This was during the first day of my first real dev job, straight out of college. I didn’t have have much experience with version control since I did mostly solo projects in college, and I wasn’t exposed to SVN or Git in school at all.

One of the senior devs was going to give me and another new guy a brief overview of the codebase. He sets us up with the GitHub repo for the codebase and tells us to clone the codebase locally. I didn’t really know what this meant but I felt kind of embarrassed to ask, so I just clicked “download as zip” on The GitHub repo.

After a minute he saw what I had done and was like “yeah, that’s not what you want to do” and showed me how to clone it. I was kind of embarrassed but I learned Git pretty quickly after that.

I don’t really have a moral to this story except that “no question is a stupid one” is much easier said than done for many people, and it can be embarrassing to ask certain questions sometimes.

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

Smart India Hackathon: Horrible experience
Background:- Our task was to do load forecasting for a given area. Hourly energy consumption data for past 5 years was given to us.

One government official asks the following questions:-
1. Why are you using deep learning for the project? Why are you not doing data analysis?
2. Which neural network "algorithm" you are using? He wanted to ask which model we are using, but he didn't have a single clue about Neural Networks.

3. Why are you using libraries? Why not your own code?

Here comes the biggest one,

4. Why haven't you developed your own "algorithm" (again, he meant model)? All you have done is used sone library. Where is "novelty" in your project?

I just want to say that if you don't know anything about ML/AI, then don't comment anything about it. And worst thing was, he was not ready to accept the fact that for capturing temporal dependencies where underlying probability distribution ia unknown, deep learning performs much better than traditional data analysis techniques.
After hearing his first question, second one was not a surprise for us. We were expecting something like that. For a few moments, we were speechless. Then one of us started by showing neural network architecture. But after some time, he rudely repeated the same question, "where is the algorithm". We told him every fucking thing used in the project, ranging from RMSprop optimizer to Backpropagation through time algorithm to mean squared loss error function.

Then very calmly, he asked third question, why are you using libraries? That moron wanted us to write a whole fucking optimized library. We were speechless at this question. Finally, one of us told him the "obvious" answer. We were completely demotivated. But it didnt end here. The real question was waiting. At the end, after listening to all of us, he dropped the final bomb, WHY HAVE YOU USED A NEURAL NETWORK "ALGORITHM" WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPLEMENTED? WHY DIDN'T YOU MAKE YOU OWN "ALGORITHM"? We again stated the obvious answer that it takes atleast an year or two of continuous hardwork to develop a state of art algorithm, that too when gou build it on top of some existing "algorithm". After listening to this, he left. His final response was "Try to make a new "algorithm"".

Needless to say, we were completely demotivated after this evaluation. We all had worked too hard for this. And we had ability to explain each and every part of the project intuitively and mathematically, but he was not even ready to listen.
Now, all of us are sitting aimlessly, waiting for Hackathon to end.😢😢😢😢😢

To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.

I have a bunch of contesters fort the worst interview.

#1 The Dishonest Ignorant

Me: *asks question*
#1: *stumbles*
Me: It's okay to say that you don't know.
#1: *continues to ramble on without making sense*
Me: Well, okay. That is all. I don't think that this will be a fit.

#2 The fraud

Me: How would you rate your knowledge in object orientated programming?
#2: Very advanced! I am an expert!
Me: Can you state the difference of an interface and an abstract class?
#2: *surprised pikachu-face* Well not that advanced!

#3 The trickster

During a skype call (without video):

Me: *asks question*
#3: *keyboard sounds aclacking*
Me: Are you googling?
#3: No *click clack click a clack* ... and to answer your question: *starts reading from the first search results*

The real bummer is, that in all of these cases, just saying "I don't know" would have been fine. (The "expert" OOP-guy would still have some explaining to do.)

It's not like that our interview process resolves around trick questions or that you'd get kicked out for getting one answer wrong. Though how can I trust somebody not to lie to me on a daily basis if they fake their interview?

We keep the interview relatively basic and rely on real-word coding exercise anyway and it helps us to get an idea on where we would gain support from them and where we need to support them.

As a developer you spend a lot of time learning new stuff anyways.

It blows my mind.

!rant

I feel darn good today! I caught some A-holes cheating the system on Stack Overflow.

So basically a question was asked with no code examples present and not a single reference to any framework being used.
The tag only had 'javascript', which probably limits to only 157.244.457 existing frameworks.

I'm commenting something like 'Show us your code so we can have a look'.

After 2 minutes, out of the blue, an answer appears. AND WOW! This guy had a Magical 8 Ball™!
He could predict the framework AND had a very specific fix. Just a one-liner! Go figure!

So I'm like thinking.. What the fuck just happened? Did I miss something? «Going over the question two more times»

All of the sudden, up-votes start popping up all over the place. The question was marked 3 times, the answer was marked an up-voted multiple times, and THEN it hit me (I'm kind of slow).
I checked both user profiles and instead of the usual 'air of mystery', these guys were actually dumb enough to include their company name.

AssertEquals == true.

So in the comment section, I raise my concerns on the legitimacy of the question as clearly this was 'telephoned' as we say it in Dutch, meaning as much as 'rehearsed' in this context.
But as if that was not enough, this another guy comes in and COPY/PASTED(!) the answer of guy #1. Again. Up-votes. EVERYWhere.

So I start going over some of the questions and answers of The Three Musketeers or TTM, as I'll refer them as of now.

TTM had posted over 15 questions combined, mostly crap and incomplete no-code questions. And they had answered most of their own questions.
Sometimes another guy's answer was accepted with zero up-votes as a smoke screen while the real winner was one of their own.

I marked ALL of these questions for moderation, left for lunch, and came back to see how far my blast radius reached.
Turns out, pretty damn far! Although their accounts have not been deleted, TTM have lost most of their reputation points.

They will remain on my watchlist for a couple of months. I know that is quite childish of me, but I just call it my 'guilty pleasure'! ;D
And besides, what else is there to do, instead of browsing DevRant?

On being a woman in tech...

You lads probably have (and my fellow ladies certainly have) heard of "impostor syndrome" and, if you don't experience it, you possibly wonder what living with it is like.

Here's an example from this weekend.

Be me, about 5 years into my career, graduated from a top college, feeling decent but still unsure of skill.

Company gets a 4 week trial of an online learning website. It includes optional assessments, so that you know where in the video lessons to start. Rankings are novice, proficient, expert.

Hear from our QA that he got ranked "proficient." Which is a pretty broad category, but I become super afraid that I'll also be assessed as "proficient" and it will look like I have the same dev skills as a fucking QA (our management overlords can see our scores).

Boyfriend has me do some deep breathing before starting the test, because it's obvious how stressed I am.

Finally take it and get ranked "expert", in the 97th percentile, even though some technical difficulties made me miss four questions in a row. I decide to use my do over, and get ranked "expert" again, this time in the 99th percentile.

You'd think I'd be like, "Lawl, I can't believe I'd get the same score as our QA!" And there is some of that. But there's also the thoughts of, "that test could have been more thorough," "that score wasn't real because I resaw a question and got the right answer the second time," and "99th percentile isn't that great on a platform where new developers are over represented."

And this is all despite the fact that, if you were to ask someone how confident I am, the answer would probably "confident as hell."

Not saying this to start any fights. Figured it could be some interesting insight into a world that some people don't experience! (not that males aren't allowed to have impostor syndrome!)

Back in my teenage , a friend of mine asked me «Can you make me a software that guesses the result of a football match ?» I said «Sure, but you have to tell me how to calculate the chances of a team»
«Yeah, use the previous performances in the league»
«Ok, but you have to tell me how to calculate the expected result using previous performances» He laughed at me and said «If i knew how to calculate chances of winning/losing, i would not need a software!»
I tried to explain it simply «Computers can execute basic operations like sums or subtractions, and they know how to follow a list of basic instructions to give you a result»
He looked me like «If computers are so stupid like you are telling me now, are we all crazy idiots trying to learn how to use stupid machines??» and stated that i obviously misunderstood the real power of a computer. I walked back home thinking how funny was my friend believing in some kind of magic inside box called pc.

Few years later, i start studying IT at university. In the free time i look for small jobs like website development, small office network setup, pcs repair.
I continue noticing people believing that pcs knows what to do and how to do it.
«You sure I lost my data ? No i didn't do a backup. You sure my pc didn't do a backup ? No i hadn't a backup software»
«Why antivirus asks me what to do with the viruses it found. It should delete them obviously! Change my antivirus, it's too stupid for my pc»
«I want more people finding my business thanks to my website. How I imagine my website ? Yeah it has to be cool and full of cool stuff»

All that boring stories leads to my final question :

is our job dealing with persons who think we are some kind of wizard, well learned about dominating the pc magic ?

Please answer no.Please.

A Fellow Ranter said I should introduce myself, so here I go.

Me = {
Gender = "Male",
CodeOfChoise = {"lua", "PHP"},
Age = "28"
Location = "404"
}

No really here we go, I am Rex, I am dyslexic and forget code really badly but it does not stop me from trying to have fun with some ideas, I use mostly PHP these days but when I want to make a quick windows tool I use a app called AMS or AutoPlayMedia Studios what as a nice lua scripting language back end.

I been coding on and off for many years since I was about 15 and I been in love with computers since I was about 6 (don't tell my wife).

So far I like the site, its better then Twitter and Facebook as it's code related and fun to read and some stuff gets the cogs a turning.

I don't have any real foot print in the dev world, I get by but I not here to be loved, or to be big in any field, I am here because I enjoy my tech.

I leave this little introduce me with a question, what was your first or first memorial computer.

Mine was the Acorn A4000 Mixed with parts from the A3000 and A5000's :) she was a little bit of a mix match.

Freaking tech support.
Freaking sparkhire.

