I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

LinkedIn is an alternative reality unhooked from the rest of the world, where hypocrisy and arrogance meet, creating Leaders, Experts and Analysts.

- Every company is an industry leader globally.
- Every offer is life-changing.
- Every normal person suddenly is an expert in his field
- Each candidate is an expert in time management, customer relationships, and software development priorities.
- They are all happy to share their achievements in a disinterested way
- They all deal with important issues, with great reflections on the meaning of life and reality around us
- Each written post usually starts with a question followed by a life experience
- Companies are dynamic, they change their internal processes on a daily basis

Please shoot me, I've had enough of this shit.

- Few companies are leaders globally
- The offers you make are traps and I always have to look for where the bullshit is.
- You're not an expert in your field if you've been doing the same thing for 10 years without moving your ass out of that chair.
- If you were a time management expert, I wouldn't have to call you every week for unresolved tasks, and I wouldn't even have to do 150 meetings to postpone the goals set. Exactly what is your experience with the customer? Because by heart shutting up and always saying yes is not a good way to get the job done.
- I have great news for you. Nobody gives a shit about your work successes. At most they're envious.
- If you really are such a deep and introspective person... how the fuck is it that working with you is hell?
- Copying a quote from a website and then building a narrative on it doesn't automatically make you a superstar
- Companies, especially the largest ones, take years to change and if they do it is because there is the economic motivation behind it, not because they are visionaries.

This rant was written by scrolling through my LinkedIn feed.

# Day 0:

Me: "Hey boss, I want to let you know that I need this kind of information from the customer for these features, otherwise I cannot finish the project's milestone in two weeks."

Boss: "OK, just continue as far as you can get. We have to get this finished."

Me: "Well, I cannot go any further for these tickets. I need that input. Shall we leave them in todo?"

Boss: "OK."

# Day 7:

Boss: "Whe didn't you start on these tickets in todo?

Me: "As I have told you, I need some information."

Boss: "We gotta get this out of the door!"

Me: "Yes, if we want to meet the deadline, we should. Yet I cannot guess the feature. Also, let me create a column: `to clarify` and move that ticket there. As I have said: I need that information. You have to contact the customer about it and get their feedback.

Boss: "OK."

# Day 13:

Boss: "Why isn't this project finished? There are still tickets open."

Me: "You never provided the information I asked you about."

Boss: "I want an explanation not an excuses."

Me o_O: "This is the explanation. I was asking you on multiple occasions about the required feedback. You never provided it. See the columns name? It's called `to clarify`. We created it last time together. That clarification never happened even though I told you that I need it. I cannot do magic. I can only implement features, and while I can sometimes make intelligent guesses to their use cases, I rather implement their actual ones than my fictional ones.

Boss: "You should have told me."

Me: ಠ_ಠ

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

Minimum wage employers and restaurants asking "and why should we hire you?".

You have 40 vacancies in your area for just your company alone.
You're paying $13.25 an hour when only a year ago you were paying $9.75.

Why should we hire you?

F*ck you, pay me, that's why.

You're not f*cking NASA
You're a God damn chain restaurant with a 40% turnover rate, who's employees probably shoot up in the bathroom on the rare occasion they even get a break.

I looked at the guy with all the annoyance I could muster, stared him down for a good five seconds and said. "You pay a few dollars over minimum. You're job is not important enough to even ask that question. Have a nice day." And got up and left.

Dude followed me and stuttered " hold up. I was just..."

But I was already out the door.

You were just what mark? Asking a dumbfuck question as if you had any leverage at all?

Your competitor *across the street* is offering 50 cents *more* per hour, and has guaranteed breaks.

What, did you forget 2008 and how you treated millions of people as disposable? The little part where you and most american industries demanded passion, without pay raises? Promotions without benefits? The jobs that if you worked hard, rather than a promotion or a pay raise, your reward was more work and less hours to finish?

You assholes thought we forgot about that? How you shipped millions of jobs overseas, blamed it on "automation" (chinese and indian slave labor), and then pointed the finger at millions of impoverished people as "lazy" in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and told them "you just got to work harder and smarter!" Or "just get a small loan and create the next google!" from the comfort of your yachts? I'm looking at you bane corp.

No, now the shoes on the other foot motherf*ckers. Hows it feel needing all *us* commoners? "Why should we hire you?"

No, why should *I* WORK FOR YOU?
Cuz I saw THREE dirty tables coming in. A line of people that could be being served. A line that could have been optimized with the proper table count and some simple changes. A menu that doesnt even incentivize your biggest sellers and a dozen other things your store is doing wrong.

Think mark, think!

This is one of those braindead questions employers paying sub $18 an hour ask, because they suffered so much brain drain from years of payola profits from too-big-to-fail wallstreet bailouts, that they forgot they are not king midas, unless they are the king midas of shit, because increasingly everything corporate America touches turns into shit.

And while were on the subject, stopping bringing in outside management to stores. It destroys team cohesion, staff morale, pisses off people *on site* who *actually know* the team, the stores daily activities and processes, and who are better fit for that role. You bring in disinterested outside management, and it's one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen: these smarmy selfcongratulating f*cks who know nothing about the particular store, have no connection to the staff, go on firing sprees or alienation-sprees to hire in friends, fuck up the schedules because again they know nothing about the employees, and then move on after a few years to greener pastures, leaving a barren radioactive wasteland of chain smokers and burnt out staff in their wake.

Dear corporate America, your free ride on the public's good will is over. It's over.

Now you're in the bitch seat. Come sit at my desk and explain to me, EXPLAIN TO ME, why I should sweat and labor to save your shitty company hemorrhaging money like a bleeding crack-addicted hobo dying with a sucking chest wound from a chicago skidrow friday-night drive-by?

You dont deserve it. Your management and company culture is worse than incompetent. It's full of smiley guys expounding about their passion for customer service while giving each other sloppy BJs in broom closets, a veritable cornucopia of cult-like corporate dick suckers *and* dickheads, proclaiming, no...PROFESSING (hence "professional") their undying allegiance and dedication to their corporate family with the intensity of cujo, foaming at the mouth, or Mitt Romney preparing for a photoshoot, plastic smiles and feigned laughs.

Dont forget to wipe your chin, asshole. It's not Ronald McDonald your blowing, but it's definitely not Gordon f*cking Ramsey either.

Would you like fries with that?

At the data restaurant:
Chef: Our freezer is broken and our pots and pans are rusty. We need to refactor our kitchen.
Manager: Bring me a detailed plan on why we need each equipment, what can we do with each, three price estimates for each item from different vendors, a business case for the technical activities required and an extremely detailed timeline. Oh, and do not stop doing your job while doing all this paperwork.
Chef: ...
Boss: ...

