An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

PM: You know that screen that pops up at the start of the app asking for permission to access health data?

Me: Yeah the iOS HealthKit permission screen. What about it?

PM: Can you take that out. I don't think people are going to agree to it. I want people to use the app.

Me: Well we can't do that, apple says if we want to use HealthKit we have to ask for permission. We shouldn't be touching that data without permission anyway.

PM: Oh no permission is fine I get that, but is it not implied by downloading the app, its clearly a health app. I really don't want people to download it and then uninstall it because they don't like this.

Me: Not really, not everyone will know what data is needed, some of it might be sensitive to them.

PM: Nah I don't buy into that. I asked 5 of my friends on the golf course at the weekend and 3 of them said they wouldn't agree to it, thats 60% of our user base, we can't have that.

Me: ... ok, well I don't agree that your 5 friends is a fair sample to judge the whole world by, either way we have no choice.

Pm: No this isn't going to fly, can we not build our own HealthKit that doesn't have this kind of permission screen? Maybe we could start our own, and invite our partners to use it?

Me: ... no

Pm: why not? We'll have legal draw up something we put in the terms and conditions.

Me: ... it will take months to build for all the different types of devices we have, if they even let us get access to them, and then we will have a different standard to everyone else.

Pm: ... no your not seeing the big picture, i'll run the idea up the ladder.

**It was approved up the ladder, and subsequently cancelled when they realised the scale of the work involved which is both a "thank god" and a "wtf" moment**

Le monday morning after a commit on sunday evening...

PM: BLAAAH!!!! Your commit broke the site, nothing is working!!!!!!
Me: What? All of tests passed (coverage 95%), no issues were found.
PM: NOO!!!! Site is broken, we can't use it no more!!!
Me: Ok, what's the problem?
PM: I've tried to enter -10021 into this field on that page and it gived me an error.
Me: Ok? So, that single page is broken?
PM: No, whole site!!!! This is important
Me: Sure... Let me take a look

* PM tried to enter a negative value into an unsigned field that I've mutated yesterday after checking LIVE database if there was no records with negative value. Reason: we've hit an int limit and there was no chance that the value would be negative. Validation? Well, yes.... Except that page was added by him this morning without even checking everything else *

Me: Here, this is the issue, *gives explanation*
PM: Well.... You shouldn't do this. This is unacceptable. You must never leave int fields without negative values. Didn't they teach you in school that integers can be negative?!
Me: What? *consufed as hell*
PM: *More morale... blah blah blah....* Revert it back!
Me: Ok but if anything else breaks, copy of this slack conversation will be kept.
PM: Don't care! Fix it!
Me: * Reverts the fix, saves chat copy * - Done.
PM: Great.

* 5 wild minutes later *
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Site is down, service is not working, what have you done?
Me: Reverted the change needed for it to work. Todays schedule is full with other important tasks. * pastes a screenshot as a proof that he asked me to do this *
PM: FIX IT NOW! Apply your fix.
Me: You're the PM. - Done.
PM: Great, now I'll fix my code. You should be more careful next time.
Me: * YOU DENSE MATHA...KER * Sure.

How's your morning going? :)

When PM don't listen, no fuks was given by us devs.

Oh the project is almost finished?

Here's another feature the client requires before it can be released.

Me: Okay this will take another 2 weeks to implement. Is the client happy with that time frame?

PM: You have 3 days and there's no test time, so test as you go.

Me: .....*quits*

True story, was the last straw.

Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

me: I don't have access to X project

PM: you don't have access to X project?

me: no, I don't have access to X project

PM: don't worry I'll take care of that

2 min. later

PM: so, you were saying ... ?

me: that I don't have access to X project

1 month later

me: I don't have access to X project

PM: you don't have access to X project?

Just got BUGS list from our Client and fuck- 95% of bugs are not even bugs :|

- No, changing the (not pre-decided) verbiage is not a bug
- Adding two more pages in the app is not a bug (what the fuck :|)
- No, APK file not running in iPhone is not a bug (goddamn :|)
- No, adding these "fuckin new" functionalities is not a bug (seriously ? :/)

AND

Mr "used to be a good coder" PM,

Getting "504 Timeout Gateway" error because Server is temporarily down is NOT a fuckin frontend bug

And No, writing Javascript with a proper design architecture is not a "complicated" way of coding
and fuckin No, Global variables and functions without any architecture don't make the programming "kind of better"

ps: And VB dot net is not a fuckin scripting language, VBScript is.

Thank you,
"buggy average coder"

** Makes a design for a landing page, in a Single-page format. My designs are usually clean and "aerated" (breathing, uncluttered). **

** Pm comes in **
Me: Oh hey! I've finished my mockups
PM: Ah nice, let's see... ** comes to my screen **
---

PM: Not bad, but can you remove this spacing, this spacing, and this one and this one... oh and that one too?

** corrects them as she says, everything starts looking cluttered and I dislike it **

PM: Great! Can you export them in pdf?
Me: Sure.

** PM goes away **

** Proceeds to re-make the mockups more "breathing" with an evil smirk **

I'm so fucking pissed at my PM right now.

He insisted that we use a third party library that his friend wrote for simple functionality. We all disagree, because it's overcomplicated for what we need to do. PM insists that we use it anyways.

Fast forward to now. The third party code is breaking, and it's way overcomplicated, so we have no idea how to fix it. Deadlines are long gone.

We're all pissed because we don't want to deal with this bullshit code, and because basically nothing is working properly.

Had a conversation with the PM today, where he complained about our "attitude issues" and said that "clearly [the library we're using] is above your skill level".

Maybe we would have better morale if you didn't force us to use this shit code.

PM: 2 months? no thats way too long, do it in 1.

Director: I had a chat with someone else who doesn't work on this team, he says that developer you complained about is a good guy and we should keep him on the team.

Business: No, we don't have time for tech debt, lets build these new features as quick as possible and lets see where we are.

everyone: WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT CRASHED AGAIN??? THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE

Thursday
PM: Hey why is A delayed? It should be top priority.
me: I just completed B, and C which were also top priority but got scheduled earlier, so I thought they..
PM: Agh, yes. But can you then finish A by the end of week? it would be very important!
me: No, I unfortunately don't think I'd have enough time by the end of wee..
PM: Why? This should be *the* top priority task. You should not start other tickets before A is done.
me: Exactly. But I *just* started. And. I. don't. have. enough. free. hours. left. this. week.
PM: But why?!
me: So just on Friday I have these 5 meetings here..
*shows calendar*
PM: Ok... OK! Then don't attend those before you are done. This should be more important.
me: Ugh, oh-key...are you sure?
PM: Yea, just let who invited you know that you can't attend and feel free to cc me in, I'll explain A is most important atm.
me: Ok, thanks, but that won't be necessary.
PM: What? Why?
me: You invited me to the Friday meetings.

Obviously I had to attend all 5 meetings today and A is pushed back to next week. :)

PM: Bro send me latest version of the app
Me: But I"m not finished with x feature and it will crash the app in its current situation
PM: No problem bro just want to test

*5 minutes later*
PM: Bro app is crashing when I do x
Inner Me: YOU PEACE OF SHIT I TOLD YOU IT WILL CRASH!
Actual Me: throw a ticket I'll handle it later.

Me, doing QA

PM: "stop submitting bug reports about screen size, we're only supporting one resolution for now"

Me: *What do you mean you're only supporting one resolution it's a website and it breaks on screens <1400 px tall*
*Sigh*
"okay, what resolution?"

PM: "No one knows"

Me: *dies*

pm: our client wants a proprietary pdf compression app.
me: Okay gimme 3 days and some sample PDFs.
pm: they won't supply any sample PDFs because they contain confidential information.
me: okay fine, I'll download some from the interwebs.

** 3 days later **

me: here is the pdf compression app. all done and works with all of about 100 PDFs we tested with.
pm: okay great I'll have the client take a look.

** half and hour later **

pm: the client said that the compression app errors out.
me: okay I'll go look at the server logs to see what's up.

** 10 seconds later **

me: what the shit is a "foxit phantompdf" file.
pm: it's the proprietary pdf format that they are using.
me: oh joy. I'll go try to find some sample files and see if I can fix it.

** 1 hour later, no sample files found **

pm: got anything?
me: *sobs obnoxiously*

The company I work for...
Has:

1. No CI/CD
2. SVN instead of GIT
3. Outsourcing to India (oof)
4. No Automated Testing
5. Uses Bugnet (ancient, outdated)
6. No clearly defined code standards
7. No real documentation on the code
8. Rubbish code
9. No desire to reduce technical debt
10. Poorly maintained DB
11. Poor outdated equipment
12. A useless PM
13. Still priotizes IE support (??)

On a scale of 1 to 10 how fucked is this company and anything they develop?

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"

First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.

Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.

PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer

PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"

FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"

Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"

End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok

Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"

15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"

And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!

I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...

Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...

Fuck those useless calls!

PM: customer X wants a call in an hour.
Me: they didn't send emails before. No questions, no prep, no call.
PM: yeah but they want to talk.
Me: these unprepared calls are pointless. I'll be sitting there, noting down the questions and telling them I'll have to look up the details.
PM: shall I tell them that you don't want to talk to them?
Me: I don't care, it's your call, do whatever you want.
PM: that's not professional.
Me: oh you're calling it professional to sit there with a pencil, writing down crap or what?
PM: what's the problem?!
Me: I've had this shit for the last two fucking calls, and they were so unprepared that they wasted half of the call just reading up, and I'm fed up with this shit!
PM: but they are the customers, and they aren't that happy.
Me: yeah, and do you know why? Because our schedule is completely fucked up and our management has been ignoring ANY warning from engineering for WEEKS! That's why they are unhappy and not because I'm not holding their fucking hands!
PM: hey, but you can't tell me what I have to do!
Me: and you can't tell me either! [he's my PM, but technically not my superior.]
PM: so no call or what?
Me: you're free to have your call. I'll sort out the shit that they're concerned about, putting that down in a proper email, and then we have at least some basis for discussion!
PM: (left for his call)

Btw., my cursing was the same in the live conversation with him.

Manager: "If needed, are you willing to work overtime this month?"

Developer: "Yes. [ ... pause ... ] would you give me some over my salary for sometime?"

Manager: Yes, increment happens every 6 months.

Developer: "I am thinking beyond it".

Manager: "No, it is not possible"

Developer: "Okay"

** alarm clock vibrates **

Developer: "It is 5:00 PM now. I need to leave. See you on coming Monday at 9:00 AM sharp"

[Developer left]

Manager: "Byeeeee ... "

My start in new company....

HR: you will get a Macbook from us...

Me: yessss!!!!

~~~

One Day before first Day:

I Picked up the laptop from company...opened the case....
No Macbook, but HP 😂😂😂...🤷‍♀️

~~~

First Day at new company:

PM: you will be using Ps, Sketch....

