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Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.
We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.
I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...
After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.
I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.
Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?
I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.
I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.
So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.
Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...
Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.86 -
Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
Finally did it. Quit my job.
The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".
Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.
Some background:
My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.
I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.
What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.
Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.
During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.
During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).
During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).
At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).
I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.
So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!
So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".
For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).
For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.
To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.
I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.
I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.14 -
"I don't use Linux because you can't game on Linux"
Shut your fucking cocksucking mouth.
Yes, support isn't the greatest and a lot of games don't work on Linux yet and some graphical drivers don't work.
But don't fucking say you can't game on Linux because you fucking can.
Steam has a Linux game library that keeps on growing and growing.
There are some platforms for games especially for Linux as well even.
I've seen steam games with freaking high requirements run with any lag on Linux computers - open source amd drivers worked well.
The support could be much better (of games/drivers) but YOU CAN FUCKING GAME ON LINUX.
THAT YOUR GAME DOESN'T RUN ON LINUX DOES NOT MEAN THAT NO SINGLE GAME DOES.
MOTHERFUCKER115 -
"full stack" means "you'll be doing everything from gathering client requirements through data architecture up to the UI design and of course implementing all of it"
"backend" means "you'll be coding everything from database through server-side code and client-side code including html and css"
"we need you on-site all day every day" means "we have no idea how and why we should use repositories with remote access despite being a company developing an internet app, and we don't trust that you would be working anyway"
"interesting challenging projects" means "the same boring crap as every other company, running on an incredibly botched and dezorganized codebase".
"competitive pay" means "actual pay is around 1.5 times the minimum allowed pay, and everything else is being siphoned off into (stupid and useless) 'benefits' like massage and fitness discount coupons"
"friendly collective having fun at numerous company events each years" means "it is mandatory for you to participate on our weekend drinking retreats but you'll only find out when we fire you because you're 'not a team player' after you refused to participate on those"9 -
##Real fuckening STORY##
Angry client: this feature is not working like we discussed !
Me: it is.. *giving some explanation*
Client : no, this is not the right way
Me: But this is what we documented while gathering requirements, and YOU signed in the documentation..
Client : that long document? you don't expect me to read all of that talk just for this simple feature..
Me inside: *killing him 5 times in 5 different ways13 -
One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.
I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.
No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.
The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.
The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.
Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.
Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.
Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.
Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.
Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.
Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.
We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.
Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.
The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.
Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.
Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.
I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.
But I worked support after the launch.
And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.
Back to support.
Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).
So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.
And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?7 -
School principal : P / Me : M / Interviewer over Skype : S
P. I recently heard you run a software club in our school.
M. Yes. (started from March)
P. Well, one software community seems that he found you somewhere, and asked me if we can do a quick interview.
M. Sure. What is it?
P. So he will connect to skype.
M. Let's start then...
*A few moments later...*
M. Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttttt?
P. Calm down! What's the problem?
M. How can I have more than 5 years of android development?
S. Ok. Recorded. Next question.
M. (uhhh)
*A few moments later...*
M. What? Why in the heck do I use subversion?........
Yes... Ah... Ummm....
No! Why should i make a gui client for subversion?
*A few moments later...*
S. Do you have hacking experience?
M. Of what? I know hacking is illegal here..
S. Like... Anything!
M. Do YOU have an experience?
S. Yup.
M. What?
S. Google.
M. How?
S. (silence) Ok. Let's move on.
M. (wtf is this guy)
*A few moments later...*
S. Okay. We were about to hire you but you didnt met our job requirements.
M. ......What? What was the job?
S. Web developer Intern
M. I got no questions regarding "web".
S. I know devs should be great at all things.
M. Shut the hell up. What company are you?
S. (says something)
M. (Searches in google) Doesnt come in search results.
S. Where did you searched it? (trembling voice)
M. (Searches in naver, search engine of korea) Nothing. Are you sure you are a company?
S. (ends call)
Hate these fake interviews. And i have no idea how they found my school
I never wrote my school anywhere.12 -
Requirements vs Delivery - Guide to Programming
This one is a killer and I've received it in multiple forwards in office email, and we always have a good laugh seeing this joke.
Client: “Our next requirement, and this is something big you know, we need an elephant”
IT Team: But why don’t you adjust with a buffalo, even it is big…. and black?”
Client: No, we need an elephant only, let me explain our current process……” (client explains for an hour)
IT Team: Fine, I understand your requirement. But our system supports only a buffalo…
Client:We need only an elephant!
IT Team: Ok, let me see if I can customize it for you”
Requirements are taken as follows:
Client wants a big black four legged animal, long tail, less hair. Having trunk is mandatory. The same was documented, signed off and sent to offshore for development!
At the Offshore Development Centre,
Design/Development – Based on requirement all features are supported in base product (as buffalo), for trunk alone a separate customization is done.
Finally the customization is shown to client:
2 -
A year ago I would have said:
"Because I love solving logic puzzles, there's no greater joy than finding a very simple, elegant translation of a user's requirements into code"
Then 2020 came. I'm SO FUCKING FED UP with coworkers and managers who miss all the required competence to organize and communicate about projects as they are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of working from home.
I'm quite sure I'm the last one to give up at my work.
The company chat has completely died down. I've tried setting up meetings, but even my bosses show up irregularly, confused about why I'm calling them in the middle of their Netflix marathon.
So if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. My answer is now:
"I'm a developer because I get nearly 6 figures, for going through my Steam Library while completely shitfaced at 11AM. When I sober up in the afternoon, I work on some hobby projects. I get to spend 500/m on ordering sandwiches"8 -
• Good night’s sleep (8-9 hours)
• Clearly defined requirements.
• A fun challenge to solve.
• An idea of how to begin.
• Music! Something fast paced and/or harsh. I find soft tunes, good lyrics, etc. are usually very distracting.
• Deadlines help, too, even if they make me stressed out and work too much.
• No political BS / hateful and intolerant political comments from my coworkers within the past day or two, as being called a horrible, racist nazi by association absolutely kills my desire to do any work for them. Going two days without something like this happening is exceedingly rare.
• Being left alone, *especially* in the morning before work! The more distractions, the harder it is focus, even if i have peace and quiet later on.7 -
Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.
Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.
Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.
Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.
Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.
NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!
Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.
Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.
So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.
FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE9 -
Got to love when the client has no requirements, other than, they want a website and they need it done as soon as possible.
Well in that case.... Here's your website.
<html>
<header>
<title>Useless</title>
</header>
<body>
Hello world
</body>
</html>
3 -
Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.
Dev: …25 -
I might have posted this before. But I am going to post it again. Because emojis.
Me: 😁 Software lead I have finished coding the thing.
SL: 😀 Cool, good job. That is going to really help out the analysts.
Software Manager: 😐 hey I noticed you have coded a new thing and pushed it to integration.
Me: 😁 Yes.
SM: 😐 Well how do you know when it's done?
Me: 😑 . . . When you run it and it does the thing?
SM: 😐 Did you write test steps?
Me: 😕 Yeah . . . they're in the issue ticket.
SM: 😐 Yeah but how do you know those are right?
Me: 😕 Because I wrote the thing and the test steps?
SM: 😐 did you put any steps in our acceptance test procedure?
Me: 😕 No.
SM: 😐 why not?
Me: 😧 Because the acceptance test procedure tests requirements. There is no requirement for this functionality.
SM: 😑 Then why did you do it?
Me: 🤔 Because it was an internal request from the analysis team. There is no customer impact here.
SM: 😑 I really think we should write a requirement.
SL: 🤔 But what requirement is he going to attach this to?
SM: 😑 We don't have to attach it to a requirement. We can just test it once and remove it.
Me: 😒 SM, you know we never remove anything from the acceptance test procedure.
SM: 🙂 We do sometimes.
SL: 🤔 When was that I have worked here for twenty years and we have never removed a test from that document.
SM: 😑
SL: 😒
SM: 😑
SL: 😒
Me: 🤐
SM: 😧 I really think there should be an acceptance test written.
SL: 😧 Looks like you're writing an acceptance test.
Me: 😒 Alright as long as y'all're payin'. Shit I was just tryin' to save y'all money.
*acceptance test written and sent to peer review*
Peer: 😐 The requirement tested section doesn't have any requirements spelled out.
Me: 😅 No.
Peer: 🤔 Why?
Me: 😓 Because there is no requirement associated with this test.
Peer: 🤔 Then why are we adding an acceptance test?
Me: 😡 WELL AIN'T THAT A GOOD GOD DAMN QUESTION!?6 -
If the below is you, please stop. I'm starting a revolution called #AnswerTheQuestion
A: Hey, just checked your code, you have a huge security issue in XYZ, you should really address that.
B: Oh god I had no idea, how do I fix it?
A: Well it depends on how you *want* to fix it, no one solution is always the right one.
B: ... Ok, well could you give me some advice?
A: Well, there are many ways to approach this kind of work, but all I can say is that this way, is definitely not the correct one.
B: ... Ok, well how would you do it?
A: That would depend on the customer requirements.
B: ... the requirements is to have a website that isn't easily hackable, what do I do?
A: Nowadays, its pretty hard to make a website completely not hackable.
B: ALL THE SERVERS ARE SHOWING RED, PLEASE HELP ME!!!
A: ........ you really shouldn't prejudge colours. The colour red doesn't always mean danger, depends purely on the use case.9 -
> project nearing deadline [✔]
> an IDE that hangs itself [✔]
> awkward status meetings that turns into pointless discussion [✔]
> confusing requirements [✔]
> getting addicted to tea [✔]
> losing track of time [✔]
> sleepless nights [✔]
> overgrown hair and beard [✔]
> did I shower today ? [✔]
> no srsly did I ? [✔]
> I don't know where am going with this [✔]
> I should probably get some sleep [?!]6 -
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. -
TL;DR: If you're an Android user, do yourself a favour and check out https://simplemobiletools.com/ . You're welcome.
Dear diary, today was a good day.
A small part of my faith in humanity was recovered after I found about Tibor Kaputa.
Apparently, this guy - like many of us - was fed up with the bloat, bugs, bullshit and 'features' of many of the stock Android apps that come preinstalled on most phones. And so, he decided to make his own.
Unlike most of us however, he actually pulled through. And then he made them open source.
No bullshit permission requirements.
No ads or tracking.
Custom themes.
And no, not just 'toggle white/dark mode', I'm talking 'pick your own color scheme', both within the app and for the app icon (!).
And then sync your colour scheme across the entire suite of apps (!!).
Simple UI, with a lot of customizable settings.
And if you get them from f-droid, it's all completely free as in BEER too!
I've spent a lot of time in the last year trying to find software that does what it's supposed to do well, without trying to pull any sneaky bullshit in the background or annoy me with crap that I don't care about in a miserable attempt to show off its useless features.
I'm not a fan of Medium myself either, but the author's article about how his suite of apps was born really resonated with me. If you care about privacy, open source software, and doing things right, you should really give it a read: https://medium.com/@tibbi/...
I'm particularly a fan of the Gallery, the File Manager, and the Music player apps, and the others don't look half bad either.12 -
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.
5 -
Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.
I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.
Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.
Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"
Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"
NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!
"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"
I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!
(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")12 -
Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).
Root: Reaches out to spec author.
Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.
Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.
Root: Logs off.
Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.
TC: Still no slack response.
Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.
TC: Still no slack response.
Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.
TC: Still no slack response.
Hours later:
TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.
TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)
TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)
———
Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…
I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!
Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.
And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!
And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.
Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)
Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.
Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.15 -
Just last month we finished a big project for a client. The company had their lawyers make a contract to transfer ownership for the website to them.
One of the requirements was to deliver all code in a word file. And just that. In the whole contract was not a word about transfering the production environment to their servers. Or supplying a working version. The files and database. No just the word file.
As of today still wondering what they where planning to do with a word file with hunderds of pages of code.
Offcourse we deliverd a working version to their servers. But why are there people making decisions about things they understand nothing at all.16 -
I'm getting so pissed off by this client, here's the gist
We signed agreement defining the following deliverables:
- news page and news article page
- releases page and release info page
(it's a guy from a record label)
After the signature we (me and my colleagues) went to work and finished all that (+ a little more actually, yea I know never overstep your agreement right but we did) and we got paid (all good)
Now after payment he's asking us to do more (some kind of mail installation thing), so I obviously tell him, as I actually have many times before, that our agreement only stretched as far as those 4 deliverables and we wouldn't work without a new agreement defining a new set of requirements or an hourly rate.
Next he goes and tells me the following
==
We already have an agreement. I'm not paying you on an hourly rate as you are not next to me. Let me know
-- First off no we don't, the agreement only covered the 4 pages
== immediatly after
Also you really need to work on your costumer service. Your attitude is very rude. I don't know how many clients you have but all this distrust attitude is not in your favours. Let me know if you want to proceed?
-- Are you fucking kidding me? I am rude and distrustful? I JUST DO MY FUCKING JOB YOU PRICK
Sorry just need to let off some steam14 -
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!?1 -
We have no more time for all this Agile stuff!
Half of our developers might have been injured when we built the Great Wall of China, but no worries, we've listened to your complaints about feeling overworked!
You can take 3 extra days off this year. Meanwhile, we're starting the next project.
We're building some pyramids.
What? You want Scrum and sprints? Sure, do sprints, whatever helps us build those pyramids!
Requirements? Refinements? What requirements are there to refine?
We require a giant pyramid.
For v1, you can build the foundation out of wet mud. It must be 500 meters. Wide, or high, we're not sure yet, we'll get back to you on that. It must have less than 4 sides, but certainly more than 3.
The Frontend team has already built a part of the entrance using 60 semi trucks filled with papier-mâché, pipe cleaners and glitter.
Now go build already!20 -
Infinite loop...
Got a story assigned with no requirements listed this sprint. Since I finished the rest already I was like, lets be pro-active and see what it's about during the stand-up.
Me: Hi, I only have story X remaining, what's it about, there are no requirements listed in Jira?
SM: Yeah person Y is going to reach out to you with the reqs.
Me: Ok, when is Y going to reach out?
SM: Y doesn't have time now, will probably be in 2 weeks.
Me: Ok, so why is the story included in this sprint then?
SM: Because they want X implemented this sprint.
(Me wondering if the Scrum Master is familiar with infinite loops, thinking let's try this out)
Me: Ok, if X should be completed, can Y reach out to me with the requirements?
SM: Y doesn't have time now, will probably be in 2 weeks.
Me: Ok, why is the story included in this sprint then?
Stand-up lasted a lil' longer today... Hope the SM got the message not to assign stories without reqs or clear communication anymore.5 -
Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.
Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)
Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.
So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.
And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.
Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...
People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.
Summary
PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.
That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.
Enjoy.8 -
Requirements gathering is fun said no developer!!
P.S. Friday implies more time implies more devranting!!
1 -
So devRant shows me a frontpage feed based on my ++/--/follows/etc.
Does this mean there is a niche bubbled hidden corner, some place where some dev is currently looking at his feed thinking: "Wow everyone agrees with me, Windows is much better than Linux, VBscript is amazing, and Git is for tryhards who hate on dropbox for no good reason"
By now, that bubble and mine have drifted so far apart that they will never meet again, and if you see this specific rant, you will not ever see that content again either.
For all you know, the majority of devs love changing requirements and clients who call them in the middle of the night, the consensus is that testing is for noobs, and everyone loves jquery.
You will never know, because you clicked ++ on the wrong rant, right when you signed up, and forever sealed your fate.14 -
Boss: Here's the next project that I would you to start immediately.
Me: So the client wants <Application Name>
Boss: Yes and it's due on Friday after 2 weeks.
Me: Yes can be done. By what time today you can give me the requirements.
Boss: Not today, I will give you the requirements next week Friday.
Me: So I should start the project next week Friday.
Boss: You have to start the project today
Me: Start with what? There is no requirement. Excuse me, I need a break.5 -
Still trying to get good.
The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.
I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.
You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.
Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.
You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".
Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.
Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?
All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.
I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.
I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.
I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.
But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.8 -
Yes, senior developers get stuck just as much as junior developers do, the difference is that they get stuck in places that junior developers can’t even access. That is partially because senior developers are expected to do so much more than just simple coding, they need to also grasp and untangle client requirements, communicate clearly and thoughtfully with the team, be some sort of guiding/mentoring/leading figure, make sweeping architectural decisions, and so on and so forth.
A junior developer is struggling with making relevant columns of a table a nice shade of purple. A senior developer is struggling with making sure that implementing new client requirements will not have a destructive impact on the current infrastructure, there will be no regressions elsewhere in the system, tries to pinpoint what prior assumptions the new stuff breaks (it inevitably does), and how to reconcile everything.4 -
You know the feeling when you deliver exactly what the requirement was and there were no more iterations and changes to those requirements after that??
No..?? Me neither..1 -
A small bug is found.
Chad dev:
😎 *Exists*
> Writes a simple ad hoc solution in a few lines
> Self documenting code with constant run time
> No external dependencies needed
> Fixes the bug, easy to test and does not introduce any new issues
That guy nobody likes (AKA. regex simp coder):
🤡 'This can be "simplified" into oNE LiNe'
> Writes a long regex expression that has to line wrap the editor window several times
> Writes an essay in the comments to explain it's apparent brilliance to the peasant reader
> Exponential run time (bwahahah), excessive memory requirements
> Needs to import additional frameworks, requires more testing that will delay release schedule
> Also fixes bug but the software now needs 2x ram to run and is 3x slower
> Really puts the "simp" in simplified, but not the way you would expect41 -
Current project has a ridiculously high amount of formal requirements
Two of them literally are
• the system shall have an “off” state
• the system shall be in the “off” state if no power is supplied
Boy do I have just the solution for you!
24 -
Computer Science is a mysterious world of three kinds of devs, irrespective of what background/profile/language they had/worked in.
The ones at the top, who keep doing crazy shit in big companies or open-source and keep adding material to the unstoppable code flowing. These constitute 5% of the dev community.
The ones at the bottom are the newbies who try to become masters/ninjas of programming by following the shit on the internet but don't understand logic or how things work. This is like 75% of dev community on the web. If you don't agree to that percentage, you don't know the number of students and non-CS people trying to code. I can see hundreds of classmates/colleagues with no understanding of basic Javascript concepts but introducing themselves as a software developer and ruler of the Web.
The remaining 15% in the middle are the "experienced" fellows who keep building shit to get to the top 5%. They work on enterprise/commercial software until the next upgrade and while the wallets keep getting fatter, they don't actually contribute to the community.
This is the part where I want people to understand the power of a dev.
What sets apart programmers/devs from other engineers:
while everyone else is busy solving the current issues/requirements of the world, we devs are the ones who 'build'.
With a right motive, a developer can solve in-numerous problems of the society, be it education, poverty or unemployment.
An experiment by Lee to put data on the web created a world of unforeseeable opportunities.
Hope to see more of Musks and less of Zuckerbergs in the future.9 -
I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.
I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).
She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).
So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.
Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.
She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).
So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.
Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.9 -
Just finished my internship.
I entered knowing nothing and spent the entire year on solo projects.
My company does not use any frameworks because "they don't want to run code on a server that they didn't write", they use waterfall, only use version control on half the projects, use notepad++, never once even glanced at my code to check I know what I'm doing - even when i asked.
Also have never heard of a code review, have absolutely no QA in place other than the devs making it and quickly testing it visually, no requirements gathering - just pictures and have never heard of tdd.
Recently was given a project with no designs, no specs other than a verbal half thought out explanation and was dumped with random deadlines like "this needs to be demoed tomorrow night" with no idea about the project progression or what it looks like. Apparently it's all my fault that it failed.
I am very grateful to them for teaching me so much and giving me opportunities to teach myself on nice projects but come on.
What boggles my mind is that the company is 6 years old and has big, big clients. I don't understand how. I once tested a project about to go out the next day that had been "tested" and found pages of bugs. They would have lost the contract for sure...8 -
Business User: Hey can we get a sample output you plan to send us?
Me: yes heres a mock
BU: This doesn't look right, can you use real values?
Me (said nicely): WELL IF WHEN YOU WROTE THE FCKIN REQUIREMENTS WEREN'T SO VAGUE AND ACTUALLY PROVIDED REAL VALUES FOR THE INPUTS WE WOULD GET AND WHAT WE SHOULD OUTPUT USING THEM MAYBE I COULD GIVE YOU A BETTER SAMPLE... AND DO LESS GUESSING ABOUT WHAT THE FUCK YOU ACTUALLY WANT...