Some time later a customer gets to the restaurant.
Waiter: This VIP wants a burguer.
Boss: Go make the burger!
Chef: Our frying pan is rusty and we do not have most of the ingredients. I told you we need to refactor our kitchen. And that I cannot work while doing that mountain of paperwork you wanted!
Boss: Let's do it like this, fix the tech mumbo jumbo just enough to make this VIP's burguer. Then we can talk about the rest.

The chef then runs to the grocery store and back and prepares to make a health hazard hurried burguer with a rusty pan.
Waiter: We got six more clients waiting.
Boss: They are hungry! Stop whatever useless nonsense you were doing and cook their requests!
Cook: Stop cooking the order of the client who got here first?
Boss: The others are urgent!
Cook: This one had said so as well, but fine. What do they want?
Waiter: Two more burgers, a new kind of modern gaseous dessert, two whole chickens and an eleven seat sofa.
Chef: Why would they even ask for a sofa?!? We are a restaurant!
Boss: They don't care about your Linux techno bullshit! They just want their orders!
Cook: Their orders make no sense!
Boss: You know nothing about the client's needs!
Cook: ...
Boss: ...

That is how I feel every time I have to deal with a boss who can't tell a PostgreSQL database from a robots.txt file.
Or everytime someone assumes we have a pristine SQL table with every single column imaginable.
Or that a couple hundred terabytes of cold storage data must be scanned entirely in a fraction of a second on a shoestring budget.
Or that years of never stored historical data can be retrieved from the limbo.
Or when I'm told that refactoring has no ROI.
Fuck data stack cluelessness.
Fuck clients that lack of basic logical skills.

So... Just overheard a conversation at an Apple store...

tl;dr;

The customer gets furious for not getting to buy a mac pro for the price he wants and it doesn't even include the monitor there.....

C - customer, S - Sales person.

C: Hey, I've heard that apple released new home computers. May I get one?
S: Hello, they are not out yet.
C: WHAT?! How can they not be out yet? They released it like a week ago.
S: Well, they announced it, not officially released it for sale.
C: Ah, whatever. Can I pre-order it now?
S: Sure, we'll need your details and a deposit.
C: What? A deposit for what? That $1000 machine?
S: Sir, do you know the prices?
C: Of course. They have released a new machine and it will cost like previous ones - from $1000.
S: Then you might be talking about Macbook Air...
C: *Interrupts* No, I'm talking about the desktop computer, the whole box.
S: Ok... It starts at ~$6000.
C: WHAT?! It can't be... Oh well, I'll buy it. I hope it's the fully-specked one. Oh and does it come with a monitor?
S: No sir. It's the base model and it has no monitors.
C: WHAT?! How can this be?
S: You see, these are devices created for professionals. They are not for home users since our iMac line is....
C: *Interrupts again* Are you saying I'm not a professional?
S: I'm sorry but by the questions and lack of information - it seems to be true - you are not a professional.
C: FUCK YOU, I'm going to another store and they will sell it for me for $1000. What a piece of crap is this.
*Customer leaves furiously*
S: *to another S* - What is wrong with that dude? Is he high or what?
S2: *shrugs* and tells that it's the 5th time someone came to order that pc and was scared by the price.

---

So yeah... It's fun to see how idiots think that anything apple releases is for them... Once again I was made sure that apple fans are brainless fucks that will buy anything it produces and if that is not in the right price - they'll get furious.

ps. I own apple product, mac pro 2015. Would never buy a newer one NOR an iphone. I don't think that anyone is dumb just for buying it - people buy whatever fits their needs and that's ok but... More than we would like to admit - people buy it because it's an apple product....

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---
<...>

< I log a JIRA ticket explaining what and how is wrong with the server with suggestions how to fix the problem so the app will not crash any longer (client own the server, has his own sysadmins -- I don't even had permissions to open syslog.. had to hack dmesg on their PROD server to pin-point the issue)
> no reaction from customer for weeks. I ping the ticket

× app crashes again

> no reaction from customer for weeks. I ping the ticket
> customer leaves a comment that their sysadmins are looking at it trying to figure out what might be wrong (ignoring what I wrote in ticket's description??? srsly?)

× app crashes again
< I post detail investigation details: snips from logs, screenshots, everything with crystal clear explanations.

> no reaction for weeks
......

well that's fun..

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

Got a report from a customer saying that our scraper does not correctly scrap content of one of their news articles. After two seconds of investigation it turned out that the "article" is just one huge JPG file with text, photos and even something looking like links.

Can we ever have a truly democratic and uncensored Internet?
I am writing this in irritation and anger as I read a story headlined " Apple CEO backs China’s vision of an ‘open’ Internet as censorship reaches new heights"
Appearantly "Open Internet" as the Chinese Government understands it is, "you can say whatever you want as long as we like it". And Apple being the ass-kissing, 730-million-customer-seeking, co**suckers that they are is only happy to comply. They even removed 674 VPN apps from the Chinese version of their App Store last year to comply with government rules, stating "We strongly believe that participating in markets and bringing benefits to consumers is in the best interests of folks there and in other countries as well, We believe in engaging in governments even when we disagree.”
That was Cook by the way.
Thats two fucking contradictory statements rolled into one!!

Anyway, I know private companies are well within their rights to do what they want to make profits. And I understand Apple might not be at fault totally. But its just so frustrating... :-(
The Net Neutrality repeal in the US, this, the Aadhar shit in India and lots of other stuff thats been happening around the world, that just blatantly undermine Civil Rights and freedom makes me imagine that only a bleak future sits on horizon. Almost Orwellian.

If only people would just realise and revolt a bit... probably we would have a different future then..

I hope I am wrong and this is just the pessimist in me speaking.

I've dealt with dusty computers, REALLY dusty computers, computers owned by smokers.

I've seen dead beetles and earwigs and spiders with their cobwebs in computers and dealt with them.

I've even seen live moth larvae wriggling about in a computer.

But never, have I ever had to deal with fluids. Until today.

I had to take apart a laptop that had been used as a toilet by a cat. It was still wet, but not warm.

And I had to try to get data off of it. But no, the urine was not compliant.

So, already pissed off customer was less happy about the fact that her data would still be a few days away from recovery to a new computer.

At least her frustration wasn't at us.

Recently, our team hired an arrogant trainee-junior to the team, who turned out to be mean towards the other developers and in a habit of publicly mocking their opinions and going as far as cursing at them. He steals credit and insults others. He openly admits he's an offensive person and not a team player. When someone from the team speaks, he might break into laughter and say demeaning sentences like "that's so irrelevant oh my god did you really say that? hahaha". Our team consists of polite and introverted engineers who cannot stand up to bullies. Normally this kind of behavior won't be suitable even if you work in a burger shop especially not from a trainee. Let alone trainee, the rude behavior of Linus Torvalds was not tolerated, despite him being in the top position and a recognized star talent in the IT field.

