A couple of years ago, I was working in a computer shop as a "technician", I was 15, first job I ever had.
One day an elderly lady came into the shop, probably 50'ish, she and her whole family "suffered" from electromagnetic radiation, and the mother had the worst suffering. She complained about her TV box that just had died.

I accept the tuner and see it's wrapped with 10 layers of aluminium foil, with a tiny hole for the IR receiver.

The whole box smells like burnt electronics, and the foil gets darker for each layer I unwrap. I try explain to her that the box gets warm and overheated by wrapping it like this, and she's lucky that it didn't catch fire.

I further explain to her that she will not get a new box, because the warranty does not cover _this_. The mother tells me she has to wrap it like this, because she gets headaches when she's watching the news.

She then proceeds to go into a rage mode and gets her whole family into the shop, where all of them starts yelling at me, the younger kids start throwing stuff down from the shelves and touching the TVs with sticky fingers (literally, sticky, like yuck!).

Unsure what to do, boss is in a meeting, and my colleague is busy in the back.

So I calmly tell them that in this building there's 4 wireless networks, 3 wireless phones, high voltage cables run in the wall behind me, there's factory tracks 20 meters behind the building, next door business is an electrician, you're standing in front of wall with 30-40 TVs, 5 HDMI splitters, 3 TV boxes and a Blu-ray player. And they've all been standing in front of them for the last 10 minutes.

They all suddenly feel really sick and run out of the store, never to be seen again. From that day, I decided I'll never work in a shop again, and pursued my dreams to become a developer.

TL;DR: Family is "sensitive" to electromagnetic radiation, almost put burnt down their house because of stupidity, yelled at me. I decided to pursue my dream as a developer.

When I quit my previous job, they hired 3 guys to replace me. One of them was a swedish guy that was completely useless. He lived in another part of the country, and our manager and a senior dev flew him in and interviewed him at the airport. That was obviously not sufficient.

I got tasked with helping him get started. The code base seen in retrospect sucked really hard, but he got the simplest tasks at first. One time he needed to add a checkbox to a form, and do something different in the BL when that box was checked. I showed him where in the code he needed to do the change, and let him on his own. 1 hour later he asked again. He hadn't even been able to place the if-statement. Omg.

I told our manager that they really should get rid of this guy, since he isn't qualified to be a developer. They didn't listen.

In Norway we have a 6 month test period where it's easier to let someone go. After that, it's quite hard to fire someone.

After a while I talked to a old colleague of mine, and they had finally been able to get rid of him. That had taken months. When he was told that he had to improve, he went to the doctor and got a sick leave. You can't fire someone on sick leave.. Finally he got the option of resigning himself, or being fired. He chose the first option..

He should have been transferred to sales. If he could sell himself as a developer, he could sell anything to anyone... :D

Why are people from Norway so good at editing files in Linux?
Their ancestors are vi-kings.

Haven’t posted here in a while, life has changed lots since last time. I applied to a new job in September/ October last year, called in for 1st round of interviews in December, got job offer in Valentine’s Day this year. I got a 42% Pay rise increase by going from private media company to governmental company.

Plus the annual pay and pension negotiations just got completed (all gov employees), so that’s a 1.55% payrise. And because I’m in an union, I might get another 1.24% payrise later this year.

So now I work at the National Archives of Norway. Which is just awesome.
Attaching a picture of my new desk, just missing the new 27” monitor I added on the left side.

So I started working at this IT company here in Oslo. Norway. After almost 6 months, I have almost not had anything to do, except little over just 1 month where I actually worked on a project, and now that is done. I have nothing to do, so today I applied for 11 jobs.

Question!

I am 26, and recently diagnosed with autism. An incredibly late diagnosis due to my absolutely amazing ability to keep everything internal.. It has caused my countless headaches and heartaches over the years and its good to finally understand what it is thst makes me how I am...

I am also aware that IT goes hand in hand with autism due to our thought process being so 'logical' and our acceptance of failure is.... Er... Not the best. But we also have the stubborness/determination to keep going, learn what it is we did wrong and improve upon it.