BU: Oh I forwarded some data
Me: *looks at input data*
(thoughts) THIS FUCKING MAKES NO SENSE!! NOWHERE DOES ANYTHING LOOK LIKE WHAT YOU WANTED.... HOW ABOUT I PULL MAGIC VALUES OUT OF MY ASS?6 -
Old rant about an internship I had years ago. It still annoys me to this day, so I just had to share the story.
Basically I had no job or work experience in the field, which is a common issue in the city I live in - developer jobs are hard to come by with no experience here. The municipality tried to counter this issue by offering us (unemployed people with an interest in the field) a free 9-month course, linked with an internship program, with a "high chance" of a job after the internship period.
To lure companies to agree to this deal, the municipality offered a sum of money to companies who willing to take interns. The only requirement for the company was that they had to offer a full-time position to the interns after the internship, as long as there were no serious issues (ex. skipping work, calling in sick, doing a bad job etc.).
On paper, this deal probably makes sense.
I landed an internship fairly quickly at a well-known company in the city. The first internship period went great, and I got constant positive feedback. I even got to the point where I ran out of tasks since I worked faster than expected - which I was fairly proud of at the time.
The next internship period was a weird mix between school (the course), and being at the company. We would be at the school for the whole week, expect Wednesdays where we could do the internship at the company.
When I met at work on that first Wednesday, the company told me that it made no sense for me to meet up on those days, as I was only watching some tutorial videos during that time, while they were finding bigger tasks for me - which in turn required that they got some designs for a new project. They said that due to the requirements they got from the municipality (which I knew nothing about at the time), they couldn't ask me to work from home - and they said it would "demoralize" the other developers if I just sat there on Wednesdays to watch videos. Instead, they suggested that I called in sick on Wednesdays and just watched the videos at home - which is something I would register to the workplace, so I wouldn't get in trouble with the school. It sounded logical to me, so I did that for like 5-6 Wednesdays in a row. Looking back at this period, there's a lot of red flags - but I was super optimistic and simply didn't notice.
After this period, the final 2 months of the internship period (no school). This time I had proper tasks, and was still being praised endlessly - just like the first period.
On the last day of the internship, I got called to a meeting with my teamlead and CEO. Thinking I was to sign a full-time contract, I happily went to the meeting.. Only to be told that they had found someone with more experience.
I was fairly disappointed, and told them honestly that I would have preferred if they had told me this earlier, since I had been looking forward to this day. They apologized, but said that there was nothing they could do.
When I returned for the last school period (2 weeks), the teacher asked me to join him for a small meeting with some guy from the municipality. Both seemed fairly disappointed / angry, and told me what still makes me furious whenever I think about it.
Basically after my last internship period, the company had called the municipality, telling them that I had called in sick on those Wednesdays, and was "a lazy worker", and they would refuse to hire me because of that.
I of course told them my side of the story, which they wouldn't believe (unemployed person vs. well-known company).
Even when I landed a proper job a few months later, the office had called my old internship for a reference - and they told the same story, which nearly made them decline my application. This honestly makes me feel like it's something personal.
So basically:
Municipality: Had to pay the company as the deal / contract between them was kept.
Company: Got free money and work.
Me: Got nothing except a bad reputation - and some (fairly limited) experience..
Do I regret taking the course? .. No, it was a free course and I learned a lot - and I DID get some experience. But god, I wish I had applied at a different company.
Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.. But f*ck this company :)8 -
At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.
This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.
We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.
So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.
I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.
Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.6 -
I couldn't sleep. I was staring at the blinking cursor. A slow, comforting blinking. Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the JavaScript ecosystem. If I saw something like a new build system, or a new framework, I had to have it.
My client changed the requirements again. I'm in pain.
- "You want to see pain?" my colleague said. Go read Apple support forums. That's pain.
I became addicted. Every time I died and every time I was born again. Resurrected.
During the night, I was crying in the Apple forums for an official answer that would never come. During the day, I was surfing StackOverflow to fix my problems. You get "single-serving" friends there. They help you, you help them, and then you never see them again.
- "Then you install Stack and boom, you're done. It's that easy to go functional."
That's how I met him.
- "You know why they make so many javascript frameworks?"
- "No, why?"
- "So that they can distract you while they put backdoors in them. So that you don't have time to check all of their code".
- "You are by far the most interesting "single-serving" friend I've ever met"
Then, my hard disk died. Of course, I didn't have backups: nobody has enough space for all those node_modules folders. All my addictions, lost.
Then I wrote him. If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I wrote him. We chatted a lot.
- "It's late, I should really go search another hdd on ebay"
- "Ebay? You called me so you could have my old hard disk."
- "No, I..."
- "Come on."
He sent me his old hard disk. It was a 256MB hard disk, but it was fine for running Arch. Then he asked me to rant about my problems in front of him.
- "I want you to rant as hard as you can"
- "Are you serious?"
We ranted all night about our bosses and clients and their fucked up requests. We kept in touch, and after a while more people were ranting with us. Every week, he gave the rules that he and I decided.
- "The first rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant. The second rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant."
I like to think this is how devRant started. This might also be the reason why we never see @trogus, only @dfox. A lot of shit still needs to happen.8 -
What the fuck is wrong with the designers? We have had meetings with the client, a proposal drawn up, a project spec written, budget agreed, witeframes drawn up exactly to spec. Designer involved in all stages for input and ideas. Now the designers have the wireframes, they are supposed to create based on these. No they make up what goes on the pages that bare no resemblance to the wireframes in terms of requirements. I am fucking fuming. I have sent the designs back with a note. Please provide designs based on the wireframes.17
-
Inspired by the comment I posted on another rant.
My uni decided to be one of those progressive tech schools that start people with Python. Mind you, I had prepared myself with studying as much as I could with math and programming by automating things and similar stuff in our computer when I was at my previous job, so I had a better idea as to what i could expect.
Introduction to computer science and programming with Python or some shit like that was the name of the class, and the instructor was a fat short ugly woman with a horrible attitude AND a phd in math, not comp sci and barely any industrial knowledge of the field.
She gave us the "a lot of you will fail" speech, which to me is code for "I suck and have no clue what I am doing"
One assignment involved, as per the requirements the use of switch cases. Now, unless someo knew came about, Python does not have swio cases. Me and a couple of less newbie like students tried to point out that switch cases were non existent and that her switch case example was in Javascript, not python, curly braces and everything. She told us to make it work.
We thought that she meant using a function with a dictionary and we pass the key and shit, a simple way of emulating the switch case.
NOPE she took points and insisted that she meant the example. We continuously pointed out that her example was in JS and that at the time Python did not have switch cases. The nasty woman laughed out and said that she didn't expect anyone to finish the assignment with full points.
Out of 100 points everyone got a 70. No problem. Wrote a detailed letter to the dean. Dean replied and talked to her (copied her in the email because fuck you bitch) and my grade was pulled up to full mark.
Every other class I had with her she did not question me. Which was only another class on some other shit I can't remember.
Teachers are what make or break a degree program. What make or break the experience, going to college is putting too much faith on people. If you ask me, trade certification, rigorous training is the future of computer science, or any field really. Rather than spending 4+ years studying a whoooole lotta shit for someone to focus on one field and never leave it.17 -
So...
I'm looking for my first job as a web developer. I kept seeing these rants about how horrible and frustrating job searching is, all of which I thought were greatly exaggerated. They're all just jokes and memes, right?
Nope.
Every fucking meme seems to be true.
- Junior developer with +4 years of experience, expert in their field - check!
- Listing requirements for 6 different jobs under "Full-stack developer" - check!
- "Expert developer required ASAP" - $10/hour - check!
- 100% remote ... *scrolls all the way down* ... for 2 days of the week - check!
- Entry level font-end position - must be an expert in Vue, Angular, React, AWS, Drupal, Wordpress, PHP, Python, ES9+, OOP, TDD, BDD - check!
- "Cool" description written in js code with no indentation - check!
And I'm not seeing these every once in a while or something like that. No. Most of the posts are like this. I thought I may just be underqualified since I've never had a real job before, but this just seems crazy to me...4 -
First day of a week long vacation and this series of emails comes in (no I didn’t reply to any of these)
Random new QA: “Why does this 5 year old functionality behave this way?”
(10 minutes later)
QA: Okay I saw your out of office message but I really need to know why this behaves this way or else I’m opening a defect because I don’t believe it should behave this way.
Internal me: Heh that’s great kid but you didn’t make the requirements.
(Another 10 minutes pass)
QA: Defect opened, please resolve this before Wednesday.
Oh the joys of enterprise development, I guess if it’s a big enough deal they’ll actually forward it on to the people I put in my away message. I’d love to see that defect holding up the release when I get back on Monday.9 -
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.
There is no technology on Earth that speaks worse of Microsoft than is this crap. Nothing they ever made (not even Comic Sans) is as bad as Sharepoint.
No proper editor. Everything is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. To run it you need a state-of-the-art server. There is no way to make the UI modern, as Sharepoint itself is built upon 1995 era HTML. Tables in tables in tables in tables in tables. And even if you do a web part that's readable, it will be wrapped in shit and presented to the client anyway.
It's so easy to break too. Most of the time I was just watching why the fuck it didn't work. Huge problem with caching as well. Deploying any change requires 10 minutes of manual labor.
I get why companies want to use it. Out of the box it's got quite a few very nice features, and aside from the problems setting it up, and hardware requirements, it works decently well.
But I won't come near it unless I'm paid 100$ per hour or starving to death.10 -
Customer: We don't know what we want, but we want it yesterday.
Sales: No problem.
Me: WTF?
I'm not even mad or stressed anymore. You didn't ask me before, so why should I bend and break, so that you don't have to deal with staving the customer. Most of the time, he changes his requirements or is the bottleneck himself, anyway.2 -
Being asked (or more accurately made!) to travel Mon-Fri (i.e. staying away from home) for at least 2 months to a customer's site to work on a completely insane project that had no design, formal requirements, preparation or support. It was just a "friendly side project" 2 friendly managers concocted.
After some research, the project wasn't actually technically possible, but the customer wanted it so I had to try to find a solution.
The complication for me was that my wife was almost 8 months pregnant with our first kid and I made it clear I really wanted to be at home. Was left to feel I had little choice but to go. Project runs over but damnit I'm taking my 3 weeks parental leave entitlement.
Day before I'm due to go back to work, I get an email saying "You'll be travelling tomorrow for the next few weeks". At that point, I replied with the most angry work email I've ever sent and threatened that if that was the case I wouldn't be back. Plans were changed.
I ended up leaving within a couple of months anyway.2 -
I’m back for a fucking rant.
My previous post I was happy, I’ve had an interview today and I felt the interviewer acted with integrity and made the role seem worthwhile. Fuck it, here’s the link:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/889363
So, since then; the recruiter got in touch: “smashed it son, sending the tech demo your way, if you can get it done this evening that would be amazing”
Obviously I said based on the exact brief I think that’s possible, I’ll take a look and let them know if it isn’t.
Having done loads of these, I know I can usually knock them out and impress in an evening with no trouble.
Here’s where shit gets fucked up; i opened the brief.
I was met with a brief for an MVP using best practice patterns and flexing every muscle with the tech available...
Then I see the requirements, these fucking dicks are after 10 functional requirements averaging an hour a piece.
+TDD so * 1.25,
+DI and dependency inversion principle * 1.1
+CI setup (1h on this platform)
+One ill requirement to use a stored proc in SQL server to return a view (1h)
+UX/UI design consideration using an old tech (1-2h)
+unobtrusive jquery form post validation (2h)
+AES-256 encryption in the db... add 2h for proper testing.
These cunts want me to knock 15-20h of Work into their interview tech demo.
I’ve done a lot of these recently, all of them topped out at 3h max.
The job is middling: average package, old tech, not the most exciting or decent work.
The interviewer alluded to his lead being a bit of a dick; one of those “the code comes first” devs.
Here’s where shit gets realer:
They’ve included mock ups in the tech demo brief’s zip... I looked at them to confirm I wasn’t over estimating the job... I wasn’t.
Then I looked at the other files in the fucking zip.
I found 3 of the images they wanted to use were copyright withheld... there’s no way these guys have the right to distribute these.
Then I look in the font folder, it’s a single ttf, downloaded from fucking DA Font... it was published less than 2mo ago, the license file had been removed: free for Personal, anything else; contact me.
There’s no way these guys have any rights to this font, and I’ve never seen a font redistributed legally without it’s accompanying licence files.
This fucking company is constantly talking about its ethical behaviours.
Given that I know what I’m doing; I know it would have taken less time to find free-for-commercial images and use a google font... this sloppy bullshit is beyond me.
Anyway, I said I’d get back to the recruiter, he wasn’t to know and he’s a good guy. I let him know I’d complete the tech demo over the weekend, he’s looked after me and I don’t want him having trouble with his client...
I’ll substitute the copyright fuckery with images I have a license for because there’s no way I’m pushing copyright stolen material to a public github repo.
I’ll also be substituting the topic and leaving a few js bombs in there to ensure they don’t just steal my shit.
Here’s my hypotheses, anyone with any more would be greatly welcomed...
1: the lead dev is just a stuck up arsehole, with no real care for his work and a relaxed view on stealing other people’s.
2: they are looking for 15-20h free work on an MVP they can modify and take to market
3: they are looking for people to turn down this job so they can support someone’s fucking visa.
In any case, it’s a shit show and I’ll just be seeing this as box checking and interview practice...
Arguments for 1: the head told me about his lead’s problems within 20mn of the interview.
2: he said his biggest problem was getting products out quickly enough.
3: the recruiter told me they’d been “picky”, and they’re making themselves people who can’t be worked for.
I’m going to knock out the demo, keep it private and protect my work well. It’s going to smash their tits off because I’m a fucking great developer... I’ll make sure I get the offer to keep the recruiter looked after.
Then fuck those guys, I’m fucking livid.
After a wonderful interview experience and a nice introduction to the company I’ve been completely put off...
So here’s the update: if you’re interviewing for a shitty middle level dev position, amongst difficult people, on an out of date stack... you need people to want you, don’t fuck them off.
If they want my time to rush out MVPs, they can pay my day rate.
Fuuuuuuuuck... I typed this out whilst listening to the podcast, I’m glad I’m not the only one dealing with shit.
Oh also; I had a lovely discriminatory as fuck application, personality test and disability request email sent to me from a company that seems like it’s still in the 90s. Fuck those guys too, I reported them to the relevant authorities and hope they’re made to look at how morally reprehensible their recruitment process is. The law is you don’t ask if the job can be done by anyone.6 -
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!1 -
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.14 -
My code review nightmare?
All of the reviews that consisted of a group of devs+managers in a conference room and a big screen micro-analyzing every line of code.
"Why did you call the variable that? Wouldn't be be more efficient to use XYZ components? You should switch everything to use ServiceBus."
and/or using the 18+ page coding standard document as a weapon.
PHB:"On page 5, paragraph 9, sub-section A-123, the standards dictate to select all the necessary data from the database. Your query is only selecting 5 fields from the 15 field field table. You might need to access more data in the future and this approach reduces the amount of code change."
Me: "Um, if the data requirements change, wouldn't we have change code anyway?"
PHB: "Application requirements are determined by our users, not you. That's why we have standards."
Me: "Um, that's not what I ..."
PHB: "Next file, oh boy, this one is a mess. On page 9, paragraph 2, sub-section Z-987, the standards dictate to only select the absolute minimum amount of the data from the database. Your query is selecting 3 fields, but the application is only using 2."
Me: "Yes, the application not using the field right now, but the user stated they might need the data for additional review."
PHB: "Did they fill out the proper change request form?"
Me: "No, they ...wait...Aren't the standards on page 9 contradictory to the standards on page 5?"
PHB: "NO! You'll never break your cowboy-coding mindset if you continue to violate standards. You see, standards are our promise to customers to ensure quality. You don't want to break our promises...do you?"7 -
Me: junior dev
Assignment: build a REST search service that also does (thing x)
Me: gosh I just can't figure out how to make (thing x) work! Nothing I try works and there are no online resources!
*goes to meeting with client*
Client: (thing x) is impossible in our application, so we are expecting (much more manageable thing)
Me: awesome! I think I can build that
Manager who can't code: what are you talking about, (thing x) is clearly better and it should be possible to do
Manager: *sends email outlining shifted requirements after the meeting, including (thing x)*3 -
Managers when a developer misses something on a project: “we need to go red fucking alert and schedule several meetings on why this developer inadequacy can never happen again and make sure to record this and make sure the stupid ass devs read all the requirements and use this mistake to offload more of our work onto the dev team”
Managers when they or any other team member misses something on a project: “oh we just made a slight woopsie, just a tiny little miss on our part, a lil fucky wucky, no need to worry”6 -
Please disregard. I just need to vent.
Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.
You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.
You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.
You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.
You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.
Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?
And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.
And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.
Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.
I just want to go back to pure dev.22 -
Everyday I fell my soul being sucked by this job.
We have too much liberty and it's all scattered, every fucking project uses a different framework.
Everything is a mess, no one seems to care and I'm feeling like shit for being the only one that seems to care.
Every time I start job hunting I fell depressed because of this nonsense bullshit they call job requirements.
Just wanna run away from this mess and never look back.13 -
Everyone talks about their hate of js but like python is honestly just as bad.
- shitty package manager,
* need to recreate python environments to keep workflows seperate as oppose to just mapping dependencies like in maven, npm, cargo, go-get
* Can't fix python version number to project I.e specify it in requirements
- dynamic typing that gets fixed with shitty duck typing too many times
- no first class functions
- limited lambda expressions
- def def def
- overly archaic error messages, rarely have I gotten a good error message and didn't have to dive into package code to figure it out
- people still use 2.7 ... Honestly I blame the difficulty of changing versions for this. It's just not trivial to even specify another python version
- inconsistent import system. When in module use . When outside don't.
- SLOW so SLOW
- BLOCKING making things concurrent has only recently got easier, but it still needs lots of work. Like it would be nice to do
runasync some_async_fcn()
Or just running asynchronous functions on the global scope will make it know to go to some default runtime. Or heck. Just let me run it like that...
- private methods aren't really private. They just hide them in intelisense but you can still override them....
I know my username is ironic :P11 -
Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.
The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.
Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!
You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.
I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.
Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.
ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....
If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.
Lol
7 -
While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.
I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.
The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.
Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.
Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.
This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.
What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.9 -
devRant competition - can you convince someone that you're hacking?
Requirements:
Windows (Linux is too easy)
You must use genuine windows command line and the following commands:
color 0a (if this isn't supported in your windows os, you can change it in properties)
cd C:\
tree
The point of this is to see how easily you can convince someone you're hacking/doing something malicious. No prize or anything, I just want to see how ignorant those muggles are.8 -
Me: Are you sure you want this in the acceptance test procedure?
Lead: Yes.
Me: I'm just saying, we don't have any requirements for this feature so it doesn't really belong there.
Lead: Just put it in.
Me: Are you sure? It's a lot of work for something that isn't even required to be there.
Lead: Go do it.
Me: Okay.
*I do the work and it goes to peer review*
High ranking person from another team: I don't see any requirements traceability. Why is this in here if there are no requirements?
Me: WELL AIN'T THAT A GOOD GODDAMN QUESTION!?3 -
I know i know, its an old story.
but.
FUCK YOU AND YOUR STUPID PASSWORD REQUIREMENTS
NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS WONT MAKE IT SAFER
FFS. JUST SAY IT HAS TO BE 20 CHARACTERS AND BE DONE WITH IT
14 -
I was once requested to update a website and the requirements were that it "must be flash based...and use our company's color scheme."
I saw the current site and critiqued the color before knowing that the color was the company's signature and had to be there. The colors were a pukish yellow like someone pissed all over the site and that color was everywhere. I said that site looked like something from 1998 and flash was not the way to go.
They wouldn't hear any of that. No need to mention I didn't take that job. -
Why the fuck are Indian software companies under the impression that interns are just junior developers that you are legally allowed to fuck over with shit/no pay. Internships are supposed to be about learning and growth. Every fucking company I apply for has some bullshit bi polar disorder because their requirements state one thing and they ask you other bullshit on the phone or at the interview.