I personally no longer feel comfortable speaking up during teams meetings or in the slack team chat. I'm afraid my opinions will be ridiculed or ashamed - likely will be called "irrelevant". I respond only if I'm directly addressed. We have important features coming up, requested by the customer, but I feel discouraged to publicly ask questions - I sort of feel having to regress into contributing less for the product. I also witness that other younger developers speak less now in meetings and team chat. Feels like everyone is hiding under the bed. Our product team used to have friendly working atmosphere but now the atmosphere is a bit like we're not a team anymore but a knot.

Lesson I learnt from here is: There is a reason why some companies have personality tests and HR interviews. Our proud short boarding process was consisting of a single technical interview. Perhaps at least a team interview should be held before hiring a person to the team, or the new hire should at least be posed a question: are you a team player? Technical skills can be taught more easily than social skills. If some youngster is unable to communicate in a civilized manner for even five minutes, it should raise some red flags. Otherwise you will end up with people who got refused from other companies which knew better.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

!dev

Just went to the pet asylum to look for a cat. There was a shy black one (eh, maybe not a good first but Moar Blacker, Moar Better 😋) and a black and white one which was very open towards me.

Probably I'll get the latter, and build some food, water and litter dispenser systems for it with motors and my esp8266 boards 🙂

The lady who was volunteering there and showed me around had an interesting story though.

Apparently both of those aforementioned cats were wild cats (so they don't come from a proper household or anything). Except that black and white one which apparently came from some rather retarded people.. think average Facebook user.

According to her those previous owners came there with 2 cats including the black and white one as "extremely wild, we found them in the forest, put them in cages (because everyone carries cat cages in their car every day, right?) and brought them here". Nice excuse for average Facebook user level of retard I have to say 😜 but it's not very waterproof, you know?

But on average the people that they get there are even worse than that.. some get a great initial meeting with a cat, but then leave them there because they don't like the stripes on a paw or something stupid like that. As she put it: "you're not fitting pants in a clothing shop, are you?! 😑"
Had to try hard to not burst out in laughter from that description 😂

Point is, the average customers there are awful.. apparently she was very grateful to have a rather down-to-earth customer like me and my home supervisor (who helpfully drove me there 🙂) for once. So terrible clients.. they're everywhere!

It really taught me to be mindful of the hardships of people in any profession who deal with clients.

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

Aaaah, I fucking love it to death, when customers spontaneously decide to hire a separate, unrelated company to add new content pages to the website developed by our company.

That furuncle of a company must have had real pro devs to just create a new /html folder, dump their shit content in there and just manually add links in the existing CMS pages.
HOLY FUCK!
As you might already have expected, the /html folder contains:
- static *.html files for every page
- inline CSS in the *.html
- the crappiest PHP mailing script I have ever witnessed
- images with random resolutions, mostly too small

The layout of these puke-ridden pages obviously doesn't fit neither the existing color palette, nor has anything common with the current layout or typography at all.
These bastards don't even use Git!

Come on, dear customer, could you PLEASE fucking NOT hire a completely separate company to do OUR job?
PLEASE? PLEASE?!

I had to compare the whole deployment folder with our repo to find out what else these brain-damaged cunts changed in our code!

So my client wants to stick with their current hosting provider (Bell) because the company is "big" and "won't go anywhere anytime soon." I just said, well okay it can't be that bad. Bell charges about 10x more and gives you about 10x less compared to other options, but it's not my money so whatever. Well, Bell has the absolute worst customer service. They have an online support form where I can type in my questions and they will call me within a day to help me. They called me during work hours and I missed the call, so they sent me an email to let me know I missed the call and gave me a number to call. I called and I might as well have called my dog because the support didn't even know what a .htaccess file is. I emailed them back and asked if they could forward my email to someone in the hosting department that could help (because the phone support I got was shit). I got a reply saying they "can't"... yup, they used the word "can't", they can't forward the email and that I would have to call. Is everyone at Bell a fucking dick chugging brainless pile of moldy-ass shit biscuits!? YOU CAN"T SEND AN EMAIL? Turns out they do have a dedicated hosting support email, let's hope the email I send ends up in front of someone at Bell who at least has a slight clue how to use a keyboard.

Please disregard. I just need to vent.

Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.

You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.

You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.

You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.

You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.

Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?

And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.

And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.

Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.

I just want to go back to pure dev.

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

I was supporting a legacy CRM app which front end used Visual Basic 6 and almost the entire business logic was written on SQL store procedures.

A "feature" of the product was the open code, anyone with admin access could modify forms, code and store procedures.

We also sold "official" (and expensive) consulting services to modify the code.

A long time customer owned this thing and it was heavily customized. They had hired us to change something, hired a third party to make other changes and decided to modify some stuff themselves because, why not?

Suddenly they came to product support asking to fix a bug. The problem happened on a non customized form.

After reviewing, I realized the form used several of the modified store procedures in the business layer. I tried saying we don't support custom code but my boss was being pushed and said "look into it"

All 3 parties denied responsibility and said their changes were NOT the problem (of course). Neither of them commented or documented their changes.

The customer started to threaten to sue us.

I spent 5 full days following every field on the form through the nested and recurrent SQL store procedures and turns out it was a very simple error. A failed insert statement.

I was puzzled of why the thing didn't throw any error even while debugging. Turns out in SQL 2003 (this was a while ago) someone used a print line statement and SQL stopped throwing errors to the console. I can only assume "printing" in SQL empties the buffered error which would be shown in the console.

I removed the print statement and the error showed up, we fixed it and didn't get sued
:)

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

What.. the actual... fuuuuuck?!

Browsing through changes on TFS (yeah, yeah boo me for using TFS instead of git if you like, I don't care, most people use/prefer TFS here, so I conform 'to the standards'..)

Anyhow, going through changes, looking for the one where some comment appeared..

'a wild comment appeared'.. tadaaah!

Checked the rest of changes.. Hm.. Someone did a validity check.. that returns the 'false' if not passed.
// OK, great! They are finally testing their shit and fixing stuff..
But apparently then they decided it is OK to do all the shit anyways.. so WTF?!
Why even bother validating it?! Oh yeah, forgot... cuz in case it returned false YOU WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO LET SOME STUFF HAPPEN!! But they weren't assigned with that exact task I guess..

TO DO:
- do the validation algo // fml, not going into how fucked up that was written..but it was horrible!
- do validity check where appropriate/needed
- test validity check and that it doesn't break functionality

+ check if the validation actually logically works?! nope, not on my to do list, not my job..

All done, better not actually do something that requires you to think.. :\

How the fuck that happened?! How can one person be assigned to check if something is stupid/wrong?! and when checking (&confirming) still lets the customer do that shit anyways?! What's the point?! O.O

Once upon a time, one or two jobs ago, a really awesome engineer specced out a distributed search application in response to a business need. This company was managed pretty oldschool and required a ton of paperwork and approvals.

