A man goes inside a pet shop and starts to move around the cages to scout the pets. He sees a monkey with a price of 5000$ and goes to the merchant to ask for details. Hey mister, the monkey…what does it know to worth that much money? Well, it knows Windows 95, 98, 2000, and also knows Word, C++, Visual Basic and last but not least, it knows how to play computer games. - Good monkey, it's worth the money. He goes and finds another monkey with a price of 10000$ and again he will ask the merchant. "What does this monkey know?" "It knows Linux, Unix, Corel and Autocad." "Nice, even I don't know those things." On a last scout run he finds another monkey just sitting there with a price 20000$. The story repeats, and he goes with a lack of confidence to ask the merchant for details. "And what does this monkey do for that ridiculous amount of money?" "I never saw her doing anything, but the other two call her Project Manager!"

At the beginning of an interview...

HR girl: You know, that position you applied is already taken but I found some similar in our company.
Me: Uhm, ok?
HRG: What about this one? It's some programming... *pointing at some IT position regarding db maintenance* Do you want to try that?
Me: Sure, why not.

I was applying to student position at embedded firmware development at the time. I did some school project with MySQL but it was few years back and I happily forgot most about it.
Anyway, story continues.

IT manager: Hi, I heard you want to join our lines.
Me: That is what I heard as well.
IT: Eh?
Me: I came for completely different position actually.
IT: Uhm, ok. We have standardised test, let's see what you can do.

It was some basic stuff for db guys but I was totally lost. I was done after 3 minutes returning nearly blank paper.
We shaked hands, both agreed this is not well fit for me and I went away.

After this botched attempt HR girl remembered that there is another team looking for embedded developer students. I was accepted.

Corporates are marvelous.

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

Me: So i've cloned the iOS project, i've run carthage, but it won't build.. Have I done something wrong?

Devs: Oh read this doc on github, we do loads of custom stuff. The depenedncy manager can't do it all by itself. You need to run `./scripts/boostrap.sh`

Me (another day): I've switched branches and i'm getting all these errors. Any ideas?

Devs: Ah this happens when someone modifies xyz. Read this pinned slack message. Run `./scripts/bootstrap.sh` again.

Me (another day): I've switched branches again, getting different errors, re-running boostrap didn't fix it.

Devs: Ah yeah, this happens when someone modifies abc. You need to run `./scripts/nuke.sh` and then boostrap when this happens.

Me (another day): Guys When I try to run the prod app its not building any ideas?

Devs: Ah yes have a look at this confluence link. You need to run `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`, then nuke, then boostrap and you'll be good.

Me: .... ok

Devs: Oh btw very important! do not commit any changes from `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`. It will break everything!

Me: ... no i'm sorry we have a much bigger problem than that. We need to talk ... like right now

I have coronavirus. Went to ER because I couldn't breathe Sunday night. Thought I was fucked. I decide to try to work a couple hours today because I'm getting restless. I'm an associate and have been on a project about a month. No prior software job.

Anyway. They ask me to clone a repo and run some tests. Cool, I can do that. They give me another example to look at to make sure I'm running the test right. Except the test files aren't attached to the email nor is the path to them provided.

I ping the other associate developer on Skype and ask for the test files and get a passive aggressive response that they're in the email. No, they're not you fuck stick, hence why I'm fucking asking you, and given that I almost fucking died a couple days ago, you should be fucking grateful I even logged on. Motherfucker.

Ok I feel better now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manager: so how long will feature A take?

Me: about a week.

Manager: and feature B?

Me: also a week.

Manager: how about C?

Me: another week

Manager: great! then we can finish the project in a week!

THAT'S NOT HOW MATH WORKS

So yesterday I became an actual human rubber duck!

So I have a colleague in my team that for weird reasons is not allowed to work with the same thing as the other colleagues in the team is allowed to work with. So she´s kind of alone, working on another project, and that seems to suck really hard.

And this is how I became a human rubber duck. She asked me a couple of questions about a technology/language I´ve never touched before and I told her I never worked with that technology or language and know nothing. But she was eager to get me over to take a look at what she meant.

So I came over to her screen and she started to tell me everything about the project, the technology and the language. I soon realized she wasn´t only looking for help, she was probably feeling alone in the work she was doing and just needed someone to talk to. So I took my role as the human rubber duck and sat down to listen to everything even though I almost didn´t understand anything.

I think it actually helped her even though I did nothing.

Being a human rubber duck felt good!

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

I am not a smart man.
Usually when I abandon project, I abandon it hard. Delete every trace of this failure, it never happened.

Well my friend doesn't, and two weeks ago he applied for a job as a game dev, and in resume he showed all of his work. Even the ones so barely functional that I wouldn't feel comfortable showing to my most compassionate friend. Somehow, he got it.

So for the past two weeks I've done nothing other than painstakingly recreating most of my projects in order to apply for the position before it fills.

Save your projects kids, no matter how crap they are. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

My boss is technically my coworker.
I screamed my lungs out after it became clear that he didn't give a shit about employees that bring him money. After snatching all funds from a finished project on time, failing to deliver on the promise about bonuses (it's what I used to motivate employees to deliver the project on time), refusing to buy a new chair to replace the one held together by scotch tape and careful balancing, I decided to quit with maximum damage.

I screamed so that everybody would hear it. That encouraged another guy to get in with quitting, and within 1 month most of the team had quit, leaving the boss with a risk of lawsuits for prepaid contacts not delivered.

Knowing that piece of shit, he probably recovered and is treating other people badly, but at least every single person from the team experienced the biggest jump in careers straight after that.

I've been doing programming as a hobby since I was 10 years old, I've always found my teachers are good at IT but not that good in Computer Science and programming, this year a new teacher joined the IT department who has actual experience in programming etc.
Our school uses two services, a rewards system which for some reason can also show our timetable, and another service for displaying our homework. In my spare time I made a project which combined these two services and showed it to him. As the first teacher with actual programming experience he was impressed and now I get to 'pitch' my project to the teachers higher up.

TLDR; It's good to have a good teacher

Me: "It's been three months, and you haven't placed the footer at the bottom of the page yet? It's in the bloody middle"

Colleague: "I havent gotten around to it yet"

Me: "I'm not really involved in this project, but I'm gonna move that fucking footer, it takes literally 2 seconds!"

He got pissed of and told me no.
He later told me "I don't want you to do it... cause I want to learn how to do it myself".

He's been working with web development for the last fucking year and a half...

Oh. It's been another 3 weeks. The footer is still right in the bloody middle of the page 🙃

Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<

I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.

The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.

After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.

I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.

After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.

I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/

But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/

But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)

I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.

... six seconds pass ...

... another two seconds pass ...

... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.

asjdlkagjdsk.

> Pic related.

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

I was assigned a girl that's new to the industry (but with a master's degree).

I had high hopes, as people told me she is quite a curious fellow. As I am just a junior Dev with 2 yrs of experience Ididn't know if I could handle her.

We started working on a project. Which was a change request for a previous project I had developed. I gave her 2 days to read and understand the functional requirements of previous project and this CR. Then explained everything too.

Then I gave here another 3 days to read the previous design document to learn how this code worked.

I asked her multiple times if she has any questions. She said she got everything. Cool.

One week goes by. We start to code the CR while she is shadowing me. I explained why we chose one of the two approaches. And why we are making any of the changes. She as usual nodded in agreement.

I asked her to create Unit test cases.

She couldn't write even one. So, I quizzed her, she knew nothing about the project! Nothing at all!

FUCK!

I wrote down the test cases in short hand and told her to document it (by reffering previous UTC). She wrote the test cases in short hand in the document. And she reused the previous document and did not even clean it out.

After fixing the document I asked her to execute them. But nope, she doesn't even know how the application flows for this project. FML.

It took her 3 days to write and test 8 test cases.

Now she is assigned to me in another project. This one is more complicated. And I gave her a function skeleton to complete. I figured that it will take me 15 minutes so let's give her a day. But nope. 3 days no progress.

I get it someone might not be quick to grasp something. But you know what grinds my gears? That even after this you act like a know it all! Fuck! For someone who hasn't worked with her she is the most dilligent developer.

How the fuck does someone survive masters and suck so bad!

This tiny project is awesome. Thanks to @JoshBent (who partly got it from another repo as well) for providing a basic DNS server with hardcoded blacklisting functionality and thanks to @PerfectAsshole for correcting my mysql syntax I was stuck on for way too long.

I've now got this fucker to read blacklisted words from a redis list into an array which checks every requested domain to see if it matches. If yes, it proxies it through to another DNS server and if not, it'll log the requested domain to a mysql database and prints is as blocked onto the terminal.

If the domain matches any host from a service known to be integrated within a mass surveillance network, it also prints this out to thy terminal.

It's working yay! Gonna keep working on it today.

The intern again. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!!

She's now done the Laravel course my manager bought her, so now she feels she's ready to tackle a real world project. Hahahaha.

Okay, I have a project set up: Replicate a simple existing website that only has a basic header, some picture thumbnails and a footer element using Laravel. I've already installed Statamic and everything she needs as dev dependencies and made a step-by-step README.md file for her to get the site running locally on her machine. I told her to replicate the home page HTML.

She didn't read the readme file after I've told her multiple times in the past to do so. She tries to run the Laravel application without running composer update and all the other commands I listed in the readme file, and doesn't read the fucking console errors she's getting. She cloned the project into another Laravel project and her files are a fucking mess.

I am sick and fucking tired of telling my manager that she is not suited for this industry, she's just costing the company money and wasting my fucking time. I have been unable to focus for the past month and a half because of her.

She can't even fucking Google the console errors she's getting, just hopping on MS Teams asking me to help without even trying to solve it on her own.

I want to cry. Fuck this company and its stupid CULTure.

I'm a computer sciences student, so I had to work on a group project at the end of the year. This project had a very big impact on our ratings, and many students were working really hard on it
One evening, a friend of mine knocked at my door to seek for help, she was too depressed to keep working on the project and needed to talk a little bit
After a little talk, we worked on her part of the project together. We managed to finish it just in time and send it to her teammate (they were not using git, our school never ever talked about it so they did not know what it is)

The next day was the d-day, every group had to show the teachers their projects
I arrived in a room where everyone was trying to fix the remaining bugs before their turn
And I saw my friend, almost crying. Her mate changed everything in the code we worked on and everything broke. There was not enough time to merge it again, they were stuck with a non functionnal soft
Obviously, he kept telling everybody it was her fault

Just go to hell, you fucker
I can't even understand how you did have such a stupid idea, now she needs to repeat her year because of you
Fuck you and don't ever come in my sight again, you selfish brat
Just because you know you will pass does not give you the right to fuck with another person's ratings

a stored XSS vuln in a banner-like component, visible in ALL the pages in the portal. Anyone can attack anyone.

HOWEVER this was not discovered by 3rd-party security specialists during latest security audit. I have escalated this to my manager and got replied that unless client actively requests this to be fixed should I do anything about it.

FFS.. it's only 2 lines of code.. And there's nothing I can do about it.

Eventualy I was transfered to another project. Now it's not my problem anymore.

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

My family hosts an 100 mile (160km) run once every year for ultra-runners. 11 hours in the first runner has done 105 km. And I'm sitting at this checkpoint logging their times and working on a project. But rain started pouring down and this not so waterproof tent has just become the worst developing workplace I have ever been in because the umbrella ain't big enough for me and the laptop. So I'm soaked and won't be relieved for another 8 hours. The things you do for family.

I am UI developer. The fucking domain model which we have in our project changes very frequently (once in a week (f**k)).

There is one person who is backend developer in this project. I call him TATTI because code he wrotes is "maha tatti".

Now real story,
Whene ever he makes any chnages to, so called, very complex domain model, he even doesn't inform me to reflect changes in UI. So whenever it goes on production, our boss abuse me for not updating UI.

Fucking tatti, just message me what should be changed or not and I really don't understand why they need changes in domain model every week.

