horrible management skills, I have become his defecto mentor for learning the project, as well as the technologies we use. The stress of being in an uncertain contract to hire position + tyrant coworker + helping the new guy + still learning and having my own work to do has been overwhelming! I don't know what to do other than hope that she doesn't try to sabotage me moving to a new team.29 -
Part of the new hire process was all salaried employees had to work all hourly position jobs for a day (over a several week period, not all in one day) to really understand what we do.
I once hazed a new network admin who was working in the call center and I sent his station a pop-up message:
“Ha! Fire me will you!! I planted this virus and if you don’t enter the password in 60 seconds I will erase the database.” The pop-up had a counter counting down from 60.
This was over the lunch hour, so all the supervisors and managers were away and ‘Mark’ in a panic ran into our office (I was hiding under my desk)
Mark: GUYS!!...GUYS!!!....OMG!….Where the frack is everybody?!!!”
He runs out.
I peek out the door window and about a second later he’s running down the hall with one of the vice presidents. Mark shows the VP the message, VP looks over at our office, sees me…laughs and walks back to his office (not saying much to Mark).
Mark not knowing what’s going on watches the counter…3...2…1….
”Just kidding. Welcome to the company!”
Ahhh…the repeated sounds of “You son of a -bleep-!!” never sounded so sweet.1 -
My company decided to hire a new director at the electronics shop. There are certain hours when we have a lot of clients. So the guy had to man a cash register.
Client: I need 2 kilo resistors
The client obviously needed resistors of two kiloohms.
The director rushed out to the warehouse and came back with 2 kilograms of resistors to the gram
How can someone be so retarded! ¿4 -
Today @ 4pm:
New dev: I need help with this issue, i've been stuck on it all day.
Me: ok let's look ...... ok, and did you try google this?
New dev: ... no
Me: ... why?
New dev: well this is clearly my issue, why would I google it? I only google for things I don't know
Me: ... ok ... we'll do you know what this bug is then?
New dev: haha ok, fair point, I'll give that a try. Thanks for the tip.
Seriously, should I be worried? I feel worried13 -
On today's episode of Fucked Up Office Drama-Rama: useless project manager finally gets her desired outcome after 6 months of whining to her boss about a team member being "difficult to work with". She has only been with us for a year and is the only one that has had any "issues" with him, and the problem has simply been that he has called her out when her lack of planning, lack of effort, lack of common sense and lack of technical understanding has caused the team extra work and pressure. His contract gets terminated, she stays on, and on top of it all she's managed to hire a replacement without consulting anyone and therefore has the complete wrong skills compared to what we need. We needed someone with frontend skills, she decided on a senior backend / architect arrogant fuck that after only a few weeks is already showing us it's not going to be fun.
Fuck my life. Time to look for a new client.5 -
All web developers should support up to IE9 without any problems.
Why? Because in Korea, it is normal.
Every person uses that damn Win7, which has either IE9 or IE10. Without IE support, no one will browse your webpage.
Now you would ask us, why don't you use other modern browsers?
We would then ask you, why would you install a new browser that is
1. Buggy
2. Heavy
3. Takes up ram
4. Has so many features
when you have an awesome minimalistic browser that is preinstalled, and works in all Windows? No thanks.
So, if you put a message saying you will soon drop support of IE, it means that you won't target Korea. Just after the support drop, there won't be traffic to your web site.
So what is the point of this rant?
1. We love IE. Lol
2. IE is lightweight, minimalistic, and the fastest browser in the world.
3. All websites should NOT drop support for IE.
4. We don't care whether web devs will have a hard time. We just think websites are built with Wix and Wordpress, and they work in IE, meaning, IE support is the number one priority.
5. If you ever start a business in Korea, and has a website, make sure to hire an senior Korean web dev who has worked with IE for a long time.
6. Here is the tl;dr
Hate us. Period.24 -
Previous developers read entire result of a SELECT into array of arrays.
Then used that later on in the following fashion.
print "name: " + result[row][17]
print "address: " + result[row][23]
...
without any description whatsoever what the numbers mean.
And it's here "result" and "row", in the actual code it was "arr" and "ii".
And these arrays were "public static" used everywhere, but initialized only at few places, so if you went onto wrong screen or if there was a phone call that kicked the app out it crashed.
But real fun began when people started changing queries and altering tables...
I seriously thought I was being pranked as a new hire.9 -
!rant
At my last job, my boss would constantly tear my work apart, belittle me and patronise me. He didn't really understand web development and just wanted to hire someone to do it for him. I ended up burning out and he persuaded me to quit because of it cause he didn't want to go through the whole disciplinary process (because he had no real reason).
A year later, and I've had my first review with my current boss, who's also a developer. He said he's learned a lot from me, I've helped the business and the junior devs grow; and that he struck gold in hiring me. I've got no feelings of burnout and I actually enjoy going to work now.
I'll be the first person to say that I'm not the best developer on my team and my new boss was probably exaggerating with me a little bit, but it goes to show that the people you work with are some of the most important people in your life.7 -
We've been trying to hire a greenhorn, fresh-faced intern from India for like a month now.
Plenty of applicants, most with very nice curriculums, a few even can think on their feet while grilled by my questions.
I've sent to talk to HR three almost college-graduating candidates, who convinced me they know the subject of data engineering enough to be working with me and that they are actually gonna do the tasks assigned.
The fucking tweep at HR, an old fart who I had to convince that HVAC maintenance is not the job of the IT department nor the data team, calls my approved candidates "too junior".
WTF, I ask. - "Not professional enough", says the human toad.
Yes, they are to be interns! - "But they do not show professionalism", answered the hag.
Yes they do! They were very professional on the interviews! - "That is for me to say!" barked the reptile.
A week pass by while I try to find more just as good candidates who are also "more professional" when the hag has the audacity to say "here, I found someone. He knows everything about computer things and is very professional".
I took like 20 seconds to find out that the kid she'd given my number to, and was now messaging me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT, was her niece's fiancee and wasn't even in uni! He was just a high school graduate!
Seriously, nepotism kids, delete your Instagrams, tiktoks and every single piece of social media.
I scaled the issue to my VP, who contacted the HR VP for India, who gave the worst possible excuse for her behaviour: "She knows nothing about computer things!" for what my own boss said "so why was she assigned to oversee the data team's new hires?!". The HR slug mumbled something and then doubled down with "well, the kids you sent her were all girls! she had never hired a girl to a technical position, she wouldn't know what to look for in an interview!"
What. The. Fuck.
My boss, my VP of a very strategic technical area, happens to be a woman who lives in a place where women's rights are for real. I had *never* heard she swear on a non-football-related context. She did. Loudly. On camera. As if the HR boss was a referee who just disallowed a goal for her team due to an very ambiguous forward pass.
Shit is still flowing, but it seems that the hiring process of the entire company is being restructured because of that.
I guess I've just sped up this process in about one hundred years?9 -
Business guy: hmmm, what do you think about getting the programmers to come to the office more often?
Me: uhhhh explain?
BG: feels like when working from home they might only give it their 90%, but in the office they'd do 100%.
Me: let's not talk about how you reached that conclusion for now. If you force them to come more often they will quit.
BG: what about the new people we want to hire?
Me: most jobs have full remote available, why would anyone pick us?
BG: hmmm. Btw next week we'll talk with some stakeholders about trying to get some outsource help. You know, for repetitive stuff that doesn't require in-house engineers.
Me: like what?
BG: you know, repetitive stuff
This is suffering. Is my only choice to tell the guy that he has no clue what he is talking about, should STFU, and let the technically capable people to handle themselves? As in, we already do but for some reason he still thinks he knows better than the people doing the god damn job? But if I do so, the salinity in his blood will bring other problems upon us.10 -
Story time:
At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.
Me: Shit, this guy must be good!
6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:
Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?
Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*
*walks over to manager*
“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”
Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”
Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”
Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”
I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.
I got it done inside a month or so.
For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.
The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.15 -
What the fuck!!!!!
Never thought I'd have to rant so soon joining my new org.
Guess the honeymoon phase is over earlier than I anticipated.
1. This company is awesome and employee friendly. They made me kickass deal which I couldn't refuse. However, upon checking glassdoor, I realised they still managed to low ball me. Lol.
But I have no complaints and I am pretty happy with whatever they are offering as of now. My next point is the primary reason I disabled my app blocker to rant out.
2. A junior is leaving and so is my lead. Damn! Fuckkkkkk!!! My lead is super awesome. There's so much dependent on her.
Entire organisation is watching the product line she and I am working on. It's the heart of the entire product.
It's just been a month I joined and so much responsibility on me already. Well, I am not fearing that.
What I am afraid of and rather uncomfortable with is that they are going to hire someone else in a different time zone who'll lead this entire thing and they might map me under that new person who'll be a senior level executive.
Fuck that shit. I don't want to leave my current manager for she is awesome too. With departure of my lead, it's just me and my manager that are left in the team.
I am not sure what the future will be but I know that there are lot of learnings coming my way.
One thing I wish for is that they relocate me for short or mid term to UK or EU. Then a lot of things will be solved for me.
For now, I am just keeping my head low and doing what best I can, which is focusing on work.
Hope they promote me with an amazing salary hike.5 -
Told the new hire that for the first week they can just familiarise themselves with the JS framework, do the tutorials, and read through the code / docs.
Boss comes by Tuesday morning "you should be finished with all the tutorials by the end of the day"
Looks like we're throwing him in the deep end!
Context: new dev has Java and 3d games background. Our app is full stack JS7 -
Note: our PM is new.
PM: can you help me?
Me: sure, what do you need?
PM: where do the folders with all the techie stuff come from?
I had no context and spent the next 20 minutes trying to work out what folders she was on about. Turned out she wanted to know where the client side folders on our development server come from, was going to explain 'Gulp' and 'Branch' to her but I think I'd be there for the rest of the day... Why do 'tech' companies hire non-tech-savie people.4 -
This week Im firing a guy who I hired 5 weeks ago. I cant take it anymore. I setted up a nice environment for him and he keeps taking whole day sometimes two or three to do a 2 hour task. He came from electrical engineering background and never had a software dev job. As a person hes more creative type not logical based type. I dont have nor patience nor resources nor time to teach him basics that be could google but simply doesnt have the mindset to do. Sorry bill gates not everyone can learn how to code, or at least not everyone should.
Advice to other people hiring new hires: test the shit out of them before hiring, dont hire from gut. This guy was giving out a nerd vibe, but the only nerd thing that he has is nerdy puns, other than that as a software dev he know less than I did when I was 12 years old.25 -
Salesperson makes commission on sales, CTO gets bonus for going to out of office meetings, designer gets bonus for every design finished. What does the web developer get?
Answer: "we can't afford to give out bonuses just for doing your job."
There are 10 websites to build in the next 6 months, 3 brand new offices in different states that need it equipment ordered and installed by me, and the other 160 clients who all think their edits are most important.
And to top it all off, every time I give an estimate for the work, boss says "just give it to them." Gee, maybe you could afford to pay me a living wage or incentivize me to keep working 6+ hours a night at home if you stopped giving away everything I build for free.
You lower the value of my work and every other web developer out there when you tell clients that the website I built them isn't worth paying for. If every one of the free sites on my list was just charged the minimum $10k, I'm looking at $200k on this board that could have been used to hire me some help or increase my pay to make me feel appreciated.
I love my job and the people I work with, but when you aren't making enough to pay the bills and you work 70+ hours a week something has to change.8 -
“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”
Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.
Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.
“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git
Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”
One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”
Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.
Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”
Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”
Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”
I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some. -
This is a rant I had 12 years ago but somehow forgot to post it.
In the middle of one of the biggest economy crash, I received an offer letter from a very big tech corp in NJ. This was my first job in 2009. I did all the hard part. 4-5 rounds of interviews, then graduated on time to waste no time and start my job.
On the first day, I went to HR finished orientation, got my laptop, started installing my regular tool chain. My manager was supposed to take me out for lunch and introduce me to the team. He came to my desk and said HR needs a copy of my passport as I am an immigrant and there is always additional paperwork.
HR tells me there was a very horrible mistake on their side and cannot hire immigrants for that role and need a green card/citizen. That was it. They apologized, took my ID card, laptop back and gave my passport back to me.
I took a yellow cab back to my dorm room which was I about to vacate in a week as I found a new apartment.
On that day I decided never to work for a financial organization again in my life.2 -
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.20 -
Right i'm building a new interview test. Short and simple, I give the potential hire a laptop with a browser open on this: http://jasonette.com/
If he / she recoils in horror, they are hired.20 -
It's sad. My teammates are resigning :( Damn management for not taking care of people that they already have. You hire new people with higher pay and let your existing people with lower pay teach them. I just feel like resigning too.5
-
(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)
Dear Current Workplace,
Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.
Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".
Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.
Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.
Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.
Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.
Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.
Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.
Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.
Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.
Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.
Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.
Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.
Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.
Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.
Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.
Fuck you for your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.
Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".
Fuck your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?
Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.
Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.6 -
- hire a new Dev.
- not burnout this year
- work less, deliver more
- start a open source side project and make it production ready7 -
An old company contacted me, seemed remorseful and said I probably didn't want to work there again but kept pushing. Eventually he said a high salary and I figured ok they had easy projects and the overpaying would beat the underpaying they did while I was there, right?
The new lead dev at the place took a month to give me work, tried to pressure me by saying she was going to tell management they are behind because of me, and then progressively stopped assigning tickets to me and assign-then-reassign them from me according to my schedule/predictions I revealed during the daily stand-ups. Why hire me at all. Then they said they changed their business direction at 3 months and let me go. What a waste of everyone's time.4 -
We have a huge codebase, built during the last 10 years, with a lot of problems caused by legacy dependencies. We are trying to modernize this gradually but it is very challenging because we have a lot of features to maintain and test coverage is low.
Today, a guy hired three days ago just proposed to rebuilt everything from scratch stating that he did the same thing in his personal project, so it wouldn't take too much to develop what we need.
Manager gently invited him having a quick call. I would pay to listen that conversation.8 -
Almost 2 months ago I left my job for another that paid slightly less.
Can't belive I am saying this but I love my new job.3 -
Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:
People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.
The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).
Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.
Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.
Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.
I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.
I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.
I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).26 -
Aaaah, I fucking love it to death, when customers spontaneously decide to hire a separate, unrelated company to add new content pages to the website developed by our company.
That furuncle of a company must have had real pro devs to just create a new /html folder, dump their shit content in there and just manually add links in the existing CMS pages.
HOLY FUCK!
As you might already have expected, the /html folder contains:
- static *.html files for every page
- inline CSS in the *.html
- the crappiest PHP mailing script I have ever witnessed
- images with random resolutions, mostly too small
The layout of these puke-ridden pages obviously doesn't fit neither the existing color palette, nor has anything common with the current layout or typography at all.
These bastards don't even use Git!
Come on, dear customer, could you PLEASE fucking NOT hire a completely separate company to do OUR job?
PLEASE? PLEASE?!
I had to compare the whole deployment folder with our repo to find out what else these brain-damaged cunts changed in our code!3 -
*senior designer*
Last year I had a meeting with the newly hired Senior Graphics Designer.
She was presenting the new design of the company's website with all the features she wants.
After a few minutes, I asked her, did you design it as a responsive website?
"What is that?" She said. I said that the website should display or have atleast a design for mobile view and desktop view.
And she replied, "is that a requirement?"
Talks to myself: how the hell we hire designers like this?
PS, she earns 4x my salary5 -
Two months ago, I went to an interview that I thought I aced... Time passed and I heard nothing. Got bummed cause it's one of the rare positions that doesn't require industry experience, plus a friend works there so that would be fun.
Yesterday tho, i received a phone call from said friend saying that he finally got an update on a situation (since the whole thing was kinda in the dark even inside the company).
Apparently, the boss who directly interviewed me fought to the nail to hire me cause I was most qualified (even tho I'm very modest and generally nervous as fuck on interviews), but was denied funds for the new department at the moment.
Still bummed about the whole situation, but god damn it feels great to know that I'm still the first choice if/when they get funds3 -
Am I really unlucky, or are juniors these days all lazy af and such pampered babies that need hand holding all the time?
So back when I was a junior, when I wanted to learn something new, I would ask for some pointers from my seniors, could be an article, a video or even a book. From there I would look up further knowledge, play with the idea in my machine. If I couldn't understand something, or if I needed a better explanation of something, I would go back to my senior, but it was really rare.
Then comes this modern day, I'm the senior now and I'm in charge of mentoring a bunch of kids, who would treat me like their personal chatgpt. "Hey Junior #0, this is something you may want to read to help your next ticket, let me know if you have difficulty". Next day junior #0 would come back and say "I don't understand, the article mentioned X but I don't know how to do X. Can you show me how to do X?". Bro, no one knows how to do X after being born, just google "how to do X" and it gives you the fucking answer. Why the fuck do you have to circle back to me because of this. Junior #1 would refuse to read any articles longer than 250 words, and require constant 1-1 meetings to give him personal lectures. Dude this is not a class room, grow the fuck up! Junior #3 would write the messiest code possible despite my efforts to introduce tons of resources, then complain "why I'm still junior, how do I grow". Bro maybe if you learned half of what I sent you, you would have gotten promote by now. Fucking lazy kids these days!
Oh I can't fire these juniors. Top management was very clear that "we don't have budget to hire other devs for you, it's your responsibility to train them better".21 -
Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with me.
Thankfully, one of the most important skills that I learned is active listening. I am less vocal about my silly thoughts and shitty opinions these days.
I don't feel dumb. Instead, I realise that I AM dumb.
The people in my new org are exceptionally smart and talented. Each everyone is a hand picked gem. This isn't a coincidence. Rather it's evident that they hire folks very carefully.
In my previous org, I used to be the one driving everything. Like the smartest guy in the room.
But here, I am just quiet in every meeting and I enjoy working 12 hours a day. I am the dumbest guy in the room surrounded by people who are brilliant and humble.
I truly feel fortunate and grateful to be part of such an amazing org and wonderful team. One of the best decisions I made in my career and life.8 -
I just spent 2 hours helping a fellow Sr Dev format an “if block” in code. Then helped show them how to step through the code. This is what passes as a senior at my company? I no joke have stayed at this job for 6 more months than I wanted to out of pure pity for my team. I want to quit so bad, but the team is in such terrible shape and can’t hire anyone new that is willing to stay. All good people personally, but gosh this job is just brain dead and eats my weekends when I should be focusing on family. Back to helping through the 500 line if block. There are worse things in life, but this just feels terrible.9
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I spent the last 3 months trying to hire new developers for my team. I found someone experienced who is great and a graduate, who is, well, a graduate.
For some reason he thinks he knows everything about our framework he has never used and seems to think he knows how everything works in our codebase which he has never seen.
That’s fine. I’ve had my share of cocky developers.
But what confuses me is that when I ask him what critical bugs are left, he reels off two significant ones. I ask what it will take to fix it. Of course he says he knows how to fix it. So I say great. Then fix it and let’s move on to a more fun part of our project.
Suddenly he didn’t know where he problem was and so I told him he had to investigate and come back with something concrete.
It’s just frustrating managing this developer who is deceitful.10 -
We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.
I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖4 -
Manager: We have a new equity survey from HR that is ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY. Anyone who doesn’t fill it out will be severely reprimanded for being against diversity in the workplace. We need this data in order to ensure we have the ABSOLUTELY EXACT ratio of EVERY minority so that we can show the people that we do not discriminate against ANYBODY for ANYTHING. One of the problems with hiring new people is that most people we want to hire turn out to be white and we are absolutely not allowed to hire any more white people because we are over the quota for white people. Now there’s a loophole to this, if that white person belongs to some sub-minority like they are muslim or gay or something like that it’s totally cool and we can show people we don’t discriminate on these things when making employment decisions!
Dev: That’s…not wh—
Mandatory Survey: Please select your sexual preferences and/or religion from the dropdown below.
Dev: jesus christ.15 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
Discussion between a new hire (NH) and a designer (D) in our project :
D : "I need the final designs"
NH : "You haven't given me any content"
D : "I'm sending you a layout with dummy text"
*2 days later*
NH : "WHATS LOREM IPSUM?!"2 -
Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.
They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.
Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.
So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.
Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.
Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.
However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".
Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.
In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.
Frankly, fuck those guys.
Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.
Let's see how this whole thing goes.1 -
Oracle really need to hire a new front-end web developer. Their site is not very beautiful, especially their JavaFX documentation sites.7
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First rant!
The first time I got in touch with programming was when I was about 14 years old. I started a private server for a game called Maplestory (yeah you know it, I know you do) and had one of the most popular servers.
Topping all the rankings of best servers, getting lots and lots of traffic...
Anyway, I started modding the game and implement new features and quests. Right until my father saw our bandwidth. Because the server was running on my computer in my own bedroom 24/7 and blowing nice hot air in my room.
Our bandwidth limit was reached in just a couple days in to the next billing cycle and had to shut everything down from that point. And this happened a few times.
I was devastated shutting it down but learned so much from it. And it introduced me to programming.
Up till now, I'm almost graduating in computer science, already have 2 companies that are willing to hire me, and probably even going to work with my dad on a huge app soon2 -
I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.
Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.
So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.
How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.
Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.5 -
Users and Bosses.
I honestly don't know who is worse, the end user or the boss.
The boss thinks all you do is click a button and everything just works, so everything should take 30 minutes to complete, why on earth would it take a week to do something?
The user seems to think every tiny idea is the most important thing ever to add, so they tell said boss it must be added, and boss normally agrees.
I get it, Marge (Fake name), adding in a copy button because you're too dumb to press ctrl + c is way more important than updating the security after a Ransomware attack.
No boss, I can't add in 30 new things and make sure the security protocols are updated all before the meeting in 15 minutes.
If you think it's all so easy and just pressing buttons, why did you hire me? Anyone who can read and press a button should be able to do it....
4 -
“You’ll be working in a fast-paced environment…” ALWAYS means “We’re incompetent, we don’t realize it, we don’t hire enough people to spread out the workload, we don’t have a real process, and we’ll blame you, the new guy, the first time something goes wrong.”4
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Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.1 -
5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.
One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).
After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".
Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.
Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding. -
End of adventures of the COO and Start of a new beginning
It takes years to improve a company and takes only a few months for a dumbass with shit for brain to take it all down
After four years working ( underpaid ) in a digital advertising agency helping the company grow, getting global exposure and few awards later, last Friday was my last day
To all the future and current CEO's out there, Don't hire someone just cause you know them, hire them for their skills or their brain power
I've seen fucking clay pots with more brains than this COO
2 -
HR is getting so desperate they are prescheduling me interviews attached with CVs in the hopes that I will interview the candidates for a senior, even though the candidates have no experience whatsoever in embedded software programming. Workday, JIRA and Excel does not count you absolute fucknuggets.
For fuck sake, I asked management to hire new grads or juniors, at least I can get a person motivated to learn, but I swear they just don't listen.
They just are content with wasting my time lol3 -
Downside of being a developer without design skills & creativity.
--
Yesterday, i created a simple food ordering app for our office. I shared it to my dev colleagues and got a decent feedback (except for the new hire). But when shared it to people like writers and graphic designers. I feel a bit off.
Graphic D: "The app should not use a blue color scheme. because blue is an UNAPPETIZING COLOR", "The yellow color is too vibrant"
Writers: They are blabbing about the grammar and spellings :(
New Hired Dev: Can you share me the codes?
** I always trying to learn how to do webdesign but i think its not really for me :(8 -
Business Intelligence, the most confused market technology has to offer. (Perhaps rivaled only by machine licking. Learning, whatever)
Step 1: develop a product that can replace a company's database guys. Make it cost more than the database guys.
Step 2: Show off product to managers using images of the product that the managers will love, but never have the skills to do themselves.
Step 3: Fucking obviously the managers buy it.
Step 4: Fire half the database staff.
Step 5: Managers give the BI tools to their remaining database guys ANYWAYS and instruct them to use it
Step 6: Database guys spend a month learning the new tool because management "wants to use it too".
Step 7: Database guys now use this new system for reports but have trouble using it for complex use cases, as it was designed for simple use cases. Meanwhile, management will never, ever touch the tool again.
Step 8: Hire new guys for reporting, because the remaining database guys can't complete both their normal tasks *and* the reports.
Step 9: Database guys are expensive. Go to step 1.1 -
Attention Software Engineers!
Quit shooting yourselves in the fucking foot! And this ESPECIALLY goes to new grads. I get that you have just finished school. I get that you need a job! But don't fucking settle for a $30-$40k salary because you're "entry level"! The only reason why there are employers who offer that type of salary is because they know that there are enough idiots who will settle for it!
On average, an entry level software engineer's salary is between $50-$60k at the very least! For Senior developers, it is at least $80K/year (although an argument can be made for why they shouldn't settle for less than $100k/year).
