Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

New job
New project
Main React component file
20028 loc
Can’t make this shit up

Dev: So how do you want this feature fixed?

Manager: It should work how it worked before.

Dev: I'm new to this feature, I don't know how it worked before or what is broken about it.

Manager: Well just make it work like it worked before.

Dev: I DONT KNOW HOW IT WORKED BEFORE THAT IS WHY I AM ASKING YOU. PLEASE TELL ME SO I CAN DO MY JOB.

Manager: Just how it worked before!

Dev: ...

Manager: ...

Dev: fuck you

Got together with my old dev team (5) who all left the same company at the same time almost two years ago. (Thats a whole other story).

One of them told us he left and went to a new company that measured performance by the amount of commits a dev would to per day. Of course he didn't know that when he signed on.

Three months into the job he had a week where his first commit wasn't until a wednesday and he got called in by the manager to explain his lack of commits and how he was going to improve.

He quit on the spot. Had a new job in less than a week.

Other devs at the company were fixing typo's and just commiting them one at a time to create a lot of commits.

Dear children let's talk about how to ask a f***ing question.

You don't just go "I need help. I can't figure it out." We had trainings on this, I sat through 3 hours holding your hand to help you try and understand things.

And yet now we have scheduled another 3 hours to help you figure this out because you said you were having difficulty with it because you couldn't figure it out. How about instead of just saying you "Need help", you start by
1. Explaining what you are trying to accomplish
2. What specific issue are you facing? Is there an error message or something?
3. What have you already tried thus far that didn't work?

Instead of "I NEED HELP I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" that is the sign of a lazy f****ing engineer, someone who doesn't want to think, who doesn't want to learn something new who wants to just coast by. Especially when this is going to become an increasingly important part of your job.

And of course you currently are still a whole job level above me because sitting around and keeping a chair warm for 10 years means you are a valuable contributor, instead of what you can actually DO!

This bugs me so much. So remember kids, when you need help, or need to ask a question, ASK IT THE RIGHT F****ING WAY!

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

Got a new job my dudes!
I feel as light as a feather.

So the new robot (Dingo) arrived yesterday. Today I did the unboxing, and damn was it disappointing. I realized the university purchased it not from the company I recommended, and they messed up the delivery.
The robot controller was missing, and the charging cable did not match the charging station input. Like dude, you had one job!
Since the lady in administration decided to disregard my recommendation and order from a random shop, she might as well assemble the robot herself....

At a former job, the company decided to replatform to Salesforce. The entire dev team was laid off. But it would take an outside agency a year to build the Salesforce site. The company wanted the devs to stay for an additional year.

The only severance was something they called a stay bonus. It was 30% of our gross income but it was still contingent on performance. And if they decide to let you go earlier, it gets prorated if you still qualify for the bonus. Not a good deal.

Each month a dev left. By the time I secured a new job and left, all that remained of the dev team was a junior frontend dev and two team leads (one FE and one BE) with no team to lead. Well, there were contractors, but they were only brought on after the Salesforce replatform announcement. I’m pretty sure the company had to hire even more contractors. No idea how much that cost them.

For me, I think it was serendipitous that I gave notice during their busiest time of year. They actually tried asking me to extend my notice. Karma was coming back to bite them. Not just for the Salesforce thing. But also for their lack of support when I was blindly accused of being both insubordinate and incompetent.

I did just quit my job.
It was my first job ever.
The only job I've ever had.

But I kinda couldn't take it anymore, the pay was a bit too low and the projects were really demanding.

On Monday, I'll sign my new contract in another company, I'm REALLY looking forward to it and barely can wait!

I'll be working with just one tech-stack which is awesome compared to now where I have to work on like 5 different stacks, sometimes in a single day.

I can't wait for the new job to kick in.

New job
New project
One css file
5725 loc
Good times

Today I quit my job lol.

In my two previous stories I told you guys about a job offering I got, and after a few more incidents in my old job, I decided I take it.

No, this is not an april fools joke, though it felt quite bad to tell my team lead that I quit on april fools day.

Due to notice period I'll begin my new work at first of july this year, can't wait <3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?

Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).

After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."

So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.

After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."

After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.

Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.

Post after a long long time...

Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.

Anyway, time for a story.

After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.

Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.

One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.

They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.

Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.

He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.

I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.

Day saved? Not yet.

Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.

My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.

I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.

Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.

And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.

I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.

I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.

I am hysterical right now.

Now realizing the whole "Fuck this shit, I'm gonna become a barista" was literally a midlife crisis.

Now, how do I find my way back to a brand new PhD application? Or a research job... Or a dev job... Honestly, I'd take whatever.

Side note, after weeks of being on my feet and working 6-8 hours a day, I have lost exactly zero kilos. This was a very bad idea. 🤦

So, I'm not the smartest, but at least now I have had two careers. How many of you can say that you've had two different careers in your life, eh?

In every new job, you get this painful realization: "Oh God! I work with a bunch of morons!!"

Ok, YOU fuck up THREE (!) times, and send me new text for the app, each time saying its '100% finished, no errors' and expect me (each iteration) to do it IMMEDIATELY

Why don't you go fuck yourself, do your damn job, do it right, and THEN contact me instead of running around like an childish preschooler with a pair of scissors

I need a new 'main' language to do all my projects in as java is kind of grinding away at my psyche.

Golang I liked quite a lot when I used it for my job a year ago, I'll give that a try..

Golang installed and up and working fine.

Oh, I know lets see if there are GLFW bindings for golang. And sure there are lets go!

Oh I need gcc and mingwex + mingw32 which I will acquire through cygwin.

hmm.. mingwex + mingw32 not found and my drive is almost full. I'll reinstall on my D:\ drive before continuing troubleshooting.

> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> Change permissions Access denied.

No problem I just don't own this object!

> Change to be the 'object owner' Success!
> Change permissions Success!
> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> takeown /F C:\Cygwin /A /R /D Y Success!
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.

At this point it would be more efficient to manually open up my ssd, and using a fridge magnet change every single bit to be exactly what I want it to be.

Or install linux.

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Stop calling people by their old occupation titles. .
Please address them by using their new titles accordingly
and they will like it their job more.

OLD: *Garden Boy*
NEW: *Landscape Executive and Animal Nutritionist*

OLD: *Petrol attendant*
NEW: *Fuel transmission engineer*

OLD: *Receptionist*
NEW: *Front Desk Controller*

OLD: *Typist*
NEW: *Printed Document Handler*

OLD: *Messenger*
NEW: *Business Communication Conveyer*

OLD: *Window Cleaner*
NEW: *Transparent Wall Technician*

OLD: *Temporary Teacher*
NEW: *Associate Teacher*

OLD: *Tea Boy*
NEW: *Refreshment Director*

OLD: *Garbage Collector*
NEW: *Environmental Sanitation Technician*

OLD: *Guard*
NEW: *Security Enforcement Director*

OLD: *Prostitute*
NEW: *Practical Sexual Relations Officer*

OLD: *Thief*
NEW: *Wealth Relocation Officer*

OLD: *Driver*
NEW: *Automobile Propulsion Specialist*

OLD: *Maid*
NEW: *Domestics Managing Director*

OLD: *Cook*
NEW: *Food Chemist*

OLD: *Gossip*
NEW: *Oral Research and Evaluation Director*

Which one got you more?

First, why didn't I know about this app sooner.