Their 'one-way interview' bs only supports flash. Flash. in production. in 2019. Flash died years ago, and its support ends next year. What the crap?

Anyway, I finally decided I should do the interview since they already have all of my information anyway. Thanks, "privacy-conscious" third party. Totally appreciate it.

I spent half an hour and couldn't get flash working on their site (but all other sites were fine), so I contacted their support. I gave them all the relevant specs (inc. ofc browser), the steps to reproduce, and all of my attempts at fixing the issue.

To their credit, I recieved a response within a few minutes. To their discredit: their response was: "What browser are you using?" This question was followed by my report (including, ofc, my browser and all the other overlooked details), immediately followed by a "debugging info" section appended by their support service that also included my browser, os, and other specs.

Learn to fucking read.

Their suggestion? Use google chrome. Barring that: record your 20-30 minute video by holding your phone in front of your face the entire time. I am so not kidding.

They also asked what page i was having difficulty on. You guessed it: the page url was also included within that "debugging info" section.

It wasn't a form letter, either. I'd understand if it was all automated, but it was a real person who was really typing up the emails, and really didn't bother reading a damned thing.

I did end up getting flash working, but their "tech support" (script-reader) was entirely useless.

The education system is a fucking joke. How do you get through all the required courses and get to the capstone course where your one goal is to build a simple prototype of a project(like a simple website) for a real world client and not know HTML or CSS when you spent a whole fuckboy semester on a class dedicated to HTML, css, JavaScript and the teacher gave you the PHP. Not only that but you can't even figure out how to use a simple google search to look up the documentation on any of these topics or even the easy to follow tutorials littering the internet on how to use Bootstrap which is what we're fucking using to make it faster to develop the core logic of our app but all you fucking want to do is take shortcuts and create a PowerPoint presentation in google slides and make an easy project look like shit and make me and yourselves look like shit. But don't fucking worry, I'll code the whole thing in a fucking night because you didn't do your part of taking care of just the front end and planned for your incompetence and lack of questions or help. I know you're busy looking for a job for after you graduate but you can't even answer a simple programming question. Let me give you the solution on how to reverse a string, cuz you don't remember c# but it literally takes 30 seconds to google the solution that is everywhere. My project team is why no one takes a degree from this university seriously.

Interviewer: So which university are you from?

Me: I am from "foo" university.

Interviewer: So why did you not go to "bar" university?

Inner Me: Wtf kind of a question is that. Why the fuck aren't you a unicorn with pigs flying out of your ass and a globally reknowned researcher at Stanford?
We all end up where destiny takes us. Some of us try very hard but things don't magically happen for us. We keep trying but at the end of the day you end up where you end up.

Real Me: I just finished my High School and had the entry test the next day. I was not prepared at all.

Is there an app for devs who are looking for a flat. Something like devRent?

So, a friend of mine just called me and asked what is it that I do in programming, and if I knew Java, because her stepfather owns a company, and they're currently hiring. Since she's not a tech person, I answered "basically, websites", but the stepfather was asking something else in the background, and she couldn't understand what the heck he was saying, so she put me on the phone with him.
I then explained, I do all kinds of web related stuff, from simple HTML single page sites, to WordPress themes and whatever, so I know PHP, Javascript, and all that crap.
And then, he asks me this wonderful question:
"And programming languages... ?", as in "do you know any?"
... I was like... Wut?...
I mean, I see where he's coming from. He probably meant compiled languages or something, but still... I felt like screaming at him "WEB DEVELOPERS ARE REAL PROGRAMMERS AND DESERVE SOME LOVE TOO YOU KNOW?! 😢"

I decided to go with a "nah, not compiled languages, no..."

I bet this guy feels real fuckin helpful, editing not only the question, but literally every answer in the entire thread. His contributions include:

Capitalizing names.
Adding italics to links (Really, he took the time and clicked "edit" just to do that to an answer)
Adding the word "The"

The fact that people spend their time religiously doing this makes my head spin.

Also aren't these edits bad? the title should be in google speak (i.e. short and broken English) so that they can be found from a search engine. I'm sure SO has some rules about the title or something, but I feel like it would be better in google speak.

Pseudo-rant:

I'm worn out from working a full-time job, working on my app, and having a family.

My app has potential, I launched it in July (iOS only so far) and am already well over 1000 active users. It's first week in the app store, it was in the top 100 for it's category.

It has some bugs that I'm working out, and some features that are in high demand.

I'm currently completely refactoring the API because I let it become spaghetti as I went from concept to v1.

That refactor means a rewrite of the website, and a major refactor of the iOS app, which is all fine and dandy.

On to the question: I am an engineer/architect, not a business major. I know I could really use help, and I know the perfect people to try to bring on, but also know I have nothing real to offer them other than a stake in the company.

As a developer, does a stake in a promising, but unproven company have enough prospect to sacrifice your time for?

Am I just being impatient, and should I continue nibbling at it myself until I get there, even if it takes a long time?

How do you determine the stake to give up, when you know that you COULD do it all yourself and keep all the monies?

I should have taken some business classes.

My father while I was tinkering in the workshop :
"You see, I think you chose the wrong studies, you would have liked something else like material science a lot more."
At this moment my face took a question mark shape.
"Wait.. What? I mean... You know, I quit mechanical engineering to computer science, I actually made this decision because I thought it was better for me."
Him :
"But you will never have a good job in it. Material science for example is the booming industry, it's the future."
"What the... No, just no. Every year at my university several mechanical engineering students get thrown out because they can't even find an internship. Whereas most CS students find more than one and end up sharing job offers with their friends. And talk about an interesting job, in the mechanical domain everything already exists and it's just a matter of applying the same boring standards over and over again, when it's not just pure technician managing. In CS new technologies and tools appear regularly, keeping it interesting because evolution is hardly limited by real life physics, just by one's brain."

Pissed me off.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

I've seen a job vacancy that asks for the following characteristics in a developer:

- extraverted, do'er (as opposed to thinker), out-of-the-box, curious, sees solutions and not problems, structural thinking vs. theoretical thinking, loves change, acts immediately, makes choices under stress, critically questions themselves if things go wrong

What the [censored] kind of programmer is that? Sounds more like a wannabe brogrammer type.

A typical, real programmer is introverted (for he is introspective, detail-minded and is therefore good at inspecting problems and finding solutions for them).

Seeing problems is not a bad thing, it's in fact necessary to be able to identify issues and not act like your typical manager who only wants to rush to solutions. He thinks deeply and theoretically before he takes action. Theory is the foundation of identifying a problem.

What programmer is stress-resistant? It's not normal for the human brain to be able to deal with stress; this is why switch-tasking is so hard.

Question yourself if things go wrong? Perhaps, but this sounds more like trying to shove the blame around.

Since we live in a rigid computer world with rigidly-defined protocols (say, HTTP), it is often useful to think in a conventional way. Out-of-the-box? Sure, if you're being innovative, or sure, as a tangential characteristic.

In my professional opinion, this vacancy reeks of bad corporate culture.. and the biggest alarm bell I find is: "There is free beer!" Err.. yeah. Anyway.

Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.

I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.

Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

A sign in front of startup office:
Do not feed the developers! We keep them on a soylent diet - eating real food might make them question their life choices.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

A recruiter asks: "Why are you looking to leave your company ?"
If you tell them you want to grow, they think you have a hidden political agenda.
If you tell them that your boss is unfair, they will think you have problems with authority.
If you tell them that you are not satisfied with the current salary, they will think you are greedy.
If you tell them that you do not get along with someone, they will think you are hard to work with.
If you say you want to be closer to home to spend time with your family, they will think you are lazy.
If you tell them that you are looking for bigger challenges, they will think you are not honest.
If you tell them that you want to acquire new skills, they will think you will quit them when you are done acquiring.
If you tell them they are the ones who initiated the contact with you, and got you interested, they will think you are a
smart-ass.
The truth is - all the reasons above are valid, and those are the real reasons why good people quit.
Which makes this question stupid - makes people uncomfortable..

At one of my former jobs, we devs had to do all sorts of non-dev work, such as writing quotes and even contracts!

The CEO of that company had this naughty habit to contact devs directly without delegating through the CIO. Sure, if it's really urgent like when some system is down because of a bug, go ahead and disturb a dev. But interrupting coders to write some freaking quote? Come on!...

Once, that CEO asked me to stop everything I was doing to write a quote to a customer ASAP, as this was really urgent.

I spent several hours writing that quote. It had to be done right as any specifications in our quotes were used in our agreeements and were referred to in the case of any dispute. So not only were we devs and salesmen in the same time; we also needed to be lawyers.

When I was done and delivered the quote to the CEO, he told me he had no intention to take on that customer in the first place. Instead, he wrote a polite we-are-not-interested e-mail to the customer and cc:d it to me just so that I could read for myself how very sleek a businessman he was.

Me: why did I have to write that quote when you knew all along that you were not going to use it anyway?
Him: It's for your own personal development.

Another naughty habit of that same CEO is that he made "jokes" and remarks that I found inappropriate, such as "You walk like a drunken sailor".

Later, he decided to discontinue our team/product because "it isn't proftable". Well, what do you expect when devs are forced to waste half day completing pointless tasks?!

It was for the better anyway, and I was actually relieved when I left the company. I'm still thinking though, that the real reason he sacked me is that I am too honest and not the docile kind of employee that would be ideal for him. I did question some of my tasks, and worst of all: I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes.

First story (not rant) :3

So I was asked to set problems for an online programming contest for my college (I'm a sophomore)

The participants were students from my college.

Teacher told me "make as hard as you can"

I gave it my all.

:|

1 person solved the first question. Nobody solved the other four. :|

Not sure if I should be proud or sad.