The engineer spent many weeks running tests and optimizing the hell out of this app cluster. It flew, and he had the data to prove it could handle production workloads (think hundreds of terabytes of data being processed every single day)

Part of the way he achieved this was having RAID0 on all of the servers to maximize I/O throughput. He didn't care much about data loss, since the application itself was fault tolerant on a much more granular level.

Management, hearing about this, absolutely flipped their shit and demanded RAID6 instead. This despite the conclusive data that the engineer had that proved RAID6 couldn't keep up.

He more or less got told to STFU.

Even this despite the fact that a RAID restripe would actually take many times longer than rebuilding the failed node from scratch (a process that took about 30 minutes by hand, and could probably be automated to be done in less than five), causing a longer exposure to actual data loss throughout the length of the days-long array rebuild time.

The ill-thought-out requirement added about 50% to the cost of the project (*many* more hard drives now required), beyond the original budget, and the subsequent bureaucratic wrangling resulted in a late product launch.

6 months or so later, after real customers were using this product, the app was buckling under around half of its expected workload. A friend of the engineer suggested to management to try RAID0. Sure enough, that resolved the I/O bottleneck.

This rage-inducing story has a happy ending, though! Said engineer left the company not long after this incident, citing it as a reason for his departure. He was immediately hired by another company, making integer multiples of his prior salary.

The product the company botched the launch of by ignoring his spec? It died a few months later. Maybe the poor customer experience was to blame? Maybe the late launch? Maybe it was another reason entirely.

Either way, millions of dollars of hardware now sat fallow. This was a black eye on the company all the way up to the C-level.

tl;dr: Listen to your engineers. You hired them for their expertise.

I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.

Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.

Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.

This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.

But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.

So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.

I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.

I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.

My only nemesis are sales people.
* They try to sell the impossible to the customer.
* They think even the biggest change takes only some minutes to implement, and tests do not even exist.
* They promise to deliver an app within half the time which means we have to cut out animations or some tests to deliver when due.
* They often get a commission (sometimes not as part of profit but revenue!) for calling their pals and asking them if they wanna buy something new (some say they also take the risk, but they don't, the company does).

There may be exceptions, but my perceived ratio between good and bad sales is about 1/20.
Now I am in a very small company with only one sales guy. Guess what, he is a good one! I hope he stays forever.

Spent the last days trying to reach paypal tech support, hung on the phone across the globe, with people at paypal CS, who weren't even familiar with their own terminology, read tons of VERY 'straightforward' documentation and it kept me up two nights straight.

ALL because I REFUSED to believe that it is like I understood it between the lines that I read.

Today I got my answer. You can create Billing Plans (rules on which you'll base your subscriptions, i.e. amount, intervals, duration..) ONLY over the rest api, and only when a customer purchases a first subscription, you're able to EDIT the plan on Paypal dashboard!

What fuckery is that!? You have a edit form, but you can not provide a create form?! TY paypal for making me build a whole billing plan manager for usually a one time transaction per website.

I AM SENDING YOU MY PHONE BILL.

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.

Well check this shit.

At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.

My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)

One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.

The conversation was like this:

Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps

Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!

Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.

Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?

Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours

Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?

Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)

Retard: Well You need to fix this

Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us

Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it

At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?

Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps

At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life

Retard: Well....I did not know

Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.

I know folks do their best, but come on Apple, this can't be that hard. Bought an IPhone at an estate sale (elderly individual died suddenly, so no one had knowledge of the apple id, passwords, etc) and I've been trying to convince apple to clear the activation lock. (AS = Apple Support)

<after explaining the situation>
AS: "Have you tried putting the phone in recovery mode? That should clear the lock"
Me: "I've already done that. It prompts for the apple id and password, which I don't have"
AS: "You need to talk to the owner and get the information"
Me: "As I explained, I purchased the phone at an estate sale of someone who died. I have the bill of sale, serial number, the box, obituary. What else do you need?"
AS: "Have you tried contacting a family member? They might have have that information."
Me: "The family members at the sale told us this is all they had. This kind of thing has to happen. I can't believe Apple can't clear the activation lock."
AS: "Yes, we can, but I'm very sorry we take security seriously."
Me: "I understand, what do I do now?"
AS: "Did you log out of the phone? Go to settings ..."
Me: "Yes, I tried all those steps before calling. It prompts for the AppleID and password."
AS: "Did you try entering the password?"
Me: "No, I don't have it. I already explained there is no way to know"
AS: "Yes..yes...sorry...I'm just reading the information in front of me. I found something, have you tried submitting a activation lock removal request?"
Me: "Yes, it was denied, didn't tell me why, which is why I'm calling. What about taking this phone to an Apple store? I have all the paperwork."
AS: "Sure, you can try. You might need the death certificate. The family or the coroner will have a copy."
Me: "What!? Apple requires a death certificate to unlock a phone!? I'm pretty sure not even the family is going to give a total stranger a death certificate"
AS: "Sorry sir, I'm just reading what is in front of me. Without that certificate, there is no way to prove the person died. You can try the Apple store, but they will likely require it."
Me: "That's a lot of drama for unlocking a phone. A *phone*"
AS: "Yes sir, I understand. If there anything else we can do let us know and thank you for being an a apple customer."

Next stop, the Apple Store.

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

I’ve had enough of shitty ISPs. Time to shame them 😈

Here in the UK, we have a company called TalkTalk who treat their customers as whores by not giving a shit and taking all their money.

I have had an ongoing issue for about 9 months now where our internet is more unstable, but also slower. We pay for 72Mbps at which we used to get, but now our internet tops out at 30Mbps if we are lucky. It can be 20Mbps one minute and 7Mbps the next, and I’ve had it drop below 1Mbps for no goddam reason.

I’ve spoken (well, argued) argued to their so called customer service department over phone and live chat explaining the situation and all they’ve done is said “restart your router”, or “we’ll send out a new router, it’s probably a WiFi issue”, or some bullshit like “I’ve ‘changed’ something on my end”. On one conversation with a so called technician, I had to explain how networking actually worded, and and even called a 7Mbps acceptable when we were paying for 10x that!!!!!

The thing that makes it worse is they actually have systems that detect any issues with customers internet lines, but they only alert the customer to the issue through an online portal, telling the customer to call up and get it dealt with rather than passing the info to a tech department and having issues fixed without the customer knowing unless it’s absolutely necessary.

So 9 months in and I still have a fluctuating, unstable internet connection which is slow and overpriced with no tunnel in sight. GIVE ME BACK MY GODDAMN MONEY YOU FUCKING THIEVING BASTARDS.

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

Ever had a day that felt like you're shoveling snow from the driveway? In a blizzard? With thunderstorms & falling unicorns? Like you shovel away one m² & turn around and no footprints visible anymore? And snow built up to your neck?

Today my work day was like that.. xcept shit..shit instead of pretty & puffy snow!!