Second, a month into my new job as senior frontend and wonder am I good enough.

Third, I know I just need to get out of my head.

Lastly, glad to be here.

My level of frustration with Microsoft is growing to a point that I'm unable to contain it.

They buy Github, it was a great tool for developers because is FUCKING WORKED! New features were never beta tested on users unless they requested it.

Why in the absolute fuck am I getting all these new experimental bullshit features that literally make it harder for me to do my god damned job?

They provide me NOTHING but grief and sleepless weekends while I fix the god damned pipeline that's worked perfectly fine for YEARS.

Your business model is bad and your products are SHIT.

Fuck you Microsoft, I cannot even stress it enough. If I had a time machine that could go back 5 years and my options were: Tell the world about Covid, make sure Trump never became president, or stop the Github purchse. I would hunt down and brutally attack the team of executives that decided to buy Microsoft.

Words cannot adequately describe how much I want Microsoft to fuck off. If the company was a person and they died in a house fire it wouldn't be enough.

I just want a VCS that does what it's supposed to do. I don't need pipelines, I don't need image repos, I don't need static code analysis.

I JUST NEED A FUCKING VCS THAT CONTROLS VERSIONS OF SOFTWARE YOU IGNORANT FUCKS.

Several hours ago decided to quit my job due to insane manager (more in the upcoming rants) without a new job lined up.

An hour ago I got an interview invite from Uber.

WHAT IS HAPPENING

P.S. Anyone working at Uber? Did you have to do much LeetCode? I’ve done two LC exercises in my entire life. Not sure what to expect.

One year ago I did the Week 242 Group Rant:
Dev goals for 2021?
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
⬜️Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

Now its 2022 lets se how far we got.
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
✅Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

What I did instead:
✅Worked on my indie Game
✅Went on vacation
✅Make my wife pregnant.
✅Construct, Paint, Decorate house.
✅Hold presentation about profilers

Future Goals:
⬜️Take care of my new born daughter soon.
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Learn to play Piano
⬜️Socialize a bit more

Let's say you have a MySQL database table for jobs. Each job has 1 associated ticket. You want to keep track if the ticket is closed or not. Every sane person creates jobs table, tickets table, keeps bool value for ticket state and relationship between them.

But because our database is designed by a half braindead amoeba, we have one table only, so each job has to be updated individually with a new ticket number and its state. Beacuse it sooo much faster to update (daily!) 13k jobs than just 100 tickets.
As a bonus - if the ticked is closed, the column "ticket_closed" is "No", if it's still open the value is "FALSE". Yes, both as varchar/strings.

I am back with some more emotional shit.

So tomorrow is my last working day at my second employer where essentially I'll just walk into the 10 seater serviced office to drop my laptop in a cupboard because no one else is here.

So today, an hour ago, they had a virtual farewell for me and everyone spoke of me highly with specific examples.

Well that's not what this post is about, but the emphasis is that I am still in dual mind of whether I made the right decision to quit my second employer so soon (in just 10 months)?

If I had stayed for two months more:
1. I'd gotten a hike this week
2. More RSUs in that hike along with cash
3. Joining RSUs would have vested for the cliff period of 1 year
4. Tenure would be at least a year
5. Would have found a better job with higher pay (on the new hiked salary).

I surprisingly got the grip of the product and that's when I decided to quit.

The reason I quit is I wanted to optimise for WLB and timezone with better team culture.

While the next job is surely a company I wanted for a long time and that too in B2C space, I really lost my affection for that role and that's where it came to me upfront and I rejected them initially before picking up the offer again.

My second employer is a very global and one of the largest brands. Really wanted to stick around and never got to enjoy the benefits which others did.

Only time can tell, because when I chased something I never got it, when I stopped, it came to me.

And what I am chasing now is something I am unable to achieve.

Why is life so fucked. Seems like I am about to lose one of my biggest and only life and career dream.

Maybe I fucked up this decision. Maybe not. Only time can tell.

First code review ever, and it's for my job.

Guy was really nice and polite.
Even correctly guessed I don't have much experience with professional coding outside my associates degree and prior job where I was the only programmer most of the time I was there.

Said that since it works functionally and is such a small program there's nothing wrong with it if it meets our purposes ( low priority project )

Then he politely in his words 'nitpicks' 3 points and gives me ideas on how to make it more reliable and less likely to need replaced or completely refactoring in the future.

I think my first time getting code reviewed went well. And one of the things he mentioned was something I didn't know how to do and only took 20 some minutes to implement so I also learned something new from this

that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?

Ok I'm seriously getting sick of this shit, my new manager wants us to have the fucking 12 hour night shifts from the office for .....no reason??!! for her own fucking entertainment I suppose!

I knew the day would come where my happy times at the new job would be over, my target now is stay 3 more months so I've been there for at least a year then see what happens. fuck me.

So one day on tech huddle my tech lead got frustrated, don't know why and told me - "the tasks you're doing can be done by interns"

I felt bad. Ofcourse I was putting my 100%.

That day I decided to put the resignation. I didn't discussed with anyone about it and sent the resignation email directly.

After serving 2 months of notice period I was able to land a better job successfully!

I called the lead on the last working day in that company and shared him the news about my offer letter and a little about the company.
His first question was - "Did you cleared all the interview process?"
In my mind - "That's only why I'm sharing the news here with you man! Stop thinking of me as a noob."
I replied with - "yes, if needed/the new company try to get feedback about me then please be honest atleast there by keeping your ego aside."

You shouldn't pull someone's leg if you aren't able to climb higher!!

Lesson I learnt;
DON'T STAY AT A PLACE WHERE THERE'S NO VALUE OF YOUR WORK AND THE DEDICATION TOWARDS IT!

Working in a startup isn't that easy, mostly for those where there's no work life balance.

3 weeks into a new job I learned that my predecessor (who resigned and was out the door two days after I started) didn’t know how to secure s3 buckets when all of our production image assets got replaced with elder porn.

Jury’s still out if it was actually him the whole time.

Why is it that when a job ad a recruiter sends has a salary range and they then ask your current salary and expected salary, they're shocked when you want a substantial increase in salary when it's still within the range they posted for the role. Sure it's more than 20% of my current job but if the new job can pay more than that and they say they can why should I lowball? Why does my current salary matter for the new jobs salary?

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

Alright, this is a rant about me and how much I suck at living.

After a little over a year of living alone thousands of kilometers away from home, I realised I suck at it. I'm home for the holidays now. Arrived here a couple of weeks ago. Christmas week was just the worst. I fell ill and thought I was going to perish in the cold. For the past year, I was working full throttle and didn't make time to take care of myself and cook and eat regularly. I'm sick of all the take out food. Ugh. Didn't even leave time for socialising, may have even broken a few existing connections. I built some good reputation at my company but it was not at all worth what I went through. Not one bit.

It didn't help that some important devs left the company and their code mess was down to me to handle. Don't even want to mention more about the family mess at home. But home is home still.

So this year, once I go back, I've decided I'm going to take control and make time for all the important things in life. I've gained new cooking skills from mom too. I've already started the job change process and if everything goes alright, I should be in a much better place before I see 2023.

So, my wife got this new PR job where she sometimes gets called in the middle of the fucking night because some jackoff in Singapore said or did some shit.
Since "husbands that work deep into the night get cheated on by their wives", and I believe in equal gender rights, I thought it would be a good opportunity to watch the new episode of the series we watch together. By my fucking self.
Is that how it feels to cheat on someone?