And if you're wondering - here was my first question -

Sam wants to invest in real estate. He's got X dollars to spend. He knows the expected value per square meter of a given property. He knows the coordinates of the vertices of the polygon shaped properties he's interested in.

(both the values and coordinates for each property are given in input)

Find the maximum return on investment he can get.

(answer is, basically you calculate the area of each polygonal house using half the vector cross product, multiply it with their expected value per square meter, and then apply a dynamic programming - knapsack approach)

;-; I really thought it was a nice question man. ;-; I put so much thought into others too. ;-;

Got ignored. ;-;

Question time:

Has anyone used PHP unit with Selenium before?

I have a.. well words can’t explain it nice enough but, beyond a joke, not even funny, spaghetti code base I’ve come to inherit recently, which god help me, doesn’t follow any design patterns at all, it’s just a stamp this here, staple this down over here and throw paint at the wall and hope it sticks.

It’s a mixture of procedural and functional with the rare class kind of mess.

So attempting to refactor by any means is not a real possibility without some kind of behavioural testing in place first otherwise I know I’m going to end up breaking something somewhere and not even know it.

Also if anyone has had the privilege of such code bases, tips to dealing with the mess are appreciated.

Oh and no, I can’t rm -rf or start again.😭

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

I’m developing a fairly sophisticated desktop app in Python with PyQt5 as the widget set. Because my partner insists that all the kids these days love Python.

Piss on Python. And that goes double for PyQt5.

I’m on the absolute hardest section of the app. It’s a fairly complex import of data from PDF reports. There are so many different parts that I decided to go with a wizard.

So, I built a QWizard in Qt Designer. It generates a C++ .ui file, but you just truck it over to the command line and run this pyuic5 command, and it converts to a handy dandy Python class. Woo. You can subclass it and consume it from your Python script.

Sounded SO MUCH EASIER than writing the wizard from scratch. But OH NO. I need to do custom validation on my custom text control at every stage to control when the Next and Finish buttons are enabled, which means I gotta overwrite some damn event.

But I can’t. Because I can’t subclass the individual pages. Because they’re part of the same damn file and the wizard offers no access to them.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to have to completely redesign the wizard so that it’s pages are in separate files, which means I have to recode the bitch as well.

The cherry on top is that there’s zero documentation for this specific thing. None. No QWizard documentation exists for PyQt5 (if there is, they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it), so I have to read the documentation for PyQt4. Not the same animal. Close, but different. Even with the differences aside, this documentation is minimal and useless. “We’re going to tell you in very general terms what you should do, but we’ll give you zero idea how to do it. And we know the very common code method you’ll want to try first won’t work.”

And getting at this stuff when you do it in Qt Designer is WAY different. And all that documentation is in C++. Because apparently you HAVE to speak C++ if you want any real info about PyQt. Because that’s perfectly reasonable, right?

So, now I’ve lowered myself and posted a question on Stack. Because, hey, once you get past the power-tripping, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling, neck-bearded high school punching bags picking apart your question rather than, I dunno..., BEING HELPFUL, sometimes you can get good info there. Sometimes. They seriously saved my ass at least one time.

But yeah. Fuck Python. Fuck everything Qt.

Getting real tired of having to reteach the basics of relational databases to the same 2 people. You were brought in as the expert in databases and SQL Server, I shouldn’t have to teach you about effing primary keys, secondary keys, many-to-many relationships, and how to join the damn tables in a basic query. Your 5 years of experience are obviously a waste if all you did was select * from bullshit. This is the 2nd week and 22nd you’ve asked the same damn questions. Get your crap together and study your ass off if you don’t know. Google the error messages if you don’t remember how to solve it before coming to me with the same question a 23rd and 24th time. I’m not going to get any work done if all you do is ninja up behind me with your laptop in tow and just spout off the question that could be done over IM or a quick duckduckgo/google search. Headphones in = do not disturb ya rude mother duckers 🦆.

So I work for a company that does outsource, this company is pretty nice, but I don't get to see it too often. The one where I'm outsourcing though is the one where I spend all of my time.

Now, this company is a kind of a startup working with AI and Deep Learning (but not if statements :o ), but I came here as a full stack python developer that should implement their AI modules into real apps (mainly web apps).

Everything sounds good untill now, I learn lots and I'm doing what I wanted: python development. The problem is: management + one kiss ass guy.

The amount of work that should be done and the deadlines that should be kept are so messed up that I end up working extra hours, sometimes even in weekend, just to get it done. I'm the only apps developer there, so passing my tasks is not an option. I tried to talk about this, but I was met with a "loser can't keep up even with these few tasks..." kind of attitude.

Moreover, there is a guy that would do anything for the boss's attention, so he speaks everyone there behind their backs (and we all know it, but he's the favorite and he actually knows his stuff so we can't do much about him).

Now the question: what should I do? I only have 5 months here (so leaving would put a hole in my CV, I don't even know what to answer at this interview question "why are you leaving"), plus that the managers from these two companies are highschool friends which means that if I go and ask for a different project, the atmosphere at work will change (maybe this is overthinking already, but I can't help it). Also, last week I could barely get through the days without crying from stress.

TL;DR: I learn a lot from this company, but the deadlines are killing me and my stress level is at an all time high. I want to leave, but I kind of can't because I want my CV to look good.

So yeah, this is my first real rant, feels good to put it out there

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

dev: “I want to start working on [feature]”

Me: “I already started to work on it, sorry for not mentioning it, we need specs from design team before I can go on, but I’d suggest going for another task meanwhile”

Manager: “noooo design is very very busy, [dev] will take care of it.”

Me: “[dev] still needs specs from the design team... and I am half done with it so no real point in re-writing the same code I wrote”

Manager: “just trust me, we do this and [dev] takes care of it.”

*me and [dev] look at each other perplexed and just nod to the manager cause it’s Thursday and the fucks to give are over*

... am I actually a patient in an asylum? I question my sanity after this exchange of words.

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

Last night I had a very strange dream. I should point out in advance, all of this is fictional and none of it really happened.

I was looking at an answer I posted on Stack Exchange.. for the sake of argument, let's say it was Super User. I remember the question being about volume limiting, which is actually an issue I and many other iOS 14.2/14.3 users have been facing in the last few months. Apparently it has been partially addressed in 14.4.

In the real world I fixed the issue by jailbreaking the phone and unloading the healthd service, while in the dream that was the answer I had documented on Super User. In reality I have documented it in several other places, but not there.

Fast-forward a couple of days in the dream where the answer was posted, and I was now looking at a reply. I don't remember the exact details of it, but apparently in the answer I had posted something about my network.. a screenshot from the iPhone? And the comment on it basically said something along the lines of "your answer is shit, and you probably have a very basic internet connection with default settings". I was really upset by that, as my network is actually quite advanced (on account of being a sysadmin).

Then I woke up and realized that it was all just a dream...

!rant

Been working on a custom html partial injector (js/jquery only) as both a personal challenge and utility to use for my website scaffold. Being a challenge, i decided not to look at any implementation from another JS framework. I won't lie, i had it 'working' at least 5 times now, but this time, after about 3-4 days, i think i got it for real. And the cool thing? It's a bit less code than my original implementation even with my generous whitespace and verbosity. And it even unwraps nicely so it looks like a regular html page in the dev tools.

I love when things finally work as they should--God knows i question my motives before then.

Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".

I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.

HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.

Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.

---

With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.

I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.

What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.

Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.

Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.

Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...

"It's for your security."

"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."

"But we can't, for security."

"It's not security. Get me your boss."

...

"It's for security."

If I had to name one of my weaknesses it would definitely be impatience.

When I'm working on a backlog issue I want it to be done, finished, pronto. In the real world that's ofcourse not always the case, I can't disturb my colleagues with every question or ask for feedback every minute. I also hate it to have to wait for someone else to do something for me if it's blocking me, like when I need to fix something on a server but don't have access or when I somehow don't have permission for something and have to wait for someone to come and fix it. Even worse: Slow programs that fuck me up when I _just a second ago_ figured out how to fix a bug or implement something.

I also have to wait for pull request reviews so I usually end up with a bunch of stacked PRs that all feature small changes but are dependent upon each other because I needed a change for a different change, never more than 2-level stacks though!

Obviously it's a bit childish to lack professional patience, but it's definitely something that I wanted to rant about and think I should grow in.

When you're developing it's very well advised to run your software locally in an environment as much as possible matching the real environment.

So for example, if you're running linux on production then you also run it locally to run your code.

Here's where people need to shut the fuck up:

No, mac is not good for linux development. Not unless portability is already a concern that you have and even then it might be counter productive. So many times when people say this, portability isn't not a concern. What runs on servers is up to them.

If your servers are going to be centos, then you develop with centos. Not with debian, gentoo, ubuntu, maxosx, etc.

Even different linux distros are a headache for portability when it's just to support a few desktops for development so don't think that macosx is going to cut it. It might not be as radical a difference as between windows and linux traditionally is but it's still not good for "linux" development. I don't think people making that statement really know what linux is now how different distributions work.

What you use for your graphical operating system doesn't matter to much but when you run your code then there's a simple solution.

Another thing people need to shut up about. It's not docker, unless you're already in Linux where docker is one of many options such as chroot or lxc.

This question always comes up, how do you developer for linux in windows? No it's not docker it's virtual machine.

It's that simple. You download the ISO for the distro you want and then install it on a VM. What does docker for windows do? It runs a linux VM that runs docker.

This may come as a great shock to developers around the world but it is possible to run linux in a VM and then any linux application your want including docker.

Another option is to shove a box in the corner, install what you need on it, share the file system and have people use that to run their code. It really is that easy.

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.

I got a median-pay front-end job through a contractor (after a contract from hell...but yeah I didn't learn...) and I'm getting zero assignments after a month and nobody seems to know what my role is.