ME: how will be the licence costs payed?

PM: it is already installed...

ME: wait, what? It's nothing in my Laptop.. Wait what? Sketch?....I haven't recieved a Mac....

PM: What?????🤦‍♀️.....

~~~

Later in the same Day...

My laptop: Fu*k you!!! Your account has been disabled. Contact your system Administrátor...

ME: wtf????? 🤷‍♀️🤦‍♀️

.....to be continued....

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

Time for an actual rant:

During an internship I heard from my PM that my assignment for the week after was going to be working on a specific sql query to add some features and fix some bugs.

When talking with colleagues about that assignment later, they laughed and referred to the query as the "query of doom" (QoD), naive as I was back then, I thought that one of my colleagues had the QoD displayed on his screen because the query he was working on looked rather large (about 20 lines). They all laughed and told me I was in for a treat.

Starting my assignment the week after I was horrified to find out the QoD was huge, and by huge I mean, printing that specific query resulted in 8 A4 pages font size 10, front and back.
There were over a 100 union statements, no proper aliases, no documentation, not a single foreign key in the entire database, naming that makes no sense. And everything written manually by 10 different developers over the past years, who all fell of the face of the earth.

And this was only the query of doom. The entire product was a complete clusterfuck of forms with a queries directly behind action buttons, because we weren't allowed to make classes (yes you read that correctly. We couldn't make classes, unless we had a very compelling reason). Everything was created by over 30 different devs who only managed to stay just long enough to get some work done.

And all of this was the result of a PM who didn't believe in frameworks, ORM's, OOP, classes, ... because that made the software slow. To this day he still manages that product, but I'm glad that I quickly decided to move on.

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

PM in daily: your turn. what have you done yesterday?

me: so i finished my PR for feature x and now i'm only waiting for review feedback there, so i can close this ticket today if no major rework is required-

PM: this is not what i asked, i don't want to know what you did, i want to know what was done.

me: uhh... okay, also i started working on task x
[note: task x, a task per definition involving a large amount of research, was very coarsly defined and it wasn't even clear to the PM what he exactly expects from me, and we agreed that the scope needs to be refined in the process],
so as a first step, i started doing some general investigations to get an overview of the topic and learn about concepts a and b-

PM: again, i don't want to know what you did, i want to know what was done.

me: okay well, i have DONE basic research on topic xy and collected information-

PM: this still does not answer my question, what's the deliverable?

me: ...so uhhh.... i read papers? i researched info online and collected and prepared information and links in a presentation which i'm also planning to present to the team-

PM: okay, can you please split your jira task in subtasks so everyone knows exactly what you're working on? otherwise we have no idea what you're doing.

for fuck's sake, shut up. just shut up

6:00 pm, no spirit to code,
11:00 pm, no spirit to code,
0:00 am, i might sleep in early tonight,
1:00 am, just one function,
2:00 am, I'm A God.

There are a lot of things that could rank up as the worst about being a dev, such as recurring meetings, documentation, shitty requirements, pm gnats, Monday, etc...but something that truly ruins it all is NO INTERNET CONNECTION.

(The PM is pretty technical)
One day:
Me: Could you create this subdomain?
PM: Sure, just a sec.
Me: Ohh and could you add a letsencrypt cert? (one click thingy)
PM: Why would you need that on this kinda site...
Me: Well in general for security...
PM: Nahh.
*walks away*

Next day:
(referring to my internship manager/guider as Bob)
Bob: Hey... we have a new subdomain!
Me: Yup!
Bob: Wait why is there no letsencrypt certificate installed...?!?
Me: Well, the PM didn't find that neccesary...
Bob: (Oo) of course it is... are we going for security by default or what?
Me: Yup agreed.
Bob: *creates cert and sets everything up in under a minute*

It wasn't a high profile site (tiny side project) but why not add SSL when you can for free?

Worst experience: had a verbal fight with pm because his poor management overworked me ( I was working on the same project till 10pm every day for 4 days with no OT pay)

Best experience: I stepped up against an abusive pm and told him to fuck off to his face.

Guys, my unfortunately daily rant of my pm

I was told to create a docker env for our team. Good. Document the process so everyone can know what to do. Good.

My PM follows what he wants to instead of step by step and changes whatever he wants to.

I am asked for help because he doesnt know. No prob.

Me: "Do this, do this and.."
PM: "that doesnt matter, trust me, I could change it and.."
Me: "...and it wont work"
PM: "I know suff too, check" *does his changes aaaaaand doesnt work*
* awkward staring*

That happened a while ago.
This week, he crashed his git repo because he was doing things in docker team (including him) decided not to.

Took me more enough time explaining him "you are not supposed to do that in the container" funny fact he wanted to prove that his way was right and even if he did my way it would crash.

Sooooo he did my way just to prove how wrong I was. Everything worked flawlessly. Rage-still-awkward staring.

Plus the "aww that's weird. I dont know how this happened"

Our project manager who also happens to be our web designer... (Start Up)

Project Manager: We have a go signal. Go convert this design to html and css. And make it responsive.

Me: Can you forward me the mail so I can check if it's actually approved?

Project Manager: Just do it.

Me: (After tweaking) There. It's done.

Project Manager: They want to change all the layout of the site. We're gonna do it from scratch. They didn't like the design.

Me: What? I thought your design was approved?

Project Manager: I thought so too. But i'm your PM so get back to work.

There was no mail from the client.

PM : Have you finished the login issues?
Me, junior dev: No mister.
PM: Why not? You're going to delay the sprint.
Me: The other PM told me not to do it.

When you're the only dev in a project with two managers, life suddenly feels like you're back to 5 years old with your parents arguing all the time.

My day.

6 am: 2yo woke up
8:30 am: start work (from home)
11 am: go get breakfast/lunch
11:30 am: work call. while driving. Learn nothing new.
12:00 noon: infuriatingly slow errand
12:30 pm: work call. Learn nothing new.
1 pm: finally get to eat. It's cold. And terrible.
6 pm: 2yo finally goes to sleep (missed nap)
9:20 pm: 2yo wakes up screaming.
9:30 pm: find 3 or 4 tablespoons of leftover tuna in the fridge. No bread.
10:45 pm: I finally finish my work (super-urgent friday-morning release of a next-Wednesday-morning deadline... Yeah idfk.)
11:29 pm: 2yo stops yelling and screaming and goes back to sleep
11:39 pm: finish writing this while in bed.
11:40 pm: Sleep?

So, in the printing industry, FTP has a long and storied history as the standard method of sending art assets. But as time has gone on, more and more people are utterly incapable of handling FTP.

Customer: "I sent you the file. It's called xyz.zip"

PM: "I don't see the file."

Customer: "I know I sent it."

PM: "Let me check with IT."

I check the logs. No such file was uploaded.

PM: "What program did you use to send the file?"

Customer: "Firefox"

Every. Fucking. Time.

It turns out the Germans actually have a word for this:

I applied for a backend job. Somehow i ended up doing frontend. Ok whatever the pay is alright and i dont mind doing js. But then i see the backend team doing absolute horseshit, stacking up overhead and not even fucking documenting the endpoints, i get mad.
And now our sysadmin left so there is no fucking server and i cant run locally because of 9trillion config files (remember the overhead part?) and the pm is nagging me to get the site done WHEN THERE IS NO FUCKING SERVER. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME, SET IT ALL UP AGAIN? THATS NOT MY FUCKING JOB YOU IMBECILE FUCKFACE.

So this bunch of idiots made this huge iOS app using lots of global variables, lots of spaghetti code and basically no separation between logic and UI.
Another bunch of idiots were told to take that iOS app and basically port it to Android. And they ported that same code mess, almost line by line, and adding some weird shit.
Now the HQ of the first bunch of idiots realize that the second bunch of idiots were too slow/inefficient/whatever, and they're now asking US to solve that Android mess and add another shitload of features.
The worst part of it, is that both bunches of idiots are still working on it, so we're basically forced to follow the same shitty style until the first deadline, otherwise we'd die suffocated by stinky merge conflicts. Which will happen anyway because our changes are going to overlap.
Oh, and the PM refuses to understand the disaster coming and there's six hours of time zone difference.

Fuck this shit.

Stupid bloody PM.

I asked him for two images a long time ago: a 1x and a 2x ‘0’ monogram for Apple wallets, since we currently have monograms for glyphs 1-9 and a-z. And this is in production, so any merchant whose name starts with a ‘0’ will cause a crash. We’ve been fortunate thus far.

But this PM. He lied about who needed to make the images for three weeks, saying it’s up to the designer, when he actually made them himself. He also said he was going to take care of handing the task off, and never did, and then said designer when on FTO. When I asked the designer about it after he came back, he had no clue what graphics (and even the feature) I was talking about, or even what the requirements for the graphics might be. I had to confront the PM before he admitted he made the originals, and (begrudgingly) said he would make the new ones.

When said PM did finally make the images, the colors were all wrong. They’re not the light teal from our branding, they’re dark blue and the font is different, making them pretty ugly.

Also, after assuring me that the naming convention for the new images is the same, I discover that they’re neither organized into folders nor even named properly. (And yes, he is aware of how it should be.) I can rename and move them around easily enough, but come on, don’t say you did the work and then give me a mess to clean up!

And to top it all off, he completely spaced making the ‘u’ monograms, so I’m still short a fucking glyph!

Asdfjskldf.

How do you do every single thing wrong? Like, how!?

PM: Please get this done by tomorrow. It's just a small change.
Dev: No its not that simple.
PM: Why is it not simple? Please explain so I can understand.
Dev after a hard thought finally explains: blah blah blah
PM: Well, we have promised the client so please do this by tomorrow, thanks.
Dev: *bangwall

Pm: OK what you've got here?
Me: a bug, haven't tested yet
Pm: *grabs a phone* follow me we will do it
Me: mkay
Pm: *attaches it, goes to the DOM inspector, starts clicking random divs* OK where the fuck the canvas is?
Me: uhmm there in this tree
Pm: *inspects the canvas element for a few sec* what do you think?
Me: ... ... Well the bug was that it wouldn't resize properly after you change to landscape
Pm: *rotates the phone back and forth looking at the canvas properties*
Pm: gotcha, see? Width and height
Me: yes, those are the default html prope...
Pm: now see, there's another width and height. That's the malfunction right there. I'm telling you.
Me: no, this is css. It overrides the html properties there
Pm: well, say what, it doesn't
Me: no it does, that's how html works for decades already
Pm: but why does that not work properly then? Mm? *stares at me wide open*
Me: well I need to do some testing before I can sa...
Pm: then what do you think we are doing now?
Me: we jus...
Pm: *gets a phone call, stands up and walks away*

QA: When I open the app I get this strange error message that includes "No data connection could be established" near the start of it.

Me: I'll clean up how thats displayed, but the error means your phone doesn't have internet connection.

QA: No that can't be it, I do.

Me: You screenshot shows no WiFi or 3g / 4g symbols.

QA: No those are never there, please investigate.

Me: I have investigated and found that every other one of your screenshots had a WiFi or a 3g symbol. Example: <link>. Please check your connection and try again, i'll clean up the error display.

PM: Oh i've had an issue something like this before. We really need to show users an error screen. We can't just leave them on this screen with no error message at all.