Stories from Gary #000

Short background info:
So I'm working as a game dev for 3 years now and by now I can say that I've seen some shit. Mostly because of one of our game designers, let's call him Gary.

So Gary, from here on called GDG (Game Designer Gary), is a regular game designer (GD). His job is to come up with new game ideas, commission the assets, make sure that translations are done, etc. - simply put, he has to get a lot of shit together before we can start working on a new game.

Would be no problem at all if GDG wasn't lazy as shit and would work for once in his life. No dev really wants to work with him anymore, since he's known for calling a game or any issue "ready for development" even if half the assets or specs are still missing.

Let's move on to a particular situation that happened a couple of months ago.

I had an issue assigned to me, which was about implementing the translations for a new game. As I read the issue and checked if everything I needed was given, I noticed that the most important part was in fact missing - the keywords for the translations.

-.-

So, I called GDG and asked where I could find the keywords, to which he responded "Oh, I'm working on them right now... and by the way I got a weird bug with the translation program. Can you come check it out?". Sigh. I went over to his office, rambling about how I should be able to help him with a program I rarely use and which was written ages ago.
As soon as GDG saw me coming roundbthe corner, he started explaining how the keywords aren't ready yet, since the program to create translations and their keywords won't let him name a translation.

"I can create new translations, but I can't assign a keyword to them."
"Okay, show me what you did", I told him, eager to leave.
He started to type the keyword, which turned out to be huge ass long and immediately I noticed a little counter, like "x/50", directly beneath the text field started to count up with every new character GDG typed. See where I'm going with this? HE WASNT ABLE TO RENAME A TRANSLATION BECAUSE HE WAS TOO LAZY TO FUCKING READ AND CONCENTRATE FOR ONCE. Sorry for that, but even thinking about it gets me angry again.

To some this might sound like nothing, but it really got to me at this point. Maybe it will become more understandable as I post more GDG stories.

tl;dr: A 40 something year old man, who's been working in his job for over 10 years wasn't able to use a program which he daily uses and asks me for help, only to find out he's a complete dipshit.

For all my friends here who have known me for years can easily notice there has been a drastic change in me.

I used to be confident. That shit was hollow but I used to laugh in the face of fear. I was ignorant and that ignorance fueled a lot of the much needed confidence.

Over the years, I learned a lot. The more I know, the more I realised how much I don't know. And for all that I know, I have to use the brain power to retain and implement it, else it rusts.

This image is of my 2021 goals that I drafted last December. Wasn't able to achieve the first, the last and the art one. But surely got myself surrounded by some of the smartest people I have ever worked with.

Now they have rightly said, be careful with what you wish for.

MY CONFIDENCE IS SHATTERED.

I feel dumb. Constant imposter syndrome. While I am learning every moment and there is no measure to it, I feel incompetent to an extent that I have started questioning how did I even reach this far?!

While, yet again I am the youngest in my team, my manager is bit micromanaging and agressive with OKRs/KPIs and tech team isn't very supportive creating constant friction (something I never faced with developers in my life because devs are my best friends), I fear how much more time will I take to ramp up in this new job and feel confident enough to tackle things on my own without constant nudge from leadership or different teams?

Or is it just that I have burnt out firefighting and lost the motivation I had?

After all, what does this all even mean?

I’ve got the cold from hell and my last years performance review to write.
These things are fucking terrible and every time I read a cheesy corporate competency that I have to prove, I feel slightly sick.
Just got to find a way of saying ‘I spent the last year doing just enough not to get fired’ and make it sound like I’ve reinvented the wheel.
Think I might be looking for a new job soon.

Started my new job in November. At least it only took me four months to discover the toxic culture before I'm on the market again. Uuuuugggggh Fuuuuck.

The nice thing with working in IT, is that I dont need to have a CV in order to get a new job.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

Started a new job last week. Pays a tad below average for position, but i get training time and budget for anything i want.
So far i have had few days of company introduction, and now a week for training courses related to position.
I have not seen any code yet, brought no value in, just joined.
Massive green flag to me.

I started a new job about a week ago in an R&D software house which is a completely different world from what I am used to.

I worked as a coder in small teams, sometimes with Agile but always sunk in multiple projects at once - requiring constant switching of sprint goals week to week.

Now, I am alone (first person in a "maybe-in-the-future" team), doing research and preparing a demo for the client. It's hella lot of responsibility yet I found it weirdly liberating - being on my own, in control of what I do.

It may change in the future when project will inevitebly grow, but for right now, a week in, I started smiling while coding and learning, which I apparently haven't done in years.

Started a new job as a senior dev but with a framework I've never worked with and I just feel like I'm slow AF and just not qualified for the job. I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm greiving my dog that passed last Tuesday.

Any senior types out there find that you’re losing your coding “chops”? I’m involved in so many OS/Middleware upgrades, infrastructure upgrades, status meetings that I can’t code to save my life anymore. I can review and guide design, but I struggle to generate new code. I can get a new dev going really quickly though - is this just a natural progression or is it game over for me? I feel like if I had to get another job, I’d be very unsuccessful. They call me a leader, but I think I’m just a slave.

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

getJob.then(stopShaving)

This new job has more work than I can possibly complete in a day, week, or month. Deadlines pile up and I’m thoroughly exhausted all weekend. My mind feels lethargic and dull. People around me seem to be getting stuff done and I feel like I’m making too many mistakes and holding everyone back. Not sure I can stick with this job for the long haul to retirement. But freelancing absolutely sucks because nobody wants to pay you enough to feed yourself and it doesn’t scale to a full time salary for me. I simply don’t have the mental capacity to do the equivalent of four peoples’ jobs to design, code, QA, launch, and do all the digital marketing, advertising, writing, and maintenance for enough sites to make up my salary.

the new job is coming up with utter shittyness and I don't care if that's even a word

- tomorrow is my LWD in current job. next week, i will be doing work for a company whose sdk my current company's code uses, with which i interact on daily basis. today a bug came in most trivial usecase of that sdk, and i was totally lost. i had 0 fucking clues regarding why that happened, and this is the company that am about to work with, from consumer to being a developer :/

- today my dad had a heated argument with his boss and maybe about to lose their job. at the very delightful time, when the only other source of income for the family , i.e me , is on a thin thread from the finances point of view.

- my relatives came yesterday. we are a small family of 3 (+2 cats out of which 1 is physically handicapped) with a very busy life and a very tiny house. and when suddenly 6 more fat asses squeezed themselves in, one of my cat got scared and ran to the terrace. its more than 24 hours since that fiasco, and my poor boy hasn't returned :"""( . He is a baby kitten, just 11 months old

my mood is now below the deepest points in sea level. hope y'all are doing good

Fuck corporate managers who set goals without consulting the team as to what they can commit to!! "These are the goals that you need to commit to and you need to get them done in three months!" ... New team. Members come and go (even I replaced one). Low cohesion. Many dependencies. Unclear goals. A PO who's certified in many different ways, but has no damn idea what to do. Sure, let's get this shit thing done in 3 months.. aaaand we're late 6 months. Nice job. Stupid fuckers. I'm so glad I'm just consulting on this project and not a member of this chaos organization.

I know I'm out of the loop since I barely use these sites, but...