How the fuck do you expect a college student to know React, Django, AWS, Angular, D3, Scala, iOS and whatever buzzword you assholes noticed were trending on quora?
And for fucks sake don't waste my time to call me and ask if I'd be available full time if I mentioned I can only intern part time.
WTF is wrong with these people.6 -
I'm starting on a new project and the person that is wanting this done recommended we have a "living document of requirements"
Fuck no!15 -
GO AND FUCK YOURSELVES. MANY PEOPLE RANT ABOUT JOB HUBTING AND INSANE REQUIREMENTS. SO HERE IN SPAIN I'M SURE THE SITUATION IS WORSE. NO FUCKING JOBS. WHEN YOU FIND AN OFFER THAT DOESN'T MENTION PHP, JAVA OR COBOL OHH. YOU NEED TO BE A FUCKING WP, FULL STACK, ANDROID AND IOS DEVELOPER, A FUCKING SYSADMIN AND HAVE 99 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE. SO YOU CAN SAY: hey search a junior offer! YEAH SURE ONE SECOND. 4-15 FUCKING YEARS OF FUCKING EXPERIENCE. GO AND FUCK YOURSELVES AAAAH
7 -
Gaming community of mine launched their slick new website with their new "ticket system" where people could put in tickets to get help by volunteers.
2 hours and an approval by one of the admins later I managed to inject forge http request into literally every form on that side. Modify permissions, delete users, edit tickets, put invalid values into every attribute of them... In other words break everything.
Turns out the whole thing was coded as a first time project by a person who has no clue about web development and noone is in charge of anything really. There are no requirements, no beta testing, no version control or backups, but at least they had a hard deadline. 🤣
Still not sure if I wanna fix their shit and do it properly or just enjoy seeing it crash and burn.5 -
Manager: We need to fix this QA backlog. I’m going to share the workload of doing QA.
Dev: Please don—
*Dev email notification getting spammed with approvals*
Dev: …Are you even pulling the code down to test it locally?
Manager: There’s no time for that! We have to get this PR backlog pushed through! I’m just looking at the code to see if it looks good and approving based on that.
*Later that day*
Manager: HEY NONE OF THE FEATURES ON STAGING MEET THE REQUIREMENTS AT ALL. THIS IS A BUGGY MESS, WHAT HAPPENED GUYS??
Dev: …6 -
I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.
During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.
So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.
(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)
John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.
*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.
Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?
And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?
Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?15 -
(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!
I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.
Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing
The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.
Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..
I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)
Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.1 -
Got a ticket today to redo the companies html e-mail signature.
Requirements: Support for Outlook 2007-2016.
Me never done one before, thinking: "Regular Html and a bit of CSS, no biggie, can't be that hard"
Also me: "Okay let's see which CSS features are supported in Outlook 2007"
Quick google search to find out that there is nearly no support for anything and that Outlook uses Word as render engine.
Someone seriously thought using motherfucking Word to render Html & CSS is a good idea? FML
9 -
For the past two years, I worked my balls off to deliver a project that eventually went live months ago.
But boss announced that no bonus is going to be paid because project got delayed.
Its not even my fault that project got delayed because customer cannot confirm requirements and keep changing.
All of my assigned tasks were also met on time, if not earlier.7 -
#newlifenewhope -> update no. 0 / Day 0
it's about the end of Day 0, front office is taking shape. the pantry is cleaned.
can't wait to see how my repurposed bunker will look like.
Order and Shipment progress :
- My Server supposed to be arrive tommorow
- Rubber Ducks Package Delivery is accepted by courier
- 2 weeks before my Office Requirements Arrive
Further Update for my Little Office Installment will be tagged as : #newlifenewhope
Stay Tuned !
2 -
This happened today
My Manager: How is the progress so far on the search module?
Me(After implementing some crazy shit requirements): It's all set. APIs are working well against the mock in-memory database. I need an actual database to run my unit tests. Where do we have it?
My manager: Let's pretend that there is no database at this moment. Go-ahead with rest of your activities.
Me(IN MY MIND): F*CK you a** hole. You don't know the first thing of software development! Which a** hole promoted you as a manager!!!
Me(TO HIS FACE): Ah.. okay!! As you wish!3 -
Recent boot camp grad here with a solid portfolio...holy crap...this industry is so illogical...got a call from a recruiter whose job needs 3 years experience. I demonstrated I know every single one of the requirements, have implemented them, know pros and cons, etc. She says OK I'll run it by my manager and see because we can't fill the spot and it requires 3 years but you meet all the qualifications. I get an email the next day, and she says sorry, we actually need 5 years...fucking face palm...I'll apply again in 5 years because that job will still be open. Really sucks that the only thing holding me back from landing a job is experience, not knowledge. No employer wants to touch me with a 10 foot pole...how long will it take be to find a job...jesus christ.13
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Me and my manager throughout 2020
January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.
February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️
March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...
April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!
May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool
June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing
July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m
August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me
September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work
Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar
October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?4 -
At work the other day...
Guy: "Oh hey I was thinking if you could help me with an application to visualize some data."
Me: "Ooookay...what did you have in mind?"
Guy: "I think we have XML files that could be turned into graphs...oh and we could add some trend lines. (Getting more excited) And maybe we could supplement it with live data...oh hey and maybe we could add real time alerts via email..."
Me: *thinks to self...there is no way in hell I am starting to work on something that he is literally coming up with requirements as he's talking* "I need specifics...so go take some time, think it through and get back to me with concrete details and examples."
Guy: "Ok. That should be enough to get you started for now at least."
That would be a big fuck no, good sir. Haven't started and won't start it. He has never mentioned it to me again since then.4 -
A morbid realization (I am just wasting your time keep scrolling)
Unless someone takes a stand for the user, and their comfort and requirements, unless someone looks a client straight in the eye and says "no, I will not do that, and neither will my team" and denies them their request, nothing will change, good devs will keep losing their spark to save themselves frustration, good people will walk away and the tyranny that we face daily grows... unless someone stands up, someone who cannot be knocked down, or reprimanded and told they're wrong for fighting for what's right.. unless someone stands up for what is right and fair... nothing changes... and nothing ever will... poor programs, bad games and content, lower standards, frustrated users, annoyance that you don't matter as a user or a dev will never go away... unless someone says enough. But no one will, money is the boss, morality a liability, and people an abundant resource. This world is backwards, devs are carrying the blame and no one who is able, cares enough to say "that's enough!".13 -
!rant but help?
I currently have Kali (for labs I'm working on to teach myself the things I didn't learn in school), Ubuntu (downloaded for school), and Fedora (downloaded for my database class)... other than Kali already having Metasploit in it, I don't see a difference between these and I know there are more versions of Linux.
What would be a good starting place for every day use, that'll support Citrix receiver (required for work no idea what its requirements are but I can find out, if i can't use it in Linux, I'll dual boot) and virtual box (or other virtual software, don't mind learning new systems), and that i can also have room to grow for security learning?18 -
Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.
Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.
For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.
I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"
Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"
And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.
the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.
Plus, you learn more when you teach others.16 -
Project management site, exclusively for use by our team and clients.
- The client creates a new project.
- They list the requirements, supplying all the necessary files and content.
- We challenge any stupid stuff by offering alternative solutions.
- We all sign off on the requirements and no more are allowed to be added or modified. If they forgot anything, it's on record who's to blame.
- We estimate time and cost to complete the build.
- If they accept, we finally begin the work
- At each stage of every requirement, we mark the status as pending, in progress, ready for testing and delivered.
Much less stress due to minimising change requests. Plus easier to follow than an email chain and easier for them to use than a jira portal.6 -
Agreed to work on a mobile app project on Android. No contract signed, just was given what the client wanted from this sub-contractor.
No specific details given, had to figure out a lot of the minute details of how they wanted the application to behave. We would deliver a working part of the product before getting a % of the pay. We charged $30 /hr on a mobile app, low as heck.
It was me and another developer, neither of us had any contact with the clients to ask questions, all questions had to go through the sub-contractor. Many arguments and months later we find that what they're asking for only a phone manufacturer can do. Sub-contractor blames us for not doing our "research" when she/he was the only one able to contact the client to get requirements.
Sub-contractor wanted us to refund money. We declined but offered solutions.
Sub-contractor goes to client and manages to get approval of what we were able to do. Finally a light in this dark tunnel spanning 7 months.
On the day of releasing to the client the finished app, we get notification from Google that the app won't be published due to a recent policy change that came into effect in January. WTF.
Go back to sub-contractor, tell the bad news. Once again he/she says it's our fault for not doing the "research". Yeah as if we knew what Google is going to change. Asks for paid money back. We refuse.
We lastly suggested that we remove what Google wants removed on the app and release it that way.
We had billed 300 hours cumulative divided among 3 people (including the sub-contractor who didn't appear to do anything), and just 2 months of development. It's been 7 months and we were only paid for 240 hours, the rest was unpaid, and the sub-contractor still wants to make us give it back. /rant13 -
Been on a conference call with some coworkers and a huge company which is trying to sell us a new tool for our CI environment. Sales guys ask us sensible questions about our requirements and try to find out our needs. No one of my coworkers says a word. Sales guys rephrase their questions but STILL: Crickets on the line from our side and this call gets embarrassing. So I try to explain our SW dev process and explain what we need for our CI and suddenly Mr. Manager sends me a text msg telling me to to "STFU!"....Oh well THANK YOU, I just tried to be polite to these sales guys who were invited by US and took their time to present us their really good tool. I mean cmon...what is F*CKING WRONG with you?5
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Well i was between jobs at the time, looking for something, anything to fill in the black hole being created in my wallet.
I applied online though this company’s website and within 20 minutes was on a phone interview setting up a face to face, this was Monday afternoon.
I went in on the Wednesday morning with the manager, no cv, no resume, no examples of work, we talked, did a couple of brain teaser questions and Friday morning I had the job 😂
I have never put so little effort into getting a job before but it was all a sham, the workload and requirements this job constantly sets out to kill me with are godly.
3 years later I’m still alive ( somehow ), and no blood has been shed.... yet. -
pms always tell the higher ups that I"don't have passion". I don't know how to show passion for their photoshop mock ups, one line requirements with no definition of done, their talking for hours about "leveraging" and name dropping about the top brass they are schmoozing with. I just ask if we are going to show our MVP to real users and she morphs to the bride of chuckie. I say we ought to pair program and she says it cost double to make a feature. Testing and code reviews are taking too much time but they hover over your shoulder while you try to fix a "mission critical bug" that occurs because they wanted us to skip practices that could have prevented the bug. Woo I feel better now!2
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Probably the MOST complete software book on a very broad subject.
This is book to read for those of you are near college grad, first job in the industry. But to the level of detail and broad coverage this book has I think it’s actually a great book for everyone in the industry almost as a “baseline”
From requirements, project planning, workflow paradigms. Software Architecture design, variable naming, refactoring, testing, releasing the book covers everything, not only high level but also in reference to C.
Why C ...because in the consumer electronics, automotive industry, medical electronics and other industries creating physical products c is the language of choice, no changing that. BUT it’s not a C book... it contains C and goes into dept into C but it’s not a C book, C is more like a vehicle for the book, because there are long established, successful industry’s built around it. Plenty of examples.
When I say it’s the most complete on a broad subject seriously like example the chapter about the C language is not a brief over like many other books, for example 10 pages alone are dedicated to just pointer! Many C books have only a few paragraphs on the subject. This goes on depth.
Other topics, recursion, how to write documentation for your code.
Lots of detail and philosophy of the construction of software.
Even if you are a veteran software engineer you could probably learn a thing or two from the book.
It’s not book that you can finish in weekend, unless you can read and comprehend over 1000 pages.
Very few books cover such a broad topic ALL while still going into great detail on those subtopics. the second part is what lacks in most “broad topic books” ..
Code Complete.. is definitely “Complete”
So the image doesn’t match the rest of my book images because I tried to make an amage to cover of the book, inception style kinda haha 😂
19 -
"not sure if we can meet those salary requirements, but I'll get back to you"
JK they just send me the code challenge, no idea of what salary to expect. scratch that one off the list.
meanwhile in another prospect i have had not just multiple interviews, but then add on two additional 'prep' and 'post' interviews for each of the ORIGINAL interviews i have to do with the recruiting company REEEEEEEEEEEEE
honestly it's not a good reflection of what is really valued at these companies - paper pushing over getting to work... ok
WEVE ALREADY TALKED FOR HOURS JUST MAKE A DESICION: GIVE ME AND OFFER, OR DON'T AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA2 -
Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.
For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.
Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.
Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.
Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.
What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?1 -
I no longer give a single flying fuck about whether this company I work for lives or dies, whether it succeeds or fails. My compensation has been piss poor compared to the level of dedication I have put in and the level of stress I've endured. Up until now, I was thinking like "well, it's a growing startup, maybe if it succeeds it can have some doors open for me". But fuck it.
I keep hearing about software developers doing pretty well for themselves, but I can barely pay my fucking bills with this shit company in this shit country.
I should've started doing this sooner, and I'm a stupid-ass motherfucker for not having been doing it, but I'll be looking for jobs with actual respectable pay now. I'm not bound by a notice time in my contract, so maybe I'll be telling whatever other companies that I can start with them immediately if they need me to.
Seriously fuck this company and its low-ass compensation. If I'm going to be paid this low, I might as well take a less stressful job with less skill requirements.
I will be jumping ship and I won't be caring one bit if it fucking sinks.5 -
With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.
YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻4 -
It's rant time!
So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).
I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.
One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.
Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.
6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.
Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.
I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.
Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.1 -
So, 9months ago my scrum master came to me and asked me to spearhead a "little" API... 2months work, no worries... I started the analysis and quickly discovered that that estimation was grossly understimated...
I convinced them that it was not 3 months but 4. I alerted to the design mistakes that were made, I pushed changes and made sure the entire project worked, was stable and the best it could be... 4 months passed, target proposition donne... Several change requests since then and we have been implementing braindead CR after CR for 5 months... Most CRs came from design issued I raised but we're ignored at the time just to come back and bite them on the ass...
Horrible design, bad documentation, amateur requirements analysis... However, delivered successfully with great acceptance...
What was my reward? They rearranged my team, removing virtually every good performer.
Never did I receive a "good work" or a "thank you"... I don't want one, I am just doing my job... However can you please not fuck me in the ass!? I now have 2 projects to spearhead at the same time and virtually no team... I can only handle so much!!!
Some good news? Ok, just announced I'm the project owner of a new project, that we will take advantage and make a 2 in one.... Great! Some more work for my lap! Thank you for the workload raise!... Ok, timewise? One month! And I still don't if that includes implementation....
TL DR; did my job, got fucked with more work...
Sorry for the vent, just wandering if I should try and not do my job...2 -
Okay, I'm interning at a government institution & boy let me just tell you... mmmh... A FUCKING MESS!
So I'm tasked with developing a HR system that the whole company should eventually use. I tell them I'm not familiar with the open source technologies they'd like me to use, they tell me no worries, you can develop a prototype with a tech stack that you're familiar with. Also, they tell me that they don't quite have the requirements from HR so what I can do for my prototype is just develop something "general" that works according to their "idea".
Being the good intern I am, I develop quite a good functioning prototype & present it to the team who then present it to the managers.
Finally we're all called in for a final meeting with the managers & HR, and guess what? The requirements for the system are different. Almost 90% of the features we built into the prototype need to change. Also, the system must use open source technologies. The managers promise to send a detailed requirements specification document, with sample data. I think this is a great idea as there's still a lot I don't understand. I expected this to happen, so I soon start to redesign afresh, this time trying as hard as possible to consider open source technologies within my plans.
But noooo... My team wants me to "finish" the system!
"Finish" what system, I ask? That was a prototype!
"Just tweak the functionality you built to meet the new requirements".
WTF!
We don't even have the actual requirements specification document, so I'll still be coding blindly. Also, the whole system needs to be re-built using open source technology!
Instead of pushing me to develop a system blindly, with no requirements, how about you push HR to tell you exactly what they need and how it should work first!?
I'm honestly exhausted with the false sense of urgency from my team!!8 -
TL;DR
Front-end dev trying to dictate back-end tech.
We are gonna start split stack (front / back ) development with the following projects and this stupid fucker who knows jackshit about backend , servers, etc... , is more versed in front end stuff and said herself that she knows nothing about databases told me this:
"No way we are gonna use Java."
I politely said:
"We are gonna analyze the projects requirements and see what technologies best fit the scenario"
Me inside my head:
"SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU STUPID CUNT, GET YOUR FUCKING JAVASCRIPT AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS!! IF WE DECIDE TO JAVA THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING THATS HOW ITS GONNA BE!"4 -
Fucking hate when business people says this to me:
- You have no time to do this, we will find somebody else to do it. (EXCUSE ME? how do you know I have no time? If have no time I WILL TELL YOU)
- Your team is too busy, we will outsource that (IF THAT it's a priority, we WILL DO THAT, fuck you, I'll tell you if we need to outsource or not)
- Requirements are too complex to do now. We will think about it and we will tell you, maybe it's just enough to add a column to db (WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK IS too complex? I didn't even see anything we can call requirement, nor speak with relevant people, so how do you fucking know they are complex if you don't know shit about dev and our platform)
Conclusion
It's true, I have no time, because I don't fucking understand what do you want, so I'm running all day and night doing useless things.2 -
"Let the developers consider a conceptual design,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day._
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Tests first—design afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of writing the tests first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple. “How much code have you written recently, anyway?” she sneered.
“I won’t,” said the plucky little Alice. “Tests shouldn’t drive design, design should drive testing. Tests should verify that your code works as it was designed, and that it meets the customer’s requirements, too,” she added, surprised by her own insight. “And when you drive your tests from a conceptual design, you can test smarter instead of harder.”4 -
tl;dr - why you no read this?
Here I am pondering why I continue to return to my job everyday when we are currently at month 13 of a 4 month project... yea let that set in for a minute... which is still at least 3-4 months away from being deployed due to annual leave of key stake holders and the whole Christmas period creeping up and things just not going as planned every step of the way.
There's no greater demotivater - is that even how you spell it - then being stuck in a project for so long you really just don't give a shit if it works or not anymore.
This has gone from a simple - relatively speaking - project to some monolithic mayhem of requirement changes and process adjustments, that have not only delayed our team, but 3rd party vendors needing to change things as well, or the requirements being wrong early so when you get up to business testing it's like "nope, that's not what we wanted" .... despite all the sessions of you personally giving the PM all the damn requirements.
But in saying that, they (3rd party) aren't innocent either, we have found nothing but issue after issue with their product since we started this project that who ever signed off on going forward with the thing should have been shot from both sides - it's not designed for the scale we will be using it yet we didn't find that out till we got so far into the rabbit hole we had a chance to be able to do load testing.
Meh, guess I'll go to work Monday and spend another week in misery trying to deliver something that just doesn't want to know what the finish line is.4 -
Another shithole agency reached out to me out of the blue 4 weeks after my application.
The senior bro sends me an assignment with 30 requirements to build an app with multiple screens. Ofcourse no design provided and no API provided. Timeline 2 weeks.
Tried ask to expedite the process and reason with him because now Im in other processes where Im expecting an offer next week so I can send him a link to a very similar project I did, he can review and if he wants to I can jump on a technical call and I can answer all questions. Guy ignored the proposal entirely and wants to stick with his stupid timelines and stupid requirements which he wrote probably down while taking a shit with zero research.
Best part is there was no introduction, no discussions about hourly rate or expectations, nothing.
Disorganized shithole. Told them to get their shit together and withdrew my application.3 -
I hate hearing "this should be a quick one" from the client. Especially when your code base is a fucking legacy with no documentations, no testing, and a multisite that shares the same classes where functions has some crazy if conditions just to satisfy each site's requirements.2
-
Me: Ahh great I almost finished the university project. One week until deadline. No Problem.
Professor: Oh Please implement this, this and this feature too. Its a little bit tricky but possible.
Can't this guy hand out all the requirements at the start of the semester ???
4 -
THICK-HEADED FUCKNUTS!
I have absolutely no idea as to why these would ever be password requirements, can someone please try to explain WHY THE FUCK
4 -
I saw a job I could apply, I matched all the requirements, 100%. Not only the bases requirements, but I also had almost all the extras, and the company was in my country and spoke my language, it's good for me since my English isn't perfect.