Working on things a & b, trying to not mess either one up, then comes shit x, coworker was updating production.. ofc something went wrong.. again not testing after the update..then me 'to da rescue'.. :/ hardly patch things up, so it works..in a way.. feature c still missing due to needed workarounds.. going back to a and b.. got disrupted by the same coworker who is nver listening, but always asking too much..

And when I think I finally have the b thing figured out a f-ing blocker from one of our biggest clients.. The whole system is unresponsive.. Needles to say, same guy in support for two companies (their end), so they filed the jira blocker with the wrong customer that doesn't have a SLA so no urgent emails..and then the phone calls.. and then the hell broke loose.. checking what is happening.. After frantic calls from our dba to anyone who even knows that our customer exists if they were doing sth on the db.. noup, not a single one was fucking with the prod db.. The hell! Materialised view created 10 mins ago that blocked everything..set to recreate every 10 minutes..with a query that I am guessing couldn't even select all that data in under 15.. dafaaaq?! Then we kill it..and again it is there.. We found out that customers dbas were testing something on live environment, oblivious that they mamaged to block the entire db..
FML, I'm going pokemon hunting.. :/ codename for ingress n beer..

Long time no rant from me. Sorry guys, has been a tough time for me.

Little background: I'm an apprentice and as such definitely not a fully trained professional. I'm working in a big company with people who have very let's say interesting ideas what I should be able to do.

This whole disaster begins shortly after I started my apprenticeship. I was offered to choose my first little project. "Something from the backlog, not very challenging and a nice beginner one. It's just about a PoC" ok, le me thinks. I choose to make a weather display.
Basic functionality was provided within the next 3 weeks. My direct boss (let's call him Jo) liked it and talked to his boss (Hugo) about it. Hugo was so excited he called our product manager to get my plugin into our software asap and began to think about where else we could use this.
This is where shit went downhill. Hugo told me it was my task to implement it on a totally different platform and to "host it in azure". I don't know much about azure and I never used it. I told him that I'd need time and some kind of sandbox to try and learn how things work. He promised but nothing ever came through. Not even Jo could do something about this.
They told me I should write this asap because "every customer would LOOOOVE this" and I honestly can't think of a way to meet all their requirements without access to our azure system/ sandbox. (There are a lot of requirements)
Am I wrong? Should I be able to do this? I'm a fucking trainee. I don't know everything.

if that site if malware free, then my ass is purple and none of my code needs to be refactored.

Hmm...recently I've seen an increase in the idea of raising security awareness at a user level...but really now , it gets me thinking , why not raise security awareness at a coding level ? Just having one guy do encryption and encoding most certainly isn't enough for an app to be considered secure . In this day an age where most apps are web based and even open source some of them , I think that first of all it should be our duty to protect the customer/consumer rather than make him protect himself . Most of everyone knows how to get user input from the UI but how many out here actually think that the normal dummy user might actually type unintentional malicious code which would break the app or give him access to something he shouldn't be allowed into ? I've seen very few developers/software architects/engineers actually take the blame for insecure code . I've seen people build apps starting on an unacceptable idea security wise and then in the end thinking of patching in filters , encryptions , encodings , tokens and days before release realise that their app is half broken because they didn't start the whole project in a more secure way for the user .

Just my two cents...we as devs should be more aware of coding in a way that makes apps more secure from and for the user rather than saying that we had some epic mythical hackers pull all the user tables that also contained unhashed unencrypted passwords by using magix . It certainly isn't magic , it's just our bad coding that lets outside code interact with our own code .

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.

Follow up on a previous rant:

I visited a customer to talk about the reporting discrepancy between two applications.

It turns out the applications were custom built by outsourced developers from Russia, that communicate with each other through a byzantine (and completely undocumented) series of web services, excel import/export tasks, and a customized SSRS environment.

These are spread across at least half a dozen servers, some on-premise and some cloud based, there are at least 3 SQL servers (2 running 2005, one running 2000), a 10 year old local install of TFS (which no one knows a username/password for), and who-knows-what-else.

They laid off their entire IT team years ago, and they have no backups.

I'm not certain anyone there even understands what the software is supposed to be doing beyond the most general terms.

No one knows if they even have source code.

Biggest case of "nope!" I've encountered in more than 20 years of IT experience.

It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.

New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.

Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.

Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.

Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).

In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.

Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.

Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.

Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.

Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.

tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.

I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end...

Storytime!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I decided to learn Flutter, because the idea of a common code base between Android and iOS sounds nice. I'm late to the party, I know.
So I install everything and start typing in the tutorial. TAB... two spaces. I absolutely hate that so let's change it. In the settings, it sends me to a FAQ which more or less says this is the way it is, deal with it. But I want my tabs to be four spaces, every code editor since the dawn of time could do this... I'M PAYING FOR THIS SHIT!!!!!!!
Ok, let's check the JetBrains website, I'm starting to lose my patience, but let's do it. At this point I should also mention that I'm feeling pretty stupid. I mean, I'm checking on the internet about how to do something which obviously must be obvious, why am I not seeing it?
I find a page on the official website. JetBrains' replies are along the lines of "Why would you want that?", "The holly wars between tabs and spaces are over", "Most people like it this way", "The overlords said this is the coding style to be used" (Ok, the last one was me reading between the lines). At the end of the thread, they provide a "hackish solution" (their words, not mine). Which doesn't work. Because why should it?
Not even when PyCharm's debugger randomly shat itself and I had to use print statements I got so angry. That was relatively fine, bugs are a fact of life, and the overall package is good, so I kept paying.
But now you're telling me that I cannot use what should be a common feature of every code editor just because you and the overlords know better?
Well, fuck you and the horse you came in on JetBrains, you've just lost a customer.

Don't you just love customers?

It al began when they showed us the flyers they were printing for their new products, an some one at our company who doesn't work here anymore had the brilliant idea of copying it to their webshop, as a fucking gimmick... Ooohh man the customer didn't seem to understand it was only visually

They wanted the 3d layering effect to be dynamic, so each product would have its own with custom colours

So it was made

A few weeks later they didn't want the informational text, they wanted links to each product that the layer uses

Sounded like logical so it was made

Again some time later, they noticed that the layers were not textured, but just plain

I argued against it because it would add unnecessary loading time for some 300 by 400 px element but they insisted

So they got what they wanted

A few days later they said that the textures were of low quality, and that we had to create ones with higher quality

Again our management said, yes

We made ~ twice the size of the element in image pixels to create a higher definition image

Then the customer wanted that the layers should change based on some selection menu above it

(At this point we realized that it would no longer be just a fun little gimmick)

So we tried to refactor/rebuild it to remove most if not all the hacks we did just to make the customer happy, that took too long for them (the customer) so we had to revert back to the hacked together version because otherwise we would not be done on time (commanded by management)

But again, we ... I say 'we' as in the company but realistically I've been the only one who has worked on the fucking abomination

But I digress...