Me: ... we have an error, thats what QA is complaining about, its not loading the text and displaying the error object.

Anyone else want to not pay attention and complain about something else that doesn't make sense? ... no? ... ok good, back to work then

*project manager + designer are showing new designs*

PM: so, can we get some estimates?

Devs (literally all of us): do we have a mockup for this interaction?

Designer: no.

Devs: What about that one?

Designer: not yet.

Devs: What happens when you click here? Hover there? How does this look if I select that option + this option at the same time? Does it make sense that a user can select *this* option with *that* option? They're kind of mutually exclusive.

PM: Well...

BTW: code freeze is in two weeks...

Project Manager: Hey Gid, we need to start migrating project-A to the new Server.

Me: Okay, I will inform Dev-Q.

Project Manager: Please do and treat as top priority!

Me: Hey Dev-Q, we need to migrate project-A to the new Server and we need to get it done asap.

Dev-Q: But I'm currently working on some critical bug XYZ which PM wants fixed before COB.

Me: I dunno maybe you want to speak with him.

Dev-Q: I was told to...

Project Manager: Yes! we need that done right away.

Dev-Q: What about the critical...

Project Manager: No! treat this as top priority the client just called.

Dev-Q: Okay.

Me: Any update yet?

Dev-Q: Yep but it seems like the database is quite large and the migration may take a while.

Me: Okay take your time.

Dev-Q: {hours later} Pheww done! All files and database migrated successfully.

Project Manager: Good good. So the critical bug XYZ was also completed and migrated to the new server right?

Dev-Q:

- PM : we have no choice but to finish this before deadline.
- Me : We can't, it's a really big feature.
- PM : But we have no choice.
- Me : But we can't.
...

*What is she waiting for*

!rant
In our advanced software engineering lecture everyone has to hold a free presentation about about an own topic.
One of my fellow students picked “failed IT large-scale projects” and - of course - had some german examples with him. You know, we germans are good in failing large projects🤣
He has chosen “FISCUS”, a project that wanted to unify the german tax system. It was a FIaSCUS. 13 years without any progess. 13 ... years ...

ok, but this is, where the story begins. The student then began to enumerate the reasons, why it has failed.

He told about bad architectures and stuff like that until the teacher interrupted him.

“No, that’s false. We had the problem, that some states, blablabla”

The important word was the “we” and we realized, that this student has by chance picked exactly that big project in which our teacher was the PM.
What the Heck.

He than had to think triple, about everything he had planed to say😂

Once, I overheard a conversation between my former PM and a client during a phone call.

Client: I will send the final draft of the project by Thursday.

PM: That's great to hear!

Client: When can I expect the updates to review the changes after the draft is sent? I need to present it at a meeting this weekend.

PM: It should be ready by Friday without fail!

Client: Excellent! Thank you. I will be expecting it.

PM: Sure, goodbye.

(After the call, PM joined the team.)

PM: So, team, the client for Project-A will be sending us a new draft for review and updates. They are putting a lot of pressure on us and need it to be ready by Friday at the latest. We need to treat this with a sense of urgency.

(After hearing this, we felt compelled to respond.)

Me: There's no way they would expect us to deliver an unseen draft within a day. Both the backend and Figma team members were forced to work last weekend, on Saturday, because you mentioned that Project B was behind schedule and the client needed an update by Monday. We simply can't continue working like this.

Backend guy 2: I also worked last Sunday on Project B.

Me: We overheard you telling the client that they should expect an update by Friday. It seems like you're the one directly putting the team under pressure, even though we still have three ongoing projects with tight deadlines.

(The office fell into an uncomfortable silence.)
(PM left the office without saying a word.)

Later on, I heard that he contacted the client to reschedule the expected time of arrival (ETA) after receiving the draft.

Best part of working from home? Oh boy, here I go

1. NO COMMUTE !! Fuck public transport. I can just grab my laptop straight to my bed, get comfortable and work in whatever posture I wish to.

2. Relaxation and peace of mind. The local park, library, football ground. I can go anywhere to get work done. All I need is my phone and laptop.

3. Better food - I can cook my own food. Dieting actually works by eating home-made food and not the fried bullshit we eat outside.

4. No office politics - Remote working means you don't have to think about being a circle and getting liked or not. Get your work done and that's it.

5. No "Extra" Activities - We all know HRs are just bored af people making employees have "fun" activities just to push a "culture" agenda on LinkedIn. Umm no thanks.

6. No toxicity - Well, this one is a doozie, you don't get workplace toxicity but you do get home toxicity. People assuming that you stay in ur room all day and do nothing. I'd still take home toxicity though.

7. If there is no work, I don't have to pretend that I am working and hiding my screen from my boss. I can just play video games in that time.

8. Option to start a side-hustle. You have more chances to retain some energy after your shift to start investing/putting time into something that can make you extra cash.

9. Worldwide opportunities - Because of WFH, I work with clients from Netherlands, Estonia, London and Cayman Islands. It never would have happened if I was in an office job.

10. Only work, no extra bullshit - be it smoke breaks, casual tea, conferences, work summits etc. None of that and I don't want it.

11. Your errands get done - Need to go to the dentist at 10 am? You can do that. Need to pick up your kid at 3 pm? You can do that. You need 5 pm time dedicated to go the gym? You can do that.

In conclusion, I absolutely vouch for WFH and would never take WFO for as long as possible.

WFH FTW !!!

Pm: '[...] So when will you set up the server its urgent'

Me: 'look buddy i applied here as a java dev, ended up doing fronted. Fine, i like js, i can do that. But then dont fucking ping me daily with server stuff what has been overcomplicated and i got no idea about, theres a backend team, ask them.'

Pm: 'you said you would do the frontend'

Me: 'yeah that doesnt contradict a word i said'

Pm: 'you took responsibility, fix it'

Me: '?????? THATS WHAT IM SAYING YOU FUCKFACE COCKSUCKER ASSHOLE THAT I DIDNT AND I WONT, FUCK A HORSE'

#¤%@ kid!!! My 5yo son has obviously been playing with his mom's mobile phone. At first, I thought it was a little cute, when I received incoherent texts about Roblox, one of his favourite games.

But then, I suddenly heard from my sister who was really upset and worried. She was wondering if my gf really wants to see her dead, after receiving a facebook pm in English, saying "oh die :-)".

No need for auntie to take it personally though; turned out she was not the only one getting the same message :-O

A little boy is facing a mobile ban for a very long time...

hey there, long time no rant.
remember that manipulative, sociopathic angry manchild turdface PM, the kind that gives you a never ending rant inspiration? the one that got immortalized in like 90% of my rants?

well... it's time for the final update.
i decided to leave the team some months ago. my boss reacted very cool and supportive and suggested topics i could work on instead. when i told my colleague, he decided to leave the team at the same day. we both also complained at HR and added some papertrails about PM's shenanigans.
shortly after, another guy from the team quit and left the company, and i know that it was 100% because of this PM.
so, there were 2 devs left from originally 6 in PM's team.
some other people in the environment of this PM quit, one of his subordinates and someone from a greater project in which the PM's project was embedded.
after some internal investigations and discussions, the PM's team was completely kicked out of this greater project, since after ~ a year, this team was neither able to deliver anything useful nor to define what it actually was what they wanted to provide. instead, they actively blocked the project, solution finding and cooperation between teams. and this is quite very much PM's fault.

the final move came this month when PM got fired. i think, management finally realized that he is a total fraud who has no clue about the whole matter (neither what devices we build nor about software development). or management. or leadership. and that all he can do is produce hot air and bullshit people for some time to make them believe he knows something.
not sure how long he'll still be around, but i'm happy when i don't have to see his face ever again. i'm just sorry for the next company he'll be moving to...

PM - We are going to launch registration of users in mobile phone. We are going to use blah internal framework as with it we will have same experience in mobile and desktop will be same.
Me - Shouldn't the experience be different on desktop its easy. On mobile following that many steps may seem complicated to the user.
PM - No but the experience should remain same.
Me - face palm(sees the overly complicated framework just for building 4 pages spends time finds bug in the framework fixes them and takes four months of frustration but launches it)
PM - We feel like ideally mobile and desktop should have different experience. This allows us to register faster on mobile. As we have already aligned with the blah framework team and think best path is to build it from scratch.
Me -

Note: our PM is new.
PM: can you help me?
Me: sure, what do you need?
PM: where do the folders with all the techie stuff come from?

I had no context and spent the next 20 minutes trying to work out what folders she was on about. Turned out she wanted to know where the client side folders on our development server come from, was going to explain 'Gulp' and 'Branch' to her but I think I'd be there for the rest of the day... Why do 'tech' companies hire non-tech-savie people.

guys my mom is a PM help

shes been telling me what to do on my personal projects for the last to days like:

Mom: "Make it so when I click it, it becomes brighter and displays all the info"

Me: "I mean I could yeah"

Mom: "No you have to do it, I don't like it otherwise"

Me: "I understand, but this is kinda my thing-"

Mom: " k yeah and get it done in 2 days"

Me: "...yes, master"

(On a real note, she actually is a PM... what was I expecting...)

!rant

I just switched jobs, so there are no vacation days for me, besides the usual.

PM: "Are you returning for work on January 2nd?"

Me: "Yeah, but I'm kinda new at the company here, so I'll be available 26-28 if you want to reach me"

PM: "Screw those days. Nobody will be here anyways, you can take those off for me."

Me: "(cries in Spanish)"

The fuck did you think was going to happen?

User: ITs dragging their feet which is why x hasn't gone out yet.

PM: Why hasn't this gone out yet?

Me: They sent me a template then another and then said wait that's wrong too I'll send you the correct one.

I've yet to receive this and no one's provided me the data to check over.

PM: Well that's not what x said.

Me: Well my email chain says so. (Proceed to show them the emails)

PM then walks off and blasts the users. Your #blamegame ended the moment you emailed me knob shits.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

Agile in practice.

I finished my story with 3 days left in our 2 week sprint.

Me: What story should I pull in next?
PM: Story <number> to add <new feature>
Me: ok, sounds good
PM: Will you finish it before our sprint ends?
Me: No, probably will take me 5-7 days.
PM: But it can't spill over, it will make our metrics look bad.
Me: I can't finish it in 3 days.
PM: ....
Me: Can't you just explain the spillover as us working ahead?
PM: It will look bad on our <automated-report>
Me: ....
Me: So don't want me to get started on <new feature>?
PM: ....
Me: <internally sighing> What do you want me to do?
PM: Maybe you can pair program with <Overpaid-Idiot-Programmer> to help finish their story
Me: ....
Me: feelsbadman.jpg

Working on a database priorly designed and maintained by some private agency.

The fuck I'm dealing with!

Boolean values stored as 'TRUE'/'FALSE'. It's varchar, my dudes.

There are no FK relations. Just the values of IDs in a column.

There are no indexes, all on just the PKs, nothing else. Nothing.

Null, what's that? I'm dealing with 'N/A', my dudes.

Unique key, what's that? The table which stores users has all the fields nullable. Email is not unique ( even though that's the required behaviour).