Each time a moron low balls his/her salary, that brings down the market value for that talent. And keep this in mind! They don't have a choice but to hire you. They could choose to outsource their work to poorer countries but they don't want to do that due to obvious quality-related reasons so they HAVE TO hire you if they need the work done. And since the ball is in YOUR COURT, demand your fair salary. You went to school for 4 fucking years. You dealt with that stress for 4 fucking years. Why settle for a salary that you could've made without going to school?42 -
New business opportunity. Hire the worst, cheapest devs on the planet and get them to build a HR system.
Judging by past popular HR systems, it'd become a best seller instantly.1 -
Update: https://devrant.com/rants/5445368/...
My previous bosses were real awesome people. However, the current one is an intentional asshole.
He wants to review every piece of work. He thinks I am a retard who knows shit. He has no sense of feedback vs. humiliating criticism.
Fucker questions every single word.
For example, consider the following statement, "They are taking the Hobbits to Isengard."
He'd critical question every word like,
What do you mean by 'they'?
Why have you mentioned it?
Why does 'They' exists in English vocabulary?
Why cannot you try 'Your'?
What data points you have?
And after endless questioning, he'd repeat the same with next word. Making sure to break my spirit of working for him.
And let me add that his communication is saturated with heavy jargons which are difficult to understand. At times, I slow down to understand and absorb and he has a problem with that as well.
My past experience says that I learned a lot from strict managers.
But this fucker intentional criticises every aspect with zero to negative appreciation. All in the name of feedback.
I have gotten tons of compliments and good ratings in the past based on my communication and thought process. However, this fucker feels that my thought process is shit and I don't know how to communicate. Furthermore, he feels that I lack sense of ownership.
I really don't know what he saw in my resume or me to even hire me in the first place.
Given how he treats me and others, no wonder people are leaving. And if he fires me, good luck to him finding a sensible replacement who matches his expectations or puts up with his crap.3 -
We got new dev leader. He has zero experiences in our field of working but he thinks, he knows everything.
He suppose to manage our work and plan development, but he is just changing our functionalities. When you try to explain to him, this wouldn't work, he just doesn't listen and try to convince you his way is better.
He also hire one of his friend. And now he is hiding him from me, because his friend is working on the same thing as I do. No idea why, but we could work together.
I am so sick of his shit that I started to look for a new job. I can't stand such an egoistic person.2 -
What was your most disappointing moment as a software developer?
Mine was the realization that when you're working for someone, all they want to see is the final product. The people paying you don't give a shit whether you put your braces on a new line, your domain model doesn't call a database directly or if you're applying the best practices. Your teammates do, but the people paying you don't.
People hire you to get the job done, and that job is to solve a problem for someone. Not in the way that's best for you, but in the most effective way for them. Since I realized this, I lost some pride in my work.5 -
It wasn't me in the interview and it wasn't really an interview at all but here we go. I worked for a pretty shit company this past summer as a paid internship and while I was there they fired a Dev because he complained about how he didn't get a BMW i8 and they had to hire new help. So instead of doing a regular interview what they did was call people in and just have them work. Like no joke from 7-4pm they just did the job the didn't get yet. They also expected them to know how to work in there system. It was a WordPress development company and they had custom plugins and themes that they just expected people to know.
Also they said they would pay them for their work but I don't think they did, there were maybe 8 different people over a week who probably just worked for free.1 -
So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.
A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.
But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.
He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).
So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.
That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.
As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.
Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...
I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.
Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.7 -
New AD account.
cannot login.
Want to create a ticket.
Need a login to create ticket.
*genius*
Go to coworkers machine.
Open ticket there.
They respond, the user must create the ticket himself.
Ffs!1 -
[Warning! - Sob story ahead, you've been warned]
Dear devRant,
today someone who interviewed me in the last days, said they want to hire me.
Good news, right?
Professionally speaking yes, but... i don't know.
I always been a freelance: never had much work, but i was always free of doing whatever i liked and whenever (no fixed working hours).
I have a room in an office with 2 other people. People i love to hate (it's complicated).
But now i'm thinking about this new work they are offering me: no more freelance, no office, no flexibility. All with a 6 months contract.
What really scares me is that i will lose what i have... even the 2 co-workers that i hate/love: i have never been able to make friends, they are the thing that comes closer to friends in my life.
I'm feeling a void in front of me:
being an adult (35 years old...) and choose a work that pays, but loose... essentially what i am, what i have hardly build...
OR decline the job, and going on "Peter-Pan-style", living at my pace: free but constantly hoping of something good to happen to me
I don't know, really don't know... so many feeling are overwhelming me now.
And tomorrow i have to make a decision5 -
I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.
So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.
I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.
About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.
But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.
Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!
And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.4 -
So, I got a new job opportunity at another company, one thing we agreed is that I would need one month to give the notice, and leave the project I was working on with the company I currently work on. Today, after 25 days, they said "the project is not available anymore, we can't hire you", I already give the current company the notice. Making all the wishes possible to keep the current project I work on.
This is life telling me, don't change from what you know to the unknown, even with good positive reviews8 -
When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...
and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...
because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.
Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.2 -
I am a junior web developer, currently working in my first job for a small company, I was hired because I have an interest in meteor and modern web dev.
When I say small I mean I am the only full time js dev.
So the project we are working (my first ever professional project from start to finish) is a travel booking web app (being a little vague, for the sake of privacy). I am the lead developer, as a new programmer of a project that is far from trivial. There are no other javascript devs in office, no sort of code review. We have an outsourced dev but as I got in a flow with one dev my boss supposedly told him to do it part time (without discussing with me), but haven't heard anything from him, so assuming he's just disappeared (probably annoyed at being treated like a commodity).
Boss has set up the stages, and forces me to move on to the next stage before that stage has been finished. I will have to go back over the whole thing to finish things off.
He will only hire cheap juniors, one front end guy with barely any experience is styling the site.
He is used to churning out WordPress and Magento sites.
Wish I had a senior I could learn off.
I want to stick at this project and see it through, but i can only see it ending in a train wreck.
At the same time I want out, I want to work under a better team with senior programmers and better code review.
I just have to do my best and see how it goes I guess6 -
Treat software development like a trade. Because it is one.
Would you hire someone to build a shed for you if you needed to supply the hammer and saw and they needed to read a "How to Build Sheds" book to just get started? No, you wouldn't.
So why would you hire someone that doesn't have any kind of ready-to-go dev environment?
Why would you hire someone that doesn't understand the basics of this field?
Why do you expect employees to stop what they are doing and teach the new guy everything he should already know, or be able to figure out on his own based on his own experience?21 -
Just started onboarding the new hire and it made me realise how much of a dumpster fire some of our code is
-
We have a new hire, and he doesn't know much so he is receptive when given feedback on better ways to handle a situation...Or at least, he appears that way. Until the next time and he didn't listen at all.
Today I'm working on the front end to match his API calls. I ask him about a list of options for one of the fields, as he didn't provide that info initially. No worries, there was a lot, easy to miss. He responds with a list of ~100 options, which he copied and pasted from, I'm assuming, their documentation. I tell him that's too many options to hard code, as there is an easy chance to have an error or for there to be one added or deleted, and ask if there is an API endpoint to get the list.
He then asks if I need the key and value, or just key. I tell him if he needs the value(human readable) then he can send me just the value, otherwise both. He says he just needs the key, so I let him know that I need both then, as the value is human readable. He says okay.
He proceeds to make the endpoint, I test it. Then I look at the code he wrote. Not only did he not send me both, he just sent the keys, but he hard coded all 100 keys as opposed to making the call to the external API.3 -
I am feeling little fucked up.
I talked to one of the female employees from my new company, I'll be joining next month.
She asked manager to hire a girl in the team, I know she casually asked but after knowing this, I know my interviews were surprisingly easy, I mean I know already that no one asked me to optimize anything... did the fucking hired me for diversity, pay is good, people are good, work is good but seriously if I'm getting hired for the fucking diversity my manager is going to have a good speech from me and I'll move from his team for sure.16 -
So today at work while trying to get a group of people together to play a game of foosball my boss comes up to my friend and starts talking with him.
The conversation then goes on to include the topic of a new hire coming onboard and my boss not wanting to take him into our team because he feels that the new hire isn’t smart enough.
I’m the time span of this argument/conversation I went and helped another coworker, bought a keyboard from a friend and also finished reading a 25 page white paper.
At the end he still doesn’t want to have the new hire on our team.
All I wanted to do was play a game of foosball 😥8 -
I have a big problem guys. I am so stressed out that i have been crying for the past few hours. I joined this company as a fresher 2 years back by signing a bond that i'll have to pay them if I leave the company. The bond is going to be over on 25th Nov,2023. They extended the bond by 3 months. I was a desperate kid back then who had pressure from family. Now the situation is that i have performed well throughout my working period. They are heavily underpaying me. Now i have 2.5 years of experience but freshers are earning more than me now. They had been giving me work every now and then. Now they have made me the lead of a new team where i have to build the world's most useless framework that does not even make any sense. The most suitable developer who was also my senior refused to join the team because he knew how useless the work is and is going to take the troll on him. Now I have to do it.
My manager said that you are going to do this and the deadline is 3 months. Which is not even feasible. This is utterly stupid. It's a waste of time. I am so fucking stressed out because of this and how much freshers(interns whom i trained) are earning more than me.
I have a notice period of 3 months. No companies are willing to hire because of this notice period.
If I resign now, i have to pay them 75k rupees and plus I have to eventually work for 3 months. I can't do this. What to do in this situation.
I am trapped.60 -
The company that I work for has recently recruited a team for Web Development, so they don't have to pay a monthly fee to the previous team who designed their website.
They have over 3000+ products in the old website, and no logical way to import them to the new website. The old team was asking for 300$ to give them an API which would return the product details in an XML format.
Obviously, paying that amount of money wasn't logical for a dying website, so the manager decided to hire someone to manually copy the content from the old admin panel to the new one, that is until I stopped him.
My solution? Write a simple web scraper to login to the old panel and collect data. Boom! 300$ saved from going to waste.
Now, the old team found about this and as much as my manager was happy, they were quite angry. So they implanted a Google reCaptcha to prevent my bot from scraping the old panel.
I spent about 20 minutes, and found out once you're logged in to the old panel, the session is saved in a cookie and you are no longer greeted by a Captcha.
So I re-written a small portion of my bot, and Boom! Instant karma from manager. We finished publishing the new site, and notified the old team, only to see the precious look on their face. Poor guy, he thought I was a wizard or something 😂😂
That's what you get for overcharging people!
TL;DR: Company's old website team wanted to overcharge us writing an API to fetch 3000+ records.
Written a basic web scraper to do the same job in less than an hour.3 -
I explained last week in great detail to a new team member of a dev team (yeah hire or fire part 2) why it is an extremely bad idea to do proactive error handling somewhere down in the stack...
Example
Controller -> Business/Application Logic -> Infrastructure Layer
(shortened)
Now in the infrastructure layer we have a cache that caches an http rest call to another service.
One should not implement retry or some other proactive error handling down in the cache / infra stack, instead propagate the error to the upper layer(s) like application / business logic.
Let them decide what's the course of action, so ...
1) no error is swallowed
2) no unintended side effects like latency spikes / hickups due to retries or similar techniques happens
3) one can actually understand what the services do - behaviour should either be configured explicitly or passed down as a programmed choice from the upper layer... Not randomly implemented in some services.
The explanation was long and I thought ... Well let's call the recruit like the Gremlin he is... Gizmo got the message.
Today Gizmo presented a new solution.
The solution was to log and swallow all exceptions and just return null everywhere.
Yay... Gizmo. You won the Oscar for bad choices TM.
Thx for not asking whether that brain fart made any sense and wasting 5 days with implementing the worst of it all.6 -
Boss at the start of a new project: "We could hire an intern to gatter some data in an excel list... You can easily implement that in the application later - right? So can you get us a excel list to fill out? "
No... Just no...
You tell me what you wanna see and how you wanna interact with the application!
In the process we will figure out which data is necessary, I will build some tables in the database for that data and then, !!! not a second sooner !!! , I'll be able to give you an suitable excel list, which includes a complete list of columns for the necessary data in a form I can work with it.
It's not my job to know what data a application needs to make YOUR JOB easier! I'm not a magician! I just love programming stuff!3 -
@Owenvii made a post over at (https://devrant.com/rants/2359774/...) and I want to write a proper response.
The biggest thing you have to look out for as a new dev is the jobs which you accept to begin with.
This isn't minimum wage no more, this is "big league", well, maybe not apple or google big league, but it's not $9.25 an hour either.