F**g cto, decide domain structure first and then tell your team to start implementing it.

Other thing, when ever I ask tatti any doubt about any field is needed to display in UI or not because it is removed or added in domain model, he fucking chutiya starts explaining me whole project instead of just telling yes or no.

I don't care what your fucking backend does. Just tell me what is needed or not. And also he is not sure whether to keep that field or not even he had made that change.

He tells, "ha ye field chahie (after 5 seconds) , nahi wese to hum kahi use nahi kr rhe, ye sirf furture ke liye rkha tha use hta do (after 5 seconds), ek kam kro Mr xyz(another back end developer) se puch lo"

Fuck you maha tatti. And due to this i left that project and switched to other.

#First

I joined a start up and worked after college hours as an intern over there. I would usually bunk my college and go to my internship. I had limited knowledge at that moment. I worked very hard over there because I wanted (still want) to gain practical knowledge.

Almost a month into it and I had to take a break from it because I had college work. Rejoined the same start up during my vacations. Worked quite a lot and learnt quite some stuff. I continued the internship after my one month vacation for another month once my college started. All this while I was not being paid, not even a little bit of allowance. But that didn't matter because I wanted to learn

Fast forward six months to November 2016. I have been placed in an MNC through my college placements. One day I get a call from this start up owner(we had become good acquaintances by then) if I was willing to work as a paid intern while I was working on the projects that the company landed (so I guess as a free-lancer) and as an unpaid intern while I was working on the company projects. I agreed. Jump to December. I have joined and started working on an Android project of this very big company.

At time point, I should inform you'll that I'm not very good at Android and that the company size is very small. Company owner plus the tech lead in one city (where I'm from) and another two full time employees in another city. Out of which one quit to start his own company apparently. The start up would primarily employ interns and provide exposure to them while getting their work done.

Back to the story. The tech lead vaguely assigns everyone their work. Everyone over here includes new interns and previous interns like me who will get paid some amount. 3-4 days into the project, the tech lead quits. The tech lead and the company owner call three of us and says that one of you will have to be a project manager for this project. And then both of them and 2 of my colleagues look at me. And I don't know what to say. I hesitate initially because it's too much responsibility but agree to it finally.

The next day I come to office and read about the project thoroughly and catch up with my colleagues about the progress. The entire day I'm panicking about what I'm going to do. In the evening, my boss tells me that we have to go for a meeting with the client for whom we are doing this project. At this moment, the shit out of me has been scared. Mostly because I don't know what the fuck am I going to do over there apart from being stupid and asking dumb questions. So we reach the client's office and wait for him. The entire time I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to drown this company by opening my mouth. Surprisingly, all the questions that I asked seemed legitimate and I asked a lot of questions. And so I didn't drown the company after all...phew!

It's been more than a week. And holy fuck! What a pain it is to manage people. Half of my time is spent on updating excel sheet about their progress, where are they stuck and what is needed. And the other half about thinking what the fuck am I doing or how am I gonna do it.

So to sum up, intern-turned-freelancer-turned-project manager who has no idea what the fuck is going on. Seems pretty crazy, don't you think.

Fucking teammate who did not know how to read/write a simple class diagram.
We warned him that he have to study or we just kick his fucking ass out of the team.

He just did nothing. When we had meetings he just stayed at home pretending to have an heart issue needing surgery.
After just 2-3 days he was tagged on FB in a photo shooted a few days earlier where he was riding a bike for a competition.

He skipped another scheduled-a-fucking-week-before meeting saying that he was on a surprise trip, when I called him 5 minutes before meeting start.

In the end we just kick him out because he did nothing. He went to professor talking about some relationship problem in the team and asked him if he could continue the project by himself just forking the ours.

Professor said HELL NO SON OF A BITCH.

But our team learned a precious lesson : choose your team carefully.

So a few years ago when I was getting started with programming, I had this idea to create "Steam but for mods". And just think about it - 13 and a half years old me which knew C# not even for a half of a year wanted to create a fairly sizable project. I wasn't even sure how while () or foreach () loops worked back in the day.

So I've made a post on a polish F1 Challenge '99-'02 game forum about this thing. The guy reached out to me and said: "Hey, I could help you out". This is where all started.
I've got in touch with him via Gadu-Gadu (a polish equivalent of ICQ). So I've sent him the source code... Packed in .ZIP file... By Zippyshare… And just think how BAD this code was. Like for instance, to save games data which you were adding they were stored in text files. The game name was stored in one .txt file. The directory in another. The .exe file name in yet another and so on. Back then I thought that was perfectly fine! I couldn't even make the game to start via this program, because I didn't know about Working Directory).

The guy didn't reply to me anymore.

Of course back then it wasn't embarrassing to me at all, but now when I think about it...

One of my teammates was pulled to help on another small project... He started to get overwhelmed with being on two projects at once, so I volunteered to help with this project as well. Expecting to just help with his load, he is being transitioned off this project and I'm taking his load...

Lesson: Do not help others.

Me: Hey Guys we've been working on this application(project 1) for 4 months and i think we're almost done.

Owner of Company(Not My Boss): CooCook4Choo we moving you to project 2, forget about the previous one.

2 months go by, project is completed.

Boss: I've got another project for you
Me: Awesome!

1 month later...

PM: We're moving you back to project 1
Me: Why?
PM: Our senior dev resigned, we only have junior Devs and we need a lot of help before deployment next month.
Me: Why am i moving back to a project i was taken off of
PM: Where an agile company and you will be moved off many projects
Me: **Fuuuuuuuuuuck!!!* Ok i'll need documentation of everything that happened in the past three months, the current issue, what the current sprint revolves around and A demo of what has been added.
PM: Relax, I've got a lot of work myself, you will get them soon.

2 days later, still don't have what i need, PM is on vacation.

Me: Guess i don't have any work to do.

Had a project intro ppt at college. Panel of 3. I spent hours on making a 47 slide ppt, trying to make sure that the ppt was simple and lucid enough for them to understand and also enjoy. They did not listen to a single word i said. Before one of them even understood the title, she started questioning me. And she kept questioning and questioning. But she never listened to my answers. She asked one question, and as soon as I said one word, she started another question. The other two kept nodding or looking bored or even fucking talking among themselves. The funny thing was, my ppt had all the answers. If she had bothered listening, she never would not have needed to ask anything. And in the middle of their senseless questioning, they all started talking about how their fucking tea needed sugar😡😡😡😡
I have lost all motivation to work on the project.

You wanted to hear more about my "glorious" teacher. I deliver. So get a cup of tea, take a seat and prepare for insanity.
As I already told in a comment my programming teacher is one special snowflake who lives in his personal bubble. We have final exams in less than a month and he spents at least half a lesson talking about vanishing bees and missing plants from his garden. Other topics he likes to talk about (and tries to turn every freaking conversation into at least one of these):
1. Other students and their stupidity
2. Diesel scandal
3. His sick wife
4. "Why does noone read newspapers anymore?"
5. Why he can't teach Java but really really really wants to and everyone hates him and forces him to do C#.

Even if I try to interrupt him he'll go on until he thinks we gained some "common knowledge" - this is how he justifies these topics.

Everytime he introduced us to a new command he compared it to Java and sometimes he even falsely corrects code because he confuses them.
We are only 6 people including me (another story for another time) and he is not able to help everyone during a 90min lesson. He normally sticks with one person for at least one hour and just talks to them or even do their tasks. This is really annoying if you have a simple question. He won't answer you until he's finished whatever he's doing.

Most of the time he doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about/trying to teach us. He's muttering statements from our textbook to himself switching halfway through to another sentence while drawing not decipherable shit on the blackboard.

Another gem are his "guidelines" for classtests. We are allowed to use any command we know. Except the ones we learned not in class. And the ones he doesn't like. And the ones he doesn't want to exist. And of course not the ones which make you're life easier. So basically we are bound to use his favourite commands or we won't get a good grade. Example: use an array. List is not allowed. Never.
He has some weird fetish with arrays.

I once presented him perfectly fine code I wrote in my freetime and asked what some warnings meant. (Was because of different Visual studio versions as I learned later.) He scolded me for using things he didn't taught us yet and ranted about how I'm pressuring him into rushing these things now - I never wanted to show this to my classmates nor was this anything else than a project for fun and learning something new. (FYI the "new stuff" where classes and objects because i was tired of kilometers of spaghetti code). His rant went on a good 20minutes and - obviously - he didn't answer my question. I asked my fiance that evening and he explained it to me.
This should it be for this time. I'm sure I have more stories to tell for another time!
Thank you for reading. ^^

Before starting a job at company CUNT, we had an interview at which I told them I do not want to work on legacy monolithic codebases. We had a nice agreement and they offered me to work as a back-end with one of their projects. I was super excited to start. CUNT was very culty, always talks about how carrying for employees they are and always keep promises on their end of the table.

A week has passed, the codebase is superb legacy shit hole, no fucking standards, monolithic as fuck (BE and FE projects live in one project folder with tons of depreciated tools - there are no docs for them. That’s how old they are). They even have secret folder in their project with YOU GUESSED IT - secret keys.

Told CTO today, that I want to switch projects, because this was not the thing I signed up for and remember THEY ALWAYS CARE ABOUT THEIR EMPLOYEES AND PROMISES MADE. He basically told me, that project owners (other company) will not understand this culturally and I can either wait it out and possibly get my hands on a better project or fuck off right now.

Also, I was told, that my judgment was garbage worth and I should work longer with project “shit hole” to fully understand it.

Such a fucking salesman.

Anyways, I told that this situation is not culturally appropriate for me either as they gave me a sort of promise and I wont leave the company as I just switched jobs and cannot afford to do that again. I’ll hopefully get another position in another project soon.

WTF IS WORNG WITH PEOPLE

Fuck post-it notes.

Oh look, another product manager found his inner child and plastered a wall with a colored arts and crafts project.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm abso-fucking-lutely in favor of connecting with your deep childish nature -- but then at least enter the meeting room like a boss, armed with some creative ideas, really get to work with some fingerpaint, modelling clay, glitter, molly, acid blotters and grape juice for the whole party.

Not only was that project poorly thought out. Not only does the assortment of colored squares contribute nothing to the clarification of ideas. The issue is also that by Monday morning, the meeting room will look like a strip club after an escalated party, floor littered with 60 little neon pink and green slips reeking of desperation, cheap glue and failure.

Now your whole project is on the floor.

OH DIGITAL WHITEBOARD YOU SAY. NOW WE HAVE 10 MANAGERS FIGHTING DIGITALLY OVER VIRTUAL POST-ITS, ON A CLOUD SERVICE COSTING $500/MONTH.

Product managers, just go fuck yourself, I don't care about your kindergarten bullshit processes.

Call me when you manage to pull a workable idea out of your ass, and just draw an SVG diagram with Inkscape, or write your brainfarts into a nicely organized Markdown file.

Inherited project from another company that the owner wants updated rather than rebuilt.

The comments could write a programmers joke book as you can tell it's been passed between multiple developers.

This is a literal excerpt
//Not sure why this line needs to be here but it breaks without it
//Nope I don't know either
//FFS now I have to deal with this. Thanks guys :/

TLDR: Skills and background or dedication for becoming a good programmer?