ALL the numeric values are stored as varchar. Varchar, my dudes. Varchar. '1', '1.1'

And finally, the good ole, 1 table to rule them all. Normalisation, fuck that.

And what's the root cause of all this? My PM used to hand them Excel sheets she maintains on her local system. FTW. I don't have a enough explanations.

Leave work with two working monitors at my desk, come back the next day to one monitor and a missing HDMI cable. Find out marketing took it for a presentation, don't get it back for three weeks. Finally get it back for a day, become super happy to finally have both monitors again. Come back the next day and PM has stolen my HDMI again, no extra HDMI cables in entire office. Apparently HDMI cables are valued like gold around these parts.

Manager: Messages not visible! bug ticket!!!!

Dev: oh fuck, there's an issue with our chat system, not good! _inspects ticket_ oh, it's just a display issue that actually is according to the previous spec, yawn...

Dev: please describe the bug better next time, I though we had a major outage, this is simply a small design issue...

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

I think I'm quitting soon guys. I literally do not get paid enough to deal with these incompetent idiots each day.

Meanwhile:

Management: forget your shitty salary, take one for the team, you get 3% of the shares in the company!!!!

Dev: what fucking shares, you haven't even converted to a corporation yet, THERE ARE NO SHARES

Management: ...

Dev: ...

Oh yeah and they called me at 6:30 PM today: "so i guess you are winding down for the day"

fuck outta here i haven't been working since 5 you fucks

jesus i swear some people need to screw their fucking head on straight, so far gone into the hUsTlE CuLtUrE they don't even know what reality is anymore

Find a place where management is able to handle some criticism.

I personally think Agile/Scrum is holy, and I don't mean "yeah we kind of do our own version of it", no, fucking do it by the book. The PM shouldn't assign estimates. Developers shouldn't receive bugfix requests from anyone other than the scrum master. The CTO can't be your scrum master... etc.

If a company can't answer the question "What were the points of feedback during the last retrospective(s), and how are those points being picked up?" -- Don't work there.

Many other things are optional in my opinion. I could work at a company without QA, without fruit baskets, table tennis, without Friday drinks. I could even live without git & continuous integration, just emailing patches to a patch integrator. I don't care.

But maintaining a safe bubble of serenity and sanity for devs to do their work in, that is an absolute must.

Also, option to WFH as much as wanted. Offices are nice for social bonding, but they kill productivity for me.

Our PM is on vacation. And our CTO/CEO takes control of the PM role.

So today he decided it was time to just start a customer change request. Regardless of the customer not having approved the actual solution and estimate.

He just said that he did not want to waste any more time talking to the customer. Now they are gonna get what ever he thinks they want.

I predict this to backfire in a fabulous way. What could possible go wrong🤔

How the fuck am I expected to salvage a fucking project that has been handed down to me with.
- No fucking clear architecture
- No fucking documentation
- Fucking shitty ass code base with no fucking coding standards
- The previous team was fucking learning a whole fucking new technology stack *Not fucking kidding* making fucking mistakes left and right
- No code reviews
- Mixing fucking local and cloud enviroment together
- No fucking testing
- Feature that were supposed to be implemented and are not working
- No configuration all the stuff are hard coded
- Full responsiblity for the whole stack
- Only one other guy with me
- And this fucking project has been delayed for a year
- MUCH FUCKING MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

Like what the fuck am I expected to do? I took the job thinking that people knew what the fuck they were doing and surprise surprise that was a fucking bust.

the problem is also I am the junior and these fucking people have more experience than me, what the fuck happened to over seeing people's work, PM doesnt give a shit, developers dont give a shit nobody gives a shit.

But when I got this surprise surprise now everyone is interested in finishing the project

BULLSHIT

Me: 'im doing frontend here, i wont bother with the server stuff'
Pm: 'ok'

...

Me: 'here i finished the full stack because the backend team is a bunch of jackasses'
Pm: 'did you set up the server?'

...

Me: 'no because its not my job'
Pm: 'you have to do it'

Sometimes it makes me wonder if he even knows how programming works.

*Me, sittting in a sprint planning meeting*

PM: We are going to start a 2 weeks sprint and everyone is expected to meet the deadlines no matter the cost.

*Scrum master being an intern doesn't still know how to plan the sprint*

Me: we are having a week long holiday due to elections next week and how do you expect to finish within the deadline when office is closed.

PM: we are aware of that, but who is ready to take this as a challenge and be proactive in completing the tasks?

How many of you have faced this situation where the company expects you to work from home and get the tasks done even during the holidays. The company only values their work and not the employees. They want us to work as slaves without valuing us. They expect us to be loyal to the company through work but they aren't ready to be loyal to us through payments.

DONT DEVELOPERS HAVE THEIR HOLIDAYS TO SPEND TIME WITH THEIR LOVED ONES? ARE WE MACHINES?

Past 3 years I've been working 1pm-9pm instead of usual 8am-4pm at our company, no issues, I'm the only developer on the projects I work on, tasks delivered always on time, meetings with PM always afternoon, etc.
Few months ago company hierarchy changed and the new operative manager started to harass me about this with made up reasons (not working 8 hour or not working at all) and he doesn't care about the fact that my projects might be the only ones at the company that never missed a deadline. He even turned some of my colleagues against me.

So now I'm thinking about to quit this job and go freelance or find a remote job. Am I doing it right?

6 hours of weekly progress report meeting in client’s office EVERY FUCKING FRIDAY.

Yes it’s a progress report meeting that can be done via email or skype

Yes it takes 6 hours

When we go to the meeting, we have
1. The boss
2. The 1% PM + 99% sales guy
3. The secretary who document everything in that meeting
4. Me as a dev

The only thing i do is to answer “yes, that’s technicaly possible” or “no, that’s stupid” when the client ask for some features or changes.

Sometimes i’m just being an accessory in that meeting.

It was years ago before i quit and become a designer 👌🏼

3:30 on a Friday, random PM: our Argentina devs just sent out a merge request. We need to release before the weekend.
me: We try not to release on Friday afternoon unless it's for a high priority bug fix.
PM: This is urgent
me: why?
PM: We're two weeks behind schedule and the dev for this it's going on vacation in an hour.
me: so, you want to release when there's no one around if something goes wrong and the person who knows anything about it isn't contactable?
PM: yes
me: no.

Got this from boss (a few colleagues got it as well):
Sites have been down over the weekend and seems the only person cares is PM! There is a condition about working when required (i.e. unpaid OT) on your contract! It is essential that sites are properly managed even at weekends - we run a online business! If anyone has problems we'll discuss next week
*Note: site was partially down and there was no major impact on the business

When I explained why we need to rebuild the sites, you said not now - almost 2 years now, still nothing happens.
When I asked if we can get managed hosting or load balancer, fecking NO again
After asking for my opinion on the sites, you & the puppet think my honesty is me being negative and incorporate, and exclude me from meetings and major part of my work

Go fuck yourself! I've warned you about the status of the sites and you did not want to listen SO DON'T TELL ME I'M NOT DOING MY JOB WHEN YOU'RE THE ONE STOPPING ME FROM DOING IT PROPERLY!
I'm sure we'll have our meeting very soon, cheapskate.

Once the system "lost" a user_id var that says who started a batch, but it was a mandatory field that was filled at the beginning of the process.

I tried to find the reason, failed, called a senior for help, he also failed to find the reason.

After a couple of hours I looked to him, he looked back and I said,
"Let's call it a solar flare bit flip?"
"It's the only logical explanation"

So it became a bit flip issue to the PM, we had a good laugh, we send as "system instability" to the client.

The bug never happened again, no one ever found the true reason, maybe it was really a bit flip 🤔

A day in the life of BoyBiscuit.

PM: Please zip up any local changes and push them to a temp folder on the repo and I will manually check to see what you have changed.
Me: *glaring at the download as zip button*

PM: Who broke the repo?
Me: *checks commit history*
Commit History: *last commit PM*

Me: Could you add the files to your commit before pushing because you've only pushed changes on tracked files.
PM: No not possible, I did 'commit -a'.
Me: ....

PM: Could you all delete your forks so that It isn't anywhere on the web
US: but it's private with only us as collaborators
PM: No because I can see it
Me: srysly?

PM: Could everyone try to write more effective code?
Me: Looks at his code
Code: Boolean b = getbooleanVal ? True : False;

Tl;Dr: PM doesn't know anything about git or working as a team.

See you tomorrow!

Back in college.
We had this course in which we gathered in teams and worked the whole semester for another teacher building a product. We had roles, like QA, devs, PM...all the works.
I was PM and during our first presentation of the product to our teacher and the client we showed the work of our first month of work. At the end, our teacher asked our QA, who have been silent the whole project and hadn't answered my mails asking for tests, if he had found any problems. "Oh, yes. The whole site is broken. I can easily break throught it"
The faces of the rest of the group showed a level of surprise that made the teacher ask if he had informed us: "No..."
Our client, another SE teacher, started to laugh and that was that.
It was awful

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

I've decided that whenever a non technical person be it a client or a non technical PM tells me it's easy or tells me it'll take only x hours, I'm going to tell them to either do it themselves, or let me do my estimate calculation. You don't fucking understand one line of what I do yet you can magically calculate the amount of time I'll take on the task? No fucking thank you sir.

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.

PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.

He fucking signs the contract.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.

PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.

The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.

NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.

We have 3 days left.

Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.

Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.

PM: Can we have it so the usernames are case-sensitive?

Me: uhh, sure I guess.. But thats like really pointless and adds no real usefulness.. In fact makes the whole logging in thing a tad more complicated for no reason..

PM: Well this one other product we have uses "Admin" for the login versus yours that used "admin" so it needs to be implemented.

(note that mine accepted "Admin" anyways...) *implemented it*

PM: So there's a problem with the username sort, it sorts by capitals then lowercase.. eg:
alpha
beta
Alpha

Me: Yeah, you asked for case-sensitive usernames..

PM: Well can you fix it?

Me: I could create a second field within the user data that is the username in all lowercase and sort by that. But that negates like all of the whole case-sensitive usernames thing.. OR I could drop all this actually important work I'm doing and do a whole bunch of work on a custom sort for this useless fucking feature you wanted me to put in..

*it's been 2 weeks and still no reply...*

Project manager: I haven't seen an automated email go out in a while.

Me: ok let me check. Can you provide me a previous email for reference?

Project manager: no
*Itterate 3 times*
Me: ok, does this template resemble the email you're missing?
PM: no
*End itteration*
PM after 3rd attempt to identify the email they're missing: comes into my office and tells me he's not even going to answer my emails anymore cause I can't find his missing email.