I didn't apply because I'll graduate soon and I want to focus on my degree.
I bet that when I graduate all my current knowledge will be obsolete and I'll no find any job - not even if I beg for it - until I starve. Do you want to bet a beer? I'm ready10 -
Oh boy, this is gonna be good:
TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck
So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:
The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.
So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!
This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.
I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.
Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!
Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...
The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.
But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.
So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)
So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"
So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones6 -
So, I just created an account on a premium objective information website. It basically sells access to several articles on laws and general "financial relevant subjects". It is important for my work and they have pretty strict password requirements, with minimum: 18 characters length, 2 HC, 2 LC, 2 special, 2 numbers.
Without thinking twice, openned Keepass and generated a 64 length password, used it, saved it. All's good. They then unlocked my access and... wrong password. I try again... wrong password.
Thinking to myself: "No, it can't be that, maybe I only copied a portion of the password or something, let me check on CopyQ to see what password I actually used."
Nope, the password is indeed correct.
Copy the first 32 characters of the password, try it... it works...
yeah, they limit password length to 32 characters and do not mention it anywhere ... and allow you to use whatever length you want... "Just truncate it, its fine"1 -
"SO culture is so mean, they downvote good questions for no reason!"
Meanwhile, most of the downvoted questions in my list:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
Translation:
- OP1: "Do my homework for me"
- OP2: "I am too lazy to google this"
- OP3: "Gimme code, here is a shitload of requirements"
- SO: "No."
- OP1/2/3/DevRant: "Oh mah gawd mah question was so gud, SO such toxic, very mean, much wow qq."
Kk.11 -
TL;DR;
I was asked to give estimation on an app, that:
1. No one has a clue what it does, even though there is v1 on the store with almost 10% of functionality working
2. No one has a clue what should be in the new rewritten version
3. We are already behind schedule and I have no clue why, I've just been told that
4. They need UI flow that shows how the app will work with static data and when API's are ready (because ya know, writing code is easier than creating wireframes and modifying them accordingly) I will then need to link app with API as if it is as simple as drinking a cup of water, especially that: 1. What is water? 2. Do I have a cup or is it given, and 3. Relax bro, drinking water is like eating a burger, piece of cake!
I'm not sure what to do, not enough that it's React Native but also spaghetti requirements that no one was able to answer my simple question: What is the app responsible of?
P.S.: Some say I must rewrite the old app ONLY, no new features, others say: Turn the new web portal into mobile app, I say: WTF is going one?6 -
Aaarrrrghhhh! I am frustrated.
My manager keeps cancelling our 1:1, which I look forward to as a potential platform for
- Me to build a rapport
- Discuss key decisions
- Slowly gain her trust that I can lead the entire product
And whenever we connect once in a blue moon, she started inviting two other team members in. Who the hell does that!!!
My colleague, she is nice and hard-working. But she fucking talks a lot. A FUCKING LOT.
1:1 and such key connects are not meant for status updates and this colleagues goes into every minor detail and explains the shit for 15 minutes each. Non-stop. No one really cares or bothers for that level of statuses.
Today she spoke for 30 minutes without a breather break. Everyone went numb.
But whatever, fuck it. I am getting things done by her so let her talk. I'll get my way through manager and skip level guy.
On the other side, they recruited a half witted potato for training. That was completely unnecessary. I am not putting in my time and efforts on someone who isn't willing to learn and contribute.
I spent more than a week explaining her basics of how to write a god damn user story and detailed functional requirements.
And even after 5 rounds of feedback (45 minutes each) the potato is stuck on colour of the button and alignment.
GOD DAMN FUCK! SOMEONE KILL ALL THE MORONS WHO CANNOT UNDERSTAND BASICS AFTER SO MUCH EXPLANATION.
I was really an impatient guy in past but over the years, I developed to be more calm and forgiving. Yet some people manage to get on my every nerve.
How the fuck am I supposed to grow when I am being dragged down instead being with smart colleagues where we can just accelerate to success!!!!1 -
Long time no rant from me. Sorry guys, has been a tough time for me.
Little background: I'm an apprentice and as such definitely not a fully trained professional. I'm working in a big company with people who have very let's say interesting ideas what I should be able to do.
This whole disaster begins shortly after I started my apprenticeship. I was offered to choose my first little project. "Something from the backlog, not very challenging and a nice beginner one. It's just about a PoC" ok, le me thinks. I choose to make a weather display.
Basic functionality was provided within the next 3 weeks. My direct boss (let's call him Jo) liked it and talked to his boss (Hugo) about it. Hugo was so excited he called our product manager to get my plugin into our software asap and began to think about where else we could use this.
This is where shit went downhill. Hugo told me it was my task to implement it on a totally different platform and to "host it in azure". I don't know much about azure and I never used it. I told him that I'd need time and some kind of sandbox to try and learn how things work. He promised but nothing ever came through. Not even Jo could do something about this.
They told me I should write this asap because "every customer would LOOOOVE this" and I honestly can't think of a way to meet all their requirements without access to our azure system/ sandbox. (There are a lot of requirements)
Am I wrong? Should I be able to do this? I'm a fucking trainee. I don't know everything.7 -
Ahh boy, uni sure is fun...
I missed my comp-sci class last week when we got a project assigned. No big deal, right? We have an online student portal where teachers can post assignments for everyone to see. I'm sure it's in there.
It's not.
Okay. How about the syllabus? Professors are supposed to create a weekly schedule for students to follow, it's probably in there, right?
Nope. Nothing.
Alright... I guess I'll email him. At this point about two classes have passed and I haven't heard anything in class, so I fire off a quick email to the professor asking for the details to be posted to the web portal so I at least have some idea of what I'm doing.
Surprise surprise, I get a response in about an hour.
"I'm not posting anything online. You should have been in class. Talk to a classmate."
*sigh*
So, from what I can gather from my classmates, we have to design a game using python. It might be a quiz, maybe. We have a week.
Are you fucking kidding me? Is it really that hard to take 20 minutes to type up a few requirements so your students at least know what you're grading for? I barely have any idea of what you even want, and from the three people I talked to it wasn't very clear even when he explained it in class. Post your assignments online, asshole!7 -
There is nothing more fulfilling than working you ass off 2 days, learning a new technology, and getting it to finally work as per the requirements and then ...
getting told that the absolute cunt of a client forgot the release date, announced its release 2 days early and decided to casually ask why there is no app on the released URL (it's a tiny Agonizing Reality [AR] app meant as a gimmick on the invitation cards for an upcoming convention).
My boss told me, the thing I worked on is now being scrapped and will not be released.
Yes, I wish the clients could slowly die in agony by a tree growing out of their appendix. Nature shall reclaim their corpses and feed a happy pig which I would happily have a feast of. 🤗3 -
"We need this project done by friday"
When:
Requirements changing on a daily basis.
No standards whatsoever, anywhere.
5 different people commiting changes with no code review.
Original team leader quit a month ago.
Current team leader doesn't know our own deadlines.
QA looking at layout through a microscope at every single possible resolution. (please move this 2 pixels to the left between 934px and 936px range)
QA being too vague some times (this looks weird some times)
Same thing being changed back and forth because no-one could agree on how exactly should it look.
PM implying at every chance that I did nothing and what little I did broke everything all the time.5 -
Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."
DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.2 -
you know what i !love?
-project managers that can't manage something as simple as pivotal tracker
-project managers that schedule repeated stakeholder demo sessions when none of my stakeholers show up (ever)
-project managers that hold repeated grooming sessions that no one gives a fuck about because they can't manage what the fuck is going on the current iteration and therfore cannot forecast a proper next iteration
-project managers that complain about what doesn't get done in a current iteration because they don't don't pay attention to high priority stories that are added by developers in the current iteration even though they have (OWN) pivotal tracker
-project managers who have no clue about the business but want to turn grooming sessions into some sort of requirements gathering meeting only so they can appear halfway competent in the stupid little pivotal tracker notes
-cats that can't decide whether they want to go outside or stay inside
i'll take cats. at least their cuddly. sometimes. fuckers.2 -
4 day work week, 8hours/day, great (and free) café, well defined requirements and a comfortable timeline. 30 no-questions-asked paid holidays a year. Pays more than $100k.4
-
Management: Our internal app must be 100% rigid so that we users follow predefined process flows exactly so no mistakes are made while also being 100% flexible so that users are free to go about their business in whatever way they feel is appropriate for their own unique needs. These are the requirements!
Dev: …7 -
In "Sprint Planning", the team is supposed to come up with stories, break those down into tasks, estimate those tasks as a team, then let devs choose what tasks they want to work on based on the stories pulled into that particular sprint.
Instead, our manager creates the stories. He assigns the stories to each developer and then has that developer announce his theoretical tasks (without any research on feature's or project's requirements!) in front of the entire team. So, when I say, "I think it will take me 6 hours to implement this feature", he says, "6 hours? I think it will take 3." and then types the estimate as 3. I have so much rage when that happens. Then we continue to sit in the room for 2.5 hours where we go through this long data entry mess of him typing out tasks and second guessing estimates. There is no team deliberation or collaboration, its whatever the manager says.
While there are many issues I take with this approach, my pet peeve would be the second guessing of the estimates. It would make sense for teams members to second guess estimates as long as they are the same teammates who have the ability and possibility to take on the tasks themselves.
But I disagree with a manager seconding guessing an implementation feature that "I" definitely have to do alone, and they do not possess the immediate knowledge to implement it themselves.5 -
Me: I would like to receive external training for RHCSA course and certification
Company: Sure! we will open a ticket for you and keep you posted
Me: it's been almost 3 months, could you give me any updates?
Company: Oh actually you are not eligible! this certification is not aligned with your job description!
Me: But...I use linux every single day and it's one of the main requirements to be able to do my job?
Company: Yeah whatever no need to get certified still..!
Me: Why didn't you tell me that 3 months ago?
Company: Well the process was changed and we decided this certification does not match your profile
Me: What matches my profile then?
Company: certificates in Azure and GCP
Me: But I don't ever use those platforms?
Company: ......
Me: ......2 -
!rant
I studied BS Computer Science and one of our requirements is our thesis. All of the groups in our section proposed Web Based apps and got rejected because web based apps are too common. So we have no choice so all of us proposed mobile apps. Mobile Development is not in our curriculum so we have to teach ourselves during the development of our thesis.
All of the groups' dev collaborated and taught each other except one group, my group. Since I am a lazy motherfucker, I didn't taught myself how to develop a mobile app (android). So I made a web based app with responsive design, purchased my own domain, used android studio's webview and voila, a mobile app with a web based admin.
P.S. We got the best thesis award.3 -
My current job. Fire half the dev staff, leave junior as only web dev with no plans to rehire. Then immediately starts a larger project that we don't have a contract for yet with half baked and fuzzy requirements, due by March. The reason for firing most of the staff? Running out of money and can't promise our jobs 3 months out.7
-
So, you are telling me that I should motivate myself? For working in a dead end job with no scope of promotion, no imminent raise, ever changing job requirements, layoffs, empty cubicles, zero SDLC process in place, no oversight from upper management, it is somehow my fault for me being late to work everyday?
One of these days, I'm going to fling my resignation paper at your face and drop the mic!
Man, Fuck you son!3 -
Late post because drinking:
I’m going back to work, got a verbal offer this afternoon after being laid off two weeks ago, thanks mainly to a referral from a former direct report that I once went to bat for. Gave myself a nice 3 weeks of chill time before start date.
But the funny thing was a company who gave me a take home assignment that I breezed through in half an hour, only to say “we’re going with other candidates” after the follow up interview calling me a few hours after I accepted said verbal offer elsewhere.
They wanted me to redo the take home assignment but with different acceptance criteria and requirements than the first time.
Fucking lol.
I told them, verbatim “I think I’ve done enough to satisfy any questions about my skills from the prior assessment. If you have more questions about design and implementation choices I’m happy to schedule a call.”
Hiring manager said he’d reach out next week.
Because even if the verbal offer gets redacted, I’ve got three other final rounds coming up and this particular place just sounded way too fucking chaotic and disorganized for my tastes. If everything else flames out and I’m left with no other options for work, I’ll consider giving them some more time out of my day, but as is, redoing a coding assessment with different criteria because you can’t decide wtf you want from a job candidate?
Not gonna lie: this is not a good look for you. -
I guess it has to do with the kind of background that I have. But I always get contacted by government contractors for development jobs. On one side I think: oh nice, stable income and benefits plus the addition of this kind of work to my resume.
On the other I cannot help but yawn at how incredibly boring these jobs sound. For those that might recall some of my comments from certain posts: i am a job mercenary.
I will code in anything that pays me well and i won't give two shits about the stack.
But man, some of these fuckers can really put me to sleep while reading their specifications or projects requirements and I cannot help but feel completely and utterly BORED.
In short: si pero no.5 -
You know what? I'm done with this bullshit of "do it and we review latter" when I ask clarification on requirements.
No you fucking stupid piece of shit, I'm a mother fucking professional developer, treat me with fucking respect!
I can't spend weeks trying to figure out wtf is your specific domain specifications if you ain't answer my questions with clarity I'm gonna keep asking them in slightly different ways as if you where a search engine and I'm trying to search wtf is in your mind.
Only then I'm gonna start planning/coding your shit.
I have better things to do.
Your lack of planning isn't my priority.3 -
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....ok5 -
Have you ever flown a plane? No? Well I need you to get in the lab today and test out these high level requirements, you should pick up on it pretty fast....
The lab looks like NASA flight control and has everything a cockpit has, sure I can just jump right on it and do my thing.
This should be fun 😅2 -
Job Application Rant #1
So, today I found a great job posting on Linkedin. I was excited and created a unique cover letter and my resume and applied. The job was in another country and I need EU work visa for the job.
The contact for the post was also founder of the company. I asked him, via Linkedin, that if they would sponsor the visa for me if everything went good.
He replied to me that " yes we do sponsor visas, but you have only 3 years of programming experience..."(three dots included). I was like wtf, did I miss important part of post about experience minimum limit or something. I would not like to be spam-applier, guy who applies without reading requirements etc.
I checked requirements again there is no minimum experience limit. Anyways, I thanked him for swift response but damn bruh, do not put unlockable requirements to job posts, so someone's dream would not be crushed.3 -
This is long rant/story:
My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.
Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.
Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.
So, the conversation goes on as follows:
"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"
"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"
"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"
"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"
"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"
"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.
…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager
"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."
Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.
**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.1 -
Follow up on my previous post "I have no words". I didn't include all their requirements.
Here you go. (The top part that's cut out says Technical requirements. Those of you who didn't see my previous post, they're asking 15-20 CAD per hour in the most expensive city in the country. Also, on top of this requirement list and the other post, theres another section I couldn't fit where they're also asking 5 years of Photoshop.)
8 -
No wonder why Google Chrome takes up alot of RAM when running, I've just seen chromiums dev requirements:
System requirements
- A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.
- At least 100GB of free disk space on an NTFS-formatted hard drive. FAT32 will not work, as some of the Git packfiles are larger than 4GB.
- An appropriate version of Visual Studio, as described below.
Windows 7 or newer.9 -
It's like a stab into your fucken heart when your coding competition entry gets rated "you did everything perfect! :) But it's not enough for the top 3. :(" with multiple minus points across different requirements bUT NO GOSH DARN EXPLANATION WHAT I DID WRONG. I PARTICIPATED TO TEST MYSELF AND LEARN SOMETHING, NOT GET PUNCHED IN THE FUCKEN FACE FOR NO REASON FFS MAN.
-
I have a question for all you Linux pros:
My son's PC runs on Linux Mint. We wants to switch to the Pantheon desktop so we installed it (I think). I can't work out how to actually switch to it, though.
We don't have an option when we log out.
On a related note, we switched to Linux from Ubuntu because his old machine couldn't handle Ubuntu's resource requirements. I'm curious whether vanilla Debian would perform better?
(No, I probably won't switch to Arch, that's a little too much for my limited Linux capabilities).9 -
My first project, ever, was a very unproud thing that was developed...
A little detail - I was 12 back then.
So, a distant family member had a business of selling things that they brought to the country. They, of course, needed a website and my parents knew that I had some skills in development so suggested them my services.
Discussion started and well, what came out was this:
1. They need a site with items list.
2. It had no actual design plans, no actual requirements, just a list.
3. Oh. It had to work perfectly on IE4 or IE5 (can't remember).
So what was actually done, was a site full of divs, clearfixes and so buggy that opening in any other browser than IE - resulted in a total failure.
We have sat down and I, with all the respect told them that my skills are not sufficient to make all of the browsers work equally (I've been on HTML/CSS for more than 6 months back then. And all of it was after school). They calmed me down and said that it's ok, they can give me as much time as I need to figure things out. Yet, my English wasn't good back then so I couldn't... (I was 12, with 3 years of basic English as a non-native speaker).
We sat around the table, discussed what could be done and if I could investigate that and re-do when I'm fully ready. I agreed. The site was launched for IE only as it worked fine and others were just throwing an error to visit it with IE.
They were happy, people were using it and they didn't say that anything was bad. Of course, management was thru FTP and editing LIVE files because, well, no php, no control panels, nothing... I felt ashamed that the site wasn't what they wanted but they were ultra happy with it - first customers rolled in from there. They paid me around 60EUR at that time (it was ~12 years ago) and I've spent a month there. (minimum monthly wage here was around 90-120EUR at that time...
So, all in all, this project that I still think I failed - pushed me to the world of devs and... I've never regretted it. Of course, when I actually met with them after years - they have dropped the site as it was not needed anymore but they said that it was exactly what they needed and there was nothing wrong, even if it didn't work perfectly.2 -
Worst architecture I've seen?
The worst (working here) follow the academic pattern of trying to be perfect when the only measure of 'perfect' should be the user saying "Thank you" or one that no one knows about (the 'it just works' architectural pattern).
A senior developer with a masters degree in software engineering developed a class/object architecture for representing an Invoice in our system. Took almost 3 months to come up with ..
- Contained over 50 interfaces (IInvoice, IOrder, IProduct, etc. mostly just data bags)
- Abstract classes that implemented the interfaces
- Concrete classes that injected behavior via the abstract classes (constructors, Copy methods, converter functions, etc)
- Various data access (SQL server/WCF services) factories
During code reviews I kept saying this design was too complex and too brittle for the changes everyone knew were coming. The web team that would ultimately be using the framework had, at best, vague requirements. Because he had a masters degree, he knew best.
He was proud of nearly perfect academic design (almost 100% test code coverage, very nice class diagrams, lines and boxes, auto-generated documentation, etc), until the DBAs changed table relationships (1:1 turned into 1:M and M:M), field names, etc, and users changed business requirements (ex. concept of an invoice fee changed the total amount due calculation, which broke nearly everything).
That change caused a ripple affect that resulted in a major delay in the web site feature release.
By the time the developer fixed all the issues, the web team wrote their framework and hit the database directly (Dapper+simple DTOs) and his library was never used.1 -
FUUUUUCCCKKKK!!! I WASTED 2 WEEKS ON A PROJECT BECAUSE I COULDN'T GET THE RIGHT SPECS UNTIL THIS MORNING.......
I SPENT THE LAST 2 WEEKS BUILDING AND TRYING TO GET THINGS TO WORK THAT I DON'T NEED....2 -
OK semi rant... Would like suggestions
Boss wants me to figure out someway to find the maximum load/users our servers/API/database can handle before it freezes or crashes **under normal usage**.
HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT WITH 1 PC? The question seems to me to mean how big a DDoS can it handle?
I'm not sure if this is vague requirements, don't know what they're talking about, or they think I can shit gold... for nothing... or I'm missing something (I'm thinking how many concurrent requests and a single Neville melee even with 4 CPUs)
"Oh just doing up some cloud servers"
Uh well I'm a developer, I've never used Chef or Puppet and or cloud sucks, it's like a web GUI, not only do I have to create the instances manually and would have to upload the testing programs to each manually... And set up the envs needed to run it.
Docker you say? There's no Docker here... Prebuilt VM images? Not supported.
And it's due in 2 weeks...12 -
We rewrote the whole thing, except for iFraming some old pages in. We had to, the system was fucking awful and couldn't cope with any of the new mission critical requirements.