So I almost finished the bootcamp on my company, there is only 2 people. Me and another guy who is from math major. He wanted to learn programming so he applied for the job. He doen’t know sql, any backend language, and not even html or css when he joined. The only thing he knew is for looping and if condition logic. He survived 1 months or so by learning a lot here. C#, .net mvc, sql, decent css and html. I believe he worked hard by learning it by himself. But the company he can’t continue anymore. I doesn’t know the reason but probably because he is seen as not good enough. Sure he is kinda slow when adding some feature to our small project but we need to find how to do it by ourself mostly. Now I’m alone with another few weeks to continue

Ok so this happend in the last 3 days, I didn't post it till now because I had to seriously take a rest with all the bullshit and stress that came with it...
(Legacy project I have the lead in called: "Foo")

Monday:
Management decided it would be effective to add a senior and a junior to Foo, which would make (together with me) to be 2 juniors and one senior developer
Well I've spend most of that day helping both the junior and the senior to setup "Foo" on their local development machines... So I could not do any programming myself

tuesday:
The senior wanted to refactor EVERYTHING... and I had to stop him multiple times because we simply do not have the time to do that...
The junior tried to work on other things as much as he could, and after he had run out of things to do, asked me for EVERYTHING... EVEN WHERE TO FUCKING CHANGE SOME GOD DAMN STRINGS!....
Also he did in total 3 commits, two of which existed of my code (because I had to "help" him

wednesday:
Both the junior and senior were removed from the project and I got another senior.. who fucking deleted the production database on accident

god damn rough few days man...

I am DONE with this woman.

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

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

But no!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So shut the fuck up and do as I say.

Kind regards

I was told by my manager that I (the guy hired to be the lead developer on this project) was not a developer I was a designer and that writing php instead of using a knockoff version of dreamweever to drag and drop all of the items was an "unsecure and unsafe practice". He screamed at me for another 30 mins over this and then sent me on my way and laid me off a week and a half later after I finished the project because "we can't afford you" I was doing ITS, network and service installs, security, and web development for $10.00 an hour. #stupidboss

Earlier i ranted about how someone hacked our site and he had our source code.
Now finally we found how was our site code stolen, thanks to @dfox he mentioned how can we pull code from got server at that time I checked trying commamds to dowload git folder but it was secure but later we found that we had another subdomain running for pur project and its git folder was not secured

I really need to let this out somewhere...

Why the f...? Srsly.. Why would anyone do that? I'm joining another project. Apparently lead dev has adopted a coding style, where:

1. Every dev writes code however he likes, i.e. no clean-code requirement at all.
2. All services are crud-only. I mean all service classes. All must have those 4 methods; no more, no less.
3. Half of the business logic is inside controllers.
4. Not a single comment... Interfaces, models, etc. -- not a single one.
5. Xmls -- tabs, classes - spaces.
6. Xml schemas are downloaded with each build rather than stored downloaded once and stored locally.
7. I can keep going on and on.

Is it just me or are these some really weird decisions?

I am on a team of 2 currently at work.

I am assigned to build some custom code for a customer going live with our product soon.

Because my team mate is already working on another customers project I explained the work may not be done in time because we were not given sufficient notice for our team of two to plan for the project.

Sales team contact me later that day asking me why I told our customer we don't have enough resources.

He wanted me to find a better phrase to tell them like "We have half our team dedicated to your project."

Another reason to hate our sales team 🤪

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

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

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

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

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

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

I really hate to have a non-technical Scrum Master...
He makes these long meetings to explain EVERYTHING to him and ask us help to be on meetings with clients in case "he over commit us" with more work.
I've had cool Scrum Masters but not like this dude that is a pain in the ass...

PS. he's good friend of the boss... so I'm sending him videos about what his role should do 😕

PS2. Fourtunately, he's about to be switched to another project soon.

My boss pays me well and treats me well, but he expects me to do project management (documentation, giving tasks to 2 junior devs, reviewing their code, helping them when they are stuck), coding, architecture and to finish the project in a time record time.

When I told him that this week I will not work on development but will start to do documentation because the project got so big that it is difficult to keep track, and also the other 2 developers are waiting for tasks for me to give them, he looked disappointed.

I noticed and told him that if he wanted to speed up development, he must hire another project manager, or another senior developer because I can not do them both and expect to finish in a record time.

He keeps asking almost every day, "When are we going live?"

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

Fuck my life sometimes.
I'd just finished my work for an ongoing project, it's been over 6 months only to be dragged out to be told another system needs an immediate change which at best will take 3-4 weeks.

Like seriously just let my mind come off down from the completion of previous project before dropping a new barrel of insanity on my desk 😬

I like being busy, don't get me wrong. but damn not even a day of recovery 😓

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

Tldr; my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature.

Today we were presenting a project which has imposible deadline. I am developing this small project alone (which is probably good). I implemented core features first but I know project still have bugs and a lot of tech debts. Another friend started to presenting our demo and a wild bug appeared as expected. He was adding rows to a table. To add a new you gotta open new modal by clicking + button and fill the form. One of the fields had a bug. When you add row by clicking Ok button, the value of the field stayed there after you open modal again. So its basically a state problem in React. I forgot to clear previous state of modal. When they see that and my friend said "oh we got a bug there". Then I enabled my mic and said "thats not a bug, thats a feature. I didn't want to enter that field again and again when I adding multiple rows and made it persistent." and you know what? They liked the idea! They requested to add that bug to two more fields. I was just joking and my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature. Instead of fixing it, I'm creating more of this bug. LOL!

Sales guy calls up from overseas and complains website we got developed from another vendor is not working.
Being just the middle man who project managed the website development with the offshore vendor, I had no clue what was wrong as the site was working fine and "worksforme" was not going to be acceptable answer for the costumer demo.
Being an embedded drivers guy, had no idea to debug this, except one:
Me: Which browser are you using?
Him: I.E
Me: try any browser other than I.E
Him: it works. Thanks
Boo yeah

Look, I'm not even mad that your dataset is the spaghettiest of all spaghetti, but why do you have ten different jupyter notebook files lying around?

I mean, I'm not implying that a monkey has more brain in his armpit than you have in your entire body, but like, you call this a dataset while all over seen so far is half-processed garbage. You could've just dipped your pc in sewage and the results would still be cleaner than this.

Luckily, your paper is half decent so what the hell, let's see if I can fish anything useful out of this. But I swear to god if I come across another static path in this... And here we go! Another static path! Ladies and gentlemen, I propose we get this guy's phd back until he learns to fucking do a decent code.

(It's actually a massively complicated project, so it kinda makes sense to be this big of a mess. But still!)

Lets create a library.

Lets use that library in a project.

Lets wrap the library call in a wrapper functione to remove duplicate code.

Lets add an overloaded wrapper call that wraps the wrapper call that calls the library to partially undo the duplicate code removal.

Lets add another overloaded wrapper call that wraps the wrapper call that wraps the wrapper call that calls the library to partially undo the duplicate code removal.

How I love it. Not.

Sometimes redundancy makes sense, especially when it are two lines which make it obvious whats going on vs a single line that leads to a fuckton of overloaded wrapper functions.

Sheeesh.

Today in "code monkeys deserve divine punishment".

Another funny thing is creating a Helper class for Junit 5 tests, making it instantiable and adding to it all kinds of shit like testcontainer creation, applications instantiation, mocks, ....

... Then " crying " why the tests are so slow.

Yeah. Logic. Isolation of concerns, each test should be a stand alone complex.

But that would lead to redundancy... Oh no.

Better to create a global state god object.

Some devs... Really amaze me, especially when they argument in ways that makes one really wonder whether they are serious or just brain dead.

I honestly don’t know how my coworker has been a software engineer for 10+ years, doesn’t know and or understand a single Linux command, only works from windows... also doesn’t understand the concept of proper version control ... thinks zip folders is completely sufficient... AND doesn’t understand why someone would need to refactor something... says it works... I’m like you have a 2000 line function... yes it works, but it’s not testable nor reusable... he says he’s tested it (at his desk) ... and so what if it’s not reuseable... he’ll copy and paste and rewrite something for another project. “That’s what we are paid todo” .... HORSESHIT!!!

I don’t understand how the system hasn’t weeded people out like this.... and he blindly doesn’t want to take criticism, or learn.. saying his Years of experience proves he knows what he’s doing... bullshit

I’m just happy management is on my side.

Today I finished my robotics project. I had in my team a total idiot (the one who used the hidden divs, some might remember from another rant). I wanted to share with you the beginning of a ranting adventure.

Me: "you can begin with a simple task. I will send you the obstacle avoidance sensors values from Arduino, and you will send the data for the Arduino motors to dodge the obstacle".

The sensors give 1 if clear, 0 if obstacle is detected.

Below is his code (which I brutally rewrote in front of him).

Now, in the final version of the robot we have something like 9 sensors of the same time to work with.
Imagine what would have happened if we kept him coding. (Guess it: 2^9 statements! :D)

I was not that evil, I tried to give him some chances to prove himself willing to improve. None of them were used rightfully.

I'm so fucking glad we finished. I'm not gonna see him anymore, even if I'd like to be a technical interviewer for hiring just to demolish him.

I'm not always that evil, I promise (?)

Ps. He didn't even have any idea on what JSON is, even if we had already seen it during FIVE YEARS of computer engineering. (And should've known anyway if he had a bit of curiosity for the stuff he "studies")

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

After 3 years of being the first in and last to leave, of getting other people's work reassigned to me - P can't complete it on time, G doesn't like the user, A refuses to work on that module, etc... I finally blew last Sept.
In the span of 2 days, my boss brought me into a project 1.5 years in (she doesn't trust P to do the coding) and expected me to be up to speed and coding in a couple of days, told the functional dept that I would cover for one of their guys on vaca for three weeks and assigned me to take over a HUGE project from one of the other functional guys who wasn't getting it done. So basically I'm now doing Ps job AND supporting another department AND taking control of a large project from another department. I'm the idiot working 14 hour days while they're all leaving on time or enjoying their 3 week vaca to India.
I lost it. It's bad enough filling in the gaps in my own department but when I'm now taking on work for other departments, that's where I draw the line. I sent my boss my resignation - just could not take the inequity in the work load.
I'm still working here - my boss ended up hiring a consultant to handle the functional project and told the functional group to find their own vacation coverage. She's also monitoring workloads much closer now. I still habe an ongoing issue with having to complete other peoples work for them but I'm not working OT to do it. So speaking up helps. So does quitting.

Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.

Writing a super extensive project in php. Twice so far, I have had weird problems of codes not working.

But everytime I copy/paste the SAME code from another file, IT MIRACULOUSLY WORKS!!!!

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!!!

Many people were hired to work on new product, but no one have told them that for one or two quarters they will have to maintain 20 years old project. I was ranting about this, but in the end accepted my fate, wiped tears with money and moved on. However one of devs took another path. When he was asked to work with .aspx and jquery 1.X instead of react, he just said : "Not going to happen" and left the building.

After 6 months of work in this startup I gave in my notice yesterday.

- Me: I decided to leave this position as well as this country because: 1. My side business is expanding and Im making the same salary like here, 2. My army drafting got postponed for this year and next year they cannot draft me anymore(because of the age gap), so basically I'm a free man and can go back to my own country, 3. I have some freelance gigs on the side as well, so having them plus fulltime job plus my own side businesses it's not sustainable.

- My project lead: What if we would increase your salary ?

-Me : No, as I said this is purely due to personal reasons

My project lead: What If we would hire another dev so that you wouldn't have to work alone on frontend?

-Me: ......

Seriously do they ever listen??? I'm telling you that I'm making nearly twice the salary that you are paying me, do you really think an extra couple hundred of EUR a month will make a difference?

Client: "We're not ready to be finished with the project but I don't want to pay you any more money to meet the terms of the contract we both signed, even though all my must-have changes led to more costs just like you had warned me they would."

Me: "Don't make any more changes, plez."

Client: "Imma make another change."

Me: "No. Stahp. Don't."

Client: "I added four new fields and probably a ton more business rules I don't care to understand."

Me: "Kill me. Just put this gun to my head and kill me."

Client: "That's not in our contract!"

As a software house, we have many teams on different projects. One project was due to a Thursday, and the PM asked the team 1 week before if they could work over the weekend since there's a lot of things to do.

On the Friday before, one of the devs showed up a bit later than usual (around 10am), but ok...

After lunch he asked to talk to HR and also the boss. They talked for around 2h, then he started to say "goodbye and good luck" for everyone.

The project was on fire and he just... leave.