Me: finally nails down the email he's *missing* and there's nothing wrong with it.

PM: doesn't believe me.

I fucking hate bad PM's. Asshole can't be bothered to provide usefull information to save his life then questions everything I tell him and thinks I'm the idiot when it takes me 3x as long to fix/find something.

there is another team in our company that has its site in the US. we haven't been working with them for very long, but we do have some common topics on which we work loosely together and exchange some information from time to time. i have met the guys only once in person when they visited Germany.

PM asked one of the devs of this team if he could move to another time zone, so it would be easier for us in Europe to arrange meetings with him.

move to another timezone. within the US. to the other side of the country where there's noone he knows. also, no site of ours.
only so it's easier for PM to arrange fucking meetings with him.

can you believe that? i cringed so hard when PM told me about that. (of course the guy refused, shocked pikachu)
and when he thought aloud that maybe he should ask the guy to move to Germany, i told him that the colleague wouldn't do that and that this was a terrible idea. he was really surprised and asked "hmm, you think?"

dafuq, hell yeah i think?!

Frequently used answers :)

UI developer - I think API is not working
Backend developer - Front end is not sending the request correctly
Tester - Testing! Testing!
UI/UX - As per android/ios standards...
QA - Let me check one more time
PM - Let us have another meeting and get on the same page
Dev-Ops - It's very complicated you know
CTO - We're working on a next-gen solution
Founder - Let us build something that no one has built, something similar to what google...facebook...

Cridits: My EX-CPO

Guys guys guys. Conversation had right just now. A PM from the company I’m freelancing for just said

“We need to move away from SQL server and shift all the data to MongoDB. I don’t want it to take more than a month tops”

Verbatim. No context. Nothing. The website is for a small time supply chain software that’s been chugging along for a decade now with spaghetti code everywhere.

How do I even respond? The other guy who works with me sent 😂😂😂 to me privately and now is offline lol wtf

Other PM: We must fix the database performance issues now.

Me: We can't. We're still only halfway on the dependency chain to tackle this and honestly, even if the dependency chain would be fulfilled, I'd leave at least 2 weeks monitoring the production after the changes were rolled out before we further poke around.

Other PM: This is taking far too long. And whaddya mean by dependency chain? Why was I not informed about this?

Me: *sigh* like in every meeting in the last weeks: the dependency chain are the current open blockers before we can proceed with the database changes. We've talked about this _at length_... Especially why these blockers exist.

Other PM: No, we need to start now. I've _examined_ at the blockers or "dependency chain" as you call it.

(Examined.... He opened on his currently streaming laptop, which was connected to the active beamer, the mentioned ticket with a detailed blocker ... And quickly scrolled. Yeeah. Warmonger...).

Me: I'm very tired of discussing this. But since you are already presenting us the ticket, read out the referenced meeting notes... We explained it in great detail.

Other PM: Why? This is just a waste of time!!!!!!!

--
Yes. This happened. Other PM was my nemesis.
In this meeting were 2 PMs (Him, Me)… I think 5 - 7 devs... And we were sitting in this meeting since 2 hours at least. Everyone was angry...

After this "manifesto of intelligence"… I simply left the room, followed by a few devs.

And yes. Other PM did this on a regular basis....

PM: Oh, i got news about project xyz.

Me: Oh good, are we finally dropping support for that shity legacy system?

PM: No you gotta make a copy of it and convert all the currency symbols and add a bunch of new features, we selling it to a new client.

I am DONE with this woman.

Background: we're a team of 3 developers and I'm the junior in this team and I've been in this shit for a year now. 2 months ago the team leader left for another project and I had to stand in for him in every responsibility against the PM and other teams.

Now I not only had to endure this insecure woman but I was also supposed to work with her! Fast-forward to today, the team leader is back and I thought I could put my headphones on and work peacefully at last.

But no!

I've found out she's sent a faulty code to production - no big deal - and said that over chat (although she's sitting right behind me):

Me: We need to fix this.
Her: What?

Me: *giving some details about the issue*
Her: Your attitude is important when you ask me to do something. Whenever you're writing to me you're typing on your keyboard like you're going to break it on my head.

*me not knowing what to say at this point because we had something stupid like this before*

Me: So you're offended by the sound my keyboard makes? (I have mx brown switches by the way and they're not even loud)
Her: No you're typing too fast when you're writing to me. The sound echoes in the office.
...

Can you fucking believe this shit? I hate people that think they can educate me but have no idea how to rationally respond to situations and take responsibility! I didn't even say anything!

And she's been saying to me she hadn't had a problem with any other people for gazillion years who knows how long and why would she cause a problem now! And thinks I am the problem, fuck YOU!

Since you don't like receiving orders why hadn't you taken the place when the fucking guy went for another project but I had to take all the responsibility? I know why you fucking entitled bitch.

Because you HAD NO IDEA AND YOU STILL DON'T.

So shut the fuck up and do as I say.

Kind regards

PM+UX: The boxes must stretch to fill the all the available width with no spaces in between, they must wrap to the next line, be 200px wide...sometimes.... and there should be no scroll bars all at the same time.

Me:so you want magic boxes that can just do whatever your thinking with no real logic defined...?

sooo shit started hitting the fan

after another useless discussion where PM tried to hardcore micromanage me and then bullshit his way out, i fucking tilted and started swearing.
after this discussion, he invited to a meeting next week to talk about "miscommunication".

no need bruh, i'll tell my boss on Monday i want to switch to another team.

pm: why this things are getting late in development.
me: no, I'm not late, on track, this will be done by end of the next week.
pm: but my estimation was for today EOD.
me: you never asked me for the estimation..
pm: we are here for that.
me: then do this yourself..*asshole*

Story of me trying to connect to a colleague from neighbouring team with 12 hour difference timezone:

Me: Hey! Shall we catch up to discuss a feature that will help us dominate the world?

She: Sure.. what time works for you?

Me: Since we have timezone challenge, I'd say boundary times would be good so none of us have to stretch.

She: umm.. good..

Me: How about 07:30 PM your time?

She: oh sweetie.. evenings don't work for me.. I want my evenings free..

Me: fine.. how about 07:00 AM your time?

She: no darling.. I am not a morning person..

Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF BITCH. I CAN'T COMPLY WITH EVERY TANTRUM OF YOURS.

And with that.. I didn't respond to her invites which were either super early for me or super late. Let her keep waiting..

Juniors with ego are shittiest folks to work with.

Context:
PM is not an IT professional but somehow leads IT operations ... (yes... I know)
---

PM: "Hey xxzero0, do you remember about the XYZ project?"

xxzero0: "Yes, tell me"

PM: "I told the big boss we can use it to make starships and explore the universe, I also said we can cut the developing time because we are already at 70% with it".

xxzero0: "....... Do you understand we planned to use this project to deploy a small ship in the sea?"

PM: "Yes, but you clearly inexperienced developer, don't know it needs only some refactoring to explore the universe"

xxzero0: "It is more complicated. There is no logic at all. It is just displaying data without doing anything and..."

*Get interrupted*

PM: "Yes, we need some refactoring, I'm such a genius."

Everytime I hear "there's a problem" in my office I cringe so bad I have the impression I'm making holes in my teeth.

I hate this "janitor" / "plumber" role I have here, so insulting in terms of brain power.

** randomly codes something **
** colleague breaks silence **
C: Phlisg? There's a problem.
Me: what now?
C: Well when I enter a title that is 500+ characters for my blog post, it breaks the layout.
Me: obviously the title is too long. Shorten it.
C: I can't because [reasons] (unfortunately true reasons)
Me: ** deep sigh ** yeah, will look at it... ** proceeds to hide anything longer than 10 characters **
C: perfect!

--- 3 days later
C: Phlisg? there's a problem.
Me: mh?
C: the text is too short, can you make it longer
Me: ** FFS ** guys, you should've asked for a "Word-type" website if you just wanted to do any kind of layout. No, can't, sorry. Choose either between broken layout or shortening your damn text.

-- 1hr later, pm comes in
PM: Text is too short
Me: Yep. Any longer will break everything visually
PM: can't you fix this?
Me: Yes I can, but it'll be a whole CSS revamp because it was not MEANT that texts should be so long.
PM: How many hours?
Me: ** overestimating ** 10 hours (2.2 days of work)
PM: nah, okay, just add it as a side project

** me, inside : WOW, WHAT A FUN PROJECT OMG **

PM: Can you fix this issue with the file upload?
me: Sure, give me the file that's having the issue so I can figure out why that specific one isn't working.
PM: Oh... it wasn't working so I deleted it.
Me: OK, are there any other files that cause this error.
PM: No... it was a single case. You can fix it anyway, right?

Tired, sick, brain foggy, cold.

I’m trying to finish my last few specs and it totally isn’t going well.

My PM also promised me he would get the change requests for this ticket to me by today so I could work on them — as we’re moving this Friday. He did not. He made the same promise last week. Bloody useless.

Oh well.
I let him know that I wouldn’t be able to finish the feature in time if he didn’t get back to me, so... week off? :D

As if packing and moving and driving is downtime.

I do need to figure out this last spec, though. I rewrote the entire feature, and broke functionality specific to some client, and apparently it’s tricky and extremely fragile. I have no idea how it was working before, and the only person I have to ask is... grumpy and overly busy, and hasn’t looked at any of it in years. Yay!

I might just go to bed.

I had a dream that I was installing some sort of package and the PM warned that it was a known malicious package and I was like "This must be a mistake, no it isn't" so I installed it anyways and then an ASCII-Art Michael Jackson started dancing on my screen to loud music and I shut down the computer and woke up and panicked because I didn't have any backups

So we have this HUGE ass project , really challenging , that my boss and "PM" have been meeting with the client for months now...

I got on board , guess what?

NO ONE HAVE A FUCKING CLUE ON WHAT THE FUCK THEY WANT!!!!!

ALL FUCKING GENERIC REQUIREMENTS!!! WHAT THE FUUUCK!!!

[ insert fucking pitch screaming!!!! ]

FUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!

i'm feeling so sick right now.

PM invited team for today to present his "vision": "<name of our component>: what it is and what it is not".
but it didn't make sense and showed that he hadn't understood the problem at all. the whole architecture made no sense given the problems that shall be solved. his architecture diagrams missed some essential parts that were actually the giant weak points of his concept. his pseudocode, that should exemplify interactions between components, didn't address the complexity of required interactions at all. it's like he expects some magic to happen and has no fucking clue about the requirements (but acts like it), even though he is the manager of this software project.
and when devs ask really interesting questions that fundamentally question his concept, discussions lead to nowhere and questions are not answered. at some point he literally said "there is no such thing as <name of our component>, i still have to find this out"
really!? after one and a half year, since you sold the idea for this component to upper management, and after half a year of development, you still can't tell what it is what we actually want to build? are you fucking serious?!