So my question really is, are many of you on the spectrum also? If so, are there any coping strategies that you can share with me/everyone who reads this?

By coping I don't mean just dealing with it, but I mean in the workplace. I've never had a job formally in IT because I never did any qualifications in it. Rebuilt my first pc at age 7 and been hooked since.

I have always been a mechanic because again, logic reasons.

I'm currently in contact with an organisation here in Norway called 'Unicus' who are specialised in employing people on the spectrum, specifically in the IT sector... Have any of you heard of them? They seem promising to me

Thanks for reading guys and please feel free to delete this if this really isn't the place for it, I just feel that within this community there are more of us and I would like to open the door for communication

devRant Stickers arrived in Norway!

If programming languages were countries, which country would each language represent?

Disclaimer: its just a joke

Java: USA -- optimistic, powerful, likes to gloss over inconveniences.

C++: UK -- strong and exacting, but not so good at actually finishing things and tends to get overtaken by Java.

Python: The Netherlands. "Hey no problem, let'sh do it guysh!"

Ruby: France. Powerful, stylish and convinced of its own correctness, but somewhat ignored by everyone else.

Assembly language: India. Massive, deep, vitally important but full of problems.

Cobol: Russia. Once very powerful and written with managers in mind; but has ended up losing out.

SQL and PL/SQL: Germany. A solid, reliable workhorse of a language.

Javascript: Italy. Massively influential and loved by everyone, but breaks down easily.

Scala: Hungary. Technically pure and correct, but suffers from an unworkable obsession with grammar that will limit its future success.

C: Norway. Tough and dynamic, but not very exciting.

PHP: Brazil. A lot of beauty springs from it and it flaunts itself a lot, but it's secretly very conservative.

LISP: Iceland. Incredibly clever and well-organised, but icy and remote.

Perl: China. Able to do apparently almost anything, but rather inscrutable.

Swift: Japan. One minute it's nowhere, the next it's everywhere and your mobile phone relies on it.

C#: Switzerland. Beautiful and well thought-out, but expect to pay a lot if you want to get seriously involved.

R: Liechtenstein. Probably really amazing, especially if you're into big numbers, but no-one knows what it actually does.

Awk: North Korea. Stubbornly resists change, and its users appear to be unnaturally fond of it for reasons we can only speculate on.

I went on vacation in Norway. And it's mandatory to visit viking ship museum if you are in Oslo. At the of the exhibition I came to souvenir shop. AND WHAT I SAW WAS MAGNIFICENT!
There was whole army of ruber duck vikings.
I thought of buying one but I didn't have a heart to replace my police officer McDucky.

Hotdog or Not Hotdog

Happy 17th of may from London

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

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

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

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

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

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

I think I have to leave the EU.
This is the straw to break the camel's back finally.

I am very disappointed, EU parliament.

Maybe Swiss, or Norway... or the moon, hmm...

The stickers found their way all the way to Norway. Thank you, devRant!

Country, job, and salery?

I'll start:
Norway
React Developer
55 k

Im 17 and Im studying IT in Norway. I started learning to program when I was 9 years old (web design) and then later moved onto Object oriented programming. Now in some classes we do web design, I can watch Netflix in programming classes

I asked the VMware crew at work when we were going to virtualize our network. This was about 5 years ago. I got basically laughed at for suggesting it. I asked when we were going to adopt Azure AD to ensure us being ready for moving to teams etc. Got insults back with how bad the cloud is.

Guess what two projects are getting finalized now? Glad I left that company. Going to enjoy some nice mellow weed, enjoy my 30 day x-mas vacay and jump fresh at a new position. New upstart with a security maker for the maritime sector. A company that embraces new tech by making it them selfs. New day with aiding in the development of an IoT based solution with cloud support.

Happy holidays peeps.

So it turns out that the iPhone X was one of the most popular christmas gifts this year in Norway. I mean fucking hell, how is that even possible given the price?