I'm one month in, and every week I have to email my boss to remind her to sign my paycheck, which is stressful because I'm charging for my time because my assignments are like "Research this" or "look at this Wordpress theme or brand guide". The team never communicates but once a week, and I'm beginning to believe that I'm not a good fit for the team because they are impossible to get a hold of and the sysadmin won't give me access to anything even when I CC my boss. (I don't want to grief this guy...) Despite this, I've been told privately by higher-ups on a few occasions that they plan to hire me full time by November...

My SO thinks that the reason people are so dodgy toward me is because they literally do nothing and I'm breaking the flow of that by asking for things. I'm used to agency output, which can be toxic and where everything is 'due yesterday', and I'm watching this team work on assignments ten times slower than normal. ("You want to change a phone number on a website footer? You'll get it next week...maybe." I can't step on toes because I don't have access...) I'm perfectly fine with having to wear several hats at a low-stress job, but I can't even get my first assignment and I'm still being asked who I am in weekly meetings, or asked things like, "Would you even be willing to relocate here?" (I actually live DOWN THE STREET FROM THE OFFICE!! WHY DO I HAVE TO BE REMOTE? Why am I being asked this question?) It feels like my boss impulse hired me, with zero input from the team, and had no real reason to hire me in the first place...

It could also be another issue: Yeah, my experience is in PHP/JS/React, "but here have a seven year old .NET project and a company laptop with zero documentation and make this form import data to a database we know nothing about." Lead dev won't even talk to me.

I feel like a joke.

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.

I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.

I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."

I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.

I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.

I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.

This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).

All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.

Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.

And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.

I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...

Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.

p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.

In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.

It's a real nice feeling when you figure out the answer to your own stackoverflow question as you're typing it out.
Not gonna make myself look like an idiot this time! No-sir-ee.

Day 1 of a new semester in college. Our 50 yr old H.O.D is a guest lecturer of this new subject called "Industrial Management" (why its included in the syllabus of CSE degree i wonder) . As there were only 6 students , the guy went on like a drunkard telling life lessons :

1) only 20% of the people in a company are only working. Rest 80% of them are just using sugar coated words at the right place ; doing politics and taking credits of the others .

2) those 80% getting benefits are usually the bosses (and in his example, the senior deans and H.O.Ds buttering the administrative dept and director ) and the hardworking 20% are the Juniors or the new joiners ( and in his example, the latest recruited ,honest teachers. Makes sense why we have shitty teachers :/ ). They altogether make sucesses to the company(although its just those 20%hardworkers doing the actual job) . But at the time of salary everybody gets the benfit.

3) Its always perfect to throw blames at senior or junior. (explaining how a parent complaining about the poor study environment to director is made to think that it's only the fault of his own child. blames going from director to dean to HOD to teachers to your own child's mistakes.)

4) Being your boss's favourite is super important. He gave example as : 2 teachers meets him with 100% results and 100% reviews. One of them is a known asshole with 0 knowledge, who makes jokes and sexist comments during the class, gives free attendence and question papers before the exam{therefore 100%reviews} . But he is dean's great ass-licker . The other one is honest hard-working teacher with real reviews and results. So he says he shows their combine results to the director along with his own buttering and ass licking, gets a hike himself and permit to give hije to one junior teacher. And who would it give hike to? The ass licking asshole, because that's how it works. What about the honest teacher?what reply would he get? Simply, appreciations and sugar coated words : "thank you for working so hard. But you did not do anything new. You were only hired to DO hardwork and give good results"

( and i was like fuck? Like seriously? Because that is something resonating with what i once heard in my internship :"yeah you are developing nice and all good, but that's what you are expected to do. You were only hired to achieve results, and you did nothing new". So that's what we are missing? Ass licking?-_- )

5) He believed its important to "look working" than being "actually working" . Quoting an example from his days as a dev, he told a story about how he once worked on a project with deadline of 1 month . He was young and worked hard and in 2 days completed the complete project and accidentally reported success to boss instead of his seniors. The boss simply congratulated his team(seniors and him) and assigned them another project. Later that day , he got an ass-wipe scolding from his seniors that if he had kept his mouth shut, they would have simply watched movies and relax for next 15 days, and submit the project during the salary time to gain bonus attention.
He even gave his short mantra or principle for such situation "kaam ki fickar kar, fickar ka zickar kar, par kaam mat kar " (get worried and tensed about the work. Display your tention and worries to the world (esp bosses) . But don't work.)

And there were many other short stories like that.

Mann, i was about to shout " you corrupt asshole ", but one thing He just told us about the importance of being in boss's good books made me stop ( nd he is a fucking HOD, senior to teachers)

But hell he told some relatable truths. Make me sad about the job life.

Bloody Office politics :|

Imagine going on quora and answering somebodies carbon offsetting question by pushing your own stupid fucking agenda with propaganda answers like

"oh we need rainforest money!"

"oh we need grassland!"

"oh support the cows"

jesus fucking christ, THIS is why we have a problem with people not accepting climate change, becuase every fucking liberal wants to pile on one another and have their 'most important' cause behind it

give me a break you fucking idiots, it won't be solved by acting this way

sorry this is in no way software related, but it's the only place left i have to rant (however in some ways it is somehow software related, due to being able to think about the real world without being an absolute idiot and pushing some stupid peer pressured political idea because your social identity and friends are more important than actual facts, but whatever)

[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.

with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).

I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)

So what do you think devranters ?

Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.

1) Never be afraid to ask questions.

There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.

Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.

That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.

2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.

3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.

4) Find hobbies outside of tech!

5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.

6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.

7) Negotiate salary. Always.

8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.

9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.

10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path.

as you can see my naive people; even dfox/trogus started to question whether or not they have done the right thing by chasing a degree that has no value in the real world. just understand that when you see someone who works at a job, he works there not because he has a degree but because he has the knowledge and skills to get the work done

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

Maybe I don't even want to understand what "programming" means. Although I keep visiting StackOverflow almost daily to find useful advice on topics that do matter to me, when I post a question myself, they mostly get deleted for being "offtopic", not real "programming" questions, prone to attract "opinionated answers" or too much concerned about usability in real life? 🤔

Was reading something about delusional disorder, and it got a bit scary cuz it made me question myself. Now, I tell you why.

I have a bad memory when it comes to trivial stuff. And I am, by occupation and therefore on a daily basis, creative and imaginative. Having pretty strong imagination means that I often have to ask myself "did that really happen or did I imagine it?" Which, given anxiety, I imagine all types of scenarios before they happen. (Parallel universes got nothing on me 😎)

So, now I'm wondering, where is the line between imagination and delusion, and how can you say what's real and what's not, be it offline (distorted memory) or online (schizophrenia).

One idea could be that video recording could help confirm, but we read emotions and vibe in real-time, and often those can't be recorded.

... Idk. Maybe I'm overthinking it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thank you for reading my half-baked thoughts!

Killing people is bad. But, there should be a law to allow killing people who don't write proper unit tests for their code. And also those "team leaders" who approve and merge code without unit tests.

Little backstory. Starts with a question.

What is the most critical part of a quoting tool (tool for resellers to set discounts and margins and create quotations)? The calculations, right?
If one formula is incorrect in one use case, people lose real money. This is the component which the user should be able to trust 100%. Right?

Okay. So this team was supposed to create a calculation engine to support all these calculations. The development was done, and the system was given to the QA team. For the last two months, the QA team finds bugs and assigns those to the development team and the development team fix those and assigns it back to the QA team. But then the QA team realizes that something else has been broken, a different calculation.

Upon investigation, today, I found out that the developers did not write a single unit test for the entire engine. There are at least 2000 different test cases involving the formulas and the QA team was doing all of that manually.

Now, Our continuous integration tool mandates coverage of 75%. What the developer did was to write a dummy test case, so that the entire code was covered.

I really really really really really think that developers should write unit tests, and proper unit tests, for each of the code lines (or, “logical blocks of code”) they write.

!rant just a question. Sorry in advance for the long post.

I've been working in IT in Windows infrastructure and networking side of things for my entire career (5years) and recently was hired for a role working with AWS.

We use Macs and we use *nix distros for days. I've only ever dabbled for 'funsies' before with Linux because every previous job I held was a Windows house and f*** all else.

I'm just wondering if anyone here might have some insights as to a great way to learn the Linux environment and to learn it the right way. I'm not the best Windows admin ever and will never claim to be, but I have seen stuff that other people have done that makes me want to swing a brick at someone's head. And I feel that with all of the setup wizards and the "We'll just do it for you." approach that Windows has used since forever it allowed enough wiggle room for people that didn't know what they were doing to f*** sh*t up royally. I'm not familiar enough with Linux to know if this is also a common problem. I know that having literal full-access to every file in your OS can cause a n00b like myself to mess up royal, thus the question about learning Linux the right way.

I vaguely understand the organization of the folders and file structure within Linux, and I know some very basic commands.

sudo rm -rf /*
Just kidding

But All of my co-workers at my new job are like mighty oaks of knowledge while I'm a tiny sapling. And at times I've been intimidated by how little I know, but equally motivated to try and play catch-up.

In addition to all of this, I really want to start learning how to program. I've tried learning multiple times from places like codecademy.com, YouTube tutorials, and codeschool.com but I feel like I'm missing the lesson that explains why to use a certain operation instead of another. Example: if/else in lieu of a switch.

I'm also failing to get the concept of syntax in certain languages I've tried before. Java comes to mind real fast.

The first language I tried teaching myself was C++ from YouTube. I ended up having a fever dream that night about coding and woke up in a cold sweat. Literally, like brain overload or something. I was watching tutorials for like 9 hours straight.