at some point in discussion he said that these questions need to be answered but that "there's no time left", and he ended the meeting. although there was still half an hour of meeting time left.

i'm so fucking sick of this, i hate everything right now. i can't listen to this bullshit any longer. in discussions, he contradicts himself all the time, it is so fucking surreal i'm starting to feel like i'm insane.

it makes me really sad and tired. i don't want to care about this shit any longer.

So new PM is forcing everyone to use Google sheets as our main project management tool as it's free and does what she likes... Was so close to just quitting.

More rage: how the fudge does she think it's acceptable for every 'to-do' no matter how big or small needs to be recorded in a sheet with roughly 30 columns @#&#&£ work is going to grind to a halt whilst we fill it in. So many better tools to use! Oh it gets worse it's 1 sheet per a person so the longer you work there the bigger the sheet gets the more time you need to spend to find, record and even open the freaking document up.

In a UAT meeting with representatives of our project partners,

The account executive, who set up the project, said to my PM in front of everyone just before the test started: "I hope your system won't fail, because everyone here will be watching"

My PM: "No it won't. But in that case, I believe it's your fault for setting an unrealistic deadline without consulting us, the development team, first"

All the representatives, being also developers from multiple companies, proceeded to stare at her with disgust.

We were 6 devs on a big project that needed to be completed in 3 months. Probably my first project as a full-stack dev and the work was very demanding.

The senior of my team was a very sharp and energetic, but also a very "in your face" kinda guy. Like, he was cool, but sometimes a little too much to handle for some people.

Anyway, this guy "Senior dev" worked faster (naturally) and harder than the rest of us and was always willing to help if somebody had problems with a framework, tool or other technology. Also, there was this other guy also a good dev (second best I would say) that just hated the first guy's guts for being "rude and obnoxious" as he put it.

One day, the PM and the senior had an argument about a major change that the PM had agreed to (just to save face with the client) that will force the team to come to work on the weekend. In the end he saved us the trouble of going throught that and the PM had to tell the client that the change wouldn't be made. From then on it went downhill for "Sr. dev" in the company. Until one day he was told that his contract was not gonna be renewed.

Short after, he showed some of us a screen cap. somebody sent him of an email from the "hateful" dev to the PM in which he wrote he had heard that the senior guy was leaving and he couldn't be happier because he was "damaging, problematic and a stressful part of his job". That was such a dick move, we thought he should get back at the guy.

So he sent a fake email to the PM using the "hateful" guy's email ID, that read:

"Dear PM. I'm sorry I said those things about 'Senior dev', I guess I'm just mad that he's a better professional than me and mad that I was born with no genitalia".

After the senior dev left I worked on one more project with the "hateful" dev and he was let go mid project for "not being proactive and making little effort on completing the project".

PM, on kickoff meeting: good code speaks for itself, need no documentation

PM, on UAT day: how does this features work, where is the documentation for it?

Dev: Just do me a favor and go fuck yourself.

Friday 4:59pm
PM: hey, we need to add this new feature to the project.
Me: no problem, I'll take a look on Monday.

Monday 8:01am
PM: how's that new task coming along?
Me: 😩

*receives email about project*

*turns around*

PM: "Hey I just sent you an email about a project"

No. Fucking. Shit.

This is something I'll never forget.

I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.

I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.

Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).

Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).

The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).

The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".

Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.

I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.

I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.

All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".

PM: Hey listen, client sent us his feedback about the app that we need to fix, they wont take time.
Me: Sure no problem.

5 Minutes later:
*Receives email*
*checks email*
15 easy tasks that take not time to finish BUT they are put inside ONE FUCKING TASK ON JIRA! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THIS SHIT! 15 IN ONE YOU DUMB FUCK!
MOVE YOUR LAZY ASS AND WRITE EACH IN ITS OWN MOTHERFUCKING TASK!

Another reason on why I hate humans -_-

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

1. Hit everything you do. You will learn more faster. Don't accept things at face value, care about why things work.

2. Study and experiment constantly. Be aware of your surroundings and what is going on. If you're not ready with a solution when a power vacuum appears, you will always be a grunt. Or worse, eventually a manager who everyone hates because you constantly tell the people who report to you how "back in your day," your code was amazing, there were no bugs and your shit doesn't stink.

3. Be honest with yourself: If you just want to keep your nose to the grindstone and make manager so you don't have to code anymore:

Quit. Stop now. Do not pass go, do not become a cancer on the industry.

Go get a job as a PM, you'll have a better career and you won't be the weak link holding everyone else back.

Tl;dr When the shit goes down, you better be ready.

So, today's comedy job story (and how depressive things become), and it's only 9:30.

Stressed PM assaults me at 8 to tell me what I have to do, standing next to me and dictacting stuff she wants done. Hate that.

As I went to a colleague to help her out with these fucking presentations (she "couldn't open them"), as I just arrived to her office my phone rings.

It's my PM. I'm 20m away, she calls me. Ok.

Me: "Yes?"
PM: "Hey Phlisg, erm, we are stuck in a conference room, can you come and open the door?"
Me: "Erm, the door has no handle, can't help"
PM: "Can you call the "housekeeper"?"
Me: "Sure" (why the hell doesn't she have his number...)

I go downstairs, go towards the conference room, and before the door there is the reception office. I ask the colleagues in there if the "housekeeper" is here, but they instead produced the handle from their drawers, and went to the door to open it.

At the same time, a person locked inside the conference room went through the window to go round and try to open the door.

Door successfully opened by colleague with handle.

I mean...

WHAT

THE

FUCK!

You have a problem? One reflex: call Phlisg. She might call me at 2 am in the morning because she cannot sleep or something.

Pissed!!

Let me tell you the story of how a feature request no one asked for got put in an early grave:

PM walks into weekly meeting with a single use case that one user called in about, despite never having this issue during the past year and a half that our app has been in production. PM's boss (genuinely one of the best people i have ever worked with) happens to sit in this particular meeting for no reason other than he felt like he should once in a while.

PM brings up use case and wants to devote 3 weeks' development time and another 3 weeks to test RIGHT NOW while other projects are already in motion. PM's boss speaks up with this: "Listen if this guy is really this upset, we can just tell him to build his own service. All the other end users have no problems with this, so it's not worth spending the resources on, i don't think."

And that is how i went from "this is bullshit" to "i love you" in the span of 20 minutes.

Client project manager calls me up one day

PM: hey can you make some precise estimates on some items for a project you’re not working on? It should be easy. It’s very similar to the project you ARE working on and it’s only a handful of user stories, mostly front end stuff. We´ll need this to be done by tomorrow night.

Me: um, I guess if it’s just a few simple items. ok

PM: great! I’ll let you know when you get access to the backlog.

Me: sounds good

Link to project is sent to me. Backlog contains over 20 user stories, most of which are backend related. And it doesn’t have much to do with my current project.

I contact PM: this isn’t exactly what you announced when I had you on the phone. If you want precise estimates with a minimum of design, this could take up to a week. I could however proceed to some ballpark estimates (poker planning) for starters if you need this quickly for your roadmap.

PM: no I need PRECISE estimates down to the hour for each item.

Me: ok then, it’ll take up to a week.

PM: 🤬🤬🤬. You told me it could be done in a day. I’m coming to realize your word can’t really be trusted.

Me: 🤦🏻‍♂️

PTSD: Getting messages again at 9PM on a friday: "do you have time for a call?"

no dude, I DONT!

IF I DIDNT ANSWER YOU DURING THE DAY ON A WEDNESDAY, WHY IN GODS NAME DO YOU THINK I WOULD RESPOND AT 9 PM ON A FRIDAY

PM: We don't need a spec. We'll figure it out as we go.
Me: O_O.... So what do you need the system to do?.....
PM: ( gives vague requirements)

4 weeks later I still no clue what they need.

Every standup, we had to make a skype call to the other office in UK. At that office was the QA lead and for this project she was on our team. One day she came in late to the standup and just looked pissed or sick or SOMETHING. This was particularly strange because usually she was incredibly cheery and "the life of the meeting" in a sense. After everybody's update, she was asked if she had anything to say. She started fucking mumbling some shit I couldn't hear because of the bad audio quality, then she progressively raised her voice until finally she was yelling and cussed out the PM, ending it off with "ALL FUCKING BECAUSE OF YOU, <PM>!!" Everybody was just fucking speechless and confused as fuck. Nobody understood what her fucking issue was, but the PM (on my end of the call) was not taking that shit! "LOOK LADY, I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR COMPLAINT IS BUT THIS IS COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE." Blah blah, he gave it to her good, told her they needed to take it offline, ended the call abruptly and then turned to all of us and said, "Jesus Christ, what drugs is she taking?" To this day I have no idea what the hell happened but it's still one of my funniest memories at that company.

Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.

In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.

Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).

But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.

Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.

meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)

of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

Migrated to SharePoint 2016 which included Reporting Services, and trying to fix a bug in the reporting services scheduler, I created a report (aka, copied an existing one) 'A Klingon Walks Into a Bar', so it would first in the list and distinct enough so the QA testers would (hopefully) leave it alone.

The PM for the project calls me.
PM: "What is this Klingon report? It looks like a copy of the daily inventory report"
Me: "It is. The reporting service job keeps crashing on certain reports that have daily execution schedules."
PM: "I need you to delete it"
Me: "What? Why? The report is on the dev sharepoint site. I named the report so it was unique and be at the top of the list so I can find it easily."
PM: "The name doesn't conform to our standards and it's confusing the testers."
Me: "The testers? You mean Dan, you, and Heather?"
PM: "Yes, smartass. Can you name the report something like daily inventory report 2, or something else?"
Me: "I could, but since this is in development, no. You've already proofed out the upgrade. You're waiting on me to fix this sharepoint bug. Why do you care what I do on this server? It's going away after the upgrade."
PM: "Yea, about that. We like having the server. It gives us a place to test reports. Would really appreciate it if you would rename or delete that report."
Me: "A test sharepoint reporting services server out of scope, so no, we're not keeping it."
PM: "Having a server just for us would be nice."
Me: "$10,000 nice? We're kinda fudging on the licensing now. If we're keeping it, we will be required to be in compliance. That's a server license, sharepoint license, sql server license, and the dedicated hardware. We talked about that, remember?"
PM: "Why is keeping that report so important to you? I don't want to explain to a VP what a Klingon is."