What is it with this seemingly ridiculous new trend on LinkedIn of replacing your meaningless job title with, somehow, an even more meaningless fake description of what you're doing? I'm seeing it all over.

Back in the day it'd just be "Python developer". Then the trend seemed to be a "Senior / lead / principle software engineer / Python specialist" (who cares if you're actually a senior eh, this is LinkedIn.) And if that wasn't ridiculous enough, now it's "Helping to transform the globe towards a greener future by implementing beautiful, robust code in Python 3.10" or similar. Who the hell wants to see this crap?!

FML or how I made myself unhireable

TL;DR: Working as a QA.
Changed jobs.
New job sucked.
Left after three months.
Got laid off from the next one after 4 months (not my fault).
Got depressed.
Got a Dev job back in the first company.
Job sucks, cannot leave… (5 months in)

Full rant:
I was doing pretty well as a QA Enginner. Started with internship, then junior in company A, then big pay rise moving to company B, where I quickly got promoted to Senior. As I was nearing 3yrs of exp, I decided it’s time for a change, as things were getting worse project-wise and felt like I was regressing. Also I was constantly bombarded with offers of +50% of my salary I could easily land, while company offered 10%.

Moved on to company C. This is where it started getting rocky. I was told I would be working on this one project, strictly test automation, nothing exciting but an easy gig. However week in, I was told to work on this other project 50/50. This was a startup kind of thing. It was a nightmare. Only manual testing. Most tickets had only a vague title, no description, no requirements, nothing. How do one test something without any knowledge how it should work? Besides that, the project lead on the client side was aggressive sometimes.
The workload was immense - 4 devs, 2 of them doing heavy overtime, so the output was like 6 devs and half of a tester….
Despite raising the problems, nothing was going to change, nor I could switch projects. The job began to heavily affect my mental health. Decided not to prolong my contract and left after 3 month probation period.

Quickly landed a job in company D. As my burnout as a tester kept bothering me more and more I decided that this was going to be my last job as a QA and next one will be a Dev. You see, I never enjoyed the tester part, I always enjoyed the automation part more. The plan was to learn in free time and after 18-24 months start applying for a dev role to see if I can land one (switching inside D was not an option). All plans went to hell, as I was handed a one month notice by the end of my third month. A month before my wedding… I was told the company was having financial issues and was laid off with about 30% of people in the company (mostly new hires).

I got depressed. I wouldn’t get out of bed for a few days. I never thought something like this would ever happen to me. Standing by my decision I was applying for development jobs, but most recruiters seeing either only QA experience or my recent 3 and 4 month employment periods weren’t responsive. Applying for testing jobs was a bit better but still nothing like before C and D.

Since company B I stayed in touch with my former manager, and he kept telling me that a new team has taken over most of the shitty work, and they are now working on cooler stuff and have more coming. He encouraged me to come back, as he has always thought highly of me professionally.
Looking at my options, I could probably get another testing job with lower pay, maybe I could land a junior Dev with like 1/3 of my salary or I could go back. So in my dark time I have reached out to my manager and just like that he got me a Senior Dev position, same pay as in company D.

Finally what I wanted right? Yeah… As soon I as joined all the new initiatives were being dropped one by one, and backlog got flooded with bugs and sh*t again. Five months in I hate my job again. Cannot leave cause no one will hire me…

Where I made the mistake?
Shouldn’t leave B despite facing regression and being underpaid?
Shouldn’t leave C no matter what?
Shouldn’t come back to B?

-- Best --
> Submitted my notice of termination for my current job
> Found a new job starting next year
> Can switch from Windows to Linux/MacOS in new job
> Got more time to work on personal projects due to the pandemic

-- Worst --
> Huge amount of software restrictions (current job) almost got several projects at work canceled. Maybe its important to say that the core business of my current workplace is auditing so there are a lot of law regulations which then apply in the softwaredevelopment process.
> New managers that do not have the slightest clue of what they're doing
> Online Teambuilding events
> Absurd amount of segmentation of tools and also different coding guidelines that are used at work. E.g. one team uses jira, another trello, another github issue tracker and so on.

New job. Almost all sites are blocked due to "security"... even spotify. I can' listen to the music. Fortunately i have access to dev rant xd

Finally got rid of my old job I ranted about so much. Started a new one on Monday. A bit anxious and terrified (there is a lot to learn) but it feels good. The team is fun and they know what they are doing. BUT most importantly: they know how to plan projects and know how to intervene if a project is about to run out of resources. NICE.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes

so... the next step from programmer/developer is always an entrepreneur/business?

i see my daily work : i open my laptop, i see tickets from my company which include bug fixes, new feature development, some discussions , etc. i fix the bugs, make the features, add my points in discussion and the day is done.
from company's point of view, i am an ideal developer. in some years i will become a senior dev, which i guess involves similar stuff but different weightage (or is it different? please comment) . after that, we become tech lead , then engineering lead , then mts1 then mts 2... etc

i am guessing you guys must have similar trajectories in your company. from what i know, some people don't continue this trajectory (from boredom, lust for money , other reasons) and instead go on building a new product / starting a company , going into managerial/ entrepreneurial role.

so this is one kind of goal : "i will learn tech enough to launch my own company and be a ceo of it". i can't relate much to it. why go into tech when you wanna launch a product? why not just go into business schools from the day1 and get business knowledge?

anyways the above are the questions that i don't really want an answer for, those are just my criticisms.

but my main question is : what about those people who DON'T want to go on launching some business?
- do you people exist?
- what's your goal? is it around the lines of "learning all the tech of the world to be the cto or chief engineer of a company"
- how do you plan to achieve it?

honestly i want to be the second kind of person, i.e the one who always codes/ aims to code but can't seem to find a proper path/goal to it. plus the job security that i have seen with businesses/entrepreneurs throughout my life, my introvert mind fails to see "just coding" as a success.

i am 23 , but i fear that when i am 40 and my 5 yo kids comes to home seeing his dad sitting against laptop "just coding" , they will feel more insecure against their friends whose father has some shop or founder of some funded startup

(40 yo dads, share your views on life too , please )

Hey! This is a followup to my last story.

TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.

First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.

Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.

One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.

The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.

I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.

Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.

Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...

Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.

One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.

I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...

Man all I ever do is fix bugs in a giant overgrown calculator, that has references to code before I was even born. It might be new job time

Second week sick I see how my life slowed down and how meaningless everything around is, everyone is rushing about some bullshit, name it new amazing job opportunity, black Friday great deal, super duper product idea or some most important bug on production that we need to fix asap.

All that can’t wait a week when I’m healthy?
Seriously, people lost their minds in today’s world to some bullshit.

I’m to old and to depressed to care about such idiotic things. Living my life as I want and on my own peace, don’t care everyone is running, I’m slowly walking and I like it.

It’s better to walk straight than run around like an idiot.

By trying to do my best. Doing a good job makes me feel good and gives me even more motivation.

Also by trying something new every time. Either by using new library, new approach do to things or whatever. Just to keep stuff exciting.

In August 2021 I asked my bosses for a raise for my extra work that I done for the last 6 months to create the first 4 microservices in the company and deploy them in production on a new infrastructure that is cloud based.
Today 27/01/2022 they reported how happy they are of me and that they will take my proposal *in consideration*.
Now i am searching for a new job.