On the next 2 months another 4 people leave the company. All from the same team/project (but not with a big surprise like him).

Apparently, the team was constantly complaining to PM and boss about unrealistic deadlines and constant requirements changes, but they didn't did anything about it. Just when more than half this team had left the company they started to rethink this actions to this project and the others on the company.

Why you should always backup.

Nearly a year ago I developed a whole project (iOS, tvOS, watchOS), but I never backed it up because I had a recent machine and thought the chance that something happens to the disk is so small I didn’t backup. But then my mac didn’t start correctly. So I needed to reset it. Lose the project, some other files but not much else. Then I recoded the project and backed it up on multiple places. But a little later, I was writing another app, again didn’t copy again... This time I deleted the wrong folder and deleted the trash, was gone too. So from then I learned to copy everything I coded. All projects I work on, I keep a copy of on an external disk, GitHub and Bitbucket. Assuming they wont crash all at the same time 😉.

So I recommend everyone to backup all your code. Even if it’s only 500 lines. Losing it is hard...

I'm out of my mind bored. I'm an unemployed person with a great job. You'd think this would be awesome. It's torture.

I work for a consulting company. I get paid whether or not they have work for me. They haven't for several months. I'm not hearing anything. I don't know when it will change.

I'm a skilled developer in a few very popular languages - nothing remotely in the ballpark of old or obsolete. I hear that's in demand. I spend most of my time answering questions on Stack Overflow. I really like to help people, but it boggles my mind that the people struggling with the stuff I help them with all have actual work to do and I don't.

I like to learn about new stuff, but I'm just not interested in learning another framework or anything else to add to the giant pile of stuff I'm already not using. It's not fun anymore.

I don't want to do another side project, either. I have a job as a software developer. That should, at some point, involve developing some software.

This is sucking the life out of me. It's harder and harder to get out of bed and come to work. I've held off looking for another job because I'm hoping this will change. The people here are great. I could go somewhere else and it could suck for completely different reasons.

Ironically, this is close to the reason why I left my last job. Ten years ago I went through a spell where I just gave up and stopped coming to work for over a month. No one noticed. Other people were stressed about getting laid off. Some of them were. Not me.

Am I part of some weird experiment to see how insane someone can go in this totally screwed-up circumstance? Are people following me around with cameras?

I'd love to find something else, but by all outward appearances I had already found an awesome place to work. There's only one thing missing - the work.

Thanks for listening. I'm just going to put my head on my desk for a while and despair. What is wrong with this industry? We're a mess on so many levels.

Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.

So I’ve been working for this company for +4 years. When I started we were 6 dev. Now we are 1. It’s just me. Thankfully I’m leaving next week to start at another company. But right now I’m kinda loosing my mind. I have a deadline tomorrow and I’m super stressed because I’m not done. I have bugs to fix, documentation to write and all that stuff. I’m pissed off because people don’t understand what I do, why it takes time, why I want to be alone at home just coding instead of sitting at the office being interrupted with stupid ass questions about html or upcoming project. I don’t give a fuck about their clients or upcoming projects. I’m only working for them 7 more days and then they have 0 dev left. Fuck them. Fuck the CEO, fucking piece of shit. Can’t wait to flip them off leaving next week.

There was an android project that I got from my senior.

he told me that another developer already completed most the project and all I have to do is minor changes...

Well when i saw, i was amazed that the code he commented is more than the actual working code without any structure.
He copied most of code from internet.

If it's not working, put in comment else use it.

It took me a whole month to figure out what's going on.

And another 2 months to fix the issues.

Well in last my senior told me that the developer took 1 year to write this code
(to be honest any normal developer can complete that project in less than 3 month)

probably the one who sent me 3 mails within 10 minutes regarding 3 different positions, and all were addressed to someone else (Hello, Mr. Completely Different Name), so i replied telling him that's not me, and gave him the info to fix it in their db. he apologized profusely and said he fixed the error.

Next day I got two mails for another two positions, with the same incorrect name.

Or the one with whom I had half an hour phone "interview" for a specific position, they couldn't answer even the most basic technical question about the project, but invited me to an in-person interview and said my questions will be answered there, the phone interview was just to make sure they don't send completely offtopic people to the interview with the client (so far acceptable).

On the in-person interview, it was partially a repetition of the phone one, but okay, lady from the company is talking to me first time in her life. We get to the part where I can ask my questions, so I ask those basics about the project again, and her answer is:
"Oh, i don't know, i'm not a technical person, you'd have to ask that to the technical person from the company, I'm an hr person from the recruiting company."

"Wait... so... not only was this whole meeting a waste of my time, but you also lied about what it is, when you scheduled it with me on the end of the phone interview?"

"Well... it wasn't a waste of time, we like to meet the candidates in person before we forward them to actual interviews in the company, to make sure that they're not completely offtopic."

"... and how exactly do you think you'd be able to evaluate that, since you're not at all a technical person and know nothing about the project??"

" Well, i talk to programmers a lot, so i've picked up quite a bit of the terms."

...

Lels

Before I was unceremoniously laid off by a shit company in which they tried to blame shit on me I was working on a opencv implementation of a proprietary document scanner.

I finished the Android prototype and was working on the ios implementation. It was left unfinished in the ios version because I was building it in swift and obj c to compare code bases.

They launched a shit unfinished Android app of their product without the scanner (they could not add the scanner lels) and have not been able to do shit on the ios version.

I did not give them the Android prototype. There was no binding contract that specified that what I developed was theirs. There is no record of anything.

The scanner? Is still in my phone and I still have the built project in my mac.
Unless them cheap assholes decide to pay another engineer for the opencv implementation, their vbscript php non theory knowing shit lead will have to figure out the required mat obj c swift java cpp code needed to build it.

Top kek

So I’m working on a project right and I don’t run it after writing 104 lines of untested code and it doesn’t work.

Which is expected but then I do some stuff and fix that, I get a new error which is great cause I’m getting closer.

Cut to tonight. I’m trying to hunt and kill this bug. And after doing nothing but copying the code to another text file so I can upload that copy and get help.

I decide to run it with a little just print statement in it to make sure it’s definitely broken and I’m not asking online for no reason.

And.. it works.. WHAT???

I uncomment the rest of the function and get rid of the print statement and scream because ITS WORKING!!

I MEAN IT HAS BUGS BUT THEYRE BUGS I CAN FIX AND FOCUS ON AFTER I FREAK OUT ABOUT IT WORKING AFTER ME CHANGING FUCKING NOTHING.

I actually do have one. 2 years ago I found myself in a stressful situation. It lasted for an hour or so but all ended well. Ever since that incident I was wondering what should be different so that situations like these could be avoided. I had an idea. I began making sketches, sorting out the architecture I'd need and then it hit me. Shit, I could reuse this very principle for a MUCH larger scale! And in fact there's noone in the market offering this yet! There are similar products, products that offer a tiny part of my idea's functionality, but none of them are even close to what I have in mind!

And so the coding began. I was still a student back then. And employed 12hrs/day. And married. Needless to say I did not have much time for coding. Now I'm also a father (although not a student any more!) which makes my schedule even worse.

All in all I've made quite a few widely reusable libraries by now which have saved me 10s of thousands of lines typing, had yet another idea on alternative TLS which seems impossible to crack (well okay, possible. But there's a twist - cracker will not be able to know he cracked the algo :) ). Now I'm close to 100k LOC of my main project and struggling with a fucking FE (since I'm more of a bkend guy). FE's already taken a few months from me and I'm still in a square 1 :/ But I'm moving forward. Slowly, but moving. Frustrated af, but not giving up.

I had a sort of a dream to start my project before I'm 30. I have less than a year left. Still doable. This project, if it's sucessful, has a potential to become extremely popular as it offers solutions to multiple problems we have today. This project should save me from 9-to-5 work every day where, no matter how great the environment is, I feel trapped. But I need money to survive in this city . With my family.
This project should be a solution to all of my problems and probably something great the world could enjoy.

I wish I could make it. I really do. I don't want to be 9-5 any more. I don't want to be dictated what's my schedule, what's that I have to do now. what to think. I want to be free of all of this. Have enough time to live. To travel, see the world. Live in a house (God I miss living in a house....). Spend time with my family. Show my lil boy what a wonderful thing the World is!

I really want this to work. I want to be free again. And I wish I hadn't to deal with FrontEnd.

Allright, enough wabbling. Time for a nice cup of tea and back to coding. "The next big thing" is not going to create itself while I'm ranting, right?

Boss only likes stuff he can see and that looks pretty. Doesn't understand code, servers, containers, DBs, etc. Praise is attributed by something looking nice in the frontend, whether or not it does crazy stuff behind the scenes.

Spent a week working on a project whilst boss was away. Got to about Thursday and thought, oh poop, I've built all this API stuff, but not much frontend. So I panic built frontend screens with no functionality just so I had something to show.

Wish I had another dev to share backend progress with (and code review)...

One of our customers asked us (a while back) to create a nice interface for their label printer (preferably integrated in their web cms)

So we started developing and after two weeks (we were almost done) they canceled the request, payed for the worked ours and said that another company was willing to do it faster (even though we were almost done)

So that was about half a year ago, meanwhile I've migrated to Ubuntu

Today I heard we have to do it again because the other 'faster' company wasn't faster, and didn't live up to the expectations

I do not have the code anymore... My colleagues also do not have the code anymore... It was removed to keep our coded clean, not sure if it's on git (the guy who workers on the part that's has a repo doesn't always commits...)

I've worked on on a standard node js script (which I didn't create a repo for because the project was canceled)

... Amazing

I work in a team where I am the only person not belonging to the main company. We have been a year and 3 months working together and they still don't realise that I have very restricted access to many of the things related to the project. So every now and then, something breaks and we have a meeting where they all tell me how disappointed they are at me because I was responsible for that and then I try to show them how I could not possibly even access the information where it is stated that I was responsible for that thing. Or that that thing even existed.

And then, the move the conversation to why they won't pay for my ramping up. This is not ramping up, assholes, this is you allowing me to access the information I need to do my job as you want!

I really don't know what to do... Other than looking for another job

After three weeks looking for decent pdf parser that will handle all documents I gathered for my project I decided to write my own.
All those I tried end up with more then 10% not correctly parsed pdfs or require to much coding.
I was sceptic so I waited another week debating if it’s good idea to do it and I said yes.

Spent 16 hours straight coding pdf document extraction library and command line tool based on pdf.js

Fuck, now when I open pdf I see opcodes instead of text.

Got two more hours until client planning meeting and then I go to sleep for a while.

Time to start testing this more deeply as I have about 60k ~ 20GB pdf documents to parse and then I need to build some dependency graph out of its text.

At least it’s more funny then making boring REST API for money.

// Tired as fuck adventures, yay

I was once coding and researching for a school project, it was around 1AM (yeah, I'm a pussy that needs to sleep at 12AM, otherwise I'm useless all the day long) and a friend was with me, he was doing another stuff.

Suddenly, out of the blue, he asks me "Hey, how much is 12 multiplied by 430?", so I say "Let me check", press Win+R, type "notepad", enter, write operation and wait looking at the screen.

"why this does not work?" I thought for some seconds until I realized I fucking typed in notepad and not in the calculator.

Just laughed my ass off and went straight to sleep. Until today, my friend thinks I'm deranged.

I have a huge deadline coming up. It's important for the future of the project that we show a mostly complete version of the product to the client that day.

They ask if I can do it. I say yes, but it will be very taxing. And by taxing, I mean it's going to use up the remaining energy and motivation I have for anything. And I've made that clear to everyone.

Coworker:
Here's an unrelated task that will take 6.75 hours of your day and I will hound the boss until he makes you do it. And I am going to send you messages after work that foreshadow another day of doing things that aren't deadline related.

So when deadline day comes around and I have to present something that has two work days of work missing, they're going to look at me like I failed. And not that I had two of my days stolen from me doing miscellaneous chores that could have waited.