Client didn't understand the scope. Our project leader somehow snuck it in and we worked on it for months. We were sure we'd be kicked off the whole project... Somehow things didn't crash and burn. How it didn't blow up defies rational thought and the laws of physics. The new system worked, the client was happy, and boss made a lot of money.
Lead dev worked weekends for what feels like an eternity, it really was his baby and no one else on our company could have done it. It's where I finally learned how to do things the proper way; DDD, unit testing and TDD, architecture, building strong components in front-end, you name it. Before that I had a great nose for code smells and how not to do stuff, but now I got to see a proper system for the first time. It was glorious.
Then lead dev left and the system degraded quite a bit because new team didn't keep to the architectural patterns or general best practices. But we had a good run.1 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part II)
The next mentor was my first boss at my previous job:
2.- Manager EA
So, I got new in the job, I had a previous experience in other company, but it was no good. I learned a lot about code, but almost nothing about the industry (project management, how to handle requirements, etc.) So in this new job all I knew was the code and the structure of the enterprise system they were using (which is why the hired me).
EA was BRILLIANT. This guy was the Manager at the IT department (Software Development, Technology and IT Support) and he was all over everything, not missing a beat on what was going on and the best part? He was not annoying, he knew how to handle teams, times, estimations, resources.
Did the team mess something up? He was the first in line taking the bullets.
Was the team being sieged by users? He was there attending them to avoid us being disturbed.
Did the team accomplished something good? He was behind, taking no credit and letting us be the stars.
If leadership was a sport this guy was Michael Jordan + Ronaldo Nazario, all in one.
He knew all the technical details of our systems, and our platforms (Server Architectures both software and hardware, network topology, languages being used, etc, etc). So I was SHOCKED when I learned he had no formation in IT or Computer Science. He was an economist, and walked his way up in the company, department from department until he got the job as IT Manager.
From that I learned that if you wanna do things right, all you need is the will of improving yourself and enough effort.
One of the first lessons he taught me: "Do your work in a way that you can go on holidays without anyone having to call you on the phone."
And for me those are words to live by. Up to that point I thought that if people needed to call me or needed me, I was important, and that lessons made me see I was completely wrong.
He also thought me this, which became my mantra ever since:
LEARN, TEACH AND DELEGATE.
Thank you master EA for your knowledge.
PART I: https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...1 -
Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.
What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).
Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.
So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.
The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).
One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).
The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.
Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.
Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ? -
It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.
Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.
This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.
It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".
The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?
Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml5 -
Do not trust Unity Collab.
Been using unity collab as a VCS for months on a project, regularly saving the files, working well.
Today i decided to refactor some code but lost track of some things, so i reverted to a version i checked in 2h before.
Unity replaced my files with the stable build back then, except... half of the files were missing. of course no undo functionality.
months of work were simply not saved in collab. no version had these files, i did modify them regularly and they never caused collab issues.
how can a company not make the vcs they add for their main product work to its minimal requirements?!
Im not sure how i could motivate myself to fix this mess. fuck this trash company, cant have a single project without major issues.2 -
Today during a follow-up meeting of the grand project I'm workng on...
TL: ... and I want to start working on the production environment and have it ready by next month.
Me: (interrupts) hold up! We are not ready, we have a huge backlog of technical tasks that need to be addressed and we are still not in possession of the very crucial business and functional requirements that you are supposed to provide. The acceptation environment is just set up on infra perspective but does not have anything running yet! The API we depend on is still not ready because you keep adding change tasks to it. We have a mountain of work to do to even get to a first release to integration yet and there is still the estimations on data loads and systems... your dream will not be possible until at least Q2 of 2024.
TL: stop being so negative @neatnerdprime and try to be more customer friendly. I want it by the end of the next month.
Me: remember what I said to you about moving prematurely. Remember I don't take any responsibility if things break because you rush the project. Please, reconsider!
TL: I just want it, please do it
FUCK YOU YOU SORRY EXCUSE OF A PEOPLE PERSON KNOWING JACK SHIT AND JUST LICKING THE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT ASSHOLE TO RECEIVE ATTABOY PETS ON YOUR UGLY ASS BALD HEAD AND CROOKED TEETH. YOU SHOULD FUCKING DIE IN A FURNACE AND LEAVE NO TRACE BEHIND.4 -
Monday
pm: anon we need this by Friday I will get send you the requirements.
Tuesday
Pm no show.
Wednesday afternoon
Pm: here are the requirements anon(literally only one sentence) wtf
Thrusday
Pm: can I test it anon.1 -
Don't you just love it when you get a project with no requirements doc, so you make your own spec and requirements, start to architect and develop the project correct way, the 2 weeks later your manager comes to you asking why wasn't features XYZ not included and how you should add functionalities for A B and C...
-
Last day of agile project i get asked for confirmation that the alpha system can handle 100000 records. We have had no load testing requests only feature pushes every sprint.
I see the back-end guys have used EF in a search function that eager joins a bunch of tables. Then the results get sorted and filtered in application code. It works fine for a few hundred records but the customer will do about 100k new records a year.
Yeah this won’t meet requirements. I wish they asked for some load testing before the last day. They aren’t going to like that one person can do a search every 15 seconds by the end of the year when I tell them. FML12 -
User: If we use Oauth2, can we audit exactly where this data is going and who sends it there, and in addition cam we audit who grabs that data from the Authenticating app and make sure it doesn't violate our requirements?
Me: No
User: Why not?
Me: Because thats like asking us to audit whether or not a user accessed files and then uploaded them to their personal drive instead of corporate. We don't mandate that application owners take responsibility for their data outside of their application, why would we require that in this case???
User: Uhhhhh
FFS the lack of understanding of application accounts here boggles my mind. I understand that the security concerns are real but throwing out all permissible contexts based on a mandate that we dont even apply to extremely permissive accounts (i.e. users compared to apps) is folly1 -
As a junior developer, I am not invited to most of the discussion. Lead comes to us with requirements and we need to build it. My lead is really helpful so no people issues.
I am not sure if it's good for my growth/career. I have recently ( 6 months) joined here. Do you folks have any experience like this? What did you do? Do discussions/meeting help to grow?13 -
my company is "pivoting" way too goddamn fast; they are pulling devs from other projects and throwing them into something that is a fragile system (was supposed to be replaced already) and is using a completely different stack than most of them usually work with. they keep promising 3rd parties that we will knock out their requirements within a week or two, and as such they are pushing haphazardly merged feature branches into production with absolutely no regression testing.
then when shit explodes and operations grinds to a halt, they tell the half of the team that actually knows how the system works to drop everything and fix it, and leave the diverted devs to continue to develop shit based on requirements drawn on a cocktail napkin, and then they fucking push both the hotfixes and the newest features at the same time.
I probably have the most tribal knowledge at this company, and they are paying me ok, so it's enough for me to just pour some rye and suck it up for the time being and milk the gig. but this can't be sustainable, right? i'm passively looking around for other work, as I've already had enough being here for over 3 years, but i'm finding most places to be slow on the application/hiring process lately due to covid.
Edit: i think i used the wrong tag here, but what the fuck ever. i haven't figured out how to tag shit properly on any platform3 -
https://chromium.googlesource.com/c...
System requirements
A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.
At least 100GB of free disk space on an NTFS-formatted hard drive. FAT32 will not work, as some of the Git packfiles are larger than 4GB.
Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, see below (no other version is supported).
Windows 7 or newer.2 -
So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...
pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah
Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.
Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.
Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.
Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.
The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...4 -
Project: Angular 11
Package doc 2.1: For Angular 13+
Package release 2.1: For Angular 12+
Me: Well, this package solve our problem but it need Angular 12 or 13 to run, so do we go for 13 ?
Team: yep,the update is on schedule so take it and update it later.
Me: We can also go to 14 directly.
Team: No, we prefer LTS version
...some weeks later...
Team: Update to 13 complete !
Me: Yes ! Let's go !
...Install package 2.1...
... Compilation...
🚫 Angular 14 is required for version 2.1
Me: are you fu***** kidding?
Final word: please, keep a good documentation on version requirements 😁
(The package has currently a 3.x in beta to solve the 2.1 angular 14 problem because why not 🤷) -
So we’ve taken over from a project team that disbanded... read: “cut their contracts because fuck this, I can earn more working for better people”.
Me and one other guy have been tasked with saving this heap of shit.
Obviously the project guys left saying “it’s nearly done, just this one feature”. Because cut contracts are easier to deal with if “everything is almost done”.
We jump on and find that’s not the case at all... this thing, is a beast, a big old stats analysis program... so we’re like “cool, let’s see what’s going o...OH MY GOD”.
The “recalculation” function was core to this POS. The contractors had done it in C# through entity framework... it took 24 hours to run, over a reasonably small data set that was due to double every 2-5 years.
So... here’s the deal, it ran over night.... then failed. And no cunt had noticed. Entity framework “can’t commit because I’m muddled up as fuck, did you really just put the whole db in EF in memory to work with it?” Exception.
Que 6 months of me and my lead doing the job properly.
Anyway, the failure: I ended up in Hospital again with a Crohn’s flare up... about 5 months in.
Fuckall to do with all this nonsense I just wanted to tell a story. it was an interesting/fun project to fix and my lead was a legend... so happy days.
Similar story, different set of contracted devs... they’d been defining requirements with the business users using the term “Risk” which the business users knew as a group of risks.
The domain model had been written RiskGroup<>— -
Windows 10 Action Center yesterday alerted me to set a PIN for my laptop.
Turned on PC this morning and typed in my regular password then realized it wanted the PIN.
Thinking how this feature came to be....
1. Windows wants you to link your login to your Microsoft/Hotmail Account and it makes it a pain in the ass to set a seperate one (Windows 8)
2. 2018 arrived an logins are a pain, everything is autologin or PIN/code based (aka short 'unsecure' passwords)
3. MS backtracks and realizes email logins are too long so they make a partial fix which basically reverts back to the pre-Win8 days of a seperate system login.. except now its called a new feature!
I realized now under enter a PIN the reason for the checkbox that says: Allow symbols and letters. It's a nice way of saying: please type in your old password again.
**Also rant #2: cuz i dont feel like waiting 1hr**
I felt great yesterday when my boss told me apparantly I have like an Expert designation at the company.
Feel like crap today cuz some user is complaining about some report:
- they asked us to create months ago
- now complaining its all wrong but never gave any formal requirements and actually did sign off on it during testing
- FIXED ASAP
HELLO!!!!!!!!!!! STOP MAKING IT SOUND LIKE IT'S MY FAULT U CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PROVIDE CLEAR REQUIREMENTS AND THEN TAKING FOREVER TO COME BACK WITH UR PROBLEMS AND NOW NEED IT FIXED ASAP BY USING A NEW DATA SOURCE THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS SINCE U USED A RANDOM ABBREVIATION LIKE I CAN MIND READ.
IF I COULD MINDREAD, ID BE WORKING ON A PLAN TO GET UR ASS FIRED.....
Happy friday and long weekend... Got 3 days to relax before i need to deal with this shit again...2 -
I work remotely for a team that works together in an office, and this morning on the conference call a team member said
"one thing i think we need to do with this is stay on task, because while these things that have been added are cool we don't need to be doing anything not outlined in the MVC requirements"
Okay first of all -- this is a completely foreign technology to this team. It's not like I diddled around adding fancy animations and no function. The problem working in a new technology with an old mindset is assuming that it's going to move linearly from step 1 to step 2. And that drives me fucking insane.
- Progress in paid contracted work is done by staying on task.
- Progress in research isn't done linearly. You have to try shit -- and figure out what doesn't work.
I feel bad because I'll chime in and shoot down ideas with a fucking guided missile because I know the answer and I've done the fucking research -- I'm not a dick about it, but replying with a simple "no that's not possible, because of this or that", the call becomes silent for 30 seconds because I've shattered their understanding of the technology because nobody has taken the time to understand anything about how this thing works!!
So until they either listen to me, ask me, or learn the smallest amount to get on my fucking level, I'll keep progressing -- because whether the old world idealists like it or not -- that's my job.
Progress.
</ rant>14 -
Crazy deadlines> Director: "You need to design a new architecture that has failover, multi-AZ, automated deployments, CI/CD pipeline, automated builds/tests as well, for our new SaaS product. You have 3 days to complete it"
Me: "Ok cool. Do we have the new product developed? Can I have the spec docs of the new software, libs and packages required for the env?"
Product Lead: "No we dont have anything yet. The POC is on my local PC, but I dont know what packages are needed to run it"
Me: "So I cant design anything unless I have the minimum requirements to run the new software"
Director: "Just get it up and running in a live environment and we'll take it from there"
Me: *sigh*..this is going to be a big mistake -
It's gotten to the point where I am legitimately impressed when I can tell a service is hashing their passwords.
All of these unnecessary complications of "must not have more than 2 of the same character in a row" but "can't be more than 12 characters" requirements make me think that the passwords are being saved in plain text.
Amazon and Dropbox do it right - present the user with an input box and no requirements printed anywhere.8 -
Why does it always follow the same format?
Me: we should do do and so because xyz. Alternatives are this and that because uvw.
Manager: no, I'll hire another manager.
[Q]uit, [T]ry again? T... fml
Manager 2: let's have a meeting.
Meeting almost ends up being about an entirely irrelevant topic. Barely get the requirements before the end of the day.
Me: write summary following conventions.
Manager 2: let's hire another manager. Manager 1: great idea, manager 2!
Manager 3: let's build a spaceship!
[D]evsplain, [R]agequit, [T]ry again?
class Manager:
"""This shouldn't be too hard..."""
... -
!rant
Nothing worse than recieving little to no documentation/requirements on a project, garbage in = garbage out...1 -
Well, I am not sure whether this is supposed to be about worst experience as a reviewER or a reviewEE so I'ma do both. First as a reviewer.
So, on my first project in this company, I introduced automated build scripting (read: suggested, was "volunteered" to do it, then had to bust my ads to get it done). Prior to this, our process was run the thing in Visual Studio a bunch of times (don't ask) and package the resulting files. Well, new requirements made this not sustainable.
So after many many meetings in which I assured my co-workers that the script wouldn't cock up and go sideways and format our server (HOW???) and showed them how to work it AND added all the features they requested. I finally send the script out for code review. Oh the joy. Questions like: "why did you implement this?" Came from the guy who told me to implement it. "Can you change the formatting?" I checked and no. "Why isn't this to the code standard?" Because the code standard doesn't include scripting languages.
And here is the piece that takes the whole piss soaked shitsicle pie "I don't understand why we're doing this in the first place. We have a build process already, why do we need a new one?" FUCKING REALLY?!?!? YOU WERE IN THE GODS DAMNED MEETING WHERE WE DECIDED TO DO THIS!!! SET OUT THE REQUIREMENTS!!! LITERALLY EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THIS SCRIPT YOU WERE THERE AND YOU'RE ASKING WHY WE'RE DOING IT NOW!?!?! Fucking hell. I forced it through anyway because I had the higher ups all signed off on it, but seriously. Just because we're doing something new that slightly inconveniences you, doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done. Stop being afraid of change.
Side note: these people actually would regularly hold up process and product improvement because change is scary.2 -
If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.
The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.
Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).
The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.
To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.
Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.4 -
So today is my last day working in [censored] company. Even though today is the last day and they have my replacement, they still expect me to complete the project 'NOW'. So I decided to make it quick the way it supposedly was. He wanted me to do tonnes of adjustments.
To prevent me from getting more stressed over satisfying my boss' requirements or meeting my boss' expectations, I made the app return the screenshot of the design. So I screenshot the design and render it to the app. So far that's the fastest route I can think of.
I really do not want to do this. But he left me no choice due to his impatient and adamant behaviour. That's why I decided to haste the project by returning the screenshot. (To be honest, this is unprofessional and dishonest, but he left me no other choice to violate my principles).
We argued about the negotiation with regard of the timeline for the deliverance of the project, I proposed 6 months countless times. He constantly denied that I did not negotiate with him. Unfortunately, the 'negotiation' defined by his action is merely a projection of an illusion of negotiating, but whatever is discussed on the table will deliberately fall into his idea and unrealistic high expectations.
Working in this company caused me damages beyond repair. My 4 weeks in this company were my worst nightmare. I don't get enough sleep due to the constant stress from the employer to complete the project in the 'immediately' phase. I brought these issues afore the table for the discussion. He simply deny it and blame it all on me, saying 'that it was my own negligence, to the company. I do not subscribe to his methodology of handling stress, by working more and contributing more to the company as passionate as possible. I am passionate about what I do and my position, what I do not passionate about is being unreasonable, ignorant, delusional and inhumane.
I learnt my lesson now. I vow to myself that In the future if I have the opportunity to be a team leader, my former employer is not and never be someone who can be my role model as a leader.
Refer: https://devrant.com/rants/5379920/...
4 -
I was reading a post over at https://devrant.com/rants/2262140/...
..and on the topic of using 3d printers to print a 3d printer, I wrote that has gotta be some sort of measure or ratio of "manufacturing automation."
Sort of like moores law or something.
"How many tools and materials does it now take to replicate THIS ONE TOOL."
Tools & Materials = 1/N
When we get to 1/N = 1.0, anyone can manufacture anything (commonly available) if they have the raw, or standardized materials, even other tools, up to and including the tool they are using to do the manufacturing itself.
I mean an apocalypse could happen, and as long as just ONE of these 'universal tool making tools' (lets call it an omega machine) exists, we can have *all* the tools and manufacturing necessary to rebuild civilization.
A universal manufacturing 'multitool' means, the only hard requirements for restarting civilization no longer rely on specialized knowledge as far as tools go:
- still need arable land after civilization is gone so when it's coming back, people can feed themselves
- still need people to operate the machine, even if its just one man, or a literal adam and eve (nevermind all the incest).
- still need knowledge to operate the machine, such as an operating manual (and literacy), or knowing say, voice commands.
- assuming it doesn't run on nonrenewable resources, or resources that can't be recycled or replaced..or resources that won't run out for a very long time.
But these are all problems we'd face even without a universal manufacturing machine.10 -
* Gets handed additions to current software platform (web)
* Gives back estimte of time after meeting with everyone and making them understand that once the testing phase of the project is reached there will be no changes, tests should be exhaustive and focus on SAID FUNCTIONALITY of the new additions. NO CHANGES OR ADDITIONS AT THIS POINT IN TIME
* All directives, stakeholders, users etc agreed on my request and spend an additional hour thinking of different corner and edge cases as provided by me in case they can't think of them (they can't, because they are fucking stupid, but I provided everything)
* Boss looks irritated at their lack of understanding of the scope and the time needed, nods in approval after he sees my entire specification, testing cases, possible additions to the system etc
* All members of the committee decide on the requirements being correct, concrete and proper.
* Finish the additions in a couple of weeks due to the increased demand for other projects, this directly affects the user base, so my VP and Director make it a top priority, I agree with their sentiment, since my Director knows what he is doing (real OG)
* I make the changes, test inside of my department and then stage for the testing environment. Everything is ready, all migrations are in order, the functionality is working as proper and the pipeline for the project, albeit somewhat lacking in elegance is good to go.
* Testing days arrive
* First couple of hours of test: Oh, you know what, we should add these two additional fields, and it would be good if the reporting generated by the system would contain this OTHER FORMAT rather than this one.
* ME: We stated that no additions would be done during the testing environment, testing is for functionality, not to see if you can all think of something else, even then, on June 10 I provided a initial demo and no one bothered to check on it on say something.
Them: Well, we are doing it now, this is what testing is for.
Me: Out of this room, the software engineer is me, and I can assure you, testing is not for that. I repeatedly stated that previously, I set the requirements, added corner cases, tables charts everything and not one single one of you decided to pay attention or add something, actually, said functionality you are requesting was part of one of my detailed list of corner cases, why did you not add it there and then before everything went up?
Them: Well I didn't read it at the time (think of the I in plural form since all of these dumb fucks stated the same)
Then my boss went on a rampage on their dumbasses.
I fucking hate software development sometimes.