Does anyone know of a training resource that will explain, in terms a 5 year old would understand, what the code is doing and why? I really want to learn but I'm starting to lose steam cause I'm just not getting it.

Thank you in advance for any tips guys and gals. I really appreciate it. Sorry for the ridiculously long questions.

I just completed my college degree in may of this year and started working in a small company of <50 employees. I'm made to sit idle all day because I'm a junior and also because they dont have much shit going on.
I approached my head a few days back to discuss the same and he says that it's my responsibility to ask my senior devs to keep me busy and assign me work.
Now do I really have to suck my seniors dick everyday to make him assign me something?
Plus this asshole made the head believe that I'm not competent enough and that's the reason they're soft ignoring me, whereas I always did everything up-to his standards and then he even sometimes appreciated me for that.

Now the real question, if I leave this company and they give me a bad review, will it have a considerable impact on my future? I'm confused as fuck. 😐

TL;DR: Newly joined fresher, made to sit idle in the company, company guys somehow make it seem it's my fault for being idle, may give me a bad review when I leave, will it make me look bad?

Man I hate programming tests that have no practical application. I'm not doing one yet, just saw an example question that made me go...ok...I kinda get what you want but..why would you EVER need this. Googled and the consensus is that..*drum roll* you wouldn't ever need it because it's only useful to see if someone can solve it in an interview.

Why not give actual problems or at least actual test cases of things that way you can see if people can solve actual real life problems. Wouldn't that prove that people can reason their way through things or not? See if they can provide a good solution for something that someone else has already encountered instead of some nonsense that wouldn't have an actual practical application?

Maybe it's just me but if you give me a problem that sounds like it's useless for some reason my brain just goes, "Ah this sounds like it's useless, better not actually devote all my brain power to this"...

Hey, a bit of a dumb question.

When can someone call themselves a "real" programmer? I'm not one to gatekeep and say dumb shit like "iF yOu OnLy KnOw PyThOn Ur NoT a PrOgRaMmEr!", but I guess I want to know when I can call myself one. All I've done so far is make unpolished games in Unity for school that are created only to meet some requirements. I've also worked in my class' team for collaborative Unreal games, which has been painful to say the least. So, when I can stop gatekeeping myself over it? What sorts of experiences should I have? I understand that it's not a list of requirements like my projects are, but I'd like a general idea of when I can call myself a real developer.

Got a bad question here. I've got my homepage (login + some archives with access permission) which I made in HTML + php (yeah I know). But I just hate how php looks. So I'd like to rewrite that whole little bastard now using some other language (not php obviously). What do you recommend? Which Lang's/frameworks are being used. I heard python and java spring were good but I wanted to hear the opinion of some real devs I guess. I'm rather a back end dude (c++) but I think it would be useful to learn some web programming too (not interested in fancy animations and shit, just a good ol' single colored site that displays the content)

I know I am probably late to the facebook drama, but I think taking out of this all is just how genius and evil all those collector companies are.

I would have probably never thought of collecting data off of mechanical turks and quick jobbers, but they did not only think of it, they deployed their system across multiple jobs, scanning more and more data in from all those connected logins, for less than a dollar per profile, which generates atleast 300 profiles on average.

The real question is why is it allowed for a third party app to actually access all that? even if there's a permission for that, why would such exist?

I really can't see why any application would need access to likes, shares, all friends, all their profiles etc.

Recently I've been considering switching to another job. I've been at my current employer my entire working carreer, and a switch might be a healthy choice soon. My current working environment is changing (and not for the best in my opnion), and I have never really looked over the fence. I've also felt that my current job lacks some real meaning.

I currently work on software for logistical purposes, but I don’t feel that my work aligns with my values, or that it tries to solve issues that are important to me.

I have received many job offers with higher pay and benefits, but again, none that really work on issues that I find important.

My question to you is wether (and if so: how much) you let your values and ethics weigh in your choice of an employer/project. And are you willing to offer up (financial) benefits for a job that aligns better with your values?

I love this wk108 tag. Have a lot of stories related to it.
For me , my mentors are the reason i am what i am today. In this crazy selfish world where people only want to run faster than the others, having nice helping people around is great.
(Val titanLannister=xx)

(1)class 6-10th, xx is a curious, but poor boy with no desktop/mobile , but still loves cs classes due to various ,caring teachers.
(2) class 11th end,programming for the first time that year, hates programming, one day when everybody goes out for lunch, xx tears down while talking to his cs teacher "why can't i score good marks when i was the best till 10th? Is programming so tough?" . I remember him giving me a little but greatest motivational lecture followed by 40 minutes of the most basic concepts in which i might had asked him a 1000 questions. "You are my chaempion", he used to say😂 (bad accent) . But god, if he hadn't motivated me that day, i swear i would have left all this and go for business. Thank-you, lokesh sir💗💗

First year : tried to go for a competitive learning course. Mann, am not cool in that stuff. Again was about to break (i was among the top scorers in school boards and had designed many small games back then. I should have been good here too, but nah... the other guys were like bullets .)
Oh my, my deepest bow to this amazing teacher SUMEET MALIK (oh sir, you were so good) .
How this guy taught? Well, he first explained the concept. Fo those who understood, he gave them question 'A', for those who didn't, he repated . For those who understood , can do question a again, and those eho did A already gets an even advance question B. And this cycle went on until the weakest student(usually me) understood the concept.
And no, it never happened even once that class finished with even a single child not doing all questions he gave.he used to teach very less concepts each class and would go to everybody's desk to check they understood the concept, the question, its working, weather we implemented or not and weather our implementation is correct or not +our doubts. Hell , i even took doubts with him for hours after the class and he always just smiled💗(oh sir, am so sorry for being so dumb)
Real Doubt classes, doubts on whatsApp, revision assignments , tests , competitions,... damn, i haven't seen a teacher with this much dedication. At one point of time, that institution was famous for our Sumeet sir's classes 😂

Then last year, i got another mentor . Harshit bhiya. The guy is awesome, and a little extra swaggy 😂. He got a lot of chill, with his big AAD badge, a bag full of stickers and his every day association with people at udacity and google. As always i tried to overwhelm him with my ton of doubts in class, but he use to just give me a few pointers/links, after which i was like quiet for the complete session😂. He gave me a lot to think/work upon and i got a kind of career to work on.

I also think of mentioning a fucked up depressing-bot assholic friend of mine, but he don't deserve to be in this list of my best people. Just fuck you mann with a blockchain of dicks, if you are reading this.

I don't understand how rubber duck strategy works.
I mean you know it's not listening to you.
I personally prefer making fool of myself and ask a dumb question from a real person which would immediately give me the answer to, than talk to an object, which is basically like talking to my monitor which is the first thing we all do.

Ok... so I have a unique question/opportunity. I can't give all the details but here's the jist:

3yrs ago I was hired to consult a now prominent(still decently well known then) web-based company with many thousands of users, dealing with a lot of money and leveraging a social environment. They had several issues but initially they really needed me to find/train chat mods.

I did not take the offer for monetary reasons, like all consulting I've done, I had additional reason and/or fondness to fix the issues. In this case it was an interesting challenge and I knew several customers and some support staff so it'd be worthwhile.

They (without request) reduced their typical 2mo probationary period to 2wk for me. With less than a day left of that period, I was 'hacked' via a pushed telegram update, on the account they made me create for work purposes (they had control of the phone number not me).

During this 'hack' one of the 2, currently active, culprits sent a message to his tg account from the 'hacked' one and quickly deleted the entire convo. The other pretended (poorly) to be me in the chat with the mods in training (at least a few directly witnessed this and provided commentary).

Suddenly, I was fired without any rationale or even a direct, non-culprit, saying anything to me.

The 'hack' also included some very legit, and very ignorantly used, Ukrainian malware.

This 'hack' was only to a 2nd gen lenovo yoga I got due to being a certified refurbisher... just used for small bs like this chat mod/etc job. I even opened up my network, made honey pots, etc., waiting for something more interesting... nope not even an attempt at the static ip.

I started a screen recording program shortly after this crap started (unfortunately after the message sent be 'me' to the dude who actually sent it happened... so i still dont know the contents).

I figured I'd wait it out until i was bored enough or the lead culprit was at a pinnacle to fall from...

The evidence is overwhelming. This moron had no clue what he was doing (rich af by birth type)... as this malware literally created an unhidden log file, including his info down to the MAC id of his MacBook... on my desktop in real time (no, not joking... that stupid)

Here's my quandary... Due to the somewhat adjacent nature of part of our soon to be public start-up... as i dont want it to turn into some coat tail for our tech to ride on for popularity... it's now or never.

Currently im thinking, aside from any revenge-esq scheme, it'd be somewhat socially irresponsible to not out him to his fellow investors and/or the organisation that is growing with him as one of few at the forefront... ironically all about trust/safety/verification of admins in the industry.

I tried to reach out to him and request a call... he's still just as immature. Spent hours essentially spamming me while claiming it wasnt him but hed help me find whoever it was... and several other failed attempts to know what i had. When i confirmed he wasnt going to attempt a call, i informed him id likey mute him because i don't have time for back and forth bs. True to form he deleted the chat (i recorded it but its of no value).

So... any thoughts?

Today I spent 9 hours trying to resolve an issue with .net core integration testing a project with soap services created using a third party soap library since .net core doesn't support soap anymore. And WCF is before my time.

The tests run in-process so that we can override services like the database, file storage, basically io settings but not code.

This morning I write the first test by creating a connected service reference to generate a service client. That way I don't need to worry about generating soap messages and keeping them in sync with the code.

I sent my first request and... Can't find endpoint.

3 hours later I learn via fiddler that a real request is being made. It's not using the virtual in-process server and http client, it's sending an actual network request that fiddler picks up, and of course that needs a real server accepting requests... Which I don't have.