Me: "I'm not keeping the report or moving it to production. When I figure out the problem, I'll delete the report. OK?"
PM: "I would prefer you delete the report before a VP sees it."
Me: "Why would a VP be looking? They probably have better things to do."
PM: "Jeff wants to see our progress, I'll have to him the site, and he'll see the report."
Me: "OK? You tell Jeff it's a report I'm working on, I'll explain what a Klingon is, Jeff will call me a nerd, and we all move on."
PM: "I'm not comfortable with this upgrade."
Me: "What does that mean?"
PM: "I asked for something simple and I can't be responsible for the consequences. I'll be documenting this situation as a 'no-go' for deployment"
Me: "Oookaayyy?"

I figured out the bug, deleted the 'Klingon' report, and the PM couldn't do anything to delay the deployment.

Getting corporate VPN access:
PM: Here's the program to get in, it should work.
Me: Won't install.
PM: sorry old version, here is the new one.
Me: Can't get in
PM: create a ticket
Support: Not sure, just try again
Me: Still won't work
Support: We forgot to set some attributes in your account, should work now.
Me: Nope.
Support: We are investigating.
*two weeks later*
Support: should work now.
Me: No it doesn't you stupid f***tards.
*gives up all hope*

The most unusual place I have coded:

At office
Last Friday at 9:05 PM.
No one was there except me and a strange tapping sound kept coming out of no where.
Outside the window, I could see two people fighting.

Do you have a ‘Drama Queen’ on your team?
This happened last week.
DK = Drama Queen
DK: “OMG..the link to the document isn’t working! All I get is page not found. I’m supposed to update the notes for this project…and now I can’t! What the _bleep_ and I supposed to do now?!...I don’t understand how …”
This goes on for it seems 5 minutes.
Me: “Hold on...someone probably accidently mistyped the file name or something. I’m sure the document is still there.”
DK: “Well, I’ll never find it. Our intranet is a mess. I’m going to have to tell the PM that the project is delayed now and there is nothing I can do about it because our intranet is such a mess.”
Me: “Maybe, but why don’t you open up the file and see where the reference is?”
DK: “Oh, _bleep_ no…it is HTML…I don’t know anything about HTML. If the company expects me to know HTML, I’m going to have to tell the PM the project is delayed until I take all the courses on W3-Schools.”
Me: “Um…you’ve been developing as long as I have and you have a couple of blogs. You know what an anchor tag is. I don’t think you have to take all those W3 courses. It’s an anchor tag with a wrong HREF, pretty easy to find and fix”
DK: “Umm…I know *my* blog…not this intranet mess. Did you take all the courses on W3-Schools? Do you understand all the latest web html standards?”
Me: “No, but I don’t think W3 has anything to do the problem. Pretty sure I can figure it out.”
DK: “ha ha…’figuring it out’. I have to know every detail on how the intranet works. What about the javascript? Those intranet html files probably have javascript. I can’t make any changes until I know I won’t break anything. _bleep_! Now I have to learn javascript! This C# project will never get done. The PM is going to be _bleep_issed! Great..and I’ll probably have to work weekends to catch up!”
While he is ranting…I open up the html file, locate the misspelling, fix it, save it..
Me: “Hey..it’s fixed. Looks like Karl accidently added a space in the file name. No big deal.”
DK:”What!!! How did you…uh…I don’t understand…how did you know what the file name was? What if you changed something that broke the page? How did you know it was the correct file? I would not change anything unless I understood every detail. You’re gonna’ get fired.”
Me: “Well, it’s done. Move on.”

so management decided that the PM/PO/SM role has to be split and that SM shall be done by someone else.

PM in retro: so i will give away this role because i cannot fulfill all roles adequately, not because of missing skills, but because of missing time. this is also why i couldn't finish my development task for this sprint. so, someone of you guys has to do the job. i expect the future SM to be always available for me in the morning and the afternoon, so due to timezone shift this has to be someone from the German colleagues. I will have to explain to that person what exactly I as a PO expect from the SM and the SM will have to follow this guideline. also, being SM is no excuse for not delivering your stories, it just takes very little time.

...i don't need to comment on this at all, he already makes a perfect clown of himself 🤡

PM: we need to show some progress, lets build a dashboard to display metrics.
Me: what metrics do we use ? The current period?
PM: No, those aren't good. Use math to show we made progress *wink*
Me: .......

when there are no task left in sprint

PM: what are you working on?
me: my stackoverflow reputation

I attended a 2-days scientific conference last week which lasted from 9 AM-7 PM.
I submit my travel expenses today and the university adm got guts to tell me that
I should commute 6 hours everyday to that place instead of staying in a hotel.

Please people, I contribute making our research and name renown to the public. I don't even get paid doing that (did it for the sake of experience).
The least you can do is to support the accomodation. The penny pinching you did in the name of cost saving is embarrasing.

I didn't like every hour spent working in the uni, yet people still ask me why I won't continue to PhD.
No offence to all PhDs out there. It's just that my practical and money-oriented ass couldn't
stand all the free work I have to do if I do that.
I'd rather work in a supermarket, at least I'm getting paid of what I'm worth.
😕

Had to program an entire ecommerce site for both a city soccer league and baseball league. Around 50 teams each. No planning or anything beforehand. They gave me around 4 days to complete the project. Once everything was squared away, of course they complained and said that half of the teams were wrong. So I had to stay until around 11 pm in the office fixing everything that Friday night. Of course everyone said it was my fault. I blame it on the lack of planning.

PM is such a fucking cunt
telling me that my data structures describing the layout of binary data would be confusing for devs, and that we shall introduce

typedef fuckingRetardedObfuscatingName uint8_t;

in our code. everyone is fine with the concepts i provide to describe this binary data, not only at our company but also in other software i've worked on and common standards i've worked with, we work like that and every fucking idiot knows what a uin8_t is.

you fucking braindead imbecile have no fucking idea how we work and you don't care, you don't even try to understand what we are doing.
god i hope you die being hit by a fucking bus or something

So the same guy who called Ninetails from Naruto a wolf is PM in this project with me

During scrum meeting:

PM: I read the project scope again and I realised there are scopes that we didn't get it. Each time I read the scope there's something new.

Me: *Sure, the scope is fucked with a long 8 feet dragon dildo to start with*

PM: Read the scope 5 times, cause we don't want to miss anything. If QA raises an issue regarding the modules which are in scope but you implemented it wrong then it won't be considered Change request and you have to do deliver it in time even work on weekends with no compensation.

Me: ...

PM: Now, go through the scope again today and we will hold a meeting after working hours (unpaid, but can be adjusted in monthly avg) and I will ask random questions.

Me: *tf*

PM: And anyone who won't be able to answer them will sit through the non-working hours and go through the scope again

Me: *YOU FUCKTARD, incompetence from your side or from business development team to create a simple understandable scope can't force us to sit through non-working hours.*

I already had an opinion about this guy from my previous rant, his improved a little in between but I guess not

how often does it happen that you have to prevent terrible architectural decisions from being made, because people who are in charge but obviously have no clue, make really weird suggestions and are really confident that this is a good idea?

PM: so please analyze functionalities X with dev Y, since module Y that dev Y develops shall provide these functionalities.
me: as i said yesterday, module Y will use my module X and shouldn't care about how this is going to be implemented.
PM: yeah, but module Y shall be able to... (lists some functionalities)
me: yes, that's what i'm currently working on in module X. my current state of the API can be used in a way that... (lists different low level functions and how a combination of them can be used to provide these functionalities)
PM: okay, hmm... i just realize that module Y will actually be a user of module X...

well.... yeah?!!
i always thought that was crystal clear?? 🤦‍♀️

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

Had a blast from the past the other day. Testing an issue with an AngularJS app in IE11 on a project managers Surface.

Nothing works. Just a blank screen. I open the JavaScript console to hundreds, maybe thousands of errors. They all seem eerily familiar, but I can't place them. It's like something from a past life.

Then I see one that brings the issue into sharp focus.

"{{variable_name}} is a reserved word"

No it isn't, I think. That hasn't been a reserved word in JavaScript since...

Me: "Is your browser in Compatibility Mode?"

PM: "Yeah, it's for one of our legacy programs"

Me: "You need to turn that off to test this app. It thinks you're using IE6, so it's having a 2 decade old shit-fit. I haven't seen those errors since I was a teenager making crap on Geocities"

I never thought an error message could make me feel so old 😩

Client: Each invoice should be it's entity. It should only report it's own open amount. Any other open amounts remain on the other invoices.

Me: No problem. ::Sets invoices to only report own open amount::

PM: Hey, the invoices in UAT are not displaying the sum of all open bills.

Me: I know. The client wants each invoice to only report the open amount on that specific invoice.

PM: That can't be right, change it back before we give the client access to the UAT environment.

Me: No problem. ::reverts invoice changes::

Client: We are failing the invoices. The invoices should not be giving total open amounts for the account. Each invoice should only report the open amount for that invoice. We told the development about this...

PM: I see. I'll make sure he understands your request.

Me: ... ::reverts the revert::

PM: Hey, the invoices in UAT aren't giving a total of the open-

Me: OMFG. I just want this task closed!

Client: After the invoice work is done, we need to talk about past due amounts and how they are reported to customers.

PM: Sure thing. It is logical to give a total of a past due amount to the customer...

Me: ::Starts updating resume::

I cant express how outraged this makes me feel.

Me to my PM months ago (when I started) "we should upgrade the versions of node and angular when I do the tests (because yes, no tests at all)
Boss:"why? No no"

Our version of node 0.10.40 has no support any longer. But hey, I'm leaving that role :-) good luck new guy if new guy comes....

PM with no technical background: "The client needs a static site in WordPress." 😐

The role of a Product Manager is just a decade or two old. Most organisations, including FAANG, are still figuring out what are the primary responsibilities of a PM.

A vast majority I know, including my dumbass, is struggling to keep things floating while in the role. Learning on the job is one of the only and most effective way to do so.

No wonder, imposter syndrome is so common in this group.

One of the main tasks is to make decisions. Important and impactful ones. The role came into existence to take the decision making load off our engineering friends while building any product.

This shit comes with huge responsibility.

BUT, not everyone understand this. In India, being a developer was a cool thing until 2018 and so everyone rushed into the role. Now somehow everyone started thinking being a Product Manager is cool because all you have to do is sit and shoot orders and things will happen magically.

I get reached out by so many folks every month asking for guidance and when I ask them what a PM does or why they want to be a PM, the narrative is more or less same.

Very few actually understand how taxing the role is or the challenges that we face while performing the job.

WHY THE FUCK ARE PEOPLE SO IGNORANT AND DUMB?

And in another news, my first week at new job was super amazing. Loved every bit of it. People are smart, processes are neat, things are structured, and lots and lots to learn for me.

How are you guys doing? Been a while that we spoke.