A few stupid requests later, some layer images are almost fully transparent PNG images that are almost 1mb in Filesize each (some products have 5 or even more layers) and the god damn thing now has to account for optional layers...

I AM FUCKING SPENT... I'VE JUST CAME BACK FROM VACATION BUT I ALREADY NEED IT AGAIN... FUCKING WORKING 60 HOURS A WEEK JUST TO KEEP ONE CUSTOMER HAPPY WHILE OTHER PROJECTS BREATH ON MY NECK

Rant rant rant!

Le me subscribe to website to buy something.

Le register, email arrives immediately.
*please not my password as clear text, please not my password as clear text *

Dear customer your password is: ***

You dense motherfucker, you special bread of idiotic asshole its frigging 2017 and you send your customer password in an email!???

They frigging even have a nice banner in their website stating that they protect their customer with 128bit cryptography (sigh)

Protect me from your brain the size of a dried pea.

Le me calm down, search for a way to delete his profile. Nope no way.
Search for another shop that sells the good, nope.
Try to change my info: nope you can only change your gender...

Get mad, modify the html and send a tampered form: it submits... And fail because of a calculation on my fiscal code.

I wanna die, raise as a zombie find the developers of that website kill them and then discard their heads because not even an hungry zombie would use that brains for something.

Multi User, One Account, and other shit

I'm gonna rant about something as a user, and someone who makes stupid web stuff.

My bank has been updating their web banking over time and they decided that every individual on an account, should have their own login. They really want to push this on their users, I suspect specifically folks like me and my wife who share one login for the joint accounts we have at the bank together.

Why share one login, because it's the only sure fire way I know that I and my wife can see all the same shit no doubt about it.

The banks never tell you what you can see or can't with joint accounts, I doubt it is even documented on their end, but in every damn case something is hidden or different in some weird way.

Messages to the bank people? If I send it, my wife often can't. I get that for security reasons that's a thing, but it makes no sense for a joint account.

ANY difference to me breaks online banking ENTIRELY. Joint accounts are supposed to be... well one account that is the same.

Other banks we used where we had different logins for the joint account, each login actually had separate bill pay accounts per user. So if I went to bill pay and scheduled something to be paid, my wife had no idea, same if she did.

Right fucking there, banking is just broken entirely!

So no Mr. Bank, fuck you we're both logging in via the same login.

Fast forward to N00bPancakes making a thing.

So my employer has a customer (Direct Customer). Direct Customer wants a thing that makes communication with their customer (Indirect Customer) easier.

The worst thing about making something for your customer's customer is that Direct Customer always imagines that Indirect Customer is gonna be super ninja power users....

But no, that's not the case... in fact almost nobody is a power user, and absolutely nobody WANTS to be a power users.

Worse yet in my case the only reason this tool exists is because Direct Customer and Indirect Customer can't communicate well enough anyway... that should tell you something about the amount of effort Indirect Customer is willing to expend.

So with that tool, this situation constantly comes up:

Direct Customer thinks it would be great if every user from Indirect Company had some sort of custom messaging, views, and etc in of Cool Communication Tool. The reason is because that's what Direct Customer loves about Ultra Complex Primary Tool that they use ....

Then I have to fight the constant fight of:

NOBODY WANTS TO BE A POWER USER, NOBODY EVEN WANTS TO DO MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT ISN'T SCREAMING AT OTHER PEOPLE OR POST MEMES OR WATCH SHITTY VIDEOS. THE MOMENT ANYONE AT INDIRECT COMPANY LOGS IN AND SEES ANY INFO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM THEIR COWORKER THEY'LL SHIT THEMSELVES, FLOOD EVERYONE WITH 'OH GAWD SOME NON SPECIFIED THING IS WRONG' AND RESPOND TO EMAILS LIKE A JELLYFISH DROPPED OFF IN NEW MEXICO... AND NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!

God damn it people.

Also side rant while I'm busy fighting the good fight to keep shit simple and etc:

People bitch about how horrible the modern web is and then bitch at web devs like we're rulers of the internet or something.... What really pisses me off about that is other devs who do that.... like bro, do you make policy at your company? You decide not to sell some info or whatever shit your company sells? Like fuck off with your 'man I miss html' because you got scared by some shitty JS error and ran back to your language of choice and just poked your head out of the the basement and got scared... and you shit on another developer about that? Fuck you.

Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.

We present to you the DevRant shitposter census!

Yes we pride ourselves in our quality bait and bullshit here at WS. Founded in [previous year a long long time ago], we focus on craftmanship, tradition, and doing it right. Our bait is loved the world over for "it's fresh flavor", "so good, it's like you're abusing heroin right along with the company employees!'

And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
Isn't it just *brilliant*.

Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].

Please, please, one vote per customer!

* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).

* Overly pixelated memes (obviously not) blatantly ripped and automatically uploaded via shitty selenium scripts

* Real life hijinxs, trolling shitty companies hiring processes for fun at their expense!

* DevRantCon now with 100% more orgies. Reserve your kickstarter ticket today.

* Disappointing vaporware announcements that take ten minutes to read and build your excitement up only to crush it before your very eyes like a child's first lego build in the hands of an angry nd merciless andre the giant disappointed by the craftmanship of a five year old.

* A livestream of a monkey on an actual typewriter, with a btc betting pool each time an actual word is typed, along with a $5 "shock the monkey" button to spice things up a bit
(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )

* Video conference with devrants creators where we all play "I've never" that doesn't end until at least one person passes out black drunk.

* Weekly comedy write ups with jokes (not obviously) blatantly stolen from cards against humanity

* HipsterRants: why your favorite [thing - game, music, movie, book] sucks, and why I hate you for liking it.

* Did we mention javascript rants?

* Cool new projects by devranters and our merciless breakdown of why each one is pure, unadulterated shit, everything that was done wrong, and why you should personally be ashamed for using it.

* SadRants: cancer, meth abuse, homelessness, how we'll all die at the end, and how the sun will one day turn into a giant ball of fire that will consume the earth and leave no trace that anyone ever existed, and nothing we do will ultimately matter.

* HappyRants: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) oh yeah, you feeling it now mr krabs?

* Technical breakdowns that are completely wrong, utterly incompetent, intentionally misleading, and wildly upvoted by people who are unfamiliar.

Vote for your favorite topic/idea today! or even submit your own for our 'consideration'!

Clickbait, now in technicolor!

On the MSc I was participating in, there is a teacher that has a lesson about Databases.

The MSc was not only for experience computer science students. We were informed that the first semester would be as an introduction to all.

So, Databases. No introduction at all. Just read the powerpoint and the pdf he had just translated (or not, because some were just from the internet), just refers to how they are structured briefly. He showed everything about Databases without the students that didn't know much to be involved (we didn't get to our lab for some reason) and then there was his assignment.