So I start on MSDN. Please God help me. Nope. Nothing. Makes sense since soap is dead on .net core.

Now what? Nothing on the internet because above. Nothing in the third party soap library. Nothing. At this point I question of I have hit my wall as a developer.

Another 4 hours later I have reverse engineered the Microsoft code on GitHub and figured out that I am fucked. It's so hard to understand.

2 more hours later I have figured out a solution. It's pure filth..I hide it away in another tooling project and move all the filth to internal classes :D the equivalent of tidying your room as a kid by shoving it all under the bed. But fuck it.

My soap tests now use the correct http client with the virtual server. I am a magician.

First Rant...
Why the fuck do I get on a C++ interview the question if I now Javascript......everytime.... NO I DON'T WANT TO KNOW JAVASCRIPT!!!

Real coders code in C/C++ and not hipster javascript. Am I alone???(probably)

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

Is it just me, or do REST API's literally rule the world right now?

Feeling like I can automate the universe.

But this is a real question. Are there reasons to avoid using web API's rather than sending data through some kind of shared database? I guess I'm not even sure what the alternatives would be right now... Are there disadvantages I should know about?

Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.

Subject: Pharo

Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.

Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.

Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.

We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny

Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.

Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.

Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.

I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.

I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.

Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.

For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.

Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.

There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.

Guess I really am a simple dude.

So at the HS I go to, there are 4~5 programmers (only 3 real "experienced" ones though including me).

So coming from JS & Python, I hate Java (especially for robotics) and prefer C++ (through some basic tutorials).

Programmer Nº2 is great at everything, loves Objective-C, Swift, Python, and to a certain extent Java.

Programmer Nº3 loves Python and used to do lots of C#, dislikes Java and appreciates Go (not much experience).

So naturally I get shit on (playfully) because of my JS background, because they don't understand many aspects of it. They hate the DOM manipulation (which is dislike too tbh), but especially OOP in JS, string/int manipulation, certain methods and HOISTING.

So, IDK if Java or C++ (super limited in them) have hoisting, but if you don't know what hoisting is, it means that you can define a variable, use it before assigning a value, and the code will still run. It also means that you can use a variable before defining it and assigning a value to it.

So in JS you can define a variable, assign no value to it, use it in a function for instance, and then assign a value after calling the function, like so:

var y;
function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

And, as said before, you can use a variable before defining it - without causing any errors.
Since I can barely express myself, here is an example:
JS code:

function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
var y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

So my friends are like: WTF?? Doesn't that produce an Error of some sort?
- Well no kiddo, it might not make sense to you, and you can trash talk JS and its architecture all you want, but this somehow, sometimes IS useful.

No real point/punchline to this story, but it makes me laugh (internally), and since I really want to say it and my family is shit with computers, I posted it here.

I know many of you hate JS BTW, so I'm prepared to get trashed/downvoted back to the Earth's crust like a StackOverflow question.

Drupal 8 fractured the community, dead ended projects that had years of being built up and supported, started a downward trend in overall number of websites using Drupal when it was still increasing market share, homogenized Drupal with other less successful frameworks that had already attempted it and failed by using composer to replace drush, twig to replace PHPtemplate, and Symfony to butcher Drupal and hang parts of it on.

The mission statement was to "bring Drupal to the modern era" and "be more enterprise friendly". All I've seen them do is make it worse. I have stopped using Drupal now, I still maintain some Drupal 7 sites but now that they killed the Drupal 7 community it's basically dead. Some small attempt was made to salvage it with Backdrop but it will likely never be as big as Drupal was and is mostly dead itself, for one thing it's not directly compatible with the huge library of modules either.

Another thing I loved killed by those without vision and giving into the "industry standards" that make one question the intellect of everyone who subscribes to them being a good idea. But hey that evil procedural programming that worked so long for so many was finally defeated. It's surely better now right... right?

At least this movement was supported by people that can't even tell the difference between the use cases in real projects between Drupal and Wordpress. Software Development is in such a good place and has no hypocrisy. One would never suggest it has lost sight of its original purpose of solving real world problems with computing and become self absorbed with its own navel gazing.

If still in doubt check attached image, it tells a very clear story about how to ruin the life of a CMS. It honestly feels like a hitjob attempted to sabotage it rather than an earnest attempt to improve something that has been doing well since 2001.

Real question, not troll. There is debate about it and I really can't figure it out.

Besides having the title software "engineer," is there really such a thing as a software engineer?

In the US, to be an engineer you have to be regularly tested by a regulated governing body, apprentice under another engineer for years, and be certified on a state level. Whereupon you are personally liable for your designs being FREE from errors.

For one thing, nobody can write bug free code, and the idea of being personally responsible for each bug is terrifying.
And two, I've seen news of people calling themselves software engineers in the USA and Canada and getting a cease and desist or sued for it, despite any level of qualification.

I'm sure there are engineers, especially electrical, computer engineers who also program.

But... ?

I don't know, I can't say either way.
That's why I'm asking.

I recently received a text to a sketchy URL. In my curiosity I tried to see if I could get the source code from said URL without actually going there directly.

My first attempt I did this with apitester.com, a website that is intended for testing APIs but comes in handy for a quick URL test and seeing what gets returned. Next, I tried an official website dedicated to telling me if a site is sketchy. Finally, I tried to CURL the url with a variety of different headers. Alas, all these attempts gave me nothing. I know if I clicked on this link through my Phone it would definitely direct me to a sketchy website, but I just can't for the life of me figure out how their backend is setup to know what is a real request and what is not.

My Question is this; what is the potential stack setup that this person could be using that would disallow anyone from testing the URL and force them to redirect to google and any real request to redirect to the actual website?

Real question: what's the fear behind people putting tape over their Webcams? It's not that I don't believe they *could* be compromised, but why would anyone want to capture and go through hours of footage of me staring at my computer? My picture is on Facebook it's not a secret what my face looks like.

Looking through Java tests, cause I need to pass one for job. And every one of them has a question like:
What's the result of:
boolean b = 42 >= 1024;
if (b = true) System.out.print(1);
else System.out.print(2);

And each time I answer like there is (b == true) and not (b = true).
Cause no one in real life would write = in if statement. Why do they put such question in each and every test.

The SIM card saga goes on:
To verify yourself, you need to go to some postal office and show them your ID and stuff. Not that this is complicated or anything (well actually, it is. Welcome to 2018 in Germany. We use more papers than potheads for the simplest shit), but you need to have a valid ID. Valid as in NOT EXPIRED. What the fuck. Why does my ID expire. Do I stop existing 3 years after getting it? What does it mean if it is, why is it culpable to have your ID expired. And who gets charged for having none, I mean obviously my ID doesn't identify me anymore?
What the hell man. I don't exist for 6 months now. Am I law free as not identifiable entity or how does it work?

And now the real question:
We got something called Bafög in Germany. Basically you get a bit money while studying. (I still work tho, I don't get really much from it.)
To apply for it, you need some tax number, which seemingly can be seen as a proof of my existence and my identity.
Why is this enough, why don't I need a valid ID there?

Germany is weird man. On the one hand government is all social and you get help if you need it but on the other hand you need to sacrifice 17 virigins to apply for said help..

Tldr; Rust community could definitely be way less annoying, but it's way more annoying listening to everyone bitch about it all the fucking time.

rant()
Tired of the Rust hype? Too fucking bad. Quit complaining that people like well-designed languages more than shitty ones. Yeah, rust devs can be real fucking zealous, but at least the language is good. If you don't like listening to people say "why not rust?" ignore them or ask yourself the same fucking question ahead of time so you don't feel defensive when someone asks it later.

Read some shit about how "it doesn't matter what you build it with if the software is good, its all the same". Ever heard of "right tool for the right job"? Rust has applications all over the place, so people are going to talk about it a lot. Also, just no. Like, Python shouldn't be in the Linux kernel for a lot of reasons, so the tools you choose can constrain whether or not your software is actually "good."

Ever heard of "unsubstantiated trust"? Yeah, you might be good at writing C, but you can get that shit to compile with nasty fucking problems and C's a straight up foot gun in my hands. It's hard to write shitty functioning Rust that does what you say it does, which is less unsubstantiated trust.

Hi all. I just have a quick question. Why is Wordpress so hated in the web development community? Is it not considered "real@ development? As someone who is decent in HTML and CSS, should I use Wordpress to make websites or just stick to HTML and CSS (trying to learn JS at the moment)

!rant .

Interesting conversation between coworker 1, 2 and 3.

1 : “ hey do you know if you want to sounds like Australians , start eating spiders. Alternatively you can try to eat kiwi to sound familiar to Australian but isn’t.

2 : “ I fancy myself sugary juices and burgers everyday, but yet I am not becoming American.”

1: “No pal you should start drinking petroleum and yell FREEDOM and ‘this is my right!’ every chances you get. That’s how you become a US citizen without the green card .”

3: “bro, you are taking you are what you eat too literally and stereotypically. Let say if you guys would to suck my dick and drain my semen down your throat, won’t me you my son . But I will get the pleasure.”

John : “Yo what the fuck?”

3: “the real question is ‘yo wanna fuck?’”

1 :”you sus bro”

2: “I’m going to pretend I didn’t read that one .”

John :” 1, which ‘you’ you are referring to? 2, of course you didn’t with that amount of sugary juices.”

2: “hey this is my right!”

John: *mute the off-topic channel *

Yo like what the fuck .

Question: What are 3 or 4 hard development skills I can focus on learning in the next two months or so to make me more marketable, given my lack of real development experience?

Details: I graduated college with a compsci degree, but have been doing systems/service administration since then. Aside from some small scripts for work, I don't have any post-college development experience. And even the skills I got from college aren't phenomenal because I was convinced I would be satisfied on the admin -> engineer -> architect ladder that I'm on right now.