Basically you don't want to work anywhere where 1. your labor will be treated as a highly disposable commodity. 2. where the hiring manager doesn't know how to do the job themselves.
The best thing you can do is, if you're new, and just breaking through (and even if you're not), is ask them common questions and problems/solutions that crop up doing the work. If they can answer intelligently that tells you the company values competence (maybe), enough to put someone in place who will know ability from bullshit, merit from mediocrity, and who understands the process of progressing from junior dev to a more involved role.
It also means they are incentivized to hire people who know what they're doing because the training cost of new hires is lowered when they hire people who are actually competent or capable of learning.
Remember, an interview isn't just them learning about you, it's your opportunity to interview *them* and boy, you'll be making a BIG mistake if you don't.
Ideally you want them to ask you to pair program a problem. If your solution is better than theirs then they aren't sending their best to do interviews, and it tells you the company doesn't fire incompetents. The interviewers response can tell you a lot too, if they critique your work, or suggest improvements, and especially if they explain their thinking, that is an amazing response to look for, it says the company values mentorship and *actual* teamwork (not the corporate lingo-bingo 'teamwork' that we sometimes see idolized on posters like so much common dogma).
Most importantly, get them to talk about their work and their team. If they're a professional, it'll be really difficult to pry anything negative about their co-workers out of them, but if they're loose-lipped and gossipy thats a VERY bad sign, regardless of what they have to say.
Ask to take a tour and do a meet n' greet of who you will be working with. If they say no, then it's no thank you to a job offer. You want to take every opportunity to get to know everyone there, everyone you'll be working with, as much as possible--because you'll be spending a LOT of time with these people and you want to rule out any place that employs 'unfireable' toxic assholes, sociopath executives, manipulative ladder climbing narcissists, and vicious misery-loving psychopathic coworkers as quick as possible. This isn't just one warning flag to look out for, it's the essential one. You're looking for the proper *workplace culture*, not the cheesy startup phrase of "workplace culture", but the actual attitudes of the team and the interpersonal dynamics.
Life is really short, and a heart attack at 25 from dipshit coworkers and workplace grief can and will destroy your health, if not your sanity, the older you get.
Trust and believe me when I say no paycheck is too grand to deal with some useless, smarmy, manipulative, or borderline motherfuckers at work constantly. You'll regret it if you do. Don't do it. Do you fucking do it. Just don't.
Take my words to heart and be weary of easy job offers. I'm not saying don't take a good offer that lands in your lap, I AM saying do some investigating and due diligence or the consequences are on you.1 -
Boss: Let's hire a new person to help us recreate our website
Us: sounds good!
Boss doesn't hire anyone and starts the website on his own
Boss: I started the new website. It's in server X and the address is test.y.com. I also want all of us to work on it
Me thinking: great he just wants us to modify the hosted files like he does 🙄
Me: I'll move a copy to GitHub for version control.
Boss: Great!
Boss creates a backup folder on the same computer and folder path that the hosted files are on.
Someone please nuke that server so my boss learns version control like I've asked before. I think I'll opt not to work on a website where he and my other co-workers will just overwrite each other's changes because he doesn't want to learn to git 😑4 -
When your manager asks for, but ignores, your feedback on new developers after interviews, because "we need to hire so the project is done in 6 months"...
Proceeds to hire 4 junior front-enders with limited/non-existanttt Javascript experience...
😓🔫5 -
When the CIO referred to our entire backend system as a "heritage" codebase in a press interview.
Cue every backend developer scrambling to change projects, every manager scrambling to reassure the backend developers, and HR scrambling to hire new backend developers. -
Story Time!
Tittle: About Larry.
Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.
Setting: Years ago, non coding job.
I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.
Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.
Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.
So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.
My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.
Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.
The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).
Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).
Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.
I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."
Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.
-Plot Twist Incoming-
Long story short, my manager says:
"Laura IS Larry..."
O
M
G
I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).
Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.
Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??
Thank god I didn't send that email...
I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.
After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.
Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...
One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.
HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).
Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).
HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.21 -
In two weeks of christmas holidays my brain had enough time to fire the guy that was in charge of my sleep pattern and to hire a new guy with less experience that is really trying hard to fix the mess that has been left for him.
Went to bed at 5am...
Woke up at 9am...
I'm getting there!4 -
Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.
"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".
Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.
"nah can't be that bad".
Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.
Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".
Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....
*drum roll*
Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.
Let me surprise you: M E.
Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...
Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".
Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.
The Lord has had zero mercy on me.
I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.
How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.
Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".
I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....
Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...
Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.
Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.
He had much Bootcamp.
Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.
If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.
Yeah. Bootcamp much good.
Creating DTOs...
It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...
Like really no experience at all.
The next week's will be amazing.
Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.
Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.
I think the recruit could make it..........
But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.
I dunno how I survive the next weeks.
And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.2 -
For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."
Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.
Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.
You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.4 -
Security in defense is a joke.
New hire does not have accts set up told him over and over!
He decides to go into a classified area and just try. Common last name with first initial.
Guess what he was able to get in because no one changed the default password!
Yep now someone with an interim clearance got access to a machine that goes from unclass to secret and then top secret!6 -
So, I was buying a new WiFi connection, had some doubts about the speed, visited the Regional Office Incharge for a demo... Asked him the speed... Dude didn't know the difference between MBps and Mbps... Pretty much gave up on the service provider.
How the fuck people hire such dumb fucks.2 -
Performance review again. I don't know why our company bothers. We're a startup, everyone here has survived two rounds of layoffs, and we barely hire anyone new to fill vacant slots even as we got series D funding.
At every other company I've been with, a performance review is like two forums, or a single page essay .. maybe a round of 1 paragraph feedback reports from some teammates.
At my current shop, it's a full on Pando assessment. It takes an hour to get through. Then it takes two hours to go through it with your manager, only for maybe 3 people to get promotions every year and less than 5% of people get any type of pay change.
It's so exhausting.1 -
Weeks ago, a change went into production. For some reason, we can't implement our own changes or create new databases in production, we have to have a whole different department do it. This would be great except for one thing:
THEY CAN'T THINK FOR THEMSELVES. I've had to tell them how to run scripts I wrote. I've had to tell them how to fix problems that arise.
Back to that script ran three weeks ago or so. It didn't add permissions to allow me, the system and application developer to see the stored procedure, much less run it. Application can't run it. Thankfully the application works without it.
Fast forward to tonight. My change that I'm attempting to implement is the creation of the stored procedure, because nothing could see it, I assumed it didn't exist... reasonable, right? Database folks tells me it exists. They then tell me they can't give me nor the application permissions because it doesn't ask for it in the change plan.
Excuse me.... WHAT FUCKING WORLD DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO CREATE SOMETHING AND HIDE IT FROM THE CREATOR LET ALONE THE APPLICATION SO IT CAN'T USE IT?! FUCKING THINK. WHY WOULD I WASTE MY FUCKING TIME TO TALK TO YOU OFFSHORE PIECES OF SHIT AT 10PM WHEN I'D RATHER PLAY VIDEO GAMES.
I'm so fucking done with enterprises. Someone with reasonable job security at a startup, please hire me. You will probably pay me more fucking money than this company does anyway.
Now on to my second change of the night. Thankfully I don't have to rely on anyone outside of me... so I won't be wasting my fucking time. -
Kind of awkward for me.
Tomorrow is my last day at my current job and my department is starting to work full time remote tomorrow.
I start my new job this next Monday, and they went full remote yesterday. As of now they're shipping my laptop my way, but they cancelled new hire orientation on Monday and moved it to the following week. I haven't heard about what is expected for Monday yet, guess I'll know soon!3 -
I got enough Today so I marked my linkedin profile with “looking for new opportunities”.
It’s actually cool you can pick up to 5 job positions, location, form of employment and let know only to recruiters not all of your contacts that you are open for a new “opportunities ”.
I picked technical consultant, software architect, technical lead, lead software engineer and principal software engineer.
Time will tell if I will be able to find something better then I am dealing with right now.
Customer I am consulting for is cool but the company I work for went over the years from cool to get the fuck out right now cause we only hire managers and people without any knowledge.
It’s probably cause they hired many people from one company that was acquired, probably those who know everything about nothing.5 -
I'm new to Australia and trying to get a job here. The visa process is sorta complicated, but let me say that you usually start with a Working Holiday Visa (6 months work) and go on from there.
Had an interview the other day. First smalltalk, then coding questions, then hands-on exercises, then I was talking to 3 different people about their experiences in the company. Overall 2 hours plus 3 hours train. The same day I get a email with a positive response and I should send in my papers (passport, Visa etc.) for the contact. I stopped sending out applications at this point.
5 days later (!) I get an email telling me they won't hire me on that visa.
Crushed my motivation for rest of the week 💀4 -
Got my first technical job with no interview. Well, let me explain.
A recruiting firm contacted about my resume that it was impressive. *I didn't have any corporate experience in there. Just school projects, personal projects and internship.
I had a quick phone interview with them and also asked me for an in person interview that same week on Wednesday. After that interview, the guy asked if I could come back for some paperwork because they have found a job for me to start the next Monday. This was exciting.
Monday at the new job, I dressed up in fitted suit and all thinking the company will also interview me. I walked in and the director was like, "welcome, you know you don't have to dress up for this job right? Feel free!" They took me to me workstation with an already clean set up.
I was confused and my stupidity asked: "what time is the interview?". The immediate supervisor I was going to be working with replied, "no need for that. We got you because of your skills. That's all we need so we both went water each other's time".
Long story short, I worked with them for almost a year but due to financial issues they couldn't extend my contract. However, the director got me a new permanent job at one of his friends office and says he will hire me back in a heartbeat if things go well at his place.
I kind of feel bad leaving the recruiter because he was one of those who actually cared and willing to help entry level.4 -
I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.
It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.
Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:
I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.
Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.
Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!2 -
I think I may have officially gotten myself fired before I even started a new job. My salaried start date was supposed to be Jan 3 but they hired me to do spot work at my hourly rate until then. My server side PHP skills were never great but they appear to be completely inadequate to the task of patching their undocumented, spaghetti legacy code. I just sent a note basically saying I either need to convert their entire site to something else 3 weeks ahead of the timeframe we planned or to basically outsource my work to another developer to patch this code. Feeling like a total imposter at the moment. I wouldn't hire me.4
-
i was about to talk about golang - but it can wait.
snapchat's discover section is TERRIBLE. the amount of BULLSHIT, INCORRECT INFORMATION, AND PURE IDIOCY IS MAKING IT TERRIBLE.
now, usually, i rant about mashable when i say it's terrible. AT LEAST WHEN MASHABLE WROTE ABOUT THIS THEY WERE CORRECT. but no, alas, my faith in humanity is put to an all time end. a new evil has arose, by the name of "wired."
of course, and incredibly late to the party, a "tech" outlet wrote about bitcoin. the headline was "is bitcoin killing the planet?" IT HAS BEEN POSSIBLY THE STUPIDEST ARTICLE IVE READ OF ALL TIME. THEY CLEARLY HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT ANY SHIT THEYRE TALKING ABOUT.
let's take a look at the TWO facts they got wrong, and displayed to over a MILLION people.
now, instead of just GOOGLING TWO SIMPLE FACTS, THEY DECIDED TO JUST WRITE RANDOM SHIT.
ENOUGH WAITING - HERE THE THE TWO FACTS THEY GOT WRONG
picture 1: bitcoin up $900 in the last year? THE LAST MOTHER FUCKING, COCK SUCKING
.
.
.
YEAR?!?
WHY DO SUCH DUMBASSES HAVE ACCESS TO SOMETHING MILLIONS VIEW?
IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE
picture two: the actual fuck????
did i just read that?
b- bi- bitcoin will "run dry" BY 2032.
i think i finally figured it out.
these facts, they're literally just random number.
<thoughtBubble>
i can see it now:
wired employee 1: hey, guess what number im thinking of?
wired employee 2: 14?
wired employee 1: *screaming* BITCOIN WILL RUN DRY IN 14 YEARS
</thoughtBubble>
how do these people get hired. do they hire only hire 12 year old interns? im genuinely asking. does anyone know?
okay, end of rant. plz continue complaining about dumbasses who have power thru the media in tech8 -
Most difficult part is to work with company where all senior admins are from sales. They never f*cking idea about developers problems.
Just give time to end user customer before 3 month schedule. and now thinking, we can do 3 months working in 4 days.