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

tl;dr - why you no read this?

Here I am pondering why I continue to return to my job everyday when we are currently at month 13 of a 4 month project... yea let that set in for a minute... which is still at least 3-4 months away from being deployed due to annual leave of key stake holders and the whole Christmas period creeping up and things just not going as planned every step of the way.

There's no greater demotivater - is that even how you spell it - then being stuck in a project for so long you really just don't give a shit if it works or not anymore.

This has gone from a simple - relatively speaking - project to some monolithic mayhem of requirement changes and process adjustments, that have not only delayed our team, but 3rd party vendors needing to change things as well, or the requirements being wrong early so when you get up to business testing it's like "nope, that's not what we wanted" .... despite all the sessions of you personally giving the PM all the damn requirements.

But in saying that, they (3rd party) aren't innocent either, we have found nothing but issue after issue with their product since we started this project that who ever signed off on going forward with the thing should have been shot from both sides - it's not designed for the scale we will be using it yet we didn't find that out till we got so far into the rabbit hole we had a chance to be able to do load testing.

Meh, guess I'll go to work Monday and spend another week in misery trying to deliver something that just doesn't want to know what the finish line is.

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

Random story, I was working on a project a few years ago that had a very tight deadline and a lot of code to write. I had been working late in the office most evenings but one night myself and a colleague had stayed later than usual as we got carried away with supporting peripherals​ in the epos.
The cleaner came in on evenings and we had seen her that night, but had not heard anything for a while so when it came time to leave we figured we best lockup the 2 offices.

After making a quick pass through the building we couldn't see her so proceeded to lock up. Fortunately before setting the alarm we spotted her motorbike in the adjacent car park and decided to have another look.

I'm not quite sure why I decided to look in the tiny supply room/closet but fortunately I did as I found the cleaner standing in this tiny room​playing games on her phone 😂

A guy who had the same nationality as the enterprise we were working for was promoted from JUNIOR js developer to UX/UI coordinator for the entire department just because he was 2 year older than me (26 vs 28). Literally he was a junior dev and went to that.

One day he was accusing me of writing a piece of code which led prod to downtime. I was in the office, he was in another country with our manager and technical director next to him and we were talking over internal conference system. I shown git history + his name + his code and he was saying ‘that’s not true!!!’.

I couldn’t resist and I began to yell something like ‘You fucking fuck piece of shit cocksucker...’ for 5 minutes. Since that day i was the god on my project for UI/UX side.

Even now he is in the same place on the same position...

PS: more stories to come with this guy

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

My first freelance project - happened to be with the worst client. They didnt wanna pay more than $500 and also had no clue what they want, so each time i present something they request additional features or changing the ones implemented. In the end i kept the half downpayment for my time and bailed without deploying or anything. I introduced them to another freelancer to take the project and never went near them again.

To clarify, it was not my first project/ just my first time dealing with clients for projects instead of doing them at work. Ever since then i have a strict no dealing with clients directly policy.

Being a c# junkie moving to c++, I hated the archaic practice of declaring things in one file, then implementing them in another.

I have been using c++ as my main language for about two months straight now, and I went back to a c# project and I HATE not having them in separate files.

Funny, eh?

In my case, the most unrealistic deadline was when I was put on a project for 30 person days in 2008. The project had been running for about 6 months at that point.

I spoke to the project manager about my tasks and she told me to finish the fat client. So I immersed myself in the sources. And I was horrified to realize that not only was it not even a POC, but the performance was lousy to say the least. It took about 70 (sic!) seconds to start the program, read in about 20 records from a database and display them as a hierarchical structure.

I asked the PM when I was supposed to have finished my work, and her response was, "Yesterday."
"Very funny," I replied.
"No, really," she said, "the deadline was yesterday."

It took me an afternoon to speed up the fat client startup to 6 seconds. And then it took us another two weeks or so to identify the processes in discussions with the technical project manager. Because that didn't exist yet either.

About 1.5 years after the deadline, the software system - consisting of the fat client, mainframe modules and purchased software - was stable enough to be rolled out.

So, I got a new job opportunity at another company, one thing we agreed is that I would need one month to give the notice, and leave the project I was working on with the company I currently work on. Today, after 25 days, they said "the project is not available anymore, we can't hire you", I already give the current company the notice. Making all the wishes possible to keep the current project I work on.

This is life telling me, don't change from what you know to the unknown, even with good positive reviews

Boss: How long will it take to finish the project?

Me: (Gives date for finishing dev and deployment.)

Boss: great, sound reasonable.

Me: ...

Boss: wait. Aren't you on vacation the two weeks after that.

Me: jup.

Boss: yeah we are not doing that again. Client can wait another two weeks.

Before someone says no Boss/PM is like that, he was/is a developer too so discussing deadlines and efforts is usually pretty relaxed since he knows our codebase and how long it takes to do things.

When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...

and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...

because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.

Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.

I fucking hate people who report somebody else's work as their own successes so much.

I've written a fair amount of perf tests for our project so far (actually I'm like the only person doing that). Some fucker from another team asks me if I could write one more. I agree, because why not. I spend a few hours, making sure to cover all cases and commit the test. Then the same fucker runs it and reports it as HIS PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENTS.

0 credit given to me. Fuck you, I just wanted to be helpful and you used this.

I'm still quite young and tend to fall for shit like this, but getting more and more grumpy because of those people.

Me: *working on a project for a year solo*

Management: Let's move development to consultants

Me: I don't think we'll profit from that

Management: Yes let's do it anyways

Me: *switching between project management and working on another project for 6 weeks*

EMERGENCY MEETING

Management: We're not getting enough output

Me: What did I say?

I'm so fucking tired of this project fuckery. Cred to my boss, she's great, but this time they should've just listened to me.

fuck javascript
node.js module system sucks. Like its module system is trash, who will want to download some fucking 1GB worth of packages to create a new project.
People keep on just creating other package managers. Yarn is good enough because it caches your packages but still, i am just from deleting some 2.2Gb node modules from my computer and just whyy ?
An area where internet connection us shitty and expensive it is just not very well.
Fuck javascript is everywhere so i have to use it,

typescript just adds another layer to the heavy lifting. You write some typed code to 'reduce bugs' but you generate much more heavy code. I could write in 1kb js file but i end up getting some 3kb js because what - i used typescript-ügvjpiahdjb

fuck javascript

We had a school project where we where supposed to implement a software with a heavy client in C# and web services for it in C#, but the web services HAD TO COMMUNICATE WITH SMTP AND IMAP. And do that in 8 days.

We were 6 in the team. 4 had no idea what a web service is, and I and the designated project lead were the only ones knowing what to do. The lead had paperwork to do for the project, so I had to do everything but the UI alone. So 1 guy did the UI, 3 were... Playing Minecraft... The lead was doing paperwork and ranting about how noisy idiots these guys were... And I was sick as hell and could not eat anything, I was vomiting all day in between which moment I managed to make half of the functionalities of the project, despite having to go to the hospital and have to continue working despite the medical request not to work.

So the day before the presentation I had half of the functionalities done and I had to explain them yet another time what web services are so they can answer the questions and cover for themselves.

On the day of the presentation it went kinda fine. It was not finished but it worked like asked.

We were asked for peer evaluation and I gave A to the lead and the UI guy and B to the 3 other lazy asses.

Shortly after I am called by the tutor in the office : "What happened on this project? Were you not working at all? Apart for the lead who gave you an A, every one gave you a D (lowest grade). I demand for explanations"

I said never mind and got back to studying. I got a B, all the rest of the group an A.

I've found a job as a junior developer several months ago, but I really want to find another job...

I know, my knowledge and skills aren't superior yet, but I am tired of that feeling of being useless.. I constantly self-educate myself after work and university, but still, I often need to ask co-workers "where's this form?", "wtf is that", "how do I access this"... Plus, their projects are HUGE, but no matter how big the project is, there are 2 to 4 people working on each at a time. And 1 person may work on 2-3 projects. And we are usually late for deadlines :/

Also code quality is meh..
Me: Why do we implement it here?
Co-worker: oh, we don't actually use it, it's just to hide warnings and pass the test.

Holy shit, wtf, I've spent half day trying to figure out wtf is this and why is it not working :/

After 1 year of working as android dev and coding in java, finally switched to another startup where everything is in Kotlin where I will be the only one maintaining that project.

Me: This code has almost no comments
Senior dev: Code is pretty self explanatory

FML

At least she spent 4 days with me and walked me through the code, so I'm not totally lost which is great!

How can I make my manager understand that performance should not be measured by how many tickets we have resolved?

If the ticket is an easy one then sure 1-2 days is enough, but for some complicated shit or dealing with models that I have never touched before, I am gonna need several days just to understand the requirement.

For some fucked up reason, our story point is in hours, instead of days. So when we say 24 hours, then it's only 3 days.

Another fucked up reason is that my colleagues doesn't seem to mind. I am the most vocal one objecting when got assigned too many tickets. They just joke around and seem to accept it.

FYI, I am just 6 months in and bouncing between 3 projects.
Am I just too lazy or slow?
In my previous company, the devs seemed to be pretty chill, and the project manager only complained when an issue has been dragging on for weeks.

So I just recently had the pleasure to set up a Rails environment for a friend on Windows. I haven't used Windows in about 5 or 6 years, and the person I had to set it up for doesn't know much about programming at all.

I all went fine at first, install database, devkit thingy and git. Then set up the project itself. And there is where the problems started.

First windows would refuse to use SSL, because of some weird bug in the Windows version of rubygems. The suggested upgrade did not work so I had to switch some gem sources to insecure connections, but at least it did install everything correctly.

Alright, I thought, that's not _that_ bad, everything is running now.

He sent me a screenshot some time later. Something was wrong with the JavaScript runtime, and I could not figure out for the life of me what the issue was.

Later again he sent me another screenshot.
His Antivirus spyware was messing with the asset pipeline. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

This was the point where I just said "FUCK IT, i'll just put everything into a fucking VM and let him use that".
I should have done that in the first place.

Long story short:
Setting up a development under Windows is painful.
Do yourself a favor and just use a VM.

So I took over a project from another dev after he left the company and his project was currently in QA pending release. They were blocking it due to some issues around the persons information not appearing consistently. It turned out he wasn't persisting the persons information in the database with the actual record.

It would be as if when you ordered something on amazon and changed your address for a future shipment all shipments would show the new address. So it turned out QA had no idea how bad the problem was and they had pushed this issue to him to fix but he just wasn't fixing it.

When I reported the problem to my boss and due to the time constraints for release they authorized a contractor to come in to assist. I ended up writing a few classes and one table to persist the data and all of it was solved. I ended up fixing the problem in one weekend. Huge problem and I fixed it in just a few days.

Used a starter to scaffold a new project. Have never used that starter before but it has more than 1400 starts on Github.

Two days after.... so far so good. The created project structure used some tools I haven't used before, some are good, others are not so good, but anyway I am towards the first release of my codes. I have done countless 'npm run build', 'npm run test', 'npm run fix', etc., but.... my fault, I haven't committed once since starting the project, thinking I would commit when the next function is implemented, next test case passed.... after all, what could go wrong anyway?

Finally, one last test case passed, I think I will commit and run 'npm publish'.... but wait, had a glimpse of the scripts section in package.json, there's a command named 'all'. An voice came out of nowhere was talking to my subconscious mind, "all.... build, lint, prettier, test..... yeah you should run all... it's another build script, the worst you can get is just some harmless error messages.....", and my fingers typed 'npm run all'...

Time stopped for a few seconds, file structure in project explorer was shifting, files & folders were disappearing & appearing, what's happening... and I looked at the 'all' script closely for the first time....

WHAT THE HELL, WHO SHOULD PUT 'git reset --hard' IN A BUILD SCRIPT WITHOUT ANY PROMPT????!!!!!!!

MY PLAN WAS TO COMMIT AND GO TO SLEEP, IT'S 1AM NOW!!! WHERE CAN I RECOVER THE LOST FILES????