But things have changed. My interest has dwindled in my current field, and I want to switch into a development role.

I am extremely comfortable with the Python language, but not so much with its many frameworks for frontend and web development.

I used to love the hero treatment I got long ago in my previous company. Appreciations and what not for conducting events, contributing to open source. I think I burned out later. Later the hero treatment stopped there and I craved for it when I wasn't doing the stuff I used to do - basically I was previously keeping others happy I guess, instead of keeping myself happy. Contributing to open source or conducting events was not even part of the day job and was mostly considered outside the working hours and hence one had to stretch to do all that extra stuff. I over did stuff I guess and burned out

In my current company, I see heros and appreciations so much for contributing to open source though not all our roles are completely defined as open source roles and we instead have to work on closed source or yet to be open sourced stuff. My role is contributing a very tiiiiiny testing bit in an yet to be open sourced project, but a few other colleagues of mine work on closed source paid advanced version of the open source core project

Seeing all the hero treatment where I'm not the hero and seeing all the appreciation, I wonder how it doesn't seem right. Surely I'm jealous, lol. But I also felt the treatment also shows some sort of Special treatment for some people. It's "Special" and not exactly for all and only for open source contributors or people doing all the popularly so called as "cool" stuff. Fortunately for them their job role kinda mentions that I believe. And people working on closed source are now trying to contribute there. I'm stuck with some of my main day job work and dying in guilt for burning out, and not being able to contribute to open source and also kind of starting to hate open source for it's dark sides. Reminds me Batman dialogue "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.". Open Source dark sides - of course the possibile dark sides of companies funding open source, the people behind the companies and also of course my company being one of them possibly, though if you ask anyone they say "Community comes first". That's full of lies is what I would say.

Inclusivity gets thrown out the window. Heroes get to talk. Heroes get worshipped. Others are not even noticed I think. I guess the only way to get noticed is to imitate the heroes

At some point I realized I'm envying or idolizing a crazy set of people, or like putting them on a pedestal. I'm trying to fix that in my head. But oh my, you should see all the treatment, the respect, etc. Surely some people just are there to do meh or grunt work or even good work or whatever without much appreciation, and then have to move on. No respect or consideration for opinions, thoughts usually. Some of them don't even have the time to care to check what people have to say. Top down hierarchy but they say it's flat hierarchy. They don't even wanna listen to some of us I think, that is during team meetings. Only very few care from what I have noticed

One good thing is I have to come to realize how much I'm like them in some behaviours and feeling damn guilty. I sometimes spend time thinking how to change myself for the long term. And how to avoid the toxic behaviors in the team and also control my anger and control my response to their behaviours. I'm also trying to understand where I'm climbing the ladder with my assumptions and also trying to see the "real" thing instead of assuming or being blind or imagining etc. But it has become so hard because idk if people are faking it, it's become very hard to always assume people are telling the truth 🙈 though it makes to assume or believe that by default. If people are okay with themselves lying, who am I question that huh

Oh china, you always know how to snap me out of long stints of mundane and/or annoying, chore-esq work.
//...and letting me excuse a 10min, otherwise purely wrong procrastination down a current political rabbit hole

I gotta say, at least in china they are bold enough to put their image and identity on whatever they make... but in that 'im selling pseudo-sex, not because im sexy--just the opposite, so you know I relate' way.

Side note: i got an automated spam call survey yesterday*... it ot got to the 1st (of claimed 3) question.. which had a surprising amount of actual reiterations before looping... it was determined to get opinions(and totally incept the lemmings, soccer moms and politically ignorant into their stance, plus intense rage/disgust/dreams of standing on a soap box and fighting about this new issue they were totally unaware of.)... about this actively serving, politician's demand that china sell tiktok or totally stop allowing any operations/use on american soil... because of the heavily implied heinous nature of controlling and twisting society via media to it's explicitly declared communism... even directly called china, as a whole, communists, with impressive dramatics (and i coached public speaking hs and college kids then over a decade of business consulting, typically involving coaching vocals and implicit vocab)

I actually listened to it because it's what a typical subject, brought out of the koolaid fog, would view as ridiculously ironic(assuming they knew the actual, and therefore inherently ironic, def if irony... most dont. It's disturbing)... but it you have decent common sense, and dont emotionally view your entirety as wrong/broken/needing to be fixed in a cult-like manner, it's the oposite of irony. History of/and politics pull this crap all the time. It still works.

It reminds me of how my moniker, awesomeest, came about. In 3rd grade i realised that even adults, knowing they were chatting with an 8yr old, even if they knew/used the correct spelling of a, less common, term... if i misspelled it as if i thought it was right, theyd actually change their spelling to match (in perpetuity) albeit my vocab was easily high school level by then...likely at least in part to my flawless(aka blind/ignorant) demeanor of confidence that whatever i said/thought was totally correct, as a matter of fact. Not like the insecure ppl trying to prove something

I used to find it so comical... now it's just sad.

This bs automated political spam/manipulation is the modern version of i remember of kids farting in the late 90s... the culprit quickly accusing someone else of their offense, but even extra immature kids 25+ yrs ago figured that out... and even made the retort a catchy rhyme..."the one who smelt it, dealt it"

*i basically programmed in a counter attack/something akin to immature passive aggressive ' who"s really the one wasting the other's time and resources now?!? Ha!' ...odd numbers automatically go into a sort of echo chamber instead of ringing, with a manual escape to actually ringing/calling prompt built in.

I can listen in at any time without it having any effecf/sound too.

I'm curious if anyone participates in these minor acts of terrorism to complete an unrequested, intrusive, and human-less format of a proclaimed opinion poll? And if you do, are you honest? Why do you do it?

Annoyance at spam aside... the real victim I mentally mourn, and view it's method of demise akin to a cardinal sin (assuming religion...blah blah)... is the data! I <3 data... good, unobscured, not contrived, simple, pure, raw data... killed before its birth :'(

Question:

For a real time chat (web) app. Whats the best technology to use for this? I dont want the chats to have delays or glitches (in case it gets sent but not delivered etc).

Backend stack is java spring boot

How about kafka? Or rabbitmq? Or socket.io? Should i use redis? Should i use AWS SQS? Talking about cloud what AWS tools should i be using to handle this the best way?

Note: it must be scalable. Meaning if i wanted to extend this software more by building a mobile app (aside from web), i should be able to use the same backend easily

Note 2: it is not ONLY a chat app. Chatting is just 1 out of many functionalities. So chatting is not the main component of the project just a side thing

Keep in mind the backend is a microservice architecture etc. Database postgresql.

So. Wow I have a question. Ok for real... I am in need of advice. I have a concept for a platform based on a specific interest which almost all of us have, based on a peer-to-peer principle with multiple services and user types/needs/agendas/reasons. The platform is intellectually straight forward and users will all participate on the platform as they see fit which will benefit other users as well as motivate more to join. The platform will serve it's own purpose and meet the users needs in a way that you may have seen before but the intellectual property and how the platform is used, is so unique that I can't risk too much information.

The question is. How do I protect my idea / intellectual property so I can recruit help and market without someone coming along and stealing it out from underneath me?

This isn't uncle Vinnys Cologne idea...

Everyone thinks they have the million dollar winner. I'm not sure if this puts gold toilet paper in my bathroom just yet but... I have something that an existing platform with money will absolutely steal and try to push as their own idea... They will probably succeed too.

So how do I protect this from happening so only I get to fail or ruin this good idea?

I'm creating a bitmap font right now and wanted to automatically generate a image with some text so I can track my progress how it looks. gnome-font-viewer displays it fine, but it'd nothing compared to some real text. Well, how hard can it be?

First attempt: Use ImageMagick to create an image and draw some text. I found a forum post in the ImageMagick forums from 2017 claiming incorrect rendering of BDF fonts, which was promised to be fixed. Yet convert does exactly nothing besides saying “couldn't read font”.

Looking around, there is exactly one tool for the job I'm looking to get done: pbmtext. It works, but doesn't support Unicode. Egh.

Maybe I could write a short script to do it, then? Python's Pillow can import Bitmap fonts (cairo can't). Halfway done I notice it can't deal with anything outside of the character range 0..256.

Using FreeFont directly is out of the question as that seems to be equally much work as creating the font in the first place. I briefly tried SDL, but the font formats it understands are limited.

So how about converting the font then, you ask? Everyone seems to be only concerned about the other way (like OTF to BDF). I tried loading the font into FontForge and exporting an OTF or TTF but couldn't get anything out of it that ImageMagick recognizes as a font.

It seems fucking impossible to render text to an image with an Unicode BDF font in some automated way.

To add insult to injury, my searches containing “bdf” are always interpreted as with “pdf”. I'm not even a Franconian, I can distinguish B and P!

A philosophical question about maintenance/updating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Youth

How is the youth?

Pretty good question we don´t really like to communicate to older people well actually most of us have a mental issue, I know it´s kind of sad but when life gives you lemons you use them to make girls cry and that our way of thinking “I´m gonna die anyways lrts do something epic” cuz we aren't afraid to talt to the president of the united states of America like this but we are to scared to order mcdonalts of our self. I mean it´s a aspect that everyone knows we don´t know that person could be a murder of maybe that´s a little to over the top but like we just don´t like it OK.

You may ask what dose she mean with mental health issues?

Well we all know the good old depression its just that we life in a world in that you have to be perfect and when you are´t than you are a disappointment your parents want you to be a doctor or lawyer or something like that because it´s a well payed job but your generation wants to be creative we need our space to crate need things and do something amazing but this world is just a weird place were everyone has to be perfect and follow a ideal. Your appearance dosen´t describes how you are not everyone that has tattoos is a criminal or dose drugs nobody talks about the real problems.