The sales people think nine women can deliver a baby in just One month. just pushing me to hire new developers.4 -
This is why you don't hire your son's friend to build your company's website. From a live (new) customer site that needs to be rewritten:
<h2><span class="wsite-text wsite-headline">
<font size="6"><font size="5"><font size="4"><font size="3"><font size="4"><font size="5"><font size="6"><font size="7"><font size="7"><font size="7"><font size="7"><font size="7"></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><strong><font color="#e4e3f1" size="7">***REDACTED TITLE***</font></strong>
</span></h2>7 -
TL:DR Company partner screws up and doesnt do job. I start new company and now able to make ends meet.
My friend and me started this company together. Our roles were defined. I would manage the development of stuff and he would manage getting the clients. I did my job. About a year into the company. He goes ahead and partners in another company. Normally I wouldnt bother, but this is when he stops getting clients for us. Our business drops 50% in the second year. He doesn't work but expects to be paid the same salary as me. I'm doing all the work for the clients while he wastes his time with the other company. He manages to make money doing stuff and buys a BMW, while I'm struggling to make rent.
Finally in Dec last year, I plan to start my own company. And i suddenly have lots of work which pays decently well. I'm looking to hire and am not as stressed with work any more.
Moral of the story: if you must partner, make sure your partner is fully invented in growing your company.3 -
I really need to get out of this clusterfuck of a mess I got into, A.K.A. our website projects. Now, it feels more and more like all these problems and issues we're having are all my fault.
Here's the thing: I had 0 experience on web development before I got this job. I started as an intern, expecting to learn all the right practices and techniques on building websites. Nope. What happened was I was thrown in this big project, responsible for almost every functionality that it was supposed to have.
A junior-level guy. Doing a huge project on his own. Hell, I'm probably even lower than a junior. But here I am, pigeonholed in this shittard. My boss even said to me, "you know more about the website than I do." Fucking hell. He's not even aware of the clusterfucks I've done on the codebase because, fuck, what did I know? I don't even get feedbacks about my code. I don't fucking know if I'm doing all of these shit right. I don't know if this function is supposed to be here, or if it's supposed to behave that way, and, shit, the concept of test-driven development is probably something my boss has never heard of before.
So right now, I'm a bit obsessed with web development best practices, and how to write clean, maintainable code. I would probably get more learning from going to meetups than I will ever have from this place.
This has been a very shitty start of my career. I hope a much better learning experience will be plentiful at my next job (if anyone's willing to hire me). It would be like starting all over again. Sorry for the long post. I would like to put this as a blog post, but it's probably not a good idea, specially since I'm looking for a new job. Thank God for devRant.2 -
As an interviewer or a senior software engineer who would want to hire someone new to your team, would you expect a person with a solid grasp of algorithms or a person who has good experience in the stack you are using? If both, what would be your priority?10
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The Director of my employer's Firmware Engineering department, an older guy, sent out a department-wide email introducing a new hire. IN COMIC SANS.
Even though I am a new employee myself, I cannot let a disgrace like this pass unaddressed. So I politely and as respectfully as possible urged him not to use Comic Sans in a professional setting, and even offered rationale & alternatives.
He essentially responded, "No offense, but I'm gonna use whichever font I choose," but with that one simple sentence riddled with grammatical and spelling errors.
Shortly afterwards, he then sent out a mass email introducing me as a new hire. With my provided bio in a business-appropriate font, sandwiched between two hideous blocks of Comic Sans.
Honestly, how the fuck do people like this make it to a managerial position? >_>4 -
I'm working in a really really small start up company (I'm the only developer here with the owner being a programming professor in the local uni).
It's my first job after leaving uni and I knew it was a risky decision that I've made but it was my hometown and I could save some extra money by saving on rent and food, also I've always loved a good challenge.
But the challenge isn't working as excepted. It's been a year since I've started here and there was no planning for almost nothing, it's a "do as you think it's best but I'll probably won't like so you have to it again" kind of methodology. Also I've been hire to do an hybrid mobile app and I've ended up doing a full e-commerce website with shitty outdated technology that I've had no experience in using.
So for me I'm more than done. I'm tired of having my suggestions being completely ignored, of the lack of planning and instruction and the fact that I'm being underpaid for what I do.
Fuck it, I'm looking for a new job.3 -
It could just be me, but I feel lime I have an extreme lack of money to pursue projects. I know java really well, but I want to develop android apps. That's fine until you consider the fact that the only computers I have available to me at my house are very old. A gradle build in android studio on my PC takes <10min. So I just really need a better computer which means I need money which means I need a job which is unlikely because not many people hire 15 year olds. In fact, my parents bought a laptop last year for me to use, but my older sister fried the video out component on the motherboard so it needs a new one which is ~$3001
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Have to write ugly ass wrapper classes around a third party dependency since my team can't be bothered learning its vocabulary. A vocabulary which is very well thought and self-consistent. Apparently, defining our own which is only occasionally more descriptive is preferred. It's already collapsing under the weight of its own maintainability cost. And, if someone joins the team that knows the dependency they are fucked anyway as they'll have to use our wrappers.
Time and time again I've tried to oppose this move on several different merits: maintainability chief amongst them, but no one listens to the lowly new hire.
I should just pipe my thoughts to /dev/null and save my breath...2 -
New hire and haven't did anything other then look at the code base. How long did it take until you actually start contributing code at your first job?9
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How the hell am I meant to get a new job in Edinburgh/Glasgow so I can learn React/Angular/Vue when no-one will hire someone without experience in those frameworks?!
I was in 2 roles back to back and in that time, every single Front End Development role now available in the market requires commercial experience in React/Angular/Vue in order to proceed.
Even the 18k Grad/Junior Development roles require commercial experience in some sort of JS Framework yet I'm certainly not a Grad/Junior.
HOW DOES ANYONE USE IT COMMERCIALLY IF THEY'VE GOT NO EXPERIENCE.
I'm doomed.
For the record, I'm a Front End Developer with 3 Years of experience with personal study experience in React.2 -
Reading over at zerohedge.
And I just wanted to comment on what this one guy posted:
"People that show up on time, dressed to work, not stoned. People that don't stop in the middle of the day to take care of personal matters. People that deliver to the right location. People that don't steal or damage product.
We pay well over the national average for final mile truck drivers. 80% of the ones you get are worthless. The ones that do a good job we reward handsomely to keep them. We have had open reqs for two years now that we can't fill at just about any wage. "
If all the people you hire leave, or no one wants to work for you for any wage, the problem isnt the pool of new hires. The problem is you.
Like a certain fast casual chain that claim they train their employees, and then just toss line cooks on the line and scream at everyone on the line.
Saw it while I was at an interview. Seen it in other
Train your fucking people.
"Good" is now a synonym for "people I dont want the expense of training, and people trained at someone elses expense."
Train your fucking people or gtfo of busines because you have no business being in business otherwise.2 -
I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:
1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.
2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.
3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.
4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.
5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.
6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.
7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.
8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.
9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.
10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.
Except…
Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.
11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.
Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.
Two cents.1 -
A bit late for wk61 but here goes:
Does anyone have any advice for an older dev (just turned 50) during job hunting?
One of the devs on my current project was let go some years a go, and hasn't found a new job yet.
He keeps applying to positions, but keeps getting rejected and being told "we went with another candidate".
Choosing the young buck who will leave in a year over a older dev who still can contribute for ten years seems like the most common descicion.
I hired him on the current project I'm doing for a client, which is on iOS, and I've thought him swift and the general process of development on ios. And he's taking to it really well :)
I hope this will better his chances, but the current client won't have the resources to hire someone full time now.6 -
Who are you going to hire in web dev position?
1. Algorithm master but new to web development.
2. Full fledged with cutting edge web dev technologies but don’t know much about algorithms12 -
Hey, you, my new colleague, you are annoying. I have reviewed your PR and left about 50 comments on your mess. I even explained to you why half of your code is shit in a very polite way. I have explained why you have to rewrite that and even how to do that in the best way possible. Result? Half of the code is gone, it works as before but without the overhead.
Now you're annoying cuz I have to go again on conventions and best practices. I totally understand that you've been doing it differently and throwing buzz words at me won't help. Just stop and do it as it's needed in this project, don't reinvent the wheel only because you can.
You know what? Fuck it! I'll approve all your PRs, anyway I am leaving soon. There is no benefit for me to teach you stuff. You're one of those guys that I voted against in interviewing process. But guess what? My manager decided to hire you anyway! Ha! I rarely vote NO and you were a one of those...
Your confidence doesn't impress me. That works on people that have no clue on what you are doing. Your just average at best, not a superstar.
Fuck it, you're on your own now!1 -
We want to hire new dev, so, these MBA guys have a brilliant plan. Give him access to our complete repository and let him go through the full fucking code and *access it*. I don't even know what to explain here..
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When your legacy retarded old as fuck frameworks are slowly dying and instead of migrating to new backend framework, losing some money but improving quality of our products dipshits in charge hire vue.js developer to try to replace jquery with vue just to keep this 10 years old legacy zombie crap alive for 2 more years..
How can you be this fucking retarded greedy motherfucking morons... it shouldnt even be possible1 -
What the Fuck!!!!!
Within next 3 days my Release date was set. I was to join a new company. My current fucking manager screwed things by postponing my release date because the new replacement they hired had not totally understood the project. Well, who the fuck told you to hire literally few days away from my release. My manager expects that the new resource learn everything I know. Fuck off man, I cannot spoon feed a person on everything.1 -
I'm currently working as a full stack web developer.
Now to my situation. Me and my team partner are part of a bigger dev department. My department lead now wants to split his responsibility into smaller groups. All groups get a new lead out of the group of devs except mine... No let's put together web and hardware development. It's not like I already coordinate all web and app related stuff. But hey let's hire a new guy for this... Hopefully someone with the same knowledge of the web as my current lead... Like none... -
Product was not thrilled with our estimates we gave them for the next phase of our project. So they got the veep to give us 2 new team members - a new hire and an existing senior - in hopes that it will allow us to finish a lot sooner.
Because 9 women can make a baby in a month, right? Gods forbid we consider removing anything from the scope of this phase. Mind you, there's still another phase planned after this one before we even release the product.2 -
i have an idea today for find job as Junior:
First of all, startups usually hire senior devs only for two reasons:
1) is critical to their business, they need people that will ensure the project will be done no matter what, seniors usually brings that to the table.
2) The startups that raise some founding, usually have 100k+ raised, that money is basically enough for hire Seniors for some time without troubles, taking into account they will usually be highly profitable in the mid term, it is not a big deal to take the risk
Today startups, at least the most interesting ones, play the game in God Mode due to that founds raising, it is like having a max level character in some MMO with insane amounts of gold, you will buy only the best gear with that gold, not the low level gear, why you want to buy low level stuff, if you can buy the best of the best? that is why Juniors are not likely to have a place in startups, they can pay the Seniors.
But, there a situation in what an startup will wish to hire some Juniors, this is situation is, when they have never raised founds, they have no Cheat Mode, this ones are usually startups that have just few weeks or months of being created, and they need the MVP ASAP, this startups usually already have one or two Mid/Senior level engineers, but they have a very highly benefit from having a Junior in their team, this guy will no take any part in the Cake, will only work for lot less money and will discharge some stuff from the Seniors (Taking into account that is a minimum competent Junior).
Here is where Juniors can get jobs, at least for start their careers, and taking into account that thousands of new startups are created every year, this is a major market.
Ok, i already test that this approach if viable, i send requests to 5 startups that meets the conditions, and got response from 4! still not make a deal, but this is a lot more than 0 response after 2 dozen of applications to more stablished startups.
What you think about this? maybe this is just the jobless syndrome attacking me fuck8 -
Got a new job last year. Didn't want to be a contractor so they said contract to hire for what I thought was 6 months. When I get there, they said they meant a year. Fine. 18 months just passed and they renewed my contract for 3rd time without even mentioning full employment.
Now, because still a contactor, IT is making all non-essential contractors take two weeks of unpaid leave last two weeks of the year. Guess who was on that list?
I have only a week of pto from recruiter company to soften the blow but have to start over saving up for next trip.
Needless to say, already searching hard for my way out of there.3 -
Arrghhh, now it is chatbot (+_+)
I am not even sure if my vuejs codes are in right direction or not and needless to say ES6. But now another task, freaking chatbots. I have trouble following and learning Facebook tools. It confuses the hell out of me every single time. -
In reference to Berkmann18's complaints about his flat.
https://devrant.com/rants/4644209/...
1. found a business that does apartment listings in the style of social media.
2. focus on helping people find less-shit room mates. Like yelp, but for assholes.
3. make your money on helping millennials and gen-z manage and automate rental payments, because both those generations HATE having to look people in the eyes, having to ask for money, or anything involving negotiation. Automate the pain, monetize their avoidance habits.