Oh well. Bunch of fucking retards.4 -
tl:dr
i fucking hate that professor for whom i have to work on laboratory project right now.
reason#1
the project is using a stack full with java. JavaScript. react and some weird facebook api of which i have no clue about. not to mention the server side of this application which uses tomcat (ok its java after all) and sql.
well that wouldn't be not so bad if...
reason#2
we wouldn't have to fucking debug his mistakes he put into the fucking prepared code AND his fucking useless instructions how to set up the project for eclipse the first time. not to mention his fucking requirements which make no sense
oh yeah im a student. i can always go and ask him for help if i need any...
reason#3
i have another 70% mandatory course at the same time and that fucker refuses to upload hos sheets in moodle and answer even one fucking question via mail. not to mention no support if I am there unless i have eclipse setup. even through the projects should be build using gradle...
reason#4
oh. and have i mentioned that this course is only about design patterns? uts not like we could see several of them in a java only application. no we literally have to learn java itself. gradle. nodejs JavaScript Extended for react which i have no clue about at the moment... and yes i especially mentioned gradle and nodejs beccause we have to set shit up and not only use a script.
reason#5
and all that wont even give us a grade. no ita simply a pass or fail part of the module which the course is part of.
have i also mentioned that the whole shit should be done in 20 hours according to the schedule8 -
We've had a project we knew was going to happen since February, and every 2-3 weeks we have been requesting feature requirements and gear to work on (hardware for test automation).
1 month ago we got the official request. 2 weeks ago sales said no to ordering equipment. Sales is now asking for weekly progress updates.
My boss said we have documentation of our asking and the group director (bosses' boss) is behind us saying, "work to make it function, not to get it done quickly."
Sometimes things work out. -
Some user requirements are completely unnecessary that you can lie about them and no one will figure it out ever2
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Today after longer vacation I came back to work.
Edit: wrote this rant long time ago, but never finished. Was too pissed.
Some easy meetings, then wanted to start on an easy job.
Just migrating some things from bash regex voodoo to proper tools like JQ.
Finished in roughly 1 h. Lovely.
Made some tea, ate some cookies.
Set up dev environment, found no documentation what so ever, got it running after half an hour.
Annoying, but ok.
Then I tried my scripts...
They worked... Except they didn't.
Console log empty, response code 200 with state: GENERATE_NO_FILES.
Eh. Fuck you. Just fuck you.
Fixed the logging configuration, which was broken since uhm... 2 years plus?
Well... Another half another hour gone...
Kinda pissed now.
Still script return failed...
Poking and trying to sprinkle debug all over that shit cause everything seems ... An incohesive, inconsistent diarrhea.
3 hours later...
Made the ticket to rewrite it.
I did nothing wrong at all.
The API just has no workflow at all. The
*seperate* API calls have to be in an **specific** order - as otherwise the generation will fail, as the prerequisites for the generation are not fulfilled.
Yeah. Completely logical. Especially not to give out any kind of warning or an error message like requirements not met, blablabla.
I drank that evening 2 six packs of beer. I was raging mad....
Then gave that shit to another manager, as I never want to touch that nuclear waste again....
How can someone be so brain damaged -.-1 -
Fun day at work.
Client sends me requirements over WhatsApp voice notes.
Says he can't send email because hes too tired.
His Requirements don't make sense.
I figured out what he wanted and then rewrite the requirements using simple language and less jargon.
Hes not happy. I reduced two paragraphs of his "requirements" to a single sentence which make more sense.
His voice notes seem like rambling.
Ugh.
He comes up with features for this webapp that cannot be tested unless you build the companion app which is coming up later.
Now he wants us to design the screens for the app which we will have to use our designer for.
Expensive. Considering most of his app is not completely thought out.
I have no idea what to do now.
We still haven't completed the requirements.1 -
My last search for a job...
Very bad.
I'm a cnc operator with 3d modeling formation.... As a specialized job I should be getting at least 50% over the Portuguese minimum wage (wich is only 650€)...
I asked only 50€ above minimum wage over 10 interviews or more and no one accepted it....
The fashion in Portuguese companies now (most of them) is to pay minimum wages... Even if I already invested 3 years of my life in formation... Basicly the same as an engenheir (not the same requirements, I know).
Ended up accepting minimum wage on my current job.3 -
Why is there no VueJS job requirements in my area? It is all about Angular and React. Quite sad my favorite JS Framework is not a favorite here.
Guess I'll be forced to study Angular or React for job requirements purposes only *sigh* 😩 It is like - forced eating the only available food that you don't like in order to survive. Oh well supply and demand.
I haven't seen any VueJS requirements yet in all the job posts that I browsed 😕11 -
For some reason I keep over engineering stuff to the point I spend 2 hours thinking the best way to do something. I'm making the backend for a project of mine and I wanted somewhat decent error handling and useful error responses. I won't go into detail here but let's say that in any other (oo) language it would be a no-brainer to do this with OOP inheritance, but Rust does OOP by composition (and there's no way to upcast traits and downcasting is hard). I ended up wasting so much time thinking of how to do something generic enough, easily extendable and that doesn't involve any boilerplate or repeated code with no success. What I didn't realize is that my API will not be public (in the sense that the API is not the service I offer), I'm the only one who needs to figure out why I got a 400 or a 403. There's no need to return a response stating exactly which field had a wrong value or exactly what resource had it's access denied to the user. I can just look at the error code, my documentation and the request I made to infer what caused the error. If that does not work I can always take a quick look at the source code of the server to see what went wrong. So In short I ended up thrashing all the refactoring I had done and stayed with my current solution for error-handling. I have found a few places that could use some improvement, but it's nothing compared to the whole revamp I was doing of the whole thing.
This is not the first time I over engineer stuff (and probably won't be the last). I think I do it in order to be future-proof. I make my code generic enough so in case any requirements change in the future I don't have to rewrite everything, but that adds no real value to my stuff since I'm always working solo, the projects aren't super big and a rewrite wouldn't take too long. In the end I just end up wasting time, sanity and keystrokes on stuff that will just slow down my development speed further down the road without generating any benefits.
Why am I like this? Oh well, I'm just glad I figured out this wasn't necessary before putting many hours of work into it. -
I hate web development
I mean why it has to be everywhere and so important.
I joined college my friend calls 4 days before my quantum physics test. Asks if I wanted to do internship. My reply sure.
( Level of knowledge at that time no idea what API is, what react is but it's just making webpages ) made a nice homepage within 4 hours of YouTube 2 tutorials and 2 developing that. Friend appreciated his manager also liked.
But failed to deliver the complete e-commerce website's frontend.
Comes next, hackathon nothing related to Android specific( I like coding for Android) need webdev in one way or other. One senior asks if want to go together sees my GitHub and rejects politely by my skills ( I would have too).
Went on with my 2 more friends with thought of making an all Android app guys team, next week team breaks. I then got offer from a friend to join with them in web development I agreed now prepare for web development.
Team was rejected internal politics of organizers ( would take no all fresher's team).
Dropped learning webd.
Now started flutter and it feels good and comfortable but stability isn't permanent.
Now seeing GSoC
Sigh...Most requirements are for web , hacktober fest also had things related to web maybe I don't recall. Still thinking about it sigh...
Got selected for college app development team. The head had to be one with excellent webd skills.
Now college provides funding for projects and ideas, prototype requires making prototype. Most easiest thing to work on
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web development.10 -
I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.
We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.
The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.
To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...
Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.
Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.
This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.3 -
Have you ever thought to send a security code to the email the user put in the sign up form just to say him later "the password must contains at least 8 characters, etc." and ask him to fill the form again from scratch?
Who is so dumb to put the input check in this order? Honeywell.
- The email is correct?
- Ok, send a code and ask to confirm it
- The password meets the requirements?
- No, ask to confirm the email again just for fun.
I'll just ignore the waste of server resources to send N * Number of users emails for no reason.2 -
I’m starting to think our “architect” hasn’t actually worked with our platform and maybe hasn’t actually programmed before. His requirements look like they were written by a high schooler bullshitting a science project. They make no fucking sense and over-complicate things on a super-intense, tight deadline. He never answers any of my questions and I’m working against him constantly to not micromanage my shit. I wish he would fuck off far away from me and everyone and my life would be so much easier. At this point, Idk how he hasn’t gotten fired. Tempted to warn management that this project is going to crash and burn hard, but not sure if that would make me look like the trouble-causer.2
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Story time;
Major project, multi million budget, huge business and IT coordination, board level status updates, meeting started back in March 2018 for a Go Live of Aug 2019.
Based on draft requirements (and experience) I request the test environment be built for half of the work. Turns out that no one told Server Eng and they are out of space in both dev and prod until Q2 of 2019. We went from Green to Red because a Service Request.5 -
markdown is not good enough! the tools aren't there for non-devs and there's no concordance on moving forward *compatibly* for anything other than headers and __possibly__ lists.
md has been around for years and still no consensus on comments, meta data, css, data imports, etc.
i could never in good faith recommend to a non-dev to use markdown, even though every academic and professional writer from legal to journalism should exclusively be using markdown to write and store their documents. the data portability and ease of search, retrieval, collection, distribution, etc of markdown compared to pdf or docx is enormous. markdown is the hex format of text, the perfect layer of data and visual so that the user and the computer can both operate on text as blocks of data rather than weirdly styled paragraphs that need to be reformatted BY HAND for citation-style or journal format, or paper size. FOR EACH SUBMISSION. Academics literally rewrite their 100-page papers to accommodate up to 10 different submission requirements.
They could be clicking MLA vs Chicago and/or using a journal's stylesheet to recompile for its styles.
Today there is some support from zotero et al to take away some of the pain, but it makes ZERO SENSE for writers to have to keep and store and keep up to date, multiple versions of the same document. Git pull does not exist for them. But the worst part is that git isnt the solution to their problem. They need a compiler more than they need version control. But they also desperately need vcs. They ALL literally have a million files named "dumdum.dumFINAL-3084_lastversion \2020, this one.dum".
They dont have git or anything like it, because they need a line-by-line solution like markdown for git to become effective.
All of writing is basically mired in the fact that people cant even roll up their paragraphs and see what the fuck it is theyre saying. Most writing reads like a long scroll through some nonsense that goes nowhere. Like this rant. but the point is that markdown and line-by line editing actually produces more logically sound writing. You start to think in terms of defining ideas in blocks, ... like code.9 -
Time to remove access to tfs for the BA. She started adding work for us for features that don't have their requirements gathered yet.
Another BA just sent us an email today about it with just a generic "we need this now" urgency with no description, no requirements, no real functionality defined. The other one had access to tfs because she was working with us on a project, and was helping out with requirements. But it seems she's forgotten that you can't just slap imaginary things in.4 -
Recruiters with no clue (a recurring theme it seems).
Got an e-mail this morning via LinkedIn proposing a position in Zurich (Switzerland) doing customization of an application according to business needs, configuration of interfaces, gathering of requirements, 2nd level support etc.
DID YOU READ ANYTHING MY LINKEDIN SAYS? I work in storage support (doing mostly troubleshooting of FC/iSCSI issues between storage and hosts), and live in Amsterdam, and while I would like to pivot to a SW dev job, this seems to be way over my grade of experience, plus I have no desire to go living in Switzerland.
Arsehole!5 -
Been developing a "3 months planned" project for almost a year now because PM cant say no to requirements, ive been finding previously disabled functionalities that client is asking for again, i think this is never going to end...
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Ok so I'm a high school student in grade 11 looking to get a degree in computer sciences. I looked at the requirements for big Universitys in Canada and they say you only NEED calculous and vectors and no sciences. I wasn't sure if not taking sciences will impact my acceptance probability or if any of you got accepted to universities without highschool science.6
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I am tired of a glorified code monkeys cosplaying software engineers.
Disclaimer: in general, I have immense respect to engineers and technological advances that came from FAANG/MANGA. Bbbuuuuttttt...
Especially people that has a few relatively short (less than a year) stints in a few of them and thinking that their salary expectation for their skills is reasonable.
What I've saw so far, based on a few hires for past few years in a company of ~50 engineers, Python/JavaScript stack, monolith to microservice transition (all people had senior and above titles):
* Have no idea how to setup own development environment on MacBook.
* Have no idea how to run code and tests for Python (from discussion, the two only development experience was "code - commit - push - done" and "clicking button in remote coding environment".
* Have no idea how to use bash/zsh (the person had "Linux skill up to 11").
* Grinding leetcode and interviewing during work hours (were let go immediately).
* Introducing a new microservice for each task (we're transitioning from Django monolith, but not to that extent).
* Ignoring all the onboarding, documentation and ignoring every request for writing documentation "I am not a technical writer".
* Knowing nothing about Kubernetes (this was in the job posting/requirements).
* Person actively hostile to any frontend task (the position is not full stack, but JavaScript is a required skill).
I am pretty open and I understand the eternal "generalist vs specialist" thing, but if the person do not posses certain skills and actively lie about it, just because "I worked at FAANG companies, obviously I have that skills" - it's dishonesty at best and fraud at worst. And if with the end of ZIRP you suddenly became unhireable in FAANG/MANGA - you need to think why.
There are tons of small software companies that nevertheless have a good salary and benefits, and most of the time hiring was a breath, because for the most of the people they were flying under the radar.
Unfortunately, since this year the hiring is exhausting, the amount of incapable candidates is incredible (a lot of them with credentials), and instead of 10-15 candidates per position (before and during pandemic), now there are more than 300 candidates per position with "impressive" working experience and only 10 people who really spend time on interviewing.
In short, if you think you're worth gold only from 3-4 companies in the world and all of them stopped hiring you - you should rethink your worth.3 -
I've been given a huge stack of paper, some users stories and loose specs. Was tasked with engineering the specific requirements, then the models and finally the database. Then I need to build an API on top of that.
Stuff I'll use is Go and Postgresql. Small issue is, I've never done DBs, so I've no idea what to do or where to start.
Does anyone have any resources to help kick-start myself in this field? I've been reading on SQL, but that doesn't really tell me anything about data structures and how to transform those user stories into product requirements.6 -
!rant: I need a little advice from fellow devs. I've come to the conclusion that development is not the right career path for me, but how to advance from here?
I've worked a little over a year as dev/scrum master and lately I've been assigned small project management tasks. I really liked the project management stuff, and I like talking to stakeholders and converting their ideas into well described requirements and development tasks.
But who will hire a junior level engineer with no formal project manager training or certifications?
What kind of jobs could I apply for?1 -
To all websites requiring at least one upper case, one lower case, one number, one special character, 25 emoji and 49 unicorns in the password when signing up.
If you say something is required, then your regex BETTER be checking ONLY for those things. You should not have hidden requirements for passwords that users are supposed to dream about and know. Especially if it's a super time-sensitive thing that they should have opened 2 Fridays ago.
I had to pull my hair out for 20 minutes (that felt like an hour) before looking at their code and reading their regex. The regex was different from what the page said the requirements actually were. What were they even thinking? 😑
The rest of everything related to this organization uses an SSO system, why can't they just use it? Isn't the whole point of SSO to avoid a different login for every tiny part of the system?
I wonder what the other less technically inclined people using the system are doing right now. Sadly, I have no way of letting them know.
I sincerely hope the dev that made that website faces the same thing while picking a password for creating an account somewhere else and realizes what he/she did.
I really needed to let it out.
I feel much better now.
Time to take out the stress ball :)1 -
Asking for a friend: Well actually a friend asked me (since "I'm good with computers", you know it ;)) and no real solution came to my mind, so I thought, why not ask the internet
Anyways. She's an artist and does a project (kind of a documentation) about the Egyptian revolution. She currently lives in Europe but still has her Egypian passport. As an Egyptian national, she fears, that she could be holden back for a while and have her laptop/external HD with all the photos/videos/interviews confiscated and/or searched. She asked me for help to have a "backup solution".
The requirements: a way to backup work (from a mac) to a secure location (I would offer my server running linux for it).
The upload would have to be encrypted (if possible, I suggested to use a VPN, is this enough?)
Access to the files should only be granted if you have the propper password (in my opinion the VPN tunnel should work here too, as when it's down, you can't just reopen it without a password.
What are your thoughts on this?10 -
client has no clue what he wants and keeps changing the requirements of the projects; wants to deploy "to a desktop app like electron but faster, but also as a lib for developer to use on a server like a CMS" 🤦🏻♂️; takes two hours in a call and literally tells me that he want to "hear himself speak" so he can clarify what he needs...
me: NOP2 -
Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.
So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.
I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).
2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.
Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.
Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.
I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*
So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).
Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.
Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.
Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla
---
Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*
--
Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.
Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.2 -
This is a rant about the passion of programming and building in the business world (AKA corporate/startup world)
I speak for myself and I believe many programmers out there who set out on their journey into the world of programming by a certain interest kindled some time when they first wrote their first line of code. We innocently eager, and dream of working for large fancy companies and start making money while doing the thing we love doing the most.
And then... reality hits. We find that most companies are basically just the same thing. Our supposedly creative and mind-challenging passion is now turned into mundane boring repetitive tasks and dealing with all kinds of bazaar demands and requirements. You suddenly go from wanting to change the world to "please move this to left by 10 px". And from experience that drives people to the extent of hating their jobs, and hating the very thing they were once so very infatuated with.
One narrative I see being pushed down the throats of developers (especially fresh young eager developers with no experience) mostly by business people/owners is "WORK FOR PASSION!". I personally heard one CEO say things like "It's not just about a salary at the end of the month. IT IS ABOUT A MISSION. IT IS ABOUT A VISION"...bla...bla...bla. Or "We don't work for money we work for passion". Yeah good luck keeping your business afloat on passion.
What irritates me the most about this, is that it is working. People today are convinced that doing shit jobs for these people are all about passion. But no one wants to stop for a second and think that maybe if people are passionate about something, even if that thing is in the field in which they work, they're not passionate about working for someone else doing something they hate? If I am really working for "passion" why don't I just quit and go work on something that I am ACTUALLY passionate about? Something that brings me joy not dread? It's a simple question but it's baffling to me why no one thinks about it. To me personally, jobs are just that; jobs. It's something to make a living and that's it. I don't give a fuck if you think you're building the next "innovative", "disruptive", "shitluptive" thing :D. Unfortunately that is viewed as "negative limited mentality".
I am quite passionate about programming and making things, but I am not so passionate about building your stupid app/website with a glue code everywhere!2 -
Blindsided by a project meeting 5 mins to end of day when I was super busy and I've spent all day dealing with shitty hacked together legacy code, requirements changing everyday and still no business solutions to some areas of the project. We already have one booked in for tomorrow at 10. What the fuck. Needless to say I pretty much shouted about everything to everyone. Fucking joke. Now I'm just mad at me for letting my blood boil externally
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Another potential client contacted me, they wanted a website building. I asked what the aim of the site was to the reply "there's no aim, a friend said I should get a website".
They run a gardening service. So I gave them a few examples of aims. They decided they wanted to showcase their work with the hope that it would bring in more jobs.
I emailed them a list of requirements as we had decussed over the lengthy phone call.
Two weeks after no response I get a call, "is my website built yet"
I explained that with the tiny budget and without content there is nothing really that could be built.
Needless to say I never heard from him again -
TLDR: A friend had only a local repository and fucked it up completly
A friend of mine had to do an project for school. Sche decided to do a little chat application. The requirements were to use java in combination of javafx.
Things started very well. Sometimes she asked me for a little help but that was no problem. She used mercurial for version control which was an inportant requirement too. But. The teacher didn't teach them how to use mercurial so all she had was a local repository. A few days ago she called me and told me that she fucked up the repository. I told her she should cerp calm and wait until i am at home. It's a fucking repository. this can be fixed i thought. But when i arrived at home and she sent me the repo i tried everything but a file (stored at .hg/store/) was missing. it was a manifest file. I asked her what happened to this file. "I deleted it because there were error messages because of it" FML. Why would you even delete such a file?
Luckily for her she sent me a copy of her repo to look at it a few days ago. so she only lost 5 commits.1 -
My DEV Story
After reading it, make a favor by ++d
Thought to be a software engineer in future
Learnt Python's basic modules, AI, and some ML
After getting intermediate in python, I started learning Java as my second language but could not do it because of JDK 8. Now don't ask me why.
Then, just stepped into game development with unity and C#, having a basic knowledge of C# with no experience in making a game myself. This is called ignorant.
After getting no success, I started learning PHP and got the chance to make a website having no content ;)
But it cannot meet my requirements
Soon I got content that AdSense regards as no content, no problem
I started learning Flask, a module in python for making web applications.