What are the real problems?

Let me tell you we life in a world were nobody talks abou suicide nobody want´s to hear about it let me tell a fact.

Every 40 seconds somebody dies because of suicide.

Suicide is like a terror act when you were close to that person you got completely destroyed if you were far away than you got hurt but not as bad as the persons who were close. But nobody talks about this because it´s not “normal” that makes the persons who need help not reach out because they think its´s not okay.Stop the silence and help :)
But how dose it feel to have depression?

Well you can describe it as this:

it´s as you would lock yourself in a room with just a window but that window dose not have a handle but a curtain that closes every day a little more until there is no light anymore and the first days after that happens you will be scared and lonely and it will hunt you down but depressed people have to life like this every day and it becomes a normal state of mind until they decide they aren´t worth living anymore and they try to kill themselves. It hurts to see all those people die but it is the truth and truth is´t always fun.

Why am I writing this?

Honestly im asking myself that but it just feels right to tell wahts in my mind because a lot of people feel like they are tongue tied and can´t say what they are thinking and feeling and don´t express themselves. And also in my head is a lot wrong but at least I feel like I am doing something while writing this. I am one of the generation Z and I am proud that our generation has all this strength to fight for LGBT+ community and the black life's and I am proud that we understood that all this community's have to be respected because all people are on this earth and we all have to survive somehow and it dose not matter what skin color you have or sexual orientation.

But these are just my thoughts I hope everyone is doing well druing these times.

And to everyone I am proud of you and I love you.

Hi devRant. Wanna rant with some shit about my company. First some good parts. I work in company with 600+ employees. It's one of the best companies in my region. They provide you with any kind of sweets(cookies, coffee, tea, etc), any hardware you need for your work (additional monitor, more ram, SSDs, processor, graphics card, whatever), just about everything you need to make your work faster/comfortable. Then, we have regular reviews (every 6 months), which rise salary from $0.75 to $1.5 per hour. (I live in poor country, where $15 per hour makes your more solvent then 70% of people, so having 100-200 bucks increase every half year is quite good rise).
The resulting increase of review depends on how team leader and project manager are satisfied with my work. And here starts the interesting (e.g. the shit comes in).
1) Seniority level in our company applies depending on the salary you have. That't right. It does not depend on your skill. Except the case when you're applying to vacancy. So if you tell that you're senior dev and prove it during interview, you'll have senior's salary. This is fine if you're just want money. But not if you love programming (as me) because of reasons bellow.
2) You don't need to have lots of programming experience to be a team leader. You can even be a junior team leader (but thanks god, on research projects only). You start from leading research projects and than move to billable if the director of research department is satisfied with your leading skills.
As a consequence our seniors are dumb AF. This pieces me off the most. Not all of them. A would say half of them are real pro guys, but the rest suck at programming (as for a senior). They are around junior/middle level.
I can understand if guy has $15 rate but still remains junior dev. That's fine. But hell no, he is treated as a middle, because his rate is $10+ now! And his mind has priority over middles and juniors. Not that junior have lof of good tougths but sometimes they do.
I'm lucky to work yet on small project so I'm the only dev, and so to speak TL for myself. But my colleague has this kind of senior team leader who is dumb AF. They work on ASP.NET Core project, the senior does not even know how to properly write generic constraints in C#. Seriously.
Just look at this shit. Instead of

MyClass<T> where T: class {}

he does this:

abstract class EnsureClass {}
MyClass<T> where T: EnsureClass {}

He writes empty abstract class, forces other classes to inherit it (thus, wasting the ability to inherit some useful class) just to ensure that generic T is a class. What thA FUCK is wrong with you dude?! You're a senior dev and you don't even know the language you're codding in.
And this shit is all over the company. Every monkey that had enough skill just to not be fired and enough patience to work 4-5 years becomes a senior! No-fucking-body cares and reviews your skill increase. The whole review is about department director asking TL and PM question like "how is this guy doing? is he OK or we should fire him?" That's the whole review. If TL does not like you, he can leave bad review and the company will set you on trial. If you confront TL during this period, pack your suitcase. Two cases of such shit I know personally. A good skilled guy could not just find common language with his TL and got fired. And the cherry on top of the case is that thay don't care about the fired dev's mind. They will only listen to reviewer. This is just absurd and just boils me down.
That's all i wanted to say. Thanks for your attention.

I implore ANYONE... please...

Have you EVER written a SINGLE Jest test that didn't have some sort of bullshit spewing stuff like this:

"ReferenceError: You are trying to `import` a file after the Jest environment has been torn down."

"Warning: React.createElement: type is invalid -- expected a string (for built-in components) or a class/function (for composite components) but got: object. You likely forgot to export your component from the file it's defined in, or you might have mixed up default and named imports."

and yet running on a device, features work flawlessly and quite well, no errors or even warnings in sight logged

This is the most fragile pile of garbage I have ever seen.

I hate this.

inb4 your stupid ass todo boilerplate garbage you wrote tests for in freshman year. i'm talking about a REAL app with HUNDREDS of components.

where the grownup testing tools at? it's a question I've still not answered after a year of fucking around with this framework

Do apk's keep record of IDE's that was used to develope them.
Pls show your sympathy for a poor dev like me.
A 400 level student in computer science came to me to develop a mobile app for his final year project, i decided to take the deal. i used react-native to build the app. when i finished the project the aim was achieved but then came the biggest stupid question "which IDE was used for the project?" i answered vsCode. then he said "The IDE i was supposed to use was Android studio" i told him that is not a problem i could use any IDE i prefer its all the same all i need to do is set up the enivronment and he answerd "i have failed my project" he lamented i asked why and he said because his lecturer said the apk must be generated from android studio. i understand that the problem was not because i didnt use pure java(android) or because i used react-native(java(android) but because i didnt use android studio to build the app . i began to question my knowledge "do apk files keep record of ide that was used to develope them? pls help me maybe some apk do. i didnt know how to convince him everything was ok because it seems he is not technically incline he just one of those guys who are taught programing on the white board not on a computer and have no real experience. he later accepted to submit the project like that since the dead line is close and hope to see a fat F on his result but later told me he got an A in the project.

New Year's goal: find out if linux vulkan/mesa drivers work on my desktop as there's no real reason to not switch now other than maybe that.

Proton, DXVK and Gallium Nine support like 80% of games now (suck it, nvidia users, we get the good ones!) and i've seen performance improvements after switching from Windows builds on Windows to Windows builds on Proton using the same hardware.

Question is: how the hell do I carry over almost 2TB of shit to the new partitions? Also, Virtualbox is a bitch on Linux as if my kernel updates it's fucked and Boxes is trash...

This is a question with a bit of backstory. Bear with me.
Firstly, i’m back (again😂) now pursuing my software engineer goal at a university.

I had a group project course this spring and me and my group produced a kinda half assed product that could help within sports teams, for a customer at the university (won’t go into details). After the course ended I couldn’t go home to northern Sweden and stayed in my student accomodation for the summer. So I took the chance and offered myself to continue work on the product this summer to make it more usable and functionable, and they hired me (first real devjob!🥰)! Now when I look into the parts of the code that I did not write (our team communcation were bad), I realize I don’t understand fully how it works and therefore feel it’s better for me (also to learn more) to rewrite some parts my old group produced, and to actually make it easier to improve. Now finally the question; how do you feel about taking on a product, scraping some parts to rewrite them, and (in your perspective), improve them?

hr- "so why are looking to switch from X"
me- "well i currently work in b2b domain amd i really want to work on B2C product where millions of users are being impacted"

hr- "yeah we also have premium companies as users and b2b work is not much different than b2c. what else?"

me- "uh umm, also i saw the opening for a journalism company , so i was very tempted to apply as i always
wanted to work for jo-"

hr- "the opening is for p, a subdomain of our company which is a music player"

me- "umm that's okay. i guess i like listening to music as well 😅 . also i wanted to work nearby to my home"

hr- "yeah that's the real reason. your current company is asking you to come to their city"

me- "no they are still remote!" (they aren't)

hr- "i will connect you with another person. please be negotiable"

🥺😭 mann i am so much out of the game i am embarrassing myself over a phone call. can't even answer a stupid why question

Funny how I sat here watching a fictional depiction of a police interrogation and it made me doubt that I know they are not effective against a specific group of people who plan everything in advance even creating or recruiting their victim ahead of time in a group activity so everything adds up.

And then also this allows collaboration with dirty cops. And of course polygraphs are inadmissible.

Thank God at least once they commit their crimes the story imprisons them. In the story.

But being a purist I was thinking how just knowing they lie is not really enough. Determining who coached them who they were in contact with how they were hooked up with them etc and what the organizational graph looks like is needed.

And even a socially retarded, nasty little empty hearted, soulless piece of garbage can stonewall away the tragedy that claims an innocent life against the background of a system that is supporting them and causes them to feel camaraderie with other more sophisticated monsters.

So then I think. A pair of skinning knives and an ekectric hand crank generator and a cauter might work better than sodium penithol was fabled to do.

So.
When a real person dedicated to justice and dedicated to the war against monsters is confronted with the truth of said monsters

And they laugh
And smirk
Or hide behind shallow masks of innocence my question is thus.

If a man so gentle and kind as I began and mostly remain can be tempted towards this

What does an angry man whose seen even more than I have whose hate for monsters burns endlessly because it's constantly fueled by exposure feel ?

In the end
Remember monsters
You think hurting something small and weak and innocent or simply alone and naive and lying makes you strong ? Makes you a big bad monster?

We're everywhere, and our hatred burns white hot. And when we explode we don't hunt weak innocent things that can't fight back. We hunt things that no one could ever pity and the death of which makes the world better.

And best of all because of this bullshit some of us can pass the polygraph even the next day.