His assignment was written as it would be from a customer that knows shit about Databases (sorry but I had to rant). We sat down student's that knew already Databases and some of us worked as database engineers. We agreed on some steps that after read the next chapter of the assignment we reconfigured them. And so on, until we had nothing and we were back at the beginning.

Needless to say, I did not lose my Christmas holidays for him. It took me 2 days after to build a database that was not a full solution but a part (I wad noy sure, the assignment was ambiguous). I passed the lesson with the minimum passable grade.

So, I wrote a nice email to the MSc teacher that had to organize it (or something like that). I did not swear at all. I was professional and wrote what I encountered and what it should have been. The Databases teacher had always that smirk and face that he was THE boss and had no respect for his own lesson. But I didn't mention it. The organizing teacher shared the email with the databases teacher.

And the time came that we had another lesson (web development, it was awful under him) with the databases teacher. And he had the wonderful idea to read the email out loud in front if everyone. He did noy mention my name. I raised my hand and told my colleagues it was me. Then I asked him in front of them, if he was contented with the results (only a few passed the databases lesson and max grade was the smallest passable), first he avoided the question. I asked again. And he said yes. We all looked at each other and somehow knew. No one spoke and I didn't push because I didn't want to take the web lesson's hours for this. It was just hopeless.

From there on, the teachers said we were their best class ever but the most complaining one. They didn't even bother to analyze the "complaints".

So, there you go. One of the lot of those teachers.

So today i had to visit this banks site to do updation on a document but for some reason the modal dialogue that was supposed to open was not working and i couldn't continue to next step.

On an attempt to contact customer support, i browsed the site for relevant details. As i do that, i observed this site is so shitty that it can't even properly render on Google Chrome! It was an horrific experience finding info in that site.

Finally found the customer support form and as I clicked the "submit" it didn't give any feedback whether it was processing or not. After like over a minute of uncertainty, it got redirected to a 404 page.

Frustrated, I went on to their twitter and I almost tweeted calling out their terrible web developer team.

But, my instinct told me to calm my titties and i tweeted a regular confused user tweet.

Got their attention and few hrs later i got a phone call from someone working there. He didn't sound like a customer service representative from the way he spoke. He told it was an issue with their website and had fixed it. I tried again as he was on the line but it was not working for me. And then i shared screenshot of the issue. He tested it again and said it was working for them. Still not working for me. ( Probably cache issue on my end ). Thought he would suggest to clear cache and try. But he asked me to try on another computer since it was working for him.

As i searched for a another system, i got a call from customer support guy and he said he will do the update on their end and told me to tell details. Since the info was not that sensitive in nature, I went with it.

Pretty sure the other guy i talked to was a developer.

This made me think - had i tweeted out a mean tweet calling out their shitty website it would have been probably awkward talking to him - I'd have to be mean again. It could've ruined his day, maybe he was under pressure from his pm that he had to make the phone call. He probably hates his job already managing that shitty legacy code..

I don't know - either way, I'm glad i was able to keep myself calm and not be a source of negative energy.

Realising that sometimes customers just don't listen...or they don't even bother trying to understand what you are doing.

It's not the first time that a set of requirements have been agreed and then they turn round and go

Cust: "but we wanted it that way"
Us: "did you ask it for us? Cause it would have been in the statement of work..."
Cust: "no but sure, it won't take yous that long. So yous can still fit it in"
Us: fuuuu....

No matter how good things are going, a customer somewhere is going to fuck you over because "you should have known" about their requirements...

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

I absolutely hate it when companies use this or that medium for communications despite me asking them time and time again for another.

I have a mail server for more professional communications. The phone, only for stuff that won't matter if I inevitably end up forgetting about it (even more so now that Google made call recording more or less impossible, laws be damned). I will forget about a phone call no doubt. I've got better shit to do than to remember your manglement decisions, thank you very much. On mail, that's all nicely on my mail server for retrieval in several years even.

So I ask them to use the email address I gave them, a dedicated one for their company too (catch-all go brrr). Can't do that with phone numbers. Managing all those SIM cards aside, our government has now limited the amount of SIM cards one can have to 10. And texts and phone calls are not a long-term medium! And I can't share my phone number with just about anyone because people will inevitably spam the shit out of it, AND it's hard to replace! It's not a good medium! So with all due respect, companies - I couldn't care less what medium you prefer to use for your customers. You don't care about what your customer wants you to use - explicitly so! - and you lose a customer. It's as simple as that. Dealing with manglement is one thing, but dealing with manglement using the wrong media is something I'd really rather not do.

But hey I guess that virtue signalling is more "in" than actually listening to your goddamn customers nowadays? Let's replace another master/slave reference. You know, arguing that if we did that 2 years ago, George Floyd would've totally survived. Not by fixing the US police brutality, oh no no no. That's not the right way. Changing nomenclature and hashtags however, and not giving half a shit about your customers, yeah that's the way to go!

I currently work on a legacy system for a company. The system is really old - and although I was hired as a programmer, my job is pretty much glorified data entry. To summarise, I get a bunch of requirements, which is literally just lots of data for each month on spreadsheets and I have to configure the system to make it work, which is basically just writing a whole bunch of SQL scripts.

It’s not quite as simple as that, because whoever wrote the system originally really wrote it backwards, and in fact, the analysts who create the spreadsheets actually spend a fair bit of time verifying my work because the process is so tedious that it’s easy to make a mistake.

As you can guess, it is pretty much the most boring job ever. However, it’s a full time job with decent pay, and I work remotely so I can stay home with my son.

So I’ve been doing it for about 18 months and in that time, I’ve basically figured out all the traps to the point where I’ve actually written a program which for the past 6 months has been just doing the whole thing for me. So what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes to clean the spreadsheet and run it through the program.

Now the problem is, do I tell them? If I tell them, they will probably just take the program and get rid of me. This isn’t like a company with tons of IT work - they have a legacy system where they keep all their customer data since forever, and they just need someone to maintain it. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing the right thing. I mean, right now, once I get the specs, I run it through my program - then every week or so, I tell them I’ve completed some part of it and get them to test it. I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human.

There might be amendments to the spec and corresponding though email etc, but overall, I spend probably 1-2 hours per week on my job for which I am getting a full time wage.

I really enjoy the free time but would it be unethical to continue with this arrangement without mentioning anything? It’s not like I’m cheating the company. The company has never indicated they’re dissatisfied with my performance and in fact, are getting exactly what they want from employing me.

I'm so disappointed about these day developers, they rather make web than native app. Google technologies ? pls. The only reason why they afraid to make app on the windows 10 is losing customer of their crappy Chrome OS, oh not to mention they don't even have the stable SDK for their native solution on the ChromeOS. So they trick developers to make web more than native, PWA, SPA ? why dont you just make a native windows applications ????