It took me 1 month to complete my website, which can convert file formats.
The idea for deploying it to the server
Sign Up to DigitalOcean
Domain Name from GoDaddy (I know NameCheap is better but got some offer from it)
Made a VPS for what I have to pay $5/month
Deploy my Flask App using WSGI server
This is the worst dev experience
.
.
.
.
Why in all the tutorial, they only deploy a flask app which displays Hello World only and not anything else
WSGI or UWSGI Server does not give us permission to save any file or make any directory in it
Every time........ERROR
Totally Fucked Up
Finally, it works on localhost with port 80
I know this is not the professional way to host a website but this option was only left.
What can I do
Now, I cannot issue a free SSL certificate through Let's Encrypt because **Error 98 Address Already In Used**
The address was port 80 on which my Flask App was running
Check it out now - www.fileconvertex.com
8 -
Everytime I applied long leave, my client and PM will plan for important feature, but they say start the sprint and for other new people i have to give KT, and they will take care. I know how that will screw up the system. So at the time it's nightmare late night at office, in office time KT, no weekends, stand-up for 1hr(every time QA will ask, what we get after this sprint). Stupid clients changing the requirements after stand-up.
Everytime code base screwed and need to refactoring. So as much as possible core functionality I'll complete and only bug fixing for newbie. I hate those days. -
Into a bunch of open source hogging meat heads because no one likes paying for things their own peers toil days and nights creating and creating more under documented over expensive licensed stuff (because agile) while throwing buzzwords to clients just make business while simultaneously choking the life out of underpaid overworked devs and engineers with the skill of running away from responsibility trying to save their own skin with the inept ability to look like a hero/King at the end of the day with a single mail sent with psychic communication or the lack thereof with people who are slogging their asses off to fix a problem created to the vulnerabilities and bugs introduced due to the impatience of the same moron who couldn't afford to give his employees/subordinates more time to figure out an elegant solution to a non existent problem created in the confusion of improperly documenting unnecessary requirements of an ignorant or unknowing client who is way too eager to process way too much load with way too less resources all the while whining about lack of features theyre not gonna use.3
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When Email and Time-sheet is everything in the workplace....
They literally don't care about your work or about successfully deploying project, if you don't have it in timesheet then you did nothing.
They want me to work on totally new things and expect to get the results within week and when I mention this is new and I can't even give estimates, they want that to be in an Email. Like WTF!! you even know this is fucking new thing that only I'm working on, there's no one to help me.
And I'm here learning,studying so I can solve these out of scope requirements with best practices.
And in the meantime they also want me to work one few other things .__.1 -
I had to do a project for my A-levels.
The task was to get a client and develop and application based on their requirements. Naturally I made my friends my clients so that I could make something I was interested in.
The teacher constantly changed my requirements during the start, because he liked everyones applications to be somewhat similar (Probably easier to mark), which demotivated me.
The timescale we were set around easter time was to have a demo by the end of summer which didn't need to work properly, and then a completed version after the Christmas holidays.
I wrote about 90% of the program over my 2 weeks off for Christmas, most of that while drunk, high, or both, and managed to complete it within them two weeks.
I went back to the code a couple months later, with no memory of writing it, to set up a demo to show my teacher and I was actually surprised at it. It was the first project of that type that I had worked on, and while there were a couple noticable bugs, it actually worked fairly well, and was really well documented. I was expecting a pile of buggy spaghetti.1 -
We have to make a final project in college in my country because we get an engineer‘s degree (Ing.) when we have finished them.
Our teacher come in and said he got some projects which fit for our finals.
I asked him what kind of projects those are.
Hey answered that most of them are web applications.
I was like „Now it finally pays off that I‘ve learned JavaScript/TypeScript and how to work with Angular and Node.js“
So I asked if I could made one of these projects with Angular and Node.js
He said „There’s no need for JavaScript, PHP and laravael are requirements.“
I stood up and went out of the class... -
Dev1: "what was that requirement? I mean, do you remember that little yet hugely important detail ...?"
Dev2: "hmmm sort of ... Maybe it's in one of the emails, possibly 2 months ago. Let's try to find it"
Dev3: "wait, probably Dev1 was not included for some reason in that thread of emails"
Dev2: "no wait, I mean the other, the one we used to talk about those other specifications from previous meeting..."
[and the story goes on]
Now you may think "ok, this event happened once and was a misstep. Shit happens"
Actually, this is the bread and butter in this company I collaborate with. All their requirements are spread across thousands of emails, usually mixed together and possibly forked into different threads. Often people are cut out from conversation because someone forgets to "reply all", other times they're lost in time.
When I asked them "why don't you use some other tool, maybe something more organized and easily searchable, something structured..."
They replied "no no, we prefer to use email for historical reasons"
My brain just melted like chocolate under the sun2 -
How do you think about unit testing/TDD when writing apps? (I'm working this at 3am so might be a bit messy... Just a thought I woke up to).
Whenever I write an app, I don't write unit tests but as I'm developing I may create test functions for specific parts that I run to validate a specific component is working before moving onto the next.
So first, when I get a problem, break it up into components based on the requirements. It's usually sort of input, processor, output sequence.
Where the processor is essentially the core app. And so I start coding it, referring to the input thru an interface, model objects, adding fields as I go along (assume no matter what the input, I will get these before the logic is called). I may add some more interfaces as well for other data I may need but I know won't be going in the first input.
So I write all the logic, functions needed to get a basic app to run that does what I am writing the app for.
Only then do I write a test functions passing in different parameters to make sure the logic and response is what I want and making fixes as necessary. At that point I basically have the simplest version of the app.
(I guess this is sort of like mocking?)
Then build outwards implementing and testing components as I go along and may do some simple refactoring/redesign. (I guess all these tests are functional then, have to start the whole app).
And finally when I have the basic requirements fully complete I will add the "nice to haves" on top via refactoring of specific logic in specific components. Again testing by running the app maybe with simple inputs.
I guess now I'm thinking how do you write unit tests/TDD if the app keeps changing (via adhoc refactorings) as you are creating it? -
1) receive functional requirements
2) create functional specification, post it on forum (no jira)
3) create memo document, post it on forum (no jira)
4) create analysis document with actual code changes without seeing the code (wait for step 8), post it on forum (no jira)
5) receive review on analysis document, fix it and post (no jira, redmine etc from now till the end of rant)
6) after analysis is approved make a checkout request
7) source code manager checkouts files from svn and posts them on forum along with the files list
8) you make actual changes to the code, post changed sources on forum
9) source code manager makes a review to check that amendment commet is present in source code and is properly tagged, and every line of code chnged is properly tagged (you are not allowed to delete anything, not even one space, you need to comment it (and put an appropriate tag))
10) after you passed review you fill in standard compilation request form
11) you code is compiled and elf is put on testing stand
12) you fill in "actual behaviour" and "expected behaviour" columns near description of changed function in template of unit test plan document (yeah we have unit testing) and post it on forum
13) if testing ok changed sources and compiled elfs along with its versions (cksum) commited to svn (not by you, there is a source code manager for that)
14) if someone developed function in same source file as you "commited" he is warned by source code manager and fills checkout request form again
15) ...2 -
Lessons from a really big project I will almost certainly finish:
When specifying a program, a lot of inputs become valid which have few to no real use cases, simply because they logically follow from the requirements.
When implementing a specification, some narrow use cases become unexpectedly difficult to handle.
It's important to recognize the intersection and reject it. -
I had registered for Machine Learning course in my university. It's a new course offered after looking at the subjects usage in industry.
The professor handling it ,have completely no idea ,and experience on ML., So yeah
His 1hour lecture is complete stand up comedy show for the students.
So, today he comes and says "ML is based on Probability", and explains probability, like for 8th grade students.
He put this question on the board, telling that ML revolves around concept requirements to solve this question.
Question:
Probability of getting sum of 7 or 11 when a pair of die is thrown?
Guess what, he tried to solve the question and got wrong answer.
I was highly interested in the course,since my project required it and thought it provide me great fundamentals, it's been 3 weeks I regret for opting it.😥 -
My company design floor plan and some photoshop work for clients.
One project was to resize the image to certain width and height and place it in the center of the photo with padding 40px around.
I wrote an extended script of Adobe to help the design department and process thousand of images within an hour.
My Boss was so impressed and have a meeting with me. He said: "You need to lead IT department and create a system that can detect the client's requirement and complete the drawing with Adobe Illustrator automatically".
Me: Thinking (Meh, I have no knowledge of Image Processing with my poor Mathematics, where can I die with his requirements?) -
Today at work, I had to do a dry run of our new production environment config for our VM server.
So I setup ESXi in a vm in my workstation. Installed it it, no problem. Setup some VMs, still going good. Then my supervisor came and said I have to make some tweaks and use vCenter. I thought: meh, that came late but ok. Download the vCenter installer from our internal CDN and ran it. Sorry general config, blah blah blah. "Setup with embedded or external platform service controller?" -"Embedded" - "minimal requirements: 11GB ram, 250GB disk storage, 2 CPU cores". Well... Fuck me. My workstation specs: 8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD, 4 cores.
What the bloody fucking hell does this stuff need 250 GB disk space for?!
Well at least I've got a permanent upgrade for my workstation.1 -
I don't know if many rememeber me but at one point this year I had to turn UDP basically into tcp, handshake, packet ordering, resend on failed, ACK response, and 4k bit aes encryption. Fucking done, it works, signed the last version and pushed to client, client loved it, just what he wanted, paid out contract then turned around and asked me to setup his server for one day with no further expectations and an extra 250, said sure don't mind, as I am setting shit up I decided to test if his business isp really blocks tcp, guess what? NOPE IT WORKS JUSY FUXKIJG FINE AND I COILD HAVE KUST RIPPED A PREMADE CORE AND GOT PAID AND SET IT UP AND HE WOULD NEVER know, but maybe theirs some weird circumstances that require the core to be made only with udp, so after I was done I asked why only udp if his line allowed tcp? Requirements maybe? NOPE HE JUST DOSENT UNDERSTAND TCP FUUUUUUUQQQQHDJDIOAJEJDICJDNXIKZMZJDJCU2
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Sent products a list of everything wrong with their requirements and why it would take an army to build (there are only 2 of us backend ninjas). Suddenly its crickets. No-one is replying me now. Suckers..
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Why Dart was designed with idiocy:
1) naming conventions are idiotic
Most other languages are smart enough to not throw errors when the variable name matches its type. And lots of others, for any lexemme - only 1 naming kind is allowed.
Fine. Oh wait, there's that thing called existing databases and GraphQL & other APIs, should they all adapt to this? No, because 2) is the bonus
2) String keys in objects. Unless it's a class with boilerplate, you write them as strings and access them as strings.
So here's the solution when you want to integrate Dart with existing services: write a lot of JSONSerializable decorators to fit with dart's pissy naming requirements.3 -
Coworker 1 starts project
Coworker 2 inherits same project
*repeat 3 more times*
Coworker n has no idea what this spaghetti code is and what it does since everyone has done quick fixes as per management requirements.
This is how the company where i work functions. And with all these projects going from one dev to the other i can tell you its a real shitshow and a lot if frustration 😤2 -
The term "technical debt" is poorly used. I hear folks of all stripes and roles proudly proclaim that they've "reduced technical debt" in some way. It's used as a catch all to describe some kind of supposedly beneficial change. I think it's just more software process word salad. Mostly because there seems to be some assumption that "Yay, that stuff that was changed is no longer a problem" when odds are that it will be changed again before too long for more "technical debt reduction". Software changes over time because the requirements change over time. I don't see the need for the phrase at all, and I think using it gives some false sense of accomplishment when really the constant change of code is the normal state.6
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Any of you are annoyed by your non-technical manager work practices?
Every release I feel like our manager's goal is to have our planning and results look good in front of higher management, no matter if it is true or not.
Oh this big task could not be done because we had to plan 4 months in advance with no info and poorly done requirements? Well let's just push it to the next release we can't have unfinished tasks logged in.
Oh we don't have time to work on tech debt and refactoring, there are too many features and bugfixes to do. Well maybe that is why there are so many bugs, eh?
Oh your automated test results need to all look perfect, does not matter if your test are even good or actually doing anything in the first place, as long as it passes.
Also, I was promised agile and got a waterfall-like bullshit process instead that barely works.
Anyways just morning rambling.1 -
Do you have that one person you work with that you just can't stand for whatever reason?
I've been having a tough time with this one project at work and been falling behind because we hired a junior dev and 2 inexperienced freelancers. So to help me out my boss let me use his office for the day to avoid all of the noise.
I had been under the impression lately that I didn't like my job due to the constant context switching and being isolated for the day was a really nice refresher.
Then the project manager starts harassing me at 430pm saying the client is now expecting something deployed in the morning with no warning or requirements. Way to set client expectations.
That one moment made me realize that the context switching wasn't what I disliked about my work. It's that one person. They're so bad at what they do that it makes my job so much harder. -
I have a guy that will come in a few hours to discuss about an e-commerce website he wants to start his business. I've accepted to do it freelance.
Things are a little quick for my taste, but I know myself enough to know that if I don't jump head first, I'll back out and miss on an opportunity to add something valuable to my resume (and get a bit of money).
The thing is : I have nearly zero experience in 1) e-commerce websites and 2) client relationship and managing. So that will be a great challenge to me, but that's precisely what I need right now.
Anyway, I'm coming to you to ask a few questions : assuming his requirements are simple and common for an online shop, should I create it from scratch or would it be wiser to use a dedicated framework (Prestashop, Wix, etc.). If the latter, which one would you recommend, cost and efficiency-wise.
Still assuming simple and common requirements, how much time would it likely take, for an average developper (I'm no Linus Torvalds) working on average 8h a day ? More like 2-3 months, or more like 5-6 months ? I'm leaning more towards 2-3, but since I don't have experience in these kind of websites, I find a lot of user stories that might take me time to figure out.
Last but not least, what would be approximately an honest price, technical costs aside (domain, host, potential framework, etc.) for that kind of work. And for maintenance ?2 -
Ok I don't know what ticks managers off about working from home.
I live an hour away from the office and my team (i.e. The whole company) consists of 3 people, INCLUDING ME. And we all work on different projects. So what's the point of even going to the small room with cubicles AKA the office? No, there aren't really any "learning from my colleagues" crap; we work on different stacks. Plus we're all juniors. Oh yeah, haven't I mentioned that? WE HAVE NO TEAM LEAD OR EVEN SENIORS. The CEO has a tech background and he communicates with us directly and discuss the requirements etc. BUT HE LIVES IN ANOTHER FUCKING CONTINENT. So, again, what's so bad about working from home in my case? My manager doesn't like it for some reason. -
It's not a real dev regret but it's related to it: Not being able to fix a price or a value for my skills.
It's a real regret.
Just coming out of college I have tried my hand at freelancing at found it real hard to fix a value for what work was offered because I just found it weird to fix a monetary value on something that I've done for free for my entire life ( at school and uni I mean).
To make it worse my first experience was with a grad student who wanted me to complete her project.
Now being from India, I know that we have a stereotype of doing work for a lower price.
But this girl took the cake.
She wanted me to create a custom Image classifier using tensorflow.
It had to train with live images and then detect those images in the live video feed.
It's quite simple but still training the basic network(which would be used to just detect features) would take a decent amount of time and effort.
No pre trained models was also a prerequisite for her.
After hearing all her requirements I asked her what price she was willing to pay.
She said 50$ lump sum.
Being really confused as to what to say to that I just stopped replying.
To this day I have no clue what would be a reasonable price to quote a client like that.
After that I just continued dealing with people I knew personally and am currently doing that as an internship. But entering the proper freelancing system again has become a kinda weird thing in my head now, since I have no clue as to what price to put on my skills.
Is there any advice that any of the more experienced people would give?
Also consider the fact that I'm relatively fresh out of college and have no corporate experience.
Even if you've read my rant and have no advice it's okay. I guess this is a path of self realization after all.3 -
Ugh. So for one of my classes (Projects In Computer Science) we have to break up into groups; Around 4-6 people per group and build some software for different local companies in the city that I live in.
Well.... the company that my group chose is so damn frustrating. Essentially we are making a glorified Applicant Form system for their website (there's more to it than just that). So you would think that the company knew what sort of fields would be needed for these forms.... Well no, we are over a month into this project and still have barely began coding shit because they are so fucking slow to respond to our emails, don't pick up our calls, or put off doing absolutely anything related to our project! Our professor asked that we would have a written copy of the project requirements made and signed off by the client within the first 2 weeks of classes starting. Took them over a month to get around to that, and still even after signing off on the requirements said that they were missing key forms that we needed to account for... Its your damn fault for not telling us that. We completely wasted our time planning out the database and structuring the front-end/back-end to work for the forms they had given us, and now there's yet another one with inconsistent fields, meaning we need to rethink out most of our system to account for this data. We only have 3 months total, 1 which is already gone and practically wasted, and even still we don't have any sort of confirmation on what form fields we have to account for.
Fucking hell just spend a little bit of time for both our sake, and your own to get us the finalized forms fields and requirements for this project. Honestly at the rate things are going we probably wont be able to finish, which sucks ass since this project is perfect resume material.
Seriously this company desperately needs us to make them this program since their current system is absolute shit. They are literally getting a system that would cost upwards of $20,000 for free, yet they don't seem to care much that we probably wont be able to finish due to their faults. If we didn't have a time cap on this project I wouldn't really care, but the fact that we only have 3 months, plus school work in other classes, exams and a personal life, its making this project a lot more stressful than it needs to be.
Its not like we have a project manager either, so all the emailing and communication is being done by myself. Honest to god, all they have/had to do was sit down for 1 hour of time to decide what they all needed and we would probably have been able to finish this project.5 -
FOR FUCKING FUCK SAKE
I have a shit ton work to do. Just finished (hopefully) all of my exams, came back to work and got tasked with simultaneously developing a new app (Android), adjusting some of my own code to work with client's specific requirements in completely different project (C#) and also I have to fix a legacy app (Android) because UE comitee will be visiting us on wendesday.
I've never seen this code earlier. I've never seen this WHOLE SHITTY PROJECT. Guy that was developing this left few years back.
It's a complete spaghetti. 550 FUCKING LINES OF CODE for a one class, most of the methods are deprecated and won't even try to work on Android > 4.0. No documentation. Nothing works. Whole code is ridden with bugs, warnings and looks like it's glued together with duct tape. I even had to migrate from fucking Maven to Gradle it's that old. -
I’m currently working 2 jobs with over 60 hour work weeks in addition to my own SaaS company.
One job is full-time 40 hours, where I am a mid level developer and I just do the waterfall of tickets that is assigned to me. This place is unorganized and has almost no communication within the team.
The second job I am the Senior Dev and project lead. It’s a contract position that I put 20+ hours in on the evenings and weekends. Agile methodology, with a modern tech stack and I promote excellent communication as well as documenting everything.
I’m in a unique position because I’m able to see these differences and compare them side by side. My full-time job doesn’t really know about the second job. I get my work done, and that’s all that matters. This place is a mess. The project lead (CTO) is a helicopter boss that sticks his nose up at any type of formal documentation and practices. No tests are written.. no SIPs or deployment docs.. no stand ups or anything. I must also mention this team has 5 developers and a QA.. my team is only 2 developers and a QA. We get through tickets much faster.. it helps when I go over every single ticket that is created and add requirements and images..
I guess my point is... I’m about to be a full-time contractor because I can’t take this unprofessionalism anymore.
Just because these formalities technical take longer. It does decrease actual time spent developing a project. Spending a couple of hours on tests and requirements can save you days of back and forth in the future. Not to mention... document.. everything.1 -
While being an intern I had to make a finance system, no requirements except for the fact that it has to invoice the right person...
As soon as it was seemingly done, I'd go to the customer and he'd just say "why isn't x in there? This isn't what I meant! Where is y feature? Why does it work like this and not like that?" etc...
I had 0 experience, and was just told to make stuff as I went, horrible experience and truly the most frustrating project I've ever done. -
Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?
Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.
Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.
Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.
Worst developer experiences:
Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.
"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.2 -
I need advice!
I have a project idea that involves creating a cross platform gui but I cannot decide on a framework.
I have been toying with the idea of electron(ugh please no), c++ with either gtk+ or qt, Java with JavaFx.