Funny part: I am simple guy if they would have given me a NAS from Synology with lot of space as a reward I would actually have been happy.

P.S. jokes on them, i left 4 easter eggs hidden in the app, pipeline, db and user manual.

Worst: being forced back into the loud distracting office, to add on to the badness the covid restrictions were not taken very seriously

Best: getting a new full time remote job and an awesome company with some awesome team mates

Bonus is I now work from home fully but can still hang out with my great former coworkers

What would you do if you started a new job and found out it's a complete clown show?

The new devRant UI is pretty cool and also love the new features in the app.

Good job dfox and trogus.

I would not consider myself an overachiever by any means, but I must say, I'm quite satisfied with my contributions this year at the new (relatively speaking) job. I got to go back to writing code almost every day, all day, and that sure as hell beats being in meetings all the goddamn time.

my boss some months ago: so there is this new project, and we're planning to slowly fade in and gradually increase the time you guys work on this project

new pm last week: welcome to the project, you're now 100% allocated to the new project, that's your highest prio now
me: ...what about the other projects? they might have questions xD
pm: don't worry about that, dealing with that is not your job

my boss this week: yeah no, the other releases are most important for our company. the new project needs to be subordinated and has lower prio, at least lower prio than critical and highly prioritized bugs.
me: so.... who decides which items from which projects i shall prioritize higher than the new project and how much time i shall spend on them?
my boss: it is your job to talk to people, give them estimates and tell them how many items you can work on, so they can decide which items they pick

so basically i'm having the feeling that i need to manage myself here. it will be fun to attend the new project daily standups and tell the new pm all the time that i couldn't do anything because i had no time. anyone else with this experience? is this normal? actually i liked our new pm's attitude "dealing with that is not your job". i should have known it was too good to be true ^^'

So I am new to coding — excited to be learning but terrified to get out and find some sort of job when that time comes.

!rant.

I fucked up. Recently I applied for a job in Intel. All questions they throw at me I answered well, but there's one question that f**ked me hard that I can't think of any answer to. (Because ! am not familiar with this)

I was questioned about SLAM ( Simultaneous localization and mapping), I am new to this.

Now I think I failed to get the job. Therefore, I f**ked up

Question for those that worked alone with a project manager, and were you covered multiple parts, frontend, backend, mobile and you basically have good friendship with the project owner/manager but the job got bored or wanted to switch jobs because you wanted to change environment.

What was the period you informed your employer/project manager in advance about your resignation and leaving? 2 weeks, a month? more? And was it enough time for the manager to find replacement? Did you leave in good terms?

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

Maybe I am just sensitive.. but sometimes I feel that my new manager is being a little harsh on me.

Again, he might behave the same with everyone and I am assuming that it's just me.

1.5 months in the new job and not a single good comment/feedback I recieved from him. It's not that he criticises me or my work, or calls me a dumbass.

But whenever I submit anything for review, I get a ton of feedback where he expects everything to extreme precision.

He guides me, explains me post my failure, and has specific pointers of what he wants/how he wants things.

But all I am given is a set of documents to read initially with an expectation that I have to figure things out. When I am not upto the mark, he then guides me.

Why I worry?

1. I am on probation and this place is a start-up, don't want to get fired.

2. They got me as a Sr PM (which was also my previous role where I excelled), so I fear that expectations would be high from me. Failing to deliver those might get me in trouble.

3. He isn't a micro manager and quite supportive, but his communication style isn't working for me (so far).

Somehow, as always, I am getting along well with everyone in the org and everyone is talking good about me.

But with my immediate boss, the imposter syndrome kicks in real hard and I am super insecure. Every time I have to interact with him, I get super stressed and anxious.

I know things take time, but given that I am a Sr PM (and my boss expects me to be a lead PM, a position higher than current), I feel if the expectations are not delivered then I might get fucked.

ugh... another shitty day. its been 2 months since i joined this team , and i am counting the days that have not gone being shitty.
i am not doing any shit of a work, yet just sitting in front of company code and slack whole day, trying to figure out what am supposed to do and how.

- my task is currently making release of a unity sdk. i never worked on unity until 2 days ago when i gor this task.
- company laptop has a fuckin jamf with unity 2019 that won't even open properly. i raised a ticket to IT and somehow got it to update and work for my laptop after 2 days.

- now i am able to create a default project and get it to run, but now the company sdk that is supposed to be installed in a project causes the project to not build when i include it.

- other team members are being assholes. i message this guy 4 times in 10 minutes since i have no clue what to do, and this asshole replies after 6 hours, when i am having my lunch. and his reply ? "try to play around this . am working on a p1 bug so can't help now" wtf man give me something, i am stuck

- there are also issues raised on our github's page for sdk. i have no clue how our sdk works internally and yet i am expected to respond to these issues. i asked the same asshole to look onto an issue(whose reporter was nice enough to include a full stack trace and even the exact place which is causing ANR and his reply was "yeah check on this , ask the other(asshole) guy about it, he fixed ANRs before. look into the sdk, we don't need to reply on GitHub issues asap".

- the main problem here is : i have zero clue how to approach this sdk! i have implemented it completely in a sample project but the whole sdk is in java with so so many pointless (from my p.o.v) interfaces and base classes that i can't understand how to get to the bottom of it! and yet am supposed to jump into this stuff.

i hate when code feels like magic and job feels like prison janitor work. i want to get into action : add apis , build stuff , make a change , but somehow i ended up with the most boring and irritating job i could find.

i can't even just stop and work on my personal stuff because they have got jamf on this fucking laptop. us these async expectations are killing me

btw did i mention the tech lead has been having a fantastic time getting married and taking multiple vacations? yeah, that guy just took a call with me for like 3 times in last 50 days. this company is all so charming from outside : weekends off, 1/4 fridays off 3 days a week standup , but so less interactions is clearly making me , a new guy with already a very less interest in java and their various shitty sdks, very uncomfortable.

Finally got my first dev job. I am looking at the code base for my company. And it’s like I know how to code in this language. But I don’t know half of the advanced shit they’re doing. I understand they have more experience than me. But I’m just not sure how to catch up to them. Or be even on the same level as them? I guess just more out of office learning?

I can read what they’re putting in the code and understand how it works. But like how they came up with it I have no clue. I guess I’ll learn over time and have to put in some extra man hours.

Jesus christ I need my VP and CIO to get their hands out of Azure and GCP and just let me work.

Yes, governance and security and IAM are big deals. That's why you have infraops people like me to deal with that.

I'm literally working with one hand tied behind my back because just about every button press or CLI command I need to do my damn job as a professional cloud fluffer requires me to go bother an executive and ask permission to pretty please can I deploy a new container, can you go press the shiny button? No not that one, move your mouse up...up..now UP..ok over lef-no..can I have mouse control? Sigh fine, do you see where it says "Approvers", no that says "Release Pipeline"

Look I actually kinda like this job, I do, in as much as when I have something to do I get left the fuck alone to do it. Meetings are minimal, aside from the odd days when one of our app services decides to yeet itself into the river Styx, there's little distractions.

Yeah, developers do dumb shit but that's probably best left to the notion of job security and never talked about again less they go to HR and complain that the ops guy was very stern and direct and made the developer take some accountability for their work product.

AND YET

It's so intergalactically stupid that I have to go ask permission just to do ops tasks by the same people barging down my goddamn door asking why the ops task isn't done yet.