4. Dashboard for splitting bills, handling rental and sub-let agreements, and divying up rental payments.
5. Get paid by geolocated advertisers for small business services, e.x. roof repair, plumbing, lawn mowing, pool cleaning, etc.
6. That positions you to do strategic partnerships with companies that provide platforms for small business providers, like angieslist.
Had this idea a while back but pursuing something else and just wanted to put it out there for people more capable than me. Lot of great developers out there that beat around for good ideas, and then there are a lot of people with good ideas who don't have the skills to implement.
Call it flattmates, or snagahome, or something like that.
On the offchance anyone decides to go for it, and you get funded, hire me to do grunt work, thats all the thanks I want.
Also I accept payment in blowjobs and beer.3 -
A long time ago in a decision poorly made:
Past me: hmm we're having trouble getting IT to give us a new build machine with the new compilers.
Past me: I know we'll just use one of the PCs that belongs to a member of the team to tide us over.
[2 months pass]
Present me: that's odd, Jenkins is really slow today.
[Several minutes pass]
Present me: holly shit fuck; it's building the whole weekends worth of builds at 9am on a workday and eating licenses like a cast away that suddenly teleported to an all you can eat buffet.
Present me: [abort, abort, for the love of fuck abort]
Present me: contacts IT, they can't find any problems, wtf happened.
Present me: discovers team member turned off his machine on Friday and builds had been stacking up all weekend.
Lessons learnt: disable power button on team members pc and hire a tazer guy to shoot whenever someone goes near the wall socket.
1 hour lost and no build results for the last 3 days.
It's looking like a bad morning
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Finally put in my notice to quit a job that has been going nowhere for a while...
... and now moving on to a new opportunity as the first hire of an exciting new startup.
Few days are better that the day you quit a job.
Today is a good day
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Nothing much here, keep scrolling...
I think my manager does not like me. I might sound like a broken record because I keep asking feedback at the end of every call (which is every other day).
I genuinely want to make her proud of the decision to hire me and want to learn for which I am willing to work smarter/harder.
What I feel is that they find me annoying. They seem to be happy with my work but guess my Indian roots of typical behaviour are showing up.
My co-worker evidently isn't confident to lead on her own and keeps me looped in to all her tasks which I am fine with. Though, I feel that I might be overstepping in her zone and manager doesn't want me to do that.
I may not be perfect and also a very sensitive guy, but I am trying hard.
Maybe they have plans to get someone else to lead and just keep me as a pawn on the board.
I don't think it is the imposter syndrome this time and surely the teams in this org are working in silos with very little communication within or outside their direct teams which kind of makes it even more difficult for me to operate.
However, as always, I have enough free time in here to resume my side project, learn another hobby, or learn new skills. Or is it just that I am assigned less task or underperforming?
Sometimes things are very confusing and one can never find an answer.
What's the best thing to do in such a situation?7 -
I’ve been working at my company for about 3 years now and under 2 managers. In my time I’ve grown to be a technical anchor and SME in multiple facets of our architecture. First manager was cool and I could really see my development under him. Then he gets promoted and I get a new manager. New manager just rides me and bleeds me dry, all while telling me “you’re just a couple months away from Senior” for like 2 years. Every time I meet with him he still says I’m not ready even though I step up and do more and more and more. He’s never satisfied. Then we recently had a shift in the roles in the company where there’s a new intermediate role in between my role and Senior which I was gunning for. After a few more months he says to me “Congratulations, we finally opened up a position to promote you… to this other role that you didn’t want”.
Naturally, I’m pissed. So I start looking at open reqs for the Senior role I’m looking for. I applied for a job and interviewed for it. I “aced” the Senior interview. The new team wants to bring me on. They tell HR that they want to hire me. Now HR is pushing back saying “hey now, you can’t just SKIP roles like that” even though it was an open requisition that I applied to, not even an in-line promotion and also they just opened this intermediate position I’m skipping like 3 months ago and again I’ve been here for 3 years. So even after crushing the interview and the other team loving me I still won’t get the job because of stupid corporate bureaucratic bullshit.2 -
The downside of writing reusable, abstracted, DRY code for multiple applications to use: you have to remember to test changes in all the contexts... my org has to hire contractors project by project as we dont have the budget to have more devs than just 1 (me) on permanently. the contractors tho often don't know about all the places our code gets used. And sometimes I even forget - last week in the rush to finish some project, we forgot to think about how a library change made for benefit of a new project a few weeks ago might effect an older (in production) project. Until shit started breaking. Annoying. very annoying. luckily i fixed it (rolled back) before the weekend, but thursday and friday were quite stressful... now tomorrow, a bunch of sleuthing time to figure out exactly what recent change caused it... argh....3
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Javascript makes me wanna blow my fucking brains out.
Why the fuck isn't appendChild working? It shouldn't be this fucking hard to get a simple result.
p = document.createElement("p");
p.textContent = String(new Date().getTime());
doc = document.getElementById("todoList")
doc.appendChild(p);
Done from within a listener function for another element, listening for onkeyup. Using bulma.
Jesus fucking christ and this is the profession I chose.
At this rate by the time I'm fucking competent I'll be replaced by wage slaves from india who started training at the age of ten because their government actually gives a shit about investing in their people instead of saddling new generations with trillions in bank debt so goldman fucking sachs can hire more underage prostitutes from epstein and mossad.22 -
In my current job, I was let go of the project I was handling for almost two years in place for a new hire with less experience. The reason is that I got complacent while sacrificing code quality as more similar tasks were assigned. I'm glad it happened and grateful for all the code practices I've learned. Transferring to a new project with the same client though. 😂1
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Im on it, all my rants refere to it:
780 columns table, pushing unfinished changes to master and recently the new hire pushed a 700mb database bkp to production... I had to learn how to clean that shit on git and rebuild the repository...
How can someone not realize they are pushing 700mb to gitlab?
That shit must have taken ages... I realized because git pull was taking too long... -
Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?
# The detailed version #
We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.
But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are
So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.
I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.
I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.
I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.
Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.
I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.
And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...
The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.
Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.
Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.9 -
Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.
Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.
I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.
After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!
After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.
So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.
Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.2 -
We recently hired a new head for one of our office districts and I am absolutely horrified how bad she is at using computers. It’s like she has never used a computer before!
Where do they get this guys and why do they hire them!?1 -
After a few years at one company, most of the colleagues that take their dev education seriously have left. We had a mini community keeping ourselves up to speed as technology progresses. As time passed, I've noticed that I'm stagnating which is one of the biggest signs, for me, that I should move somewhere.
I'm now at a new company, working on a project that is in a much worse place than any of the project I've worked on previously.
I've done my due diligence and checked the company before joining, of course. And I've asked all the questions I wanted to know so I can know with some level of certainty whether we're the right fit. Sadly, that definitely didn't turn out to be true.
I'm currently working on tasks that any intern/junior can work on, while being paid a senior salary. There are a lot of areas in the project where I can spend my time more efficiently, e.g. stability, performance. But, it turns out that swapping colors, brushing some css here and there is more important to the client than fixing very, very unstable project.
And I'm not the share holder. It's not up to me to decide. The only thing I can comment with certainty is, why just not hire 2 juniors that can do the same work I do right now, instead of wasting my time/energy on meaningless tasks and such boring issues that I've left behind years ago. I've emphasized that being challenged is very important to me, and I'm given breadcrumbs to deal with.
And I'm unsure what to do now. I don't want to be that guy leaving just a few months after joining. Should I wait it out? I already mentioned that I don't think I'm properly utilized to lead dev and PM. I guess I should give them a month or two to see whether something will change?1 -
New office stories during the emotional turmoil...
Story 1: The creepy fuck
So being unaware of the fact that I was connected with this guy on LinkedIn already.
Ron walks upto my desk and greets me on my first day on floor. Weird, but whatever.
I politely interact, because gotta make friends and create my following to get shit done.
The next day, randomly comes asking for a laptop sticker and I am like WTF! He is like sticker was an excuse, I just wanted to say Hi!
👀
Day 3: same random creep shit. Talks about personal topics and invades personal space uninvited.
Day 4: Keeps starring at me while I ignore and judges me evidently with stupid suggestions on how to exist without being asked for.
Fuck this guy.
Story 2: The classic case of Dunning Kruger effect
So I get introduced to my tech team today and everyone start piling on me to guide them on decision making. The CTO creates a Slack thread with me and Co-founder asking me to get things moving on priority.
The co-founder shut him out right away. Fucking hilarious.
But, a retard starts schooling me on how to use Slack. Lmfao.
Me being polite, said I'll follow.. dude starts bragging on how he wrote company policy to get everyone on Slack yada yada..
To be honest, the Slack experience is beyond broken based on what these idiot has setup.
He literally opened my Slack and responded to the CTO thread.
That's where I got pissed. I upfront told him that hey! Calm your tiddies down. I know how to use Slack. I have used it since it was in the beta.
I have been in much much mucy bigger orgs and places more well structured than what you have here.
I told him on his face what the flaws where and how I felt a downgrade from where I am coming from.
The look on his face was priceless and he started sweating. Lol
Never again he'll school anyone.
I mean I understand if you are humble and genuinely guiding a new hire. But being cocky unnecessarily and shoving things down my throat without yourself knowing shit or know about the other person is purely asshole move.
Anyway, I am still upset about the scam. Fuck this world.5 -
Our company has a retarded system for external/outsourced employees, incase you don't know in France many companies hire "consultants" that work for other companies, the gain from this is as a consultant your company takes care of finding a job for you and setting you up and all that jazz
In return they take a cut from your salary, the retarded part of our system is, the management of externals is done through a tool, everyone who has access to this tool can see how much these externals are making.
Found most of them on avg in the 100-125k eur/year range
With the exception of one getting paid a whooping 174k eur/year
Assuming the external company takes a 30% cut
That means that most externals in our organization in France get paid around 70 to a 122k/year
I don't feel like working in this shithole anymore.
Fuck my rng, vasectomy should be mandatory for every new marriage in a third world shithole like mine.2 -
I was on vacation during spring break and was supposed to start on a contract-to-hire the following Tuesday. Towards the end of the week the recruiter tells me the company got delayed on paperwork because of accounting (no funds). Thankfully, my current job accepted me that week until I could start the new job. Friday of the week I got back they tell me I can start Monday. That evening my current job (startup) comes back with a solid counteroffer and here I am. If they would've taken me in after my vacation I wouldn't be at my current job.
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Best boss ?
Well, on Friday we learned our business was shutting down, bankruptcy.
Other new recruits have had a 10 days notice. My boss had me a 30 days notice instead, and have been fighting day and night since then to find a new investor to buy our solution and hire the team with it, comforting me that I will be part of that team.
Feelsgood to have a boss having your back :-)
(see previous rants for more)3 -
Fuck, the gas spring in my ergo knee stool at home has given up. Now it's in the lowest position, not that ergo anymore, which also tore the rubber gaiter on the spring piston. On top of that, the seat cover is so worn out that I had to duct tape it so that the filling doesn't crumble out too much.
That thing is 20 years old, and the manufacturer discontinued the product years ago. Buy a new one? Noooo. Modern quality would be worse. So I ordered a generic gas spring, let's see whether I can install it, plus a moped fork gaiter. And then hire some professional upholsterer to finally get a luxury leather cover.
That will likely still be cheaper than buying the closest modern product that is even in a similar class.6 -
Assuming Mac: Alfred for OS such as searching and opening apps, using spaces to setup smart project areas, divvy app to quickly size and move around the windows, terminal shortcuts to open files in the OS or in an editor, transmit for hidden files and dragging between panes and server + occasional mounting for preprocessing, inbox-zero mentality, a properly setup google drive app so you don't email forked files back and fourth, beanstalk for deployment of larger stacks, surge.sh for targeted front-end sites, Ember CLI or brunch for build pipelines, CodePen for UI experiments outside of the project, slack instead of email, pick up the telephone and just call for clarification more often, stylus is easier to maintain then scss, hire designers that actually know what their job is if you can. For arduous WordPress administration, rightclick open in new tab for everything - or half your time will be pushing the back button, wp-migrate pro, and in general try to get out of WP when you can.
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AI is a long overdue economic miracle the world needs right now:
- It will create a _lot_ of jobs — even a monkey can be trained to be a “prompt engineer”.
- It will shake up and shuffle stale old corporate status quo. You had a contract with Microsoft, then Amazon introduced some AI in AWS, and you jumped ships. Microsoft then caught up, so the market didn’t change, but got shuffled. That’s good! Many new big contracts signed = fat bonuses for a lot of people they will spend on stupid luxury shit with huge markup.