I really want to be be able to create binaries for Mac windows and Linux while keeping bundlesize low and efficiency high. With this in mind I am leaning towards a c++ implementation but qt (which seems to be the best option for this route) has an insane learning curve. Is there something I am not thinking of that would satisfy these requirements?10 -
How Microsoft expect anyone to develop using any technology they introduce with so many limitations.
Moi a Microsoft dumb enthusiast said to myself : hey dude you are a developer stop whining about the app gap bust a move create decent array of apps and release them, went into a full project management mode wrote requirements did sketches and some prototypes, time to execute.
1. first app: image files organizer, viewer , with some light editor capabilities and album creator after some work i came to discover that you don't have a proper file system APIs to show a folder tree view in my app "WTF" there are work arounds and dirty solutions but seriously? i can only access the stupid media folders created by Microsoft and that's it.
so i ditched the apps until uwp become a development tools with target audience other than kids who eat crayons, and while using "Edge" i thought to my self : "you know what dude extensions are cool and if you do something like a speed dial it would be awesome"
fire up my text editor started writing my extension to discover that:
"you cannot use localStorage from local HTML files".
moral of the story
MS is failing with consumers not because people hate MS but rather MS hates itself like no engineer over there said to him self this is fking stupid ?
other limitations :
no proper system tray access
no registry access what so ever
and i have started 2 days ago.
yeah Ms this is the main app gap problem the uwp sucks big time. compared to android Java which has a great access to every aspect of the device even apple provide better APIs for their systems.
if uwp is MS future then rip MS.
please i stand corrected if anyone knows better.2 -
A shitty platform that, although open source, there is no clearly documented way of setting a development environment for it. This pile of crap states clearly that it does NOT support RTL languages. One of the core business requirements is Arabic support. What to do? Look for other platforms? WRONG!
Base the fucking business on it and ask ME to see why the SQL database is not encoding the Arabic characters correctly and to look into the logs that back-end puked. My expertise is mobile development anyways damnit. Sure the backend code is Java code (Java jokers and haters, not the appropriate place) and I know it but there is no fucking way to test that motherfucker or to build it! No fucking testing server can be made! Only instructions to get a Docker image pulled and set up.
FML.
"This company is a fucking م."
I cannot believe I am so frustrated that I am ending this rant with a fun puzzle.
Hints to help you decipher the quoted sentence:
Hint 1: That Arabic letter is the perfect letter.
Hint 2: You don't need to be an Arab to understand what it means.6 -
I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!
5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.
4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.
3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.
2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.
1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)
This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.
Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.
Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.
Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.
Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.
Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay -
Working as a Dev for a while now, I tell new people not to bother with it. There is never any job satisfaction as people in charge never understand the basics.
Instead of learning to write efficient code, figure out how to solve real business problems, work towards a maintainable flexible product to quickly deliver value on changing requirements, write automated tests to improve quality, maintainability and prevent live issues - basically do anything a good Dev strives for - you will just constantly end up working for people with no interest beyond the next couple days, on a shit code base that no one can understand, with people that don't want to learn anything about software design and just check boxes off.
Apart from pay this must be the worst career possible in a technical field.4 -
"if compiler can infer this, there is no need to add "x ->" , simply use it" ..AAAGHH FUCK YOUUUUU KOTLIN!! what else should i fucking not write? why do't you take a number of my employee and ask his requirements, maybe add a ShoppingKartApp.kt in your compiler next time? it will be completely inferred when i write "Fuck you" in the gradle.
And fucking companies are promoting this! I wonder how those devs are living there
Person A knows only that lambda is
{name:Type,name:Type->code}, and thus writes a clean code.
Person B comes says "This shit suck", writes "{ acc, i -> acc + " " + i }" ,goes away
Person A : "wtf is this shit? why it works?"
Please for the love of god, follow some rules! My first language was python, i love its zen:
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Readability counts.
- Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
- There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
- If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
-...
I just wish it follows at least one thing from python's zen : "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."3 -
Sooooo....worked at a place (which i think was my first rant on here lol) a little while back where, to keep a long story short, was treated like shit and still managed to pull out some magic for them before i left my contract (cos work pride).
Come to new company, it is a consultancy company. The project I worked on at the previous company, they had came (while i was there, i went to the meeting) and done some requirements analysis for them (that weren't even relevant, mostly because the CIO was a tard).
Come to find out today, through the grapevine, that these lot have been claiming that they done more than requirements and actually implemented the full solution and even wrote a case study about the shit they weren't involved in. "Oh look at this GDPR project we completed for this £400M turnover company and all the problems we solved".
More hurtful cos this project I done with no help from anyone, got moaned at every day, got my references threatened, wouldn't let me work from home but anyone else could. Serious, a lesser man would have punched the CIO....repeatedly.
What would you do? I'm getting sick of fighting in every job but also getting sick of never getting any credit for the shit I've done. -
A friend asked me a few days ago if I could maybe be interested in making their small company a website and accompanying CMS, because none of the out-of-the-box solutions seem to suit their needs. I agreed to think about it - at least let's see what the requirements are and so on, and see if I could and should do it or maybe redirect and point them to a better direction. Always help a friend in need is my motto. And to clarify, with these people I can be sure they're not considering this a friend favor (i.e. doing something for free, or for really cheap), but these people tend to be willing to pay relatively well.
But to the question: I've never done freelance work on this field - I have absolutely no idea how to evaluate the value of my work, e.g. how much should I ask? And what are the things I should take into account and think of differently versus being on full-time payroll in some company?1 -
First week at the University, i became a circular mail with an offer for a place in the webteam. Requirements were a basic knowledge in linux/ubuntu and its packagemanagement and also some minor basics with nginx.
one day later i decides to mail my interest and that i mostly self-taughted me using linux since some years and began programinga year ago with python and recently deployed my first project in a VPS with nginx.
either, my qualification is quite high for that job or i was the one and only applicant, but who cares, i'm in.
this is my first employment in the it area,so i'm quite exited, even its mostly an administrative position. i gonne administrate the vm's for some websites and a special portal for students.
but! due to the fusion of two faculties at my university, there will also be two websites to be merged( our is on zope/plone and the other is a typo3) (computer science vs media... no really^^
well, now i have to wait for the doodle for the first meeting -
It was great when non tech guys explained me the requirements. Now a bunch of technical managers do with no clarity to themselves and obviously we revamp it every time we give them a demo.
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Hey fellow devs,
i finally did it! i applied as a junior dev in a software company for inHouse projects. the job interview is today in one week.
little background story for those of you who are just procastinating at this time:
i have started coding when i was in school. just little stuff - nothing special. after i finished school i edjucated in the business field (did not found the english word. something like office person or in our words "user").
after that my company changed the ERP System and i wanted to do that so badly. and i got that job. i worked my ass of to get that baby running. from entering the orders to production to shipping and billing, i made that all happen by myself. as we had some very specific requirements i also wrote applications myself. after about three quarters of a year we switched to the new system and it ran smoothly (company is producing windows and doors). i was so proud when the first windows were finished.
BUT there was one problem. I was alone. no second it person i could talk to. no one i could learn from and no one who could learn from me. i then decided to change the company. same product, same job - but within a team. It was a whole other experience. i really enjoy the exchange with my colleagues. we learn from each other and we solve problems together. we can rely on each other. As i worked there i also wrote applications for inHouse usage and i even launched my own first app (not related to company - private commercial project)
BUT there is one problem. I am still the only dev. so i try to code the lease i can at my current job so that the team still works and the whole system stays maintainable for everyone. I do not feel good holding back the desire to code something. so after two years (and with a lot of talks with my cousin) i finally applied for a job as a "real" developer.
I have no bachelor, so the invitation for the job interview made me so damn happy. i really hope that i can transmit my passion for this job and if everything fits that they take me.
The next rant will then be about the result of my job interview :)
PS: even if i do not get the job. i am proud of myself that i applied!
Thanks for reading, potato potato1 -
TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.
Okay my team needs some advice.
Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..
Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.
ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.
The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....
We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.
I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...
Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.
Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions... -
What (realistic) requirements would you need to run windows 10pro OS with kali linux on a VM for pentest/ coding environment ONLY. no gaming etc. ?
Im starting my software development school soon, and im needin a new laptop.
Any requirements/ good to know appreciated from you old time code gods5 -
Don't you hate the subjectiveness of functional requirements and no functional requirements? I'm the only one?
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My DNS provider does not have an API. They do have one... That is wrong... But on the description page, they say we have to open a ticket to be given access. No requirements. Nothing...
And then I am told "they do no longer offer dns for private hosting". I don't even host with them, I only have a domain with them.
But the magical word is no longer. That means they did offer it. In the description of the API it still says "and for everyone who feels comfortable interacting with a REST API." Oh, and they asked anyone who works on it to be so nice and share any SDK's they might have coded up. Would have shared my SDK. Would have... If no Rust SDK was available yet.
So, what the fuck...
The problem with that is that I need a wildcard certificate for my homelab with DNS validation. So, I need to dynamically set a txt record. Now I wonder... Was this done on purpose? They are selling wild card certificates. Letsencrypt are giving them out for free. I bet they deactivated it, so they can sell more...
Anyway. Solution time.
Short term: I make my own API with black jack and hookers... And selenium.
Long term: I need to fucking move my domains to a different provider.
But what the fuck... What the fuck?7 -
The part with those goddamn change requests on top of the requirements that were never fucking stated correctly in the first place.
Hate that part, because the customer is always right!
Always right, my ass. Fucking asshole dickheads. -
Has anybody experience with Scrum in small web development agencies? Especially estimating stories with story points instead of hours/days?
We have a new junior project manager, without any practical experience working agile, who wants to establish scrum because what he read about it sounded so good... I already worked agile with kanban before and I loved it, but I only have little experience with scrum.
I think scrum, or agile in general, won't work with the clients we have. Most of the time, our clients have a fixed deadline, a fixed budget (either money or time) and they know their requirements, so there is no much room for beeing agile.
Regarding story points, I just adding an unneccessary layer of abstraction, because the customer wants to know how long a specific feature takes. Sure, story points are just another, more dynamic unit for time, but then why nut estimate in static time unit in the first place? Another fear I have, is that some devs may be more ignorant regarding deadlines and expectations on customers side. "yeah I'm working for 10 days on this story, but it's 8 points!" instead of informing the project manager "Currently I spend 2 days on this feature, we estimated 3 days, but it seems I need 3 days more".
Maybe I shouldn't be worried, but it would be great if you could share your experience and learnings. Thanks in advance!14 -
Guys I need to deploy a very simple authentication API service.
You register with a username (actually an ID with a determined format), a password and uuid. You login with your username and password and if credentials are correct you get back the uuid as a response (JSON or whatever the fuck).
If you forget your password, you can use your uuid (which is confidential, very long string) in some POST request to set a new password. If you forget your username, you use the uuid again in a GET request to get back your username.
I've been looking at a bunch of solutions online and I don't think they suit my purpose exactly and all require emails (Like Firebase, AUth0, etc.) So, let me get this straight: NO FUCKING EMAILS INVOLVED PLEASE.
The above are the EXACT requirements I need for my work (for a good cause too). I fucking hate 0-requirement exploratory research tasks and I'm plagued with those. Those requirements are the only way it should work. So again, NO EMAILS INVOLVED PLEASE.
Also, please note that I have never developed an API in my life. I feel like StackOverflow will be assholes about this so I am asking this here.
I know it is very easy to do and there are probably dozens of ways to do this. I just do not know how, documentations are vague and overwhelming (or I'm just a little stupid lately). Another thing is that I am not sure of how can I do this in the most secure way. Bonus if this can be dockerized.
I know I sound a little rude,so I am sorry. It is just my frustration and depressing times I am going through that's preventing from thinking straight.6 -
Do you ever feel your job is too demanding compared to other software engineering jobs?
I've worked in two companies for now.
First company, Kotlin microservices and we had QAs, didn't have to write a lot of tech specs and no post mortem or on call at all (not yet atleast), it was just talk to PO, he tells the business requirement, we work together to make tickets, no legacy code so was easy to know what to do for tech, no monolith to handle or anything, much easier, just code and meetings.
Current job is meetings with PO telling you what he wants, have to write a full on tech spec and also know business requirements and product knowledge as the current PO doesn't know anything about how the products work, writing huge tech specs, communicating on requests sent my clients on slack, pretty much always firefighting, the system is so fragile and legacy, coding is actually less its mostly spending hours finding out how this shittt legacy flows work (no docs) , PO pretty much does fuck all, just wants meetings and wants us to do very very stupid tedious low impacts projects. This bundled with oncall and onpoint and the absolute sheer amount of incidents our team is involved in (on average we have 4 a week LOL, varying size but they're all very annoying) and the overtime oncall benefit is so bad too, if you do get paged out of hours, you just get that hour back during work hours. In other companies like friends, you get paid for the whole time you're oncall, whether you get paged or not. I can't go out anywhere on weekends or anywhere at all during on call in case I get paged, which happens a lot. Its a cluster of a mess. This bundled with manager stoll not wanting to promote me to IC3 despite all I've done so far.
My question is, is this more normal than I think it is? Is this just how crap our career can be? Mind you I'm in the UK so not getting those mind boggling US wages sadly either. Have US colleagues in same team doing same job but obviously getting more11 -
Bad (or at least uninformed due to unclear requirements) design decisions lead to somewhat perplexing (and above all, frustrating) problems down the line...
Here I am, wrote a cli client for event bus subscription, and since EC2 is eqv to Docker, had to fix the main function to keep it alive - now the deploy stage on the ci/cd pipeline fails due to startup script timing out. But why tho?
I’m not really sure whether I should’ve designed this differently from the get-go or whether my build and deploy configs don’t match anymore due to recent changes and I should figure out what’s wrong with them... or both.
Bottom line is: I have no idea what I’m doing.9 -
Just received code review from interview technical task. 50 percent of it was because of encapsulation (that 5-8 variables could have been private instead of public). 20 percent was about shit that was expected but missing (error validation, dependency injection). It was missing because it was not specified in app requirements and also noone said that I have to build a production level application for a simple interview here. 10 percent was nitpicking about formatting(I used default intellij formatter) and one ide error that appeared because of project importing. And only 20 percent of feedback was actually constructive and useful. Cool. Also developer said that he was shocked that I made loading animation but didnt call it in my app. However I made it, but if you have fast internet connection it doesnt show up. I mean if you run my app on a phone with gprs connection u will see that damn animation. What Im supposed to do slow down the app so u could see it? But we are building production level app here no? Shit. It feels like he applied double standards to me or something. Half of review nitpicking about useless details and another half about shit that is expected to be in the app but was not even communicated. Also I did not get developers contact so I could ask him what the fck he wanted from me.1
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Right guys and gals, I need your opinions.
Recently was approached by a recruiter who thought I’d be a good fit for a role, a role that is a step up from senior dev but without moving into people / project management.
More like a bridge between architects and senior devs.
I thought what the hell, why not. So I agreed to go for it.
It could be quite a decent payrise (though that wasn’t my motivation for going for it) and I like the idea of doing more mentoring, design and research than I do now. It would involve stuff like learning new tech, coming up with examples and implementations of how the dev team need to use it to churn out user stories.
For the last few years I’ve been mainly a back end developer, which didn’t start by choice and I always liked to be full stack.
But the recruitment process for this role has been quite slow (number of reasons) and since then I’ve been given a new piece of work at my current employer doing some greenfield angular work, plus the c# back end.
I’m really, really enjoying this angular work. Haven’t done it for a while and it feels great to get back into it. Seem to be picking it back up with no problems, like the old magic is still there.
Also the money at my current place is good enough.
So now I’m wondering if I should bail on this other role in favour of seeing this out and maybe going back to being full stack (tho for reasons I’ll outline below in the long term that might have to be elsewhere)
But I’m also trying to remind myself that up until enjoying this work there’s a reason I decided to go for this other role.
Current place is a small company that has no project management process. It’s chaos, and everything’s an emergency. There are no requirements for anything, not enough people etc. No one has a clue how to run an IT project.
The one thing we do have is good development practices in our team and we have been greenfield for the last 12 months working on a new product. But we do tend to be pigeon holed into looking after a specific service/area.
But this new place if I got the role, is a bigger company (I’ve worked in small, medium and massive companies so I know what the difference is like), they’re a household name, they have resources for learning, putting people through aws certs, etc. They give people time each week to invest in themselves. Much more agile.
And thinking about it now you don’t often see a role that allows you to ‘move up’ without having to take on people/project management and still having time to be hands on.
(Just maybe more hands on with strategic work than delivering user stories for business as usual)
So just in general, what do you think? -
SQA here.
What do you even do when dev, other senior QA, your boss and management all give conflicting requirements for a big milestone planning while still ramping up?
My instinct tells me to do what my boss and dev tells me and to come up with the solution that makes the most sense.
No we don't have a product owner ffs. It's like a bizarre waterfall scheme. I have figure out this on my own and hope I made no big mistakes because the ones with the knowledge are unavailable to help. Been thrown in this shit and it's been 3 months I work here. I am honestly trying my best to filter the best out of this.4 -
How do I create a Collab..
Well, I'm looking to form a team of 2 - 4 members. We will be devoted to learning machine learning through books, Kaggle, self assignments and various group discussions and pair programming. We will form a group name, open a GitHub account and upload our projects there. Am looking up to extending it to build projects together. This can also help us build our portfolios.
There are no tight requirements. But some good programming skills especially in Python will be great and a good understanding of high school math. We will be learning together.3 -
Holy shit why does change management have to be such garbage? I've never worked anywhere with a formal change process that felt remotely like it adds value. It seems like it's even WORSE when there's a dedicated change/process team. They just get super edgy and jaded, likely because no one wants to follow their ridiculous requirements, and bitch at people whenever the real world happens and things have to happen "out of band".2
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Project manager pissing for a ticket with a vendor that provides no dev credentials, a new json property is added to an analytics script causing no harm at all, been chasing the PM for a week to do a deploy and merged the changes to a branch that has 6 different requirements, gotta do it early hours so I can enjoy my holidays with no issues...
... Project manager decides not to go live because he even told the stockholders of the existence of the requirement -
Following an interview, I've been tasked with creating a "simple address book" webapp with Laravel and Vue.js.
There isn't much in the spec, with the only requirements being the use of Bootstrap, no auth, and inclusion of pagination and searching.
This is very easy with Laravel and my question to the community is how much further do I go with this?
Should I add alphabetical pagination alongside laravel pagination? What about a nice material ui?
I sent a design from Dribble to the employer and asked if making the app look fancy would be worth my time. He said I'm free to use any front end design and lib that I want if I'm able to demonstrate my use of them in code review, and he also said that the project "was only intended to take you a couple hours" which it would if I weren't to add a fancy ui.
So, shall I just make a simple app with Bootstrap tables, add responsiveness and keep the css semantic for brownie points, or go all out and spend a day or two making it beautiful? There is one other candidate so I have competition.1 -
A friend outsourced a project to us with partial requirements. We developed it as per the requirements and submitted the app and admin portal to his client. I was aware of certain critical features missing in the requirement. Generally we provide an admin portal to manage the backend of the app, but in this project a backend was to be made but the adding or modifying users section was not mentioned in the requirement. My team presented the project and convinced them to create or modify users writing SQL queries on the production DB (they are sales guys with no technical knowledge)
P.S - we won't be responsible for any DB errors :P -
I need an idea for a JS coding challenge for a job interview that a poor unlucky person is going to take after me, 'cause i'm leaving..
Requirements: it must be simple, but not simple enough for my other two colleagues. Aka no webpack, no framework, plain js inside a webpage.
My other two colleagues don't even know how to do an array.forEach() or literally how to code in general. They are copy-pastah programmers.
How can i do that without offending anyone?3 -
Can you recommend a design pattern for dealing with workflows?
I am wondering how to represent a decision tree while also making it easy to maintain and each step should be unit-testable on its own.
I want to avoid a big if-else-block, but I am also unsure what design pattern to apply here.
Basically, there a bunch of yes-no-question (though some conditions may be more complex) that can be nested very deeply, and depending on a certain set of requirements we want to display different actions.
(The workflow is fixed, there is only 1 at at time yet it may change a lot over the next iterations until we figure out what our userbase wants.)4
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