"Because you won't give me permissions in GCP to actually DO anything".

Okay. Rant over. Time for lunch. Good meeting, see you all at the holiday party.

Finally, I finally got my dream job, but three weeks after starting, I will say I am going into depression.

First, I have to learn a new language (the lang is less than 7 years old) on the job. The language is so different from the paradigm I am used to-from OOP to functional programming, it has very little confusing documentation and a small but growing community.

Though I have been able to show some work, goddamit, it's taking me blood and sand to adjust and be productive.

My onboarding tasks are fixing bugs and implementing a feature, and it has been like walking in a dark tunnel.

I have to face my problem alone as all the devs in the team have swapped.

I rarely sleep, and I recently started to have an existential crisis!

Also, I work part-time on another project, and my output is so poor due to the fact that I am trying to adjust to the new job. Just this evening, I got a call from the manager who was passively aggressive, complaining and asking me to rethink (a passive way of saying "you are fired, if you do not...").

I am feeling anxious. It is taking so much time daily to adjust to the new job.

Will the depression pass?

My best and worst dev experience this year was getting a new job.

The bad parts: I’m inheriting a code base that was maintained by an outside agency, so there’s very little documentation. There’s a lot of systems maintenance and upgrades that have to be done because it was never done. I’m working at a larger organization, so tracking down who I need for info can be tricky. I’m the only person maintaining my code base.

Now the good parts: Better pay and benefits. My co workers, dev and non-dev, are always helpful. Since the dev team is small, we are very discerning when we pick up work for the websites. I have more independence to self-learn. I’m not at a blame culture. My role is permanently remote.

So far I think the good outweighs the bad.

all these jobs sites are trash

surprisingly, Indeed is the only good one. can search and even 'not' works a good amount of the time

linkedin - hah. they started hiding their 'advanced' searchs and filters. why? yet they let posters post the same job but in 20 different areas, flooding the damn results

dice straight up wasn't searching the other day. but even now there are a load of jobs without decent filtering and theyre all crap pay so uh no.

glassdoor constantly ask if you want to get notifications every time you click on anything. fuk-off

and cybercoders lol omg. youd think the tech oriented one would KEEP YOU LOGGED THE FUK IN. log in? k. new page? nope youre not logged in.

jfc can anyone do anything right?

after switching job, i have found one particular way of diving into new company's code to be very effective : understanding it as a product first

as a dev i would go straight into the manifest ,yml or gradle files when joining a new company to get the understanding of the codebase as early as possible, and that was my mistake.

say , if the company's product is a food selling app that uses 5 modes of authentication : email, google, fb, mobile and sso, how can i understand the authentication code when I haven't interacted with each of them as a user? I won't know of any further screens, any further logics, steps etc that someone would do as a user , and it would be more effort to understand code without knowing of the outcome first

imho backtracking is a very good way of understanding a system. checkout the outcome first, code later

Dear Windows, we have to talk. I love you, you know that, and I know that your market share has been shrinking in recent years and you're shit scared of becoming irrelevant but for the love of god:

- STOP asking me every god damn few weeks if I want to change my browser settings - NO I FUCKING DONT WANT TO USE BING, FUCK OFF

- STOP trying to be like an app and add pointless new "features" that nobody cares about and just do your fucking job, which is to be a PLATFORM which is stable, never changes and that gets out of my fucking way

- STOP reinstalling apps I uninstall, Im NOT FUCKING INTERESTED IN PAINT 3D, FUCK OFF

FUCK, ME,

I’m sooo excited when any new frontend JS framework is available. Angular, React, more recently Vue, Svelte. Bring ‘em on. I wanna try them all.

Just kidding…
As long as the tools at hand allow me to get the job done, keep clients and end users happy, I don’t give a fuck.
This meme is actually the epitome of what I hate with a lot of web developers I’ve encountered

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 stupid

Best:
Seeing ALL the members of my team finally coming into their own. One person tackled our entire not-at-all-simple CI/CD setup from scratch knowing nothing about any of it and, while not without bumps in the road, did an excellent job overall (and then did the same for some other projects since he found himself being the SME). Two of my more junior people took on some difficult tasks that required them to design and build some tricky features from the ground-up, rather than me giving them a ton of guidance, design and even a start on the basic code early on (I just gave them some general descriptions of what I was looking for and then let them run with it). Again, not without some hiccups, but they ultimately delivered and learned a lot in the process and, I think, gained a new sense of self-confidence, which to me is the real win. And my other person handled some tricky high-level stuff that got him deep in the weeds of all the corporate procedures I'd normally shield them all from and did very well with it (and like the other person, wound up being an SME and doing it for some other projects after that). It took a while to get here, but I finally feel like I don't need to do all the really difficult stuff myself, I can count on them now, and they, I think, no longer feel like they're in over their heads if I throw something difficult at them.

Worst:
A few critical bugs slipped into production this year, with a few requiring some after-hours heroics to deal with (and, unfortunately, due to the timing, it all fell on me). Of course, that just tells us that next year we really need to focus on more robust automated testing (though, in reality, at least one of the issues almost certainly would not - COULD NOT - have been caught before-hand anyway, and that's probably true for more than just one of them). We had avoided major issues the previous three years we've been live, so this was unusual. Then again, it's in a way a symptom of success because with more users and more usage, both of which exploded this year, typically does come more issues discovered, so I guess it tempers the bad just a little bit.

That one time when i just got my first job and I was new to everything aaaaand my aunt have already started to pitch the idea of me making some company with one of my second cousins (because he was studying for some business degree and i was the tech one)

I mean, I understand the wish to do things "in family", but family and money should never mix imo

A new year, a new job.

After a years hard graft learning front end code I finally landed my first dev job!

Even though the job is a while away, there will be nothing stopping me getting there and learning all I can in this industry.

#bosh

I started a new job, got through on-boarding and took my first ticket. Made my modification to the code base and the tests fail .. each time I run them .. on different tests .. randomly.

What the hell have I gotten myself into?

To my review of 2021 ... a good lesson was learned.

I was doing so much for my company.. late night workings.. team handling.. client handline.. to name a few.. But in december they broke my heart.. Altough after little negotiation I was able to get a good package but somehow I Realized this is the time to switch.

But am at good position in my current company so I just cant go away for few pennies. I have to check for company's culture.. my tech stack.. etc too..

But I am determined to get a good job and packge with Challeging tech stack in 2022.

Hope this 2022 Bring brighter future to all of you .. Happy New year

I'm studying 10-12 hours every day, and it feels like I'm stuck in a loop that every time I learn something new I feel like I have to learn other 10 things at the same time. At least I finally found something useful to do while I don't find a job.

having your scant free time outside of work consumed by take home assignments to try and get a new job, got like more than 3 assignments to deal with

fml

Hi all, how do you deal with imposter syndrome?
I just joined a new job 3 mths back and am struggling with feeling productive. I feel my manager thinks I might be incompetent as my project deliveries are getting delayed.

I was burnt out as last job and it hasn't been easy picking up domain knowledge in a new workplace esp with wfh.
Any advice on how to deal with such a situation ?

now... Im just tired and bored of what i do. i had a very hectic year rewriting a core functionality in my company, it was full of optimizations, logic improvements and learning new things.