Another member of the team updated the production JSON configuration of the project with a missing comma, this broke a system that's not yet live and where there aren't any real users (only used for demos/testing).

Instead of having a good laugh about how silly this was, the CTO/CEO removed their write access to production..

First month of project we suggest that we test that Entity Framework has made reasonable DB queries because the system will need to handle a lot of records. “Not a priority in this sprint because we need features.” Devs try to get it into every sprint. The last week of the project they want us to dump in a ton of records so they can test it. The N+1 SELECT query issue is on main queries. It is so bad and slow with more records that a simple query causes the container management to auto scale the application on a single query. They can have max 8 users in the system at a time and it will take 10 seconds to do a simple page refresh.

They get on our case and we dredge up all of the correspondence where they completely ignored our advice. Fix it now! We need another sprint. Fix it free! No.

Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.

The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.

Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.

The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.

A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.

I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.

I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.

Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.

!dev

I had semi-jokingly changed my username from dextel2 to nothappy, because of that one bad day.

But, it is now when I realized that I am actually NOT HAPPY, things are lately rough, I am constantly scared for no reason, I doubt my skills, I doubt myself for no reason, and top of that there's always a chance for another epileptic attack.

I tried and keep trying to distract myself from negative thoughts but the more I try the more I fail, I've become distant with my younger brother, for the record I'm very overprotective about him. I don't even know if he feels the same, as this year ends or every day passes by I feel changed from my past self (not in a good way).

Switched my first job to get another good job, turns out they don't even have any projects and I'm just a guy they are showcasing like they have ONE amateur developer and we are looking for an entire project and it did work for one client which I'm gonna deny personally because the client is not clear about the project itself, I do not care about the consequences, my heart lies in academics and I'll put my 100% in academics, shall I'm kicked.

A lot has happened in this year, but this one is/was unique and very hard to process. I've always been joyful, sarcastic, funny, you name it, but all of it has just vanished, don't know why. I'm also becoming distant from my ONLY 3 friends and parents.

Trying to debug why there's NaN% instead of 15% (project in JS).
Later realises isNaN(Val) literally checks for NaN datatype rather than Val is a number or not.
*shit*
Ctrl Shift F - isNaN in Atom (searches entire project), rethinks logic, refactors code
Looks around *no ones there*
Silently pushes the changes along with another major commit.

>has idea for project (creating a watchface for my watch)
>downloads SDK
>finds out only Eclipse is supported
>Tries to go the CLI way
>Can't find a way to setup a new project without Eclipse
>Finds a boilerplate
>Gets random unexplainable, undocumented errors
>"Well, guess that's another idea that will not workout due to the incompetency of others"

Anyone who says 'Docker is easy" should burn in hell.

Sure, It took me 5 minutes to run my project in docker container

Took another 25 to run multipl;e comntainers via compose

Now, 3 hours later, can't run compose from multiple Visual Studio solutions. Says "Pull failed"

No doc. No examples. No nothing.

I'll try for another hour or so, if not, fuck that docker shit. I'll go to Service fabric.

I'm fucking tired of putting my efforts into bug fixes.

5 years of web. I never had a client that likes to keep it's crappy slow piece of shit product on the market in the exact same way it is.

If they didn't sell it to state employees (and good luck for them if they do not use it) their product would be dead.

That's the only way they get money: bids. And the minimum a state pays is 15 MILLION.

And they don't have 90K to pay another dev to help creating a new product.

Their CEO fucking REJECTS anything that's not a bug fix. Once he said to our PM:

"It's pretty and more fast, but wasn't this way that made me rich"

I'm thinking I'm getting another client, seriously. Everyday the same thing breaks and they already know the fucking answer:

WE NEED TO FUCKING REFACT

CREATE A NEW FUCKING PROJECT

This shit is making crazy. I can't sleep. I can't eat and I'm always fucking tired, no matter what I do.

I need to stop working for Brazilians.
I'll try US, Canada or somewhere in Europe.

I swear to god, if I read another medium post on how you managed to be focused and productive I will fucking... well... roll my eyes, make a facepalm and rant about it on devRant!

Who gives a shit if I'm unproductive and unfocused?!

Well, look at me now, I'm fucking productive while I write about you, you fucking peace off shit! And guess what? I'm not even using any of your 40 todo apps or time trackers. There is no pomodoro timer next to me or framed quotes from Steve Jobs hanging on the wall. Oh, I must be a fucking genius!

But what if YOU became unproductive?
What will happen when YOU start to procrastinate?

Do you really think the world would care?

Oh, but you are not really a writer are you? you're a developer building your app!?
Well fuck, I guess you're going to change the world than?
It's your big project. Your life's work, your legacy.

Let me remind you...

All apps will be abandoned!
All blog post will be forgotten!
Productive people will die!
Focused people will die!
Enthusiastic bloggers writing about productivity will die!
All CEOs and CTOs will die!
All developers will die!
Steve Jobs is dead!
In x years, you and I will also be dead!

Whatever you do, it's not really that important!
It's really not.

You're not going to change the world.
The world doesn't need another app.
The world doesn't need your advice on how to be productive.
You are not special.

Deal with it!

This pic is from my class messenger group.
Translation:

Dear teacher! Our group have chosen another web builder for the project, we hope it's not a problem...

Yeah, I use templates which I can copy code from to my group's site, but for the love of *!#* life I consider myself a noob beginner even tough I've been in this field for a year or two now but I can code with more confidence now. What the hell are these people going to do if they only willing to rely on school and wix...

But I can always be wrong, these are just my thoughts.

Working with the Android SDK after about a decade of mostly avoiding ever having to do so directly...and fucking hell, nothing has changed.

It's still obtuse as fuck, you constantly have to provide contexts to operations which can't need them (there's only one fucking keyboard to close), and whilst they have added some new stuff which helps like Material, the APIs are just as mental, the setup just as elaborate and manual - and they don't seem to have deprecated anything along the way, so fifteen years of random software design decisions cohabit awkwardly together like the Bucket family.

I don't really mind Java, it's just long-winded C - but boy has it found its niche here. Your code is more boilerplate than not until you've written more than you'll mostly ever need to for an app.

At this point I'm just laughing when I come across another Stack Overflow solution for a trivial operation that involves writing an entire class. I would try Kotlin but this isn't a new project, and I'm not pissing another ingredient into this hot mess.

Alright, Android Studio is an improvement on Eclipse, but that's not really saying much.

I was once asked to create a fully secure chat system prototype (the ui didn't matter) in 2 days. We ended up building a client in python (which I wrote) and it kinda worked and a c# backend that didn't really work.

1 hour before we had to present the project to some high up management we decided that we couldn't fix the bugs in the system.

So I came up with a cool idea. Why not use ssh?
So I set up a bash script that writes to a file and tail -f that reads from the file. That way you could chat securely with another person.
I made it 15 minutes before the presentation with no Internet working :) they said it was hacky but a cool solution they saw that day :p I felt happy and that I had to thank Linux for being there for me

The interview wasn't so bad, but it was deceiving, not to the fault of the company though. During the interview process, they were asking all sorts of questions about my Angular and front-end skills. I was to take over a project that used Angular heavily, and none of their devs knew angular. At the time, this was going to be my dream job! After I got the job, and met with the contractor who was handing over the project. He told me that he spent that weekend rewriting the whole thing on rails and ember. When I brought it up with my boss, he was not happy. I would have been fine working on it, but instead I got put onto Wordpress projects with the evergreen promise that I would transition to that project or another one like it. Never happened, built up my skills contributing to Open Source, then left.

[Hardware geeks, microcontroller geeks, please come]

Yet another Hacktoberfest tshirt...

Gotcha? (I bet you know who I am)

Just kidding. Just a random project idea I am not sure if it is possible to make from scratch.

It is essentially a usb external storage
About 32gb

And has a lcd that shows available storage space

And some buttons to play snake. (Yup)

Is it possible?

What should I expect when creating from scratch? (Microcontroller, c language, interfaces, etc)

A year ago I was hired as a Jr dev to assist the senior dev because he was so busy. Within 2 months he was pushed out and I replaced him. I thought maybe he just got busy with other things or found a new job.

After working alone this past year, I was told last week that since I am so busy with things outside the job, they were hiring someone to help me finish the project I'm currently on.

(for context : I work as a contracted dev for a small dev company of 5 or so people. One for each language/os.)

I can't help but think that I'm probably being pushed out and replaced. I flat out asked that, but never got a reply. Now I'm 70% through a project and disgruntled with everything. Not sure how I'm supposed to feel really.

If they want to replace me for one reason or another that's fine, I just wish they weren't shady about it.

I should probably be working right now, but I'm going to take my kids to the pet store to clear my head. I'll enjoy a little time away from my computer.

!rant

I love the first weeks after a job change. It's just like falling in love, everything seems to be perfect until you take off the pink glasses.

Have to wait until I'm assigned a burning project to have a full picture.

Actually I am in a burning project. Deadline in 2 weeks. Doing Bugfixes which do not require in-depth project knowledge, and... It's fine. All a matter of perspective. I also think that project based work suits me more than usual 15y old legacy enterprise shit. And I'm able to switch. From embedded C++ over hardware dev to fullstack .NET (I consider myself as a full-fullstack dev, able to do everything from hardware to frontend).

Topics such as IOT, medical, device engineering, machine learning. Wow.

It's my first company having >50 employees and multiple offices in multiple countries. I used to jump every 2 years from one shitty garage company to another.

Wish me good luck ✌️

I just got a fucking job again after 2.5 months between jobs and the new place has been allowing (if not encouraging) the piracy of Windows Server in client environments... I thought this place had so much potential but I was wrong.

Going to start looking for another full time job or really buckledown and try to get my freelance project/business started.

BTW fuck microshaft for expensive licensing, but I’m not risking my certs and professional career for some idiots trying to pirate software.

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

Fml
Friday: I just finished a project with someone and I went and told my boss that I'm done with this some other work can be allotted to me. He told me that I can start working on another project with another guy. This guy told me that we'll have to start working from tomorrow.
I was mentally taken aback because I thought Saturday's are holidays. And I had a feeling that maybe Saturdays are working but I wasn't just showing up(sidenote: I'm an unpaid intern here who started a month back). So I asked him one more time whether I should come tomorrow. He replied with a ya.
Saturday: I get ready take a cab to office only to realize that Saturday's are not working and what he understood from my 'tomorrow' was Monday.

FML. Wednesday evening i started working on a personal project that i wished to complete till Thursday night

Thursday ,5th july, my birthday (fuck it). Went mad on project , 11:40 of night , it was still incomplete.

Fuckit fuckit fuckit, i have to do it , i have to do it. But here comes another idea that seems implementable 😑

6th july ,9:30 am of morning and then its complete ( not 100% market product levl complete, but , yeah i did all that i felt i can do)

My body temperature :103 -_-
I AM FUCKIN ILL NOW AND WHY DO I HAVE TO ALWAYS DO THIS NIGHT CODING !!!!
fucking excitements -_-
Don't you guys ever go through this phase? When you are so excited about a project you can't seem to think beyond that? And end up hurting your body?

Friday afternoon, the week's work is finished, and I'm ahead of schedule.
An email arrives for another project.. "URGENT yaddayadda". The dickheads where it came from have taken weeks to react, and now it's urgent. Yeah, fuck you assholes, ideally with a smoothing iron.
On the upside, I'm not addressed directly, and that project isn't my task. But boss could make it mine in no time, and I think he would.
I don't even open the email, nobody has seen it anyway yet, AND I GO HOME! :-)

"My code" only exists when you work alone on your precious project. Do not carry over that mindset when you work with a team or you will just ignite another endless holy war

One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.

Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.

Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.

A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.

After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.

Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)

As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.

However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports

They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.

After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...

The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.

In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs.