Hi guys, I got some questions for you:
I'm a 17 years old guy from south Italy with 5 years of programming experience, mainly with Java and Kotlin. Since finding a well paid job here is soooo hard (especially when it comes to IT), I will surely go to another country (England, Sweden, Denmark and Norway in my list) once I get my scientific high school diploma. Here are the questions:
1) I have very high skills on JavaFX, both front-end and back-end. Is JavaFX commonly used in companies? Or should I move to other technologies like Android?
2) Will my diploma (plus a good amount of open source projects) be enough to find a job?
3) What certified English level is commonly required in these countries?

Most awkward video meeting?

Can a conference call count? This happened several years ago.

Diving into international markets that could potentially make us millions of $$ (no pressure), while the phone was ringing the CEO's number (in Norway), my manager leans over and whispers
DevMgr: "This project will be managed using *proper* software development methodologies, none of this agile shit you want to use."
<CEO picks up>

I had already been in talks with their dev team to get a feel for their tech stack and we had discussed project milestones, potential release cycles (laying the ground work for using agile methodologies) before getting upper mgmt involved.

The partner dev team was listening and kept throwing out agile buzzwords and I could tell my manager was getting pissed. He would blurt out "Those specifications will need to be fully documented before PaperTrail writes one line of code!". No one said anything, but I could tell the other mgrs/VPs in the room were uncomfortable with the hostility towards discussing features.

Oh my god, I'm basically at the verge of self-destruction! I've been trying all day to set up a simple Node server with react, but it's never that easy, is it? You need Babel to transpile ES6 + JSX to ES5, and then you need Webpack for god knows what reasons, and there are so man configuration files and options, and there are 1000 tutorials with 1001 ways to do something. I've created probably 20 new project because when I complete a tutorial and try to do something on my own, all hell is loose and I get some cryptic error message and am unable to ever get it to work. Holy cow, I need a drink... Am I just a retard? Greetings from Norway, by the way!

Why does Norway have barcodes on their battleships? So when they get back to port, they can Scandinavian.

We had this social network in Norway, called Nettby (similar to MySpace). Where you could write HTML code on your profile page, and add css of you had a premium membership. That's how my interest for web started. i had no idea what I was doing.

Then I made a website for a LAN-party for my hometown, with booking seats and payment, and the works.

Made my first commercial website a year later, I was 12 at the time. 6000 NOK (underpaid, but for a 12y/o it was a lot of candy)

Fast forward to highschool, teachers say computers are a waste of time, and I'll never be successful in life with that.

Turned 20 a few months back, I run my own corporation, and work at mid-Norway's largest production company (web, 3d, video, graphics)

!Rant

Yes, I know I'm shameless, but here we go:

Are there any norwegian devs out there that are looking for a new colleague (webdev)? :D
I'm going to be out of work in a few months time, and have started applying for jobs in the Oslo area, but most jobs I see listed require 3+ years of experience. I've worked with web for about 9 months and I'm keen to get more experience. Interested in a full time job or being a trainee.

Proficient in HTML, CSS/SASS, JavaScript/jQuery, PHP, Wordpress, MySQL.

If yoy know anything, please let me know :)

i wonder if Norway is a cool place to work in. ?

Best place to buy rubber ducky?
(Not Amazon)

Why does Norway have barcodes on their battleships? So when they get back to port, they can Scandinavian.

Are there any Italian devs here? Or anyone who wants to move to italy? 😂

I built startupjobsitalia com a couple months ago to help early Italian startups and founders find local talent. I moved to Italy from Norway in 2022 and noticed that there wasn't a dedicated site for this like they have in the Nordics!

It was a good way to learn Next.js, OAuth, and Supabase, but it'd be way cooler if Italians could actually get some value out of it🤞🏻

Company policies when it comes to hiring in Norway is super strict. Being a self-taught developer for over 10 years and I still can't even land an interview because I don't have a formal education. Though this might be because I don't live in the capital and don't have a lot of chances to apply to jobs

I want to go to Switzerland, Norway or the Netherlands, find a person who’s healthy both mentally and physically but somehow still unhappy, and beat the shit out of them.

Have anyone in Norway/Scandinavia ordered a devduck/apparel from the swag store and can tell me how long it did take? Want to order one, but not until at the start of next year.

Just a little shout out to my fellow Norwegians here! Anything exciting happening?