- “We have no fucking idea how to solve X” -> “AI”. A lot of people with more money than sense will spend big on wannabe startups that will hire a lot of people, pay a lot of salaries/office space rent, and then go under without a lawsuit filed. They would’ve kept that money in their offshore accounts otherwise, e.g. where it can help no one but their cum troph… I mean children.
- Lifes of a lot of people will be improved should they be caught in this grift. But not many people will lose their jobs — AI is still stupid AF. Good enough to impress gullible people with money, but bad enough to not actually have any meaningful impact. Perfectly balanced, as things should be.
- If you’re a junior dev, adding AI to the list of things you show people so they hire you will improve your chances of getting a job. You won’t be replaced — with all my insight and the access to all major enterprise AI models there are, I wasn’t able to make it write passable code, let alone good code.
- If you’re a senior dev, just spend an evening reading some buzzword guide so you know how to use those buzzwords, and you’ll be fine.
- AI consumes way less power than crypto!
- That said, AI still has its uses, and I use it daily. It _can_ do useful things if you know how to use it — ask retoor.
TL;DR: it will make a lot of rich people spend a lot of money (we’re talking cash, not stocks), it will create a lot of new jobs. It won’t replace anyone’s job bc it’s still too stupid to do that.10 -
Listing my skills:
I have published react-native apps.
I can build an extensive backend/API thing with node.JS/a good framework.(worked on something for my countries national football league during an internship as main/only dev)
I have some experience with c# but havent used it since school.
I have no issue getting into new frameworks/languages, as long as its not PHP.
I have experience working in software teams.
I have experience running my own company(Online store selling airsoft supplies - i quit).
Im working towards getting familiar with Tensorflow 2.0.
I have a Cambridge English assessment certificate at grade C2.
I am currently working(for 0 pay for 50% of the shares) on developing a social media app that uses location tracking on a 20-200 meter scale.
I have ADHD and have been spoken on/warned due to its effects( i.e. forgetting to report progress, getting distracted, needing stimulation so i browse youtube(even have it playing in the bottom corner sometimes), poor communication.
Am i worth anything at all as a developer... im getting pretty depressed due to not having an income at this point... and I dont think anyone will hire me4 -
New dilemma. Now that I have some interviews lining up, I’m having trouble trying to figure out which direction I want to go. One is a company offering unlimited PTO (whatever that actually means), remote only, non-micromanaged work. If I want a nap in the middle of the day, cool. Just gotta make progress.
Another is in an industry that I really want to get into.
A third is with a major entertainment company that is contract to hire with a high probability of hire. Amazing perks and benefits from what my friends that work there tell me.
And it’s looking like maybe all three making an offer simultaneously is a possibility.
So I might need to choose between a comfortable situation, my ideal industry, and a big name on my resume that includes great benefits.
I should be happy but this is stressing me out!1 -
In my previous position I did mostly networking and helped out where I could setting up servers and workspaces. About a month ago our systems admin left the company so I got to spend all day troubleshooting network issues and configuring the proper NAT statements to connect a new hire to our customers networks. I was supposed to be working on migrating our api from the Splunk search head to the indexer to keep it from absolutely tanking the performance of our database.
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I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.
I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).
I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.
- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience
However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.
I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.
What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.
This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid3 -
!dev
Why the FUCK do bank waiting lines have to be so fucking long? And why do these old cunts have to spend 30+ minutes in the booth each? If this goes on, I'll have to wait in line for THREE FUCKING HOURS just to raise my fucking daily transaction limit! And all I fucking wanted was to order the parts for my new goddamn rig! If you have too many cocking clients to handle, hire an extra worker or five!2 -
Just received an email from a company i applied while searching for a new job. They sended me this little assigment to show my skills since they had the feeling i couldnt show them much.
(they browsed through 3 of my websites while i was there, including a check on the code)
It was a simple layout assigment. Just a responsive page with a hamburger menu (also mentioned during this interview)
It took me a couple of hours to create it and ive send it back in the hope of some positive feedback.
Feedback: assignment was pretty good but it show a lack of php experience. I was clearly more on the .NET side.
....
I just sended html, css and js files as requested. HOW THE F* DO YOU COME TO THIS CONCLUSION?!?!
Damn idiots, im glad i found people that actually do know how to hire people!2 -
New guy on my team keeps on saying "oops" and acts like a newb...
He's an experienced dev tho... Like 10yrs...
FML... HOW THE FUCK DID MY BOSS DECIDE TO HIRE HIM...
And then this afternoon I decided to look at internal mobility... all the postings (there were only a few even though we're supposed to be hiring like crazy this year) had descriptions that required experience in everything
Do you want me to move or not ...
"Things here are so much better than before" ... my ass... -
Hire are a few tips to up productivity on development which has worked for me:
1) Use a system of at least 16gb ram when writing codes that requires compilation to run.
2) Test your code at most 3 times within an hour. This will combat the bad habit of practically checking changes on every new block you write.
3) Use internet modem in place of mobile hotspot and keep mobile data switched off. This will combat interruptions from your IM contacts and temptations to check your WA status update when working.
4) Implementation before optimisation... This is really important. It's tempting to rewrite a whole block even when other task are pending. If it works just leave it as is and move on to the next bull to kill, you can come back later to optimise.
5) Understand that no language is the best. Sometimes folks claim that PHP is faster than python. Okay I say but let's place a bet and I'll write a python code 10 times faster than your PHP on holiday. Focus more on your skill-set than the language else you'd find yourself switching frameworks more than necessary.
6) Check for existing code before writing an implementation from scratch... I bet you 50 bucks to your 10 someone already wrote that.
7) If it fails the first and then the second time... Don't try the third, check on StackOverflow for similar challenge.
8) When working with testers always ask for reproducible steps... Don't just start fixing bugs because sometimes their explanation looks like a bug when other times it's not and you can end up fixing what's never there.
9) If you're a tester always ask for explanations from the dev before calling a bug... It will save both your time and everybody's.
10) Don't be adamant to switching IDE... VSCode is much productive than Notepad++. Just give it a try an see for yourself.
My 10 cents.1 -
I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.
I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)
I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:
1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company
2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)
3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth
4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.
5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.
6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.
7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .
8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.
My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?
we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.
So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?
then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?
if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.
For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.
same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS
for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .
an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".
edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"
but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product
The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad2 -
So at work, I was trying to convince a senior programmer to adopt Golang for a new project that would need to handle large amount of throughput as oppose to Django with gunicorn and other optimizations (which is what we usually do).
The response was "we'd have a hard maintaining it, as no one really knows Go and it will be hard to hire people with Go knowledge".
So my question: "in your opinion, is that a good reason?" I have some go experience from other jobs, it seems like a superior solution for this problem.6 -
Being in a situation at work where 50% of my time I can work on really exciting new Laravel projects where I got free hands on everything technical. Enjoying this very much. The other 50% is fixing existing broken wordpress sites with like 5 billion plugins. Want to shoot my fucking head off doing this shit, need to convince my boss to hire someone else just for the wp shit
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Exams are done, i passed some subjects that made me almost drop out.
Felt good. Now if i manage to do well again in exams i may finish the uni on time.
And now here it comes. One of my professors saw that i was coding my self in contrast of the 90% of other students, and with 2 more guys from my year, suggested us to his friend that owns a company, so we could work there.
I went there, talked about the team and the product we have to do and it seems that for now the only developers are me and 1 more girl and 1 more guy, all new commers, not even juniors.
Shiet. The team told us not to be worried since they will be our instructors and help us out and if we need more help they will hire a senior dev.
Not sure how i should react to that.
I do that mostly for experience so i can leave the country when im done with uni to go to estonia holland or finland.
One more thing, we still don't know what languages we will use and even though i told them that im pretty good with python they seem not to consider it at all. I'm the only one of the juniors that has actually made projects and coded on his own, not with university projects.
Also so that all other employees use windows machines.
Sad.
Hope all that goes well.1 -
So I've been in a new job(in a nearshore company) for roughly 2 months, and has been a marvelous experience. They hire constantly and for me that's a good sign but welp.
Today I got a message in linkedin from an unknown guy who applied to a mobile job offer, asking me if I could recommend him for the opening. From one side I feel awkward, I don't know the guy, his skills, his drive for learning and from other side I know how hard can be to land a job, but asking a stranger to get a recommendation... First time that happened to me, I don't know if the guy is at the end of the rope or is just trying to get the easy path.
PS: at this very moment in the company, I barely know the hiring and management people at the company 🤷♀️1 -
So people are getting new jobs left and right, and there are several others looking for new jobs including me...
Well... now the CIO is following people around the office and watching them walk to their car and stuff. To me this just makes the situation worse.
If he's so worries about people leaving then why doesn't he hire people instead of trying drive everyone out? -
So.... we're going to support the .NET WebBrowser control as a supported browser now. Yeah, the one from System.Windows.Forms. It can't even run a basic browser conformance test, barely if at all supports jQuery 2, and throws an error message if you look at it the wrong way. Time to hire a new tester.
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So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.
So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.
After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.
PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.
I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.
I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.
I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.
Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.
Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.
But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer. -
!rant apologies
I am a third year computer science student and I'm interested to see how professionals think I stack up against grads they have worked with straight from uni.
I have spent 15 months at a web company working on bespoke solo products on LAMP stacks. I know html, css, JavaScript and its library JQuery very well (I know JavaScript is massive to be saying I know it well)
I am reasonable at PHP and MySQL. Currently I am studying node.js and building an api that mashes up data from other APIs to build a new service. I'm also working on a C# Microsoft framework bespoke website. I know git to a reasonable level - branches, merges, rollbacks and all that jazz.
I am also studying development architectures to try and be more useful.
So if you guys came across a new grad that knew HTML, css, JavaScript, JQuery, maybe angular js, PHP, basic Linux commands, MySQL, C#, dev architectures, agile methods, node.js, git and has 15 months experience working on small to medium sized solo projects would you want to hire them?
Point to note I'll probably graduate first class (80%+) from a mid range uni.
Sorry, I know this is not the place but I like this community.5 -
PHP gurus / masochists.
I've been using Symfony components for new, isolated features in a legacy php application for awhile now. the time has come to integrate using the kernel, and routing for new endpoints while existing endpoints use the existing apache means of loading pages.
It's not my first rodeo doing this, but I'd appreciate any wisdom/resources/patterns you followed for anyone who's had to do the same.
My clients don't have the means to do hire the appropriate ammount of devs to do a proper port, so this is a long path towards modernization by ceasing to bolt on features to existing code and instead, when working on something, updating it to the new design pattern and then extending that, with a spec, documentation and code coverage.3 -
A new dev hire, just said that after a Windows update all her files, settings, are deleted. Thankfully it was still in recycle bin. I don't know who's at fault, but I had a fix to this problem.
Linux. Passed her the ubuntu installer USB key.6 -
Oh let the rant time begin…
So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.
Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.
Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.
Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.
So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.
Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.
I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.
I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.
So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.
After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.
I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.
Frustrating is not the word.1 -
TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...
Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.
So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.
When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.
I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.
Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.
At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.
Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.
I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.
They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..
So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.
Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.10 -
Last week I conducted a FE React-JS tech interview (high-level, no coding challenge) with a potential new hire. He knew his stuff in React 16.8+ but I was baffled npm install was the only npm command he could name, he'd never heard about semver, never used SASS, and didn't have any Nodejs exp. I asked him to name a tough situation he encountered and solved in React, and he said "too many re-renders, so we used useMemo and useCallback" but that's kind of basic and it was evident he didn't understand this meant passing props by reference under the hood. So I wrote a very mixed report, but this is only the 3rd interview conducted. Was I too harsh? To me this signaled a lack of curiosity (especially for a self-taught programmer which he was). My manager was kind of disappointed about the guy following my report.
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So I do some custom integrations for a local bank. A customer is referred to me by the Bank, we failed to o agree on the price by about 100usd. The customer the goes to some old timer who doesn't even know the difference between php and asp. Then new 'dev' can't figure out how to do the integration and then turns to me to do the work for him for 1/3 of what I had charged the client. Don't know if I should tell him to go to hell or call the customer and ask him to get a hire someone who can differentiate between his nose and ass hole.1
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I can't help but stress out about finding work in development. I just want an internship / entry level summer position to put myself in a better position for post college and to explore and learn in new environments. But it seems like my best chance for scoring that internship is building a solid portfolio or experience, something that I haven't had time to do..