...What a day ,
"CTO new priority need this project started and completed ASAP."
Me: "What about my current project you wanted me to work on that was a high priority which took over Another project I was supposed to be working on?"
CTO: "This one is a higher priority than both of them"
Me: "ok sure shall get onto it".
PM: "A client has come in with an issue on another project I need this fixed now".
Team leader assigns me a bunch of tasks that need to get done which is ok but 5 people need me to get it done so they can do the bulk of their work.

Later for a side project CTO asks me to get a list together of things that are missing for this side project, about 60 seconds later he asks me to send him the email now - bare in mind nearly 300 assets I need to go through which are not organised so what the heck I just send him it mid sentence.

End of day get told that CTO wants me on yet another different project...

Each of these projects takes 4 months to get done. But arggggg... oh and then I hear that our new PM has decided to cut all project deadlines by half....

I am but a single person,
I just want to sit back and watch everything burn around me... But the company has a history of Scape goating people on failed project deadlines... Never a dull day in the office but tbh kinda like it.

It's been a while since I've heard a consensus of a moronic idea from the corner offices. I was invited to a department planning meeting (just to listen, not necessarily engage or add value) and discussion went to the development of a mobile app.

Mgr1: "The CEO has the net present value of the mobile project as $20 million. Where did he get that number?"
VP: "No idea."
Mgr2: "How will it be any different than our web site that is already mobile compliant?"
VP: "It is to gain market share"
Mgr3: "Market share from who? A mobile app is not going to increase our customer base. At best, it will only move some of our existing customers to mobile. No way it would scale to those numbers."
VP: "The primary benefit is so customers can browse offline."
Mgr2: "Offline browsing isn't listed in the milestones."
Mgr1: "We're not going to push and keep gigs of data up-to-date on someone's phone just for random times they don't have internet access."
VP: "I guess that's right. We can push our pdf catalog. That's only a few hundred meg."
Mgr2: "Pushing the catalog? That's not on the listed milestones"
VP: "Its all assumed."
Mgr3: "Who owns this project? Web team is already maxed to capacity."
Mgr2: "Marketing team only has 3 developers, we can't take on anything as complex as a mobile app and support the existing processes."
Mgr1: "What about the network infrastructure and PCI compliance? We're talking about a system for the web site and another for mobile, right?"
Mgr2: "Who is going to manage all the versions in the app stores and future changes to the mobile platform?"
Mgr4: "Not us"
Mgr2: "Nope"
Mgr1: "OK, good. Its very likely this project will be dead on arrival at the next company strategic meeting."
VP: "Mobile the only project on the strategic meeting agenda. Sorry guys, it's happening. We're not going to leave $20 million sitting on the table.
<awkward silence>
VP: "Next item of business ..."

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

So I was working on a website for a club in my college. I designed a pretty decent UI and at first everyone accepted it. So I made a working website with my friend, made backend with node and all was set.

After that, the fucking member of club brought in another graphic designer for changes. And they literally made the whole website with heavy images. The designer made heavy neon backgrounds in Adobe Illustrator and didn't even compressed it.

They made the whole fucking website with images and they ran it all on localhost and were happy with the speeds! ಠ_ಠ

They even put an image in fucking Navbar!

And then I left that project, I could not see more destruction.

WHY DO PEOPLE ALWAYS LEAVE CLOSE TO DEADLINES???

My team exists of three developers and a product owner. By the end of the month we have to deliver two new applications. It has not been going as smoothly as we'd hoped so far. However, one of the developers has cut his time for this project from fulltime to 1-2 days a week starting this week. The other developer is also needed on another project and has to run to the rescue whenever there is a problem with the servers, so he doesn't really solve any bugs either. Also he'll be leaving straight after deadline so he has to document everything only he knows and he'll be on holiday next week. Also, the product owner leaves tomorrow and will be back after deadline.

So.. Here I am, junior developer, have been here for about three months and I have to fix everything and do the communication to our testers as well. I'm feeling too overwhelmed right now...

!dev

Here here to another year. So it's year end and I'd like to share an insight why I'm not happy.

> Left good job but the pay wasn't so good
> Lost girlfriend, I blame myself for this
> We were on the same project, so naturally my entire project is sabotaged
> She gave away my very first API which I built by myself
> Been unemployed 2 months and did nothing
> Got hired for react js and AngularJS but boss wants me to do java backend
> I DONT EVEN KNOW JAVA, IT ISNT ON MY RESUME
> And I might not get gold 🏅 medal for the academics

2 years from now I'll switch from industry to academics, I want to shape young minds properly

My paper just got rejected. Again. The first time it was expected. But for this journal, it wasn't supposed to be. Some of the reviewers' comments are stupid. (for eg. I mention a no-loss algorithm fir a game which, so his/her comment is like what's no-loss? , like are you fucking kidding me, if you don't know that, then why are you a reviewer in the first place)

Anyway now I don't know what to do. I'm looking for more journals but all have so high impact factors and I'm not even sure confident to submit again. Had a good mind to mail the editor in chief but well, I don't think it'd help. What do you guys think?

In the middle of another project, another paper, online courses, now this. I'm just done. I didn't go home as well. It's around four o' clock in the morning here, so noone here is awake.

Can anyone hear me?

(Ok, I love js in general (specially with es6), but here's something I hate about the "ecosystem". Dont take this too srsly also)

Holy fucking gagged shit, these project readmes that start out for too long about the project objective instead of stating the actual thing/s the software does.

WHAT DOES IT FUCKING DO!?
STOP BEING FUCKING FANCY ABOUT YOUR PROJECT.

Jesus christ, people jacking off about their awesome tool and how it will make everyone happy. No one cares.

"shitsmoke.js is a framework that focuses on delivering truly reliable data with static checking enabled on deployment."

WHAT THE SHIT DOES THAT MEAN?

Gimme a bullet point with the goddamn features (not the fucking BENEFITS) and I'm done.

These are like layers of marketing bullshit texts you have get through, getting more technical as you go on.

But sometimes they never do a technical summary, THEY GO STRAIGHT INTO THE GODDAMN API. And the API docs belong to a docs site, there is github.io and packages that take care of that.

You're like a goddamn linguistic detective, trying to disect the meaning of these words to understand if some package is what you're looking for.

And I don't wanna visit another website to understand what it does either!

This happened many years ago.

First, the background. I was working on a government project with a consulting firm. I would regularly sit on conference calls with several business analysts, project managers (yes, plural), and government employees where I was the only one with any technical knowledge of the platform we were working with. Of the other supposedly technical people, most of them were warm bodies hired by the consulting firm. They knew little to nothing. Most of them bullshitted their way into the jobs.

They hired a new project manager (or program manager, I don't remember) to lead the project at a high level. Things were not going well, because the environments were unstable. Since it was high security government project, we couldn't do any work for several weeks because you cannot copy work from outside environments. Literally a criminal act.

The new lead PM proceeds to take charge and send demanding emails. The one that sent me over the edge was an email that indicated we were all not working hard enough and we had to provide our detailed plans for a project in 30 minutes. Yep, she had it in all caps and a large font at the bottom - a 30 minute deadline. It would have been a rough 24-48 hours to put that together. 30 minutes was an impossibility.

That was the last straw for me. I flipped my shit and ripped my boss a new one. To be totally honest, I regret doing that. It only made stuff worse. Within a month or two, I quit along with our best business analyst.

About a year later, I found out from another government employee of the agency that a scandal erupted within the organization. At least one director level person on that team (government employee) was fired for cause. If you know how governments tend to work, generally it requires serious ethical or criminal violation for an employee to be fired. The consulting firm I was working got most of their work canceled, and they had to lay off most of that team. I'm convinced, based upon other stuff I read about my former employer, that kickbacks were involved. They had no problem paying off government employees for fat contracts and/or cooking the books (another scandal).

However, after that experience, I hope I never work on a government project EVER AGAIN.

Monday morning client meetings are usually a pain. If they're not delayed once, they're delayed twice, and they go on for hours, taking up the entire morning for everyone on the project.

To make today even better, it was about an hour of our client ripping into us developers on the project, and the application we're making, to shreds, saying that we have a lack of attention to detail and are working well.
(not bearing in mind, we're building a hybrid application, so it's a glorified web page and we can't test on every android phone, or iOS device and any combination of keyboards for those in between, and every problem comes with its own quirks when you're forcing things with html, js and angularjs).

I feel back for the pm, she had literally 5 more hours of salty, salty calls with our other poc about the issues raised and how we could go about fixing all these minor issues, since they know the solution to them, despite having little to zero technical knowledge.

Just another day in the office I guess.

Anyone else feels forced into a position by your project leader to be responsible for another coworker's work?

I feel like it is a burden of an ship anchor. They expect me to explain when she does not do her job correctly or uses too much time on X task.

So I finished 6-month long frontend studies and the school proposed internship in one of the best local coding companies. I got their test, basically to write 'API-based internet app with any of JS frameworks'.

Me: 'Hooray!!!'. Couple of days later, app delivered. Made with jQuery (because this is the only js framework the fucking coding school taught me). Very long, very personal cover letter sent along with it.

They: ' We are sorry, but we will not consider anything written with jQuery'.

Me: 'OK'. Learning ReactJS alone by myself for two weeks, 8-10 hours daily. Another two weeks - another project delivered. News agregator, fetching from 3 APIs and merging news based on publication time. News categories, news search - all the bells and whistles. Made 100% myself - not some clone from Udemy workshop or youtube.

They: 'Sorry, your project isn't good enough'.

Me (silently): Fuck you too, stupid HR manager. If you aren't able to see the motivation and dedication in a person, shove a dildo up your ass.

Coded a project for months, only tested it in Firefox. Then I think about the other users, so I fix everything in Chrome. After this I sent it to a friend to try it out, says not working at all in Safari, Mac. Okay, another few nights without sleep then... 😩

The worst part of being a dev? Working in teams.

And I don't mean that in the "I'm the best ninja code wizard in the whole world and you're all holding me back" kinda way. I'm thinking more in the lines of someone who has to deal with that kind of attitude on a daily basis. As someone who recently was put in a leading position in a dev team, this is by far one of the worst experiences that came with it.

Some examples?
- One dev completely changed the naming scheme for variables in a class he worked on for one. single. bug fix. His reason? He just didn't like it!
- Another one noticed that data he was supplied with was not in the specified format. Instead of flagging this with the project leads, he just rewrote his parser to fit the data. A couple of weeks later the supplier noticed the error, fixed the format and suddenly everyone wondered why the software failed processing the data.
- Or that one senior dev, that just refuses to accept changes because "it was always done like this and it worked" No, it didn't. That's why it was changed!

Once a dev team reaches a certain size, people need to realize that stuff like coding rules and process guidelines are not there to annoy them but to help the whole team work as efficient as possible. I don't care how good a programmer you are, if you can't check your ego you don't belong in any kind of team-oriented development project!

Just when I had almost fallen in love with this new job which I started 8 months ago, this happens.

My “manager” had conversation with me. He was complaining that my work is of poor quality (objectively speaking, it is not). I don’t even directly work with this manager anymore. He “leads” this big project and he really wanted me to get involved in it but I struggled because it’s a big codebase and I was a new joiner. Months later, a new project was started and I worked on the backend for it. And I really liked that project more as I literally wrote it from scratch. And even the “mangers” for that project was a bit chilled out.

Now, the first “manager” kept trying to involve me in the first project but new requirements kept popping up in the second project and I was happy to work there. Somewhere down the this, this irked the first “manager”. Also, the company is known to be very cheap with salaries (a good work culture though) and they are paying me more than others since I switched from another company to work there. So they are probably expecting more output for the salary they are paying me. That seems to be the main problem here.

Obviously this first “manager” has never worked a development job before, let alone reviewing my code or something. So I was confused after this conversation. He’s asking me if I noticed these issues in my work and how I can do better and I bluntly replied no, I don’t see any issues in my work. He said he’ll speak to me again on Friday (2 days from now) and expects me to give an answer about how I can improve and stuff. He seems to be power-tripping do so I’ll probably be firm about my position. Will probably mention the money part as well.