I took 10 days off hoping id come hating my job less. I learned kotlin and worked on a personal server side project with it during the vacation and honestly i loved it. I missed learning new languages and concepts.

so i thought, well if i enjoyed coding during the vacation then my burnout is cured right ? well once i went back to work today I felt like shit and couldn't do a thing. disgusted of the idea coding for my employer. Too tired to continue my personal project after 8 hours of my job

I guess im back to square one

The new job is sucking all of my motivation away. Been a while since I’ve did any coding just for fun. It’s tedious to even start learning new things after work.. how do you people deal with it?

Started looking for a new job....
First job I replied is to a company that is always requesting workers because they only pay minimum wages and bosses are stupid fucks.
They didn't even had the name of the company in the announcement. Only saw it in the email.
My reply: No thank you. I was already interviewed by your company and I know it's fame between machinists. If I wanted to get minimum wages I would be working in cleaning.
Fuck them. Exploring workers like slaves.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

Fuck ticketing systems man.. jumped from a good job that i previously thought was going to be a deadend and jobhopped to a new one with a significant salary increase. Problem is that The stress levels increased 5x, and there’s significant rush to complete tasks that have sub optimal descriptions to put it nicely. The problem with that is that the lead doesn’t have enough time to properly write them and catching him during work hours for him to explain them is sometimes impossible. Sitting in limbo with 4-5 tickets open, all of them with high priority and stresing the fuck out.

I just experienced a new level of wut at my job. Web Engineering has a Google group email. This morning someone at work sent us an email about canceling a work order (and he didn’t know how to cancel it)…for a plumbing issue 😑Wrong engineering department, my dude. And you can cancel your work order by going to the request system where you submitted it or the email receipt of you request, which was certainly not to this Google group email. You have the work order number, so you must have an email somewhere about your request. And how’d he get this email?? I’m seriously wondering if this is a weird phishing attempt.

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

Saw a Job ad stating they give a brand new MacBook Air as you get hired (as a FrontEnd developer)

Is this a red flag? BC to me it really looks like a red flag.

Why would I specifically need a Mac? Just to test stuff on shitty Safari? I really hope so and I also really hope that it won't be to start developing iOS apps

I'm... Confused? Undecided?
I like the place where I work because of the people... Even the worst are nice (tough sooner or later I'm gonna have words with the engineer... I had no problems so far but when he gets mad his a dick).
I'm being prazed a lot... One of my bosses say that I'm a find and every time I talk about looking for other jobs everyone tries to make me change my mind.

On the down side... They pay like shit. I should be getting double at entry...
Machines have no mantainance... One is even working without oil and that brakes my hearth.
I'm still a temp... One would think the owners would be doing everything to keep me, since I can get to a lvl that others take years and I keep finding mistakes that more experience workers don't see.
Well... I'll wait and see. They can't keep me as a temp for more than a year...

I've become so cynical during the pandemic. Got a message from some HR lady in LinkedIn, and while I am in no way looking for a new job, I looked up the company. They make one type of industrial devices and sell them around Europe. Rather low turnover.

I'm a pretty high skilled web developer / architect. I build highly scalable web based applications using cloud platforms. The message was obviously just copy pasted and sent to various people, but the initial reaction in my mind was to ask her where did she get the idea in her small little head to ask me to work for her shitty company instead of the one I'm working for now which has over 500 expert developers in various fields, incredibly interesting projects that you can take your pick from and in general one of the greatest work cultures ever with no corporate bullshit. Were you gonna pay me triple the money or what? because I still wouldn't do it.

I just messaged her that I'm not interested atm.

I feel bad for bootcampers. Their schools tell them to apply for a job even if they don’t have all the qualifications because they will learn on the job. That’s fine if you’re applying for an upgrade in the same career path. But when you’re changing careers, a lot of jobs don’t necessarily have time to invest in you like that.

I do have respect for those who DM me on Slack and ask if the job is open to new bootcamp grads. At least they are taking the initiative to ask and not sulking that they’re not good enough.

I tell them “this role requires experience in x. If you have that, then apply” because I don’t actually know they’re not qualified.

I was like them before. It’s hard to get the first job and sometimes it’s a lot of luck. But the first job will make getting the next one easier.

At least they’re not recruiters trying to convince me to pay them to fill the role.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

How much of mentoring should I expect as a junior dev? 4 weeks in this job. I get assigned a ticket, tryhard for 3-4 days on it only for my implementation to be replaced by a mid/senior with another broken solution with new bugs which I dont even know how to debug. They are not even in the office, I have to call them and mentoring that I get is max 30min a week. Is that normal? I expected at least 30min a day mentoring. I feel that I cant grow here as fast as I would want to. If I wanted to waste my time on digging through dozens of articles to learn what senior could tell me in 10 minutes, I wouldnt have accepted this job.

At old e-commerce job, some orders were coming through with most of the shipping info missing. The only info filled out was the State. When we looked at Heap, we could see the user was filling in those fields. There was both frontend and backend validation for required form data, so the user shouldn’t have been able to checkout without an address.

When I looked at the BE logic, I saw addresses were retrieved from our database by using a method called GetOrCreateDefaultAddress. When the website couldn’t find the address in the db, it created a new one where the only address field that was filled in was the state.

Unfortunately, this default address creation was happening after the submit button had been hit. There was no logic to validate the address this late in the checkout because the earlier form validation in the process should have caught this.

The orders did have email addresses, so customer service did have a way to contact the customer. I have no idea what happened to the user’s address. Was it never saved? Did it get caught up in a cron job to delete old users and addresses from the db??

how to get rich: step 1: sell your organs; selling your organs is a quick and efficient way to make money, the more you sell=the more you make.

step 2: tax evasion; just stop paying taxes, why give away your money when you can just keep it?

step 3: print money; why get a job when you can just print money? say goodbye to that annoying 9-5!

step 4: invest in the cryptocurrency $bigblackballs. $bigblackballs is the new bitcoin! it will take over all other cryptocurrencies in the market and make everyone rich. $bigblackballs to the moon! get on the wave while you still can.

thanks for reading, hopefully, you learned something from this tutorial!!!!

First day of work at the new job.
BUT, don’t wanna work. Just want to snuggle in a cozy blanket and watch GOT on Netflix
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(I know GOT is not on Netflix, but don’t you wish it was?)

So... I've been looking for a week on why my machine was braking tools on every piece...
Found out yesterday, it was machining without water....
Told the engenheir (my direct boss)... Started working at midnight and was the same...
Decided to fix it, besides the fact that I'm a temp and shouldn't be doing his job...
Can't fix it... To many broken pieces....
Well a few metal pipes like straws and some rubber bands and its fixed for now...
I really can't understand why a engenheir gets 10x more money and can't bother to fix the machines....
Well I know why... He's not the one paying for new ones when these brake.
Next: other machine Is working without oil...
And no, I'm not messing with that... In a few months they will just have to buy a new one.

Working as a Dev for a while now, I tell new people not to bother with it. There is never any job satisfaction as people in charge never understand the basics.

Instead of learning to write efficient code, figure out how to solve real business problems, work towards a maintainable flexible product to quickly deliver value on changing requirements, write automated tests to improve quality, maintainability and prevent live issues - basically do anything a good Dev strives for - you will just constantly end up working for people with no interest beyond the next couple days, on a shit code base that no one can understand, with people that don't want to learn anything about software design and just check boxes off.

Apart from pay this must be the worst career possible in a technical field.