I wrote my first line of code (that wasn't HTML or CSS) when I got to college. Since then almost all my time has gone into my cs engineering curriculum and working a real shitty blue collar job during breaks (for 4 years now) because Im broke and got denied by the 20+ positions I applied for. I can't really do anything with the code I wrote for my schoolwork because I can get fucked if I post it anywhere or share it. I have loads of ideas, but am worried that they are too big to do while maintaining my GPA and scholarships. It sucks too because I am a quick learner, and would even venture to call myself good at what I do.
So since I have hardly been able to pursue any independent studies, I haven't been able to really explore the field, so I don't even know what to areas i need to focus on to make myself a better candidate. So basically I'm broke, don't have shit for pet projects, don't know what I want to do with my life, and can probably expect to work like a dog next summer too because I've heard most companies hire for the summer in the fall.
I don't write this because I feel bad for myself. I write this because it's likely that most people here have been in a similar situation. I also don't like to make excuses for myself like I have been doing. Any advice folks? What should I be doing differently?3 -
How I wish my job interviews would end like this:
HR: "So, we're looking for a developer with experience in Nuxt.js. Can you tell us about your experience with that framework?"
Developer: "Honestly, I'm not very familiar with Nuxt.js. But I have a lot of experience with Vue.js, which Nuxt.js is built on top of."
HR: "Oh, well that's just fantastic. So you're telling me that we're supposed to hire someone who doesn't know the most important part of our stack? How hilarious!"
Developer: "Look, I understand that Nuxt.js is important to your team. But I'm a quick learner, and I'm confident that I can pick it up quickly."
HR: "Oh, I'm sure you are. I mean, it's not like Nuxt.js is a completely different framework or anything. You can just magically learn it overnight, right?"
Developer: "I never said it would be easy, but I'm willing to put in the work to learn it. My experience with Vue.js and JavaScript is still valuable, and I think I could make a positive contribution to your team."
HR: "Oh, I'm sure you could. I mean, it's not like there's a million other developers out there who already know Nuxt.js. We might as well just hire someone who doesn't know anything and hope for the best, right?"
Developer: "Okay, that's enough. I get it, you're not interested in my skills. But maybe you should consider the fact that your job description didn't even mention Nuxt.js as a requirement. If it was so important, you should have made that clear from the beginning."
HR: "Oh, don't get angry. We're just trying to find the best candidate for the job. And clearly, that's not you."
Developer: "Fine. I don't need this kind of attitude from someone who doesn't even know the difference between Vue.js and Nuxt.js. Good luck finding someone who meets your impossible standards."
HR: "Yeah, good luck to you too. I'm sure you'll find a job where you don't have to learn anything new or challenging."
Developer: "At least I'll be working with people who appreciate my skills and experience."
HR: "Sorry, what was that? I couldn't hear you over the sound of your arrogance."
Developer: "You know what? I don't need this. I'm out of here."
HR: "Wait, wait, wait. Don't be like that. We were just having a little bit of fun. You know, trying to lighten the mood."
Developer: "I don't think it's funny to belittle someone for not knowing everything. And I don't appreciate being treated like I'm not good enough just because I haven't used Nuxt.js before."
HR: "Okay, okay. You're right. We shouldn't have been so hard on you. But the truth is, we really do need someone who knows Nuxt.js. We can't afford to waste time on training someone who doesn't know the technology."
Developer: "I understand that, but I'm willing to learn. And I think my experience with Vue.js and JavaScript could still be valuable to your team."
HR: "You know what? You're right. We've been looking for someone with Nuxt.js experience for so long that we forgot to consider other skills and experience. We'd like to offer you the job."
Developer: "Really? Are you serious?"
HR: "Yes, really. We think you'd be a great fit for our team, and we're willing to provide you with the training you need to get up to speed on Nuxt.js. So, what do you say? Are you interested?"
Developer: "Yes, I'm definitely interested. Thank you for giving me a chance."
HR: "No problem. We're excited to have you on board. Welcome to the team!"4 -
Be me, a ret***
Already 3 months in a new position. (check my previous rant)
Storm have passed for a while but another storm is brewing.
C levels are having disagreement with each other.
Caught in the crossfire as one the of C's hire.
Have some chit chats with both side of C, each telling different stories.
C#1 told me there was a demand from C#2 to force tech guys (not defined who or how many) to resigns.
C#2 told me there is no plan to close the whole tech team. But there's a distrust brewing in the tech team especially on the C#1
Be me, C#1 hire...
Me telling them IDK what their real intentions are but there's a high probability for my reputation to be tarnished on the job Market.
I've always had good review amongst peers and confident I did and do a satisfactory job for my previous employer.
Be me:
Resorted to flexing my connection to high ranking (think of C suites) reference who I've worked and have good relations with.
Connected them to my C#2.
Dunno how the C#2 thinks of me and what my value to C#2 are.
Don't know what the future hold for me.
Tried doing one interview but topics of my reputation comes up because of me jumping to executive position without having "Manager" ever in my resume.
Got a bit too defensive on that and it might eff up my chance to have a backup ready in case I urgently need to jump ship.
Depression and impostor syndrome hits like a truck every day.2 -
I was assigned as an on-boarding buddy for a new hire in finance. I wish I had know they were hiring finance as I would have recommended a friend who had to relocate to Nashville to get her job back with Amazon.
They're hiring finance and sales people, but my company has yet to replace any of the developers who have left since the layoff last year. It's a startup, so I understand them needing to generate revenue more than anything else, but it really doesn't look good for the company.2 -
The following piece of advice will be for those aspiring for an IT service desk position:
When companies are looking to hire service desk agents, they're primarily looking for socially skilled people with strong communicative skills, rather than primarily technically skilled people. When I first joined the IT world, I went on different interviews for that position and across all of them there was one truth: all the interviewers were eyeballs-focused on my social and communication skills and a mere thin layer of technical skills was required (depending on how technical the service desk). In fact, I immediately got aggressively dismissed twice for two of those when I filled in a Myers-Briggs personality test according to my Sheldon-type personality (selfish, condescending etc). Conversely, when I applied for a new position and I faked that test into answering everything focused positively on the social aspect, I was an immediate top candidate.
Here's a definition from the ITIL Foundation course, chapter Service Management: Because of how lateral the function of the service desk has become today (not only used to solve technical issues, but also company-wide issues), the most important and valued skills when hiring a service desk agent are fully focused on empathy and soft skills and none of those are technical skills. This is because the service desk has people that are the front window of your company and thus you can't make social mistakes as to protect your company's reputation. That risk has to be minimized and you need the ideal people. The people who in fact solve the technical problems are behind a back-office and they are contacted by the service desk agents.
In the beginning, when I did my first service desk job, I also thought: "Oh, I'm going to have to convince them I'm this technical wizard". In the end I got hired for being able to explain technology in human language and because in the interview I successfully communicated and explained ideas to both the team manager and the CEO, not because I knew what goes on inside a computer. This is a very important distinction.
My friends have also been in service desk positions and ironically they were the most successful when they were empathetic slimeballs (saying: "of course, anything for you" while not meaning it, constantly making jokes), rather than people with integrity (those got fired for telling the customer they were wrong while being unfriendly).
I hope this helps.8 -
This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
--------------------------
There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))
5 -
How do I deal with a lead who was hired to lead a predominantly backend team when he's just an average frontend dev. He's so afraid to try new tech and so reluctant to learn. Plus most of the junior developers are better than him. He even tries to shift the blame on other devs. It's so hard to deal with the guy. Our old lead was so much better the guy was a really bad hire zzzzz.1
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update : we are at hr round baby!!!
part 1 : https://devrant.com/rants/5528056/...
part 2 (in comments) : https://devrant.com/rants/5550145/...
the tech market is crazy mann! it's one of the top indie fintech companies in our country and has a great valuation.
i totally felt that they i am crashing the interviews , and am seriously not trying to be humble. before the dsa round , i was trying to mug up how insertion sort works 🥲
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now my dilemma is should i switch if i get the offer. in a summary:
current company:
- small valuation but profitable (haven't picked funding for last 3 years , so poast valuation is some double digit million $, but can easily be a unicorn company)
- very major b2b player in my country. almost all unicorns (including this fintech company) and some major MNCs are their client and they have recently acquired a few other companies of us and eu too, making them- a decent global player
- meh work : i love being a cutting edge performer in android but here we make sdks that need to support even legacy banking apps. so tech stack is a lot of verbose java and daily routine includes making very minor changes to actual code and more towards adding tests , maintaining wrapper sdks in react/cordova/unity etc, checking client side code etc.
- awesome work life balance : since work is shit and i am fast enough, i am usually working only 2-4 hours a day. i joined gym, got into shape , and have already vsited 5 places in last 6 months, and i am a guy who didn't used to have time even on sundays. here, we get mote paid leaves than what i would usually need.
- learning opportunities: not exactly from the company codebase, but they provide unlimited access to various course learning platforms like linkedin learning, udemy and others, so i joined some web dev baches and i now know decent frontend too. plus those hybrid sdks also give a light context to new things
new company :
- positives : multi billion valuation, one of the top players in fintech , have been mostly profitable ( except a few quarters)
- positive : b2c so its (hopefully) going to put me back into racing shoes with kotlin, jetpack and latest libraries.
- more $$$ for your boy :)
- negetive : they seem to be on hiring spree and am afraid to junp ship after seeing the recent coinbase layoffs. fintech is scary these days
- negetive : if they are hiring people like me, then then they are probably hiring people worse than me 😂. although thats not my concern what my main concer is how they interviewed. they have hired a 3rd party company that takes interviews of people FOR THEM! i find that extremely impolite, like they don't even wanna spare their devs to hire people they are gonna work with. i find this a toxic, robotic culture and if these are the people in there then i would have a terrible time finding some buddy engineer or some helpful senior.
- negetive : most probably a bad wlb : i worked for an year for a fast paced b2c edtech startup. no matter how old these are , b2c are always shipping new stuff and are therefore hectic. i don't like the boredom here but i would miss the free time to workout :(
so ... any thoughts about it?4 -
Most developers are morons.
Because the field of software development has a relatively low barrier of entry, we naturally have a large and steady supply of under-trained and clueless keyboard monkeys, hereby referred to as zombies.
The reason the industry is set up this way is because companies need a steady supply of new talent. Big Tech is so greedy, they snatch most good talent and bench them, leaving the scraps for everyone else. Other companies lower their standards and hire anybody that can copy and paste. Most entry-level software work at smaller companies is usually low risk and high churn and that's where the low barrier of entry comes in.
I have nothing against zombie developers, so long as they know their place.
I've seen too many zombies think they're CTO material after 2 years of fixing javascript bugs, or think that if they watch just enough egghead.io videos, they'll be promoted to senior.
Typically a zombie developer will go down one of two paths: 1) they either burn out and realize that software isn't what they're meant for (most common scenario) or 2) they actually get good and decide to stick around.
The ones who stick around though usually do so because it hits a sweet spot for them. To them, software is:
- Interesting enough to do it for a full-time job
- Good enough at it to secure a steady job at a two-bit company
- Pays enough to pay the bills
These people don't have a deep passion for software. It's basically just a full-time hobby for them.
And I have nothing against that. The market is satisfied, they're satisfied and I'm satisfied so long as they don't start thinking that they and I are on the same level.
Know your place, zombie devs.
2 -
to method java doc or not to method java doc
i'll do whatever we're supposed to , but i dont see consistency in industry or my slave drivers
i remember when i first did i was told not to, but then a new senior hire comes in does it and nobody bats an eye1 -
Last week I got a call I thought it was a screen interview, but turned to be a technical interview for a job I probably applied for back in 2015.
Today, I got a call for face to face HR interview next week which is going to be in the middle of the day and the company is about 1 hour away from my home/work.
Right now, I am feeling good at my current company. Nice salary, only me and manager but we are hiring, and its close from home.
The other company, is a bigger company, salary is unknown, and working hours are less but if you count driving hours it will be much longer! And work will be related with SharePoint “0 Experience” and Web Developments.
PS: Both companies aren’t tech companies!
Even tho I am happy here, I have this thing inside me that asks me to change jobs and challenge myself learning about new technologies “Or technologies I have never worked with”!
However, If keep doing this I won’t settle and If I find myself stuck at a job I hate and try to move to other companies, they won’t hire me because I keep moving!
I hate overthinking these stuff,
and just need to get it off my shoulders!1 -
When not even google can develop a HTML page so it displays correctly in Edge.... Seems Google needs to hire new web developers... Why should it be so hard to develop a HTML page with proper CSS?
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