It sucks that I left a corporation because of work culture issues and joined this smaller company. And I see the same corporate disconnect cropping up here.

Wasted a day as Shitlock Holmes with the build chain.

It would not reproduce the firmware hexfile that had been checked in. Reverse engineering that along with the mapfile to find out the cause, it was a const string that was guarded by an ifdef from another file that was auto-generated as prebuild step via a script that fetched some version control info.

Or, it would have been if the installation instructions had been correct and someone had described that no spaces in the absolute path name of the project are allowed. Otherwise, that shit just failed silently.

I then had to reverse engineer the intended workflow from the commit history in the version control to figure out that the last dev obviously hadn't quite understood the project specific workflow and how the version control interacts with these build scripts.

At least, I finally did get a matching hexfile.

This project is frontend hell.

We have a dark theme and a light theme. Light is the default but not for mobile. For mobile the dark theme is the default. And if we dont like something we just create a overwrite css. And if that one isnt working we just create yet another overwrite file. And !importants. They are important to make sure things are working.

The we use this framework, but not for mobile. No mobile is just custom jQuery.

Ow and of course separately from the mobile version we need a iOS app. An app which totally differs from the mobile version because we want users to use this now.

So the other day, I was working on some Python project when there was this bug that kept transforming. Like seriously, I would turn from "bool not defined" to "function does not exist" to literally "file does not exist"... within the FILE. And when I fixed them, new bugs kept popping up, and I couldn't find anything that was a problem. Nothing. There was this one function in there that, if I changed even the comments in there, would break. And so.... I turned off Atom and turned it on again. ( ha ) Didn't work. I restarted my computer. I copy pasted the file into another file. I used another IDE. I restarted GHCI. I restarted Jupyter Notebook... and after 6 hours... I found that it was because an if statement has a comparison between a bool and a bool, with a = in the middle. (not ==). I swear I almost threw the computer on the floor.

I currently work for my college for the web team. We are working on a year long project which is to update the college's old website to one that is not only more user friendly, but is also mobile friendly (unlike the old one). My job for the past week (with another week to go) has been to simply delete all HTML attributes that were used in HTML3, and this entire site was written using it.

We had this team project to do in my second year at university. In C btw. My team consisted from 3 members. We had about a month or so to finish it. So of course we started 2 weeks before the submission. Well... I started. Those two didn't give damm about it at first but after I pushed them to do something one of them tried to code this simple function. It was supposed to check if the opptions from command line could be combined. His fuction had around !!200!! lines of code 😲 but he swear it was working. I was skeptic so i tested it. waaaaaait for it... it didn't work... the very first combination I tried that should not be accepted passed his awesome test 😱 I gave him another two chances. Result was the same.
I was furious. I had my part to do with little time to test someone else's code... So I desided to code the whole project on my own. Then I told my "coworkers" that they either pay me for it or they will be without any point for this project. I earned 80 € that day 😀😎

Btw my test function for those opptions had less than 10 lines 😁

I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.

We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.

So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.

4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.

I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.

The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!

I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.

Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.

I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.

I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)!

I have been given the displeasure of updating a company's WordPress website which was built and (sort of) maintained by another company which ended up closing down. NOTHING WAS DOCUMENTED. Almost no comments added anywhere. Not even a description of the what a particular file does. File names are basically completely random. There are 3 versions of the same theme this company made and no indication of which one is actually being used. On top of this; they used plugins and modified them, so they cant even be updated without them breaking. As well; after looking around it seems they used jQuery mixed with Angular (or maybe the plugin creators did this?). The website isnt mobile friendly either; one of my tasks was to see what I could do with fixing this. Seems basically impossible based on the complete mess of a project this is.
All this being said, I just graduated from Post Secondary and have almost no experience working with WordPress, There arent even other developers to help assist me on this project.....
Gonna be quite the experience.

We use a open-source business management software (incl. crm, e-commerce, billing, accounting, warehouse, ...) that is highly customizable.

Previously we had "Company A" that customized it for my company. It was very expensive so they hired something to do the same but cheaper & inhouse. The codebase that "Company A" has written was terrible (confirmed by CTO & the new colleague").

Then the CFO wanted functionality A. Colleague said that this will take 2 weeks to implement. One week later, it was no longer needed & functionality B was now mandatory. Rinse & Repeat.

The CFO: "Why is nothing ever gonna get finished" or "why is the quality so bad?"

So they hired another person for the same position. This person has more experience so it costs them a lot more... And suddenly, everything works well

They contacted a few months later a consultant that analyzed the company. The consultant asked (for good reason) why such a small company has 2 people maintaining the in-house BM software. And suddenly, they wanted to get rid of the worst person. <enter my previous rant>

He is thrown out. Now the head of Operations wants to remove that software because it was not "sexy" enough (her words). So they introduced a glorified spreadsheet with less functionality. That new colleague was offered to take the lead on that project... And thus he fled to another company.

That project failed and now everyone is fired... And they hired back "Company A" to maintain that BM project.

I was having a discussion with my Spv because I am stuck at my project, when suddenly he said :
"Hey, you seem to enjoy this subject!"

And I was just standing there speechless..
🤨
Excuse you...
I spent so much time than required in the contract because I'm getting paid and more importantly because I can put this experience in my portfolio.
Not because I enjoy this job.
I'd rather work on my personal project, preparing for job interview or playing with my cats if I have another choice.

He is a nice guy and has helped me a lot, but in the end it's all about the money.
Or maybe because I have a hard time trusting people these days.
I can't wait to start job hunting next month so that I can say goodbye to this job.

never before have I been happy to be asked to work overtime, but for once, fuck yeah...

Bit of back story, I am tech lead on a massive project that has been run like a complete shit show, the PM who also happens to be the brains behind the project seems to think we are miracle workers and for the first 9/10 months of the project would make significant, like delete a weeks worth of code and start over changes, 3-5 times per week. There are features for the v1 release that have been built in excess of 5 times. I have been saying since October that even without all his constant changes, we will NOT make the deadline, and naturally as is part of my job I argued against every unnecessary feature he tried to implement, eventually he pulled me into a meeting to tell me how much he values my opinion, I need to stop arguing with him and he does not want to work with yes men (I have a rant about that convo already).

I believe our CEO finally started smelling a rat as he insisted on joining our daily stand-ups, during which said PM scripted some lovely stories to disguise the fuckup we are in, and since has assigned another PM to take over and do proper project management and risk analysis.

That is where the email comes in, a lot of the work assigned to me will miss the deadline by a month, honestly I am impressed that it is by so little and so few people will not be missing it, but anyway, he probably spun a few stories there too.

So I spent part of the work compiling the most perfect surgical response as not not actively throw him under the bu, but create a quite a few questions that they hopefully as, as himself and the CEO where cc'd into the mail.

And the jist is, the deadline itself was still impossible and 8 of the 10 tasks assigned to be have ZERO back-end whatsoever, and those tasks are about 80/90% integration to said non-existent back-end, some of those services and data structures have not even been planned yet and we are a week past the deadline and 3 weeks from the just as useless extension.

I'm typically very humble about my work. There's a certain project that I enjoy a lot. It is challenging to me, which is something important to me. I learn a lot.

Colleagues do not enjoy the project in the way that I do. In fact, most of them don't like it or try to avoid when they can. When they can't, they often consult with me about the project. I have a genuine curiosity and interest in it.

However, there is one aspect of it that I don't like at all, but I deal with it. It comes with the territory, I guess. What IS discouraging and turns me away from it though, is when colleagues "get the better end of the deal" when it comes to making special arrangements for this project. Sure, make me dedicated to it for a period of time so that I stay focused on the topic, but yet, kind of do the same for another team member but reward the other person with not having to also deal with the particular task I don't enjoy. Give them the pieces I enjoy and stick me on the pieces I don't.

I know this is a very general post and it probably makes no sense, but I needed to let off some steam and still keep it somewhat anonymous. I work hard for this project and I often don't take credit when it's given to me / when I should be taking it. It's just discouraging how things are arranged sometimes.

I was fine with Eclipse. Then everyone around me told me that Eclipse is old and IntelliJ is new and super cool and makes me super fast and much more productive. Finally in our company we got a Ultimate 2018 license and I started to use it. There is a function: import from Eclipse. Hey cool - let’s import and go... but no. After importing I needed one day to get that running. But I’m not really convinced. After that... ok let’s try another project where colleagues have used IntelliJ already. But after checking out - that also didn’t work well and I spent the whole day it running locally. Although it’s a maven project. Up to know I think Eclipse is better in handling Tomcat and better shows the version control state of files. And for me the workspace concept of Eclipse seems to be better than the project concept of IntelliJ. But maybe I just have to get a better understanding of IntelliJ. Hopefully I can do my first coding in IntelliJ tomorrow. Maybe then I can see all the benefits. So far...

My companies org is in a serious state of disrepair when it comes to project management.

Everything is tracked via conference. Each level of management (CTO, EVP, SVP, BP, S DIRECTOR, DIRECTOR, S MANAGER, MANAGER) all have a different tracking page that all say slightly different things.

To organize things there's a technical project manager who isn't just new to the team, he's new to the field. He's not technical, or experienced in project management. He's never worked within a scrum before.

He's dictating how to organize the teams scrum, and he's getting it very wrong. Decided to organize efforts in all the confluence pages by creating another one for him, again it's different.

When the work in confluence page 3/16 isn't done by a due date anybody knew about, the engineers have to hop on a call and get a Micky mouse solution out the door by the of day so upper management doesn't think the projects off the rails.

In the mean time I've taken a small group of more junior devs and shielding them. We have a side scrum that we manage and is going great, and I'm blocking the BS.

CORPORATE SUCKS. Golden handcuffs are a thing. I might set sail for greener pastures once i don't have to pay back my signing bonus if I leave.

!rant (okay somewhat it *is* a rant, idk)

So I recently got into using react-native to make an android application, with another partner of mine.
I use a Mac while my partner uses Windows
Now since I was the one who suggested to use react-native, I started the project on my system, set it up (took some efforts though), and put the code on a git repo.
My partner cloned the repo, and it stopped working. Bummer.
The exact same code worked perfectly well on my system, but didn't work on his windows.
When he made a new project on his system, it didn't work on my system.
The error that kept occurring was EISDIR on both our systems.
Is react-native not meant to work for development on different platforms or is windows just a bitch as usual?

Everyone in this team calls everything a team effort, but once I start offering my help, they be like "no, I can do it. I know more than you".

Hmm. yeah, but you (sysadmin) use jQuery and vanillajs mixed. For example: $('#hello') and document.getElementById('hello').
Also you put console.logs everywhere, I don't mind putting console.logs in development, but not in production.
Oh and he copies the libraries to every folder that needs it, so there are at least 12 jquery libs in this project and the version is not even the same. Lol.... Please slap me to death.

There is another networkadmin that calls himself a (python) developer. He doesn't agree with my simplicity.

His work (just an example, changed names but you get the idea)
"A notebook that is used by x-department"

Model: Notebook
endpoint: department-notebooks

Model: DepartmentConfigs
Endpoint: notebook-department-configs
You won't believe what he put in 'department'configs, it's literally hardware vendor, model, versions.

Like... really? What the hell you doing man?!
Just have these models for example: device, department, vendor, product, category

We do not only have notebooks, but also servers, routers, switches and more.

His argument of having configs in the name is that they do more complex things. Hmm, I don't see it in the code and the data is messed up:
Microsoft, microsoft, micro soft.

He fixed it by hardcoding it in a select box. Mickysoft isn't the only vendor, fuck you!

fuck this team, fuck these people

Another fucking rant, a story was assigned to me. But that stupid fake developer worked on it immediately and message me he fixed it already. I guess he won't let me touch his baby.

Everything is just piling up. This team and people aren't fun at all.