About to start my new job (on Monday).
I went to the new office once to get the new work laptop (a fucking Mac).

They also told me be fast in setting up the work email as the client i'll be working on will send some instruction on how to use their accounts.

Even heard them since... hopefully they'll just pay me for doing basically nothing as I now have literally NOTHING to work on when I'll start.

Also, they told me something about the project I'll be working on, and to be honest, the whole project would take about 2 months to be done from scratch, but we have until November to make it work... I'm so fucking confused!

My best friend (a consultant in salesforce) told me that he feels that software development is becoming like a blue collar casual job that anyone who has enough IQ can just pickup and start working. Have in mind that, he doesn't even have coding basics so I take his opinion with a grain of salt (since his work is just knowing the salesforce framework and teaching his clients what button to click where. He spends 80% of his day in business calls or meetings).

Personally I think that anyone can learn coding basics, but only certain people can stay in this field because you need to constantly grow, change, learn new things, have a huge treshold for failure and also somehow motivate yourself. Only 20% of my unversity peers are actually coding nowadays. Also only around 2-3 people out of 10 people in coding bootcamps actually become devs. So for me dev job is clearly not a casual job.

What are your thoughts on this?

thoughts on term insurance/life insurence/ health insurence/ other insurances of this sort?

I am new to adult life but i personally find them very sketchy and screaming of a scam?
- Like if I die right now, do i expect some 3rd party to whom i just started paying a few dollars per month to give my family 100x that amount immediately?

- firstly, how can i ensure this , i have just died and my family would be in shatters(I guess) , they won't be having some worldclass lawyers or mental/financial power to fight over a dead guy

- secondly am guessing they are all about specific ways of dying, current salary, whether the family can survive on their own without that insured guy gone, etc etc. so basically everything they could make to not shed some money. So why bother? I am currently in a situation where the family is working on 60-80% of my income. but even with me gone, they can survive if they want. its human nature of survival, that's what made us come out at the top of food chain. so doesn't that make the whole point of insurances moot?
- thirdly how can someone guarantee a fixed income 'after death' when my current income itself is not 'guaranteed' , when 'alive'? here comes another pandemic, or some recession, and behold, am fired from my job. the. how come those companies guarantee an income in such crisis? Last time i checked, it was just an ugly civil war between insurance companies and common people when covid suddenly hit fatally to a lot of families. these guys were coming up with new rules and legalities to get away from paying to the families of deceased.

health insurance does somewhat sound okay, but at the same time feels like even bigger scams. in a nutshell, every health policy is like : "we will cover 50-100% of any major operation/doctoral procedure that costs x amount and is prescribed by a doctor if you keep paying us 0.1x amount every month for your whole life"
I see 3 problems in this:
- PRESCRIBED BY DOCTOR? obviously a doctor is a godly person that can prescribe a genuine operation based on a person's situation, but this whole payment based on word of mouth screams of shadiness. if someone said that "hi you are a technical expert. we won't pay you directly but whenever you are going to work on something for someone, we will cover your fees and your tools's cost that you tell to that person" . nice, am now recommending aws's most expensive ec2 instance to every mf that comes to me for an frontend issue.
- why do we need to have such procedures that will cost so much? where is the concept of subsidiary? What is the point of having an awesome technology like CT scan or MRI when no person could afford it? I know even water comes at both Rs 20 and Rs 250 bottle, but the rs250 bottle is a luxary, not a necessity . if a few people want rs 250 bottle then they can have it, hell they can have it in a gold platted bottle and pay 2500. but the underlying material is available to all for affordable price(if not free), right?

-------
Well that's all my little rant. I am intrigued by the business models of these fear mongering devil insurance companies. so would like to know your opinion on instances where these companies are correct and its beneficial to take an insurance

Should I point out on an interview, that I've been approached by other companies too? will that help me or not? what do you think?

A philosophical question about maintenance/updating.

There is no need to repeat the reasons we need to update our dependencies and our code. We know them/ especially regarding the security issues.
The real question is , "is that indicates a failure of automation"?

When i started thinking about code, and when also was a kid and saw all these sci fi universes with robots etc, the obvious thing was that you build an automation to do the job without having to work with it anymore. There is no meaning on automate something that need constant work above it.

When you have a car, you usually do not upgrade it all the time, you do some things of maintance (oil, tires) but it keeps your work on it in a logical amount.
A better example is the abacus, a calculating device which you know it works as it works.

A promise of functional programming is that because you are based on algebraic principles you do not have to worry so much about your code, you know it will doing the logical thing it supposed to do.
Unix philosophy made software that has been "updated" so little compared to all these modern apps.
Coding, because of its changeable nature is the first victim of the humans nature unsatisfying.

Modern software industry has so much of techniques and principles (solid, liquid, patterns, testing that that the air is air) and still needs so many developers to work on a project.
I know that you will blame the market needs (you cannot understand the need from the start, you have to do it agile) but i think that this is also a part of a problem .
Old devices evolved at much more slow pace. Radio was radio, and still a radio do its basic functionality the same war (the upgrades were only some memory functionalities like save your beloved frequencies and screen messages).

Although all answers are valid, i still feel, that we have failed. We have failed so much. The dream of being a programmer is to build something, bring you money or satisfaction, and you are bored so you build something completely new.

Get to know the new company better (Changed job shortly before Christmas).
Learn some DPs, DDD, k8s, finish introduction to hacking course, start doing htb and thm machines, finish and defend my thesis, finish books clean code, thinking in java (reading it to fill in gaps on knowledge), a few books about pentesting.
Among non tech goals: pass drivers license exam for cars, another one for motorcycles, go back to learning russian.

Behold! This is the first time in my career when Jest and unit testing in general actually helped me 😂

Spent two days moving from a fucking slow piece of crap called Gatsby to Vite, trying to comprehend the difference between TS aliases, Babel aliases and Linaria aliases. Found an answer inside a totally unrelated issue explaining Jest stuff, good job on documentation, Linaria!

Vite is fast. Crazy fast. Forget about Webpack, Parcel and things alike — Vite doesn't even need to bundle JS.

Gatsby was slow to the point of my computer's audio glitching, I'm not even talking about the OS interface lags.

Vite is fast to the point that I don't actually need a new MacBook.

my former client didn't pay me my three weeks salary, I don't know if I deserve it. I got kind of distracted from the past two weeks because I just moved in to a new house and the following week I got sick and got positive of covid, they didn't ask for my time log and I didn't give it, because I was shy I was not able to work that much. I decided to resign because the stress I'm getting from work is starting to affect my health too much physically and mentally. Now, that client didn't pay me my three weeks salary I asked several times and I didn't get any response. Did I deserve that? To not get paid because because I was not able to work that much and I suddenly just resigned? I'm paid hourly, I extended my stay for a week in good faith but still my client didn't bother to pay me... instead of getting more stress from that I decided to move on. But still, it hurts me to think I've spent hours working on a job that would turn out to be free.

!dev
The conversation with my friend.

friend: "So you are getting a new Job?"
me : "Yea, maybe I will start a business tho. btw , what you do for a living now?"
friend: "I fap for living."
me: "aacha? come on serious."
friend :"serious only I am telling. I donate my sperm for RM150 per sample."
me: "WTF"
friend: "yeap. and that's how I made more virgin marry with my donation."
me: "YUCKS, stop it."