Official declaration: I am the dumbest person I know.

Our entire test environment just fucking died today, redeploys don't work, connections time out, databases suck balls

I had no other choice but to start drinking alcohol at 2 pm

So I have this massive fight with a PM, yelling at eachother for 5 min. Once out of our system we sorted it out, no hard feelings

I wish we had more pm's like him

!rant
So my pm gave me a task and estimated it to 6 days. I was like, well, thats a vacation for me isn't it :). I started it 3 days later and read the description... Get these api into this app..etc..mvp and all... so I worked on the views first. Later I found out that the api were totally incompatible, and no such data was found or COULD BE MADE for the app. that was day 1 :)
I kept publishing apks with empty views, nice empties If I do say so, and just said we have to wait for backend to make tokens and data. Vacation starts, (sorry boss if you're reading this :D)
On day 6, the PMs were just rushing up and down, contacting backend, back to me, then backend, office ping pong, (a lovely sight), til the senior SysAdmin said, its impossible. Of course I knew this, buuuut, who would miss such a lovely opportunity.

PS: to all PMs, keep on dreaming those impossible ideas :)

Worst hack/attack?

Probably developing a complex food ordering website and client just stole the website and didn’t pay as it turns out our PM didn’t let the client sign a contract. Can’t sue as we have no legal binding documents.

We did managed to get access to the database and decided to change our passwords manually, but like I don’t get paid much for this

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

*in Sprint planning listening to my PM creating tasks*

PM (to Team): So this will be an MVP we can expand on in the future. Do let me know upfront if any tasks should not be in the Sprint.

Team Manager (to PM): Let's see... Yeah I think you've nailed it... Good.

Developer (to Team): Guys, I see the task for the frontend team to integrate machine learning doesn't have any details.

PM (to Developer): Ooh machine learning! Good catch!

PM (to Team Manager): This was one of the tasks we really needed this quarter, will we still be on track?

Team Manager (to PM): Yeah no worries we'll add it as part of the MVP design in Confluence.

PM: Okay assigning the task now. *Assigns to Developer*

*Team Manager goes on 1 month vacation*

Me (thinking to myself): Wtf

Product Manager: We’re assigning you to the Guest Checkout project.

I look at the Guest Checkout epic in JIRA and see it only includes frontend scope. Nothing about backend implementation.

I also find an older ticket about guest checkout. It was written by the former Product Manager. It explicitly says our admin switch for guest checkout no longer works because rebuilt checkout to use react. Why does no one bother to check the backlog??? I found this just by searching “guest checkout.”

Me: Um, our website doesn’t support guest checkout.

PM: What?! But the admin has a guest checkout option that can be turned on and off.

Me: Those admin options only apply if you’re still using the out-of-the-box solution for the e-commerce platform. Remember how we rebuilt checkout using React? We didn’t build it to support guest checkout. That admin switch doesn’t work anymore. We can ask a backend dev to confirm.

I check the code. The code that relates to the admin switch for guest checkout no longer exists. It’s a dead switch.

BE Dev: We made a lot of customizations since we purchased the e-commerce solution. So yeah, that guest checkout switch doesn’t work.

PM: [to me] …Our BE devs are busy with other projects. Can you do the backend for guest checkout?

😳

Me: You realize I’m just a frontend dev with only some backend knowledge, right? I’m not even close to fullstack. And you want me to architect an entire guest checkout flow? That will work with our current checkout experience? And that is HIPPA compliant? On top of doing the frontend?

On my project the customer has re-signed into a contract several times when they have budget to continue work. The first time they got us to build the system was a huge success story because the team was assembled quickly and we did rapid development. Initialize repo to prod in 1.5 months. The customer asked for the same dev team. Strong dev team, a PM that doesn't take shit, and pure agile. Lets call her don't-take-shit PM.

When the customer re-signed the executive decided that she didn't like don't-take-shit PM. So the project manager gets replaced by play-by-the-rules PM who will comply with stupid requests and micromanagement. He isn't a bad PM but he tries to make everyone happy. The amount of management types executive installs on the project is massive, and development team is cut down in major ways. Customer and executive shit rolls down to the development team and we can't get anything done. The customer starts to lose faith because we can't get traction. They start demanding traditional waterfall/SDLC docs. Which causes more delay in the project.

So the executive decides that the PM can take a fall for it to save face for the company. She moves play-by-the-rules PM to another project. He starts handover to a new PM that has a history of being her pushover. The customer hadn't seen him yet so now we have push-over PM.

Play-by-the-rules PM is finally out of the project and instead of moving to a different account the company decides to "lay him off because there is no work". So basically they made him take the fall for the failure while promising reassignment, and instead let him go. This is so unfair..

Meeting with push-over PM yesterday and he shows us his plan. Identical to play-by-the-rules PM's plan that got him axed.We point that out and show him the docs that were made for it. His face clearly communicates "OH SHIT WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR?"

I once had a PM who would consistently ask us to fix one off "bugs" (read little design tweaks). He wouldn't even bother to write them down anywhere. He once came over and asked why we hadn't fixed one of his bugs. We had no idea what he was talking about. According to him, we were supposed to organize and prioritize according to his whim. He never logged into our task management system.

When it finally came time to sell off our work to some of the business owners, we showed some of the "bug fixes" we did because that's all we ever heard we were supposed to do. The business owners were mad that we hadn't done anything they had asked us to do. PM throws us under the bus saying that we didn't know how to do our jobs and that we never listened to him. I was so glad when he moved to be lead of the QA department. Then I wasn't so glad.

He would have bug quotas that his team would have to meet. He pitted the entire QA team against all of the devs saying things like, "All the devs suck at coding. It's our job to save the company and the world from their buggy software." He got the only good QA guy fired because he faked a bunch of documents stating that they had had performance reviews and no improvement was made (these meeting never actually took place), and that he hadn't been meeting his big quotas. He was outside of our department and was buddy buddy with one of the C-levels, so his word trumped ours.

Then one glorious day, after I had already left the company, his department was absolved into the technology group. That same day was the day he was fired.

I kind of pity him. I didn't know if he had a family, but how can a man such as that support his family? Perhaps he doesn't have a good relationship with his wife and that's why he sucked at his job?

PM: Did you start looking into that stress testing tool.
Me: Literally looking into it right now
PM: Ah cool. So you'd be ready tomorrow?
Me: No
PM: Why not?
Me: I literally started looking at the tool. I can't promise anything.

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

The company considers the project manager I work with to be the best. After working with him, I consider him to be everything that is wrong with project management.

This PM injects himself into everything and has a way of completely over-complicating the smallest of things. I will give an example:

We needed to receive around 1000 rows of data from our vendor, process each row, and host an endpoint with the data in json. This was a pretty simple task until the PM got involved and over complicated the shit out of it. He asks me what file format I need to receive the data. I say it doesnt really matter, if the vendor has the data in Excel, I can use that. After an hour long conversation about his concerns using Excel he decides CSV is better. I tell him not a problem for me, CSV works just as good. The PM then has multiple conversations with the Vendor about the specific format he wants it in. Everything seems good. The he calls me and asks how am I going to host the JSON endpoints. I tell him because its static data, I was probably going to simply convert each record into its own file and use `nginx`. He is concerned about how I would process each record into its own file. I then suggest I could use a database that stores the data and have an API endpoint that will retrieve and convert into JSON. He is concerned about the complexities of adding a database and unnecessary overhead of re-processing records every time someone hits the endpoint. No decision is made and two hours are wasted. Next day he tells me he figured out a solution, we should process each record into its own JSON file and host with `nginx`. Literally the first thing I said. I tell him great, I will do that.

Fast forward a few days and its time to receive the payload of 1000 records from the Vendor. I receive the file open it up. While they sent it in CSV format the headers and column order are different. I quietly without telling the PM, adjust my code to fit what I received, ran my unit test to make sure it processed correctly, and outputted each record into its own json file. Job is now done and the project manager gets credit for getting everything to work on the first try.

This is absolutely ridiculous, the PM has an absurd 120 hours to this task! Because of all the meetings, constant interruptions, and changing of his mind, I have 35 hours to this task. In reality the actual time I spent writing code was probably 2-3 hours and all the rest was dealing with this PM's meetings and questions and indecisiveness. From a higher level, he appears to be a great PM because of all the hours he logs but in reality he takes the easiest of tasks and turns them into a nightmare. This project could have easily been worked out between me and vendor in a 30 min conversation but this PM makes it his business to insert himself into everything. And then he has the nerve to complain that he is so overwhelmed with all the stuff going on. It drives me crazy because this inefficacy and unwanted help makes everything he touches turn into a logistical nightmare but yet he is viewed as one of the companies top Project Managers.

Gets scheduled into team meeting. Relatively new, see 5 pm ok sweet nbd. *reads IST. Tf is IST? Google that shit, INDIA FUCKIN STANDARD TIME? 5 pm IST != 5 pm EST. Fuckin oh no that shits at 6:30 am. Brb while I slice myself open with safety scissors.

PM: are you free next week for an hour to catch up?
Me: sure no problem
PM: Does tomorrow 15:00 work?

Me: hmm 🤔 is today thursday or is it sunday already?

Imagine developing a frontend for 2 months.

And then one day, PM says, that we have a critical library that we need to integrate with. There is no other alternative (apparently).

And then you check the library, and see, that it's written in a completely different language, that we can't really integrate with.

Project restarts and you get blamed, for not mentioning this earlier.

Yay!

Me on the inside whenever I hear the PM say quick and dirty

PM measure workload by UI upgrades and careless abt backend, meaning you cant justify u were developing backend while there is no output.

How my day went.

Project Manager: We need deliverable X.

Me: That's not listed.

PM: But we need it. Other PM says what you provided isn't enough.

Me: Too bad. I was not told to deliver it.

PM2: We need deliverable X.

Me: Look at the requirements. It is not there. I'm not providing it.

PM2: We need it. Let me ask PM3.

PM3: We need deliverable X.

Me: No. It's not listed. And here's why it's not even applicable.

PM3: Oh....ok

i led yesterday's daily, since PM had no time and asked me to replace him.

in the beginning, i started the round with exactly the same words the PM always used, which made one of the Indian colleagues burst into laughing with muted mic

daily was held.
after the daily, 3 colleagues thanked me and commented on how awesome daily was, which made myself burst into laughter.

my theory is that people like daily standups where they are not steamrolled, interrupted and snapped at all the time.