I had a complaint about a product I bought from a store a while back. I was resistant to taking into the store because the people there make you feel like you are stealing when trying to return a defective DVD. So I contacted the store via their website. I put in my first and last name and my email in the message to them. This is an excerpt of what I got back:

---

Response By Email (Triston) (12/12/2019 03:56 AM)
Hi Phuckin,

Your satisfaction is our top priority and your comments have been forwarded to your local Store. The management team there will take appropriate action and you can expect a response from them within three business days.
<store specific info>

Customer By (Phuckin Chit) (12/11/2019 03:40 PM)
<details of my complaint, etc>

---

Apparently I had created an account with this store a while back when I was angry. Hence my name being reported as Phuckin Chit. Even though I entered my name in the form it used the stored name associated with my email. At this point I am not sure they are going to help me.

Bad English aside I am so sick of incompetent customer service reps. Holy shit it's like they will hire anyone these days.

Here just read from this script and not the code version. That's all the tech you need to know right here on this single piece of paper.

Fucking incompetent bastards need to go work at a non technical job like Burger King because tech support is beyond them.

They'd probably fuck that up to. That's a completely different rant, those who can't even do fast food jobs right. At that point just go get on disability because your fucked.

To be fair I will occasionally get someone in the tech support sector who knows their shit but it's few and far between and its always a welcome surprise.

Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.

During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).

Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.

I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.

30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.

I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.

Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :)

Like 4 years ago I worked in a company as IT that used a windows desktop app with SQL Server 2008 (yep that old) to manage their sales, this app was written in WPF, the app was good because it was customizable with reports

One day the boss wanted to keep extra some data in the customer invoice, so they contacted the app developers to add this data to the invoice, so they they did it, but it in their own way, because the didn't modify the app itself(even if it was an useful idea for the app and companies that use it) they just used other unused fields in the invoice to keep this data and one of the field that the boss was interested was currency rate, later I verified in the DB this rate was saved as string in the database

The boss was not interested in reports because he just wanted to test it first and let time to know what the boss will need in the reports, so at the of the year they will contact again the devs to talk about the reports

So is the end of that year and the boss contacted the devs to talk about the reports of the invoices using the currency rate, this rate was just printed in the invoice nothing more, that's what the boss wanted that's what's the devs did, but when asked to do the reports they said they could'nt because the data was saved as string in the DB o_O

Well, that was one the most stupid excuses I ever heard...

So I started to digging on it and I found why... and the reason is that they were just lazy, at the end I did it but it took some work and the main the problem was that the rate was saved like this 1,01 here we use comma for decimal separator but in SQL you must use the dot (.) as decimal separator like this 1.01, also there was a problem with exact numbers, for example if the rate was exactly 1, that data must be saved just 1 in the field, but it was saved as 1,00 so not just replace all the commas with dots, it's also delete all ,00 and with all that I did the reports for my boss and everyone was happy

Some programmers just want to do easy things...

A customer of ours not to say names trains people for infosec certs upon investigating their website I noticed they don't have forward secrecy enabled.
Why? What? Even?

Turn it on you baddies.

Fucking google 2 step auth and their lack of customer service.

I have my account setup with my phone and a backup email account. No backup keys, since I only found out about those today! Thanks for letting me know this late in the game -.-

And yet. After I made a clean install of the os on my laptop. Tried to log back into my account. I am not getting text messages or emails to my backup emails (even though its allegedly sent.... And no its not in the junk mail) to validate my 2 factor auth.... Like fuck you!!!

If you gonna give us the ability to fort knox our accounts. At the bare minimum have some customer support to at least be train to answer a phone and tell me if your servers are having an issue or something. Im so in the fucking dark here and cant access shit.

Magento Debugging Horror!
Changing lots of things in magento with no problem. Continuing development for quite sometime. Suddenly decide to clear cache to see affect of a change on a template in frontent. Suddenly magento crashes! There's no error message. No exception log. No log in any file anywhere on the disk. All that happens is that magento suddenly returns you to the home page!
Reverting all the changes to the template. Clear the cache. Nope! Still the same! Why? Because the problem has happened somewhere in your code. Magento just didn't face it, because it was using an older version of your code. How? Because magento 2 even caches code! Not the php opcache. Don't get me wrong. It has it's own cache for code, in a folder called generated. Now that you cleared all the caches including this folder, you just realized that, somewhere something is wrong. But there is no way for you to know where as there is absolutely no exception logged anywhere!
So you debug the code, from index.php, down to the deepest levels of hell. In a normal php code, once the exception happens, you should see the control jumps to an exception handler, there, you can see the exception object and its call stack in your debugger. But that's not the case with magento.
Your debugger suddenly jumps to a function named:
write_close();
That's all. No exception object. No call stack. No way to figure out why it failed. So you decide to debug into each and every step to figure out where it crashes. The way magento renders response to each request is that, it calls a plugin, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin, which calls a list of plugins, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin.....
And if in each step, just by accident, instead of step through, you use the step over command of your debugger, the crash happens suddenly and you end up with the same freaking write_close() function with no idea what went wrong and where the error happened! You spend a whole day, to figure out, that this is actually a bug in core of magento, they simply introduced after your recent update of magento core to the latest STABLE version!!! It was not your mistake. They ruined their own code for the thousandth of time. You just didn't notice it, because as I said, you didn't clear the `generated` folder, therefore using an older version of everything!
Now that after spending 7 hours figuring out what has failed with absolutely no standard way of debugging and within a spaghetti of GOTO commands (Magento calls them plugin), why not report it to github? So you report it with a pull request. This also takes 1 hour of your time. Just to next day get informed that your pull request is rejected because another person already fixed the bug and made the same pull request. It was just not on the latest stable version yet!
So you decide to avoid updating magento as much as possible. Because you know that the next Stable version will make your life and career unstable. But then the customer complains that the Admin Panel is warning him of using old Magento version which might pose SECURITY THREATS!

I feel like a fucking god now!

We run a webshop and we are in contract with the national post office. Every time there is an update to their program I fear ahead of time what will be fucked up again.

After today's update we weren't able to open any shippment list we just saw a mile long error message. After the customer care couldn't figure out the problem, and the suggested solution might take up to 2days, and it is basically only a new customer file, i fired up my good old sqlite viewer friend, to chek if I am lucky...

Guess what! That shit is using unsecured sqlite dbs, so i've had no problem examining and even rewriting the values. So checking the logs and scraping the DB I've found the problem.

Apparently some asshole thought that deleting a service but keeping all of its references in other tables scattered around is a good fucking idea. And take it customer care, the new customer file won't fix shit, because it was in the global DB. I swear i am getting more familiar with that piece of garbage then the ones who made it.

On top of that the customer care told us, that if we couldn't manage to send the shippment list with the program we are not elligible for our contractual prices.

It is not enough that I had to fix their fucking shit program, they also "would like to charge us" because their pogram isn't working. What a fucking great service. (At least the lady on the telephone was friendly)

It really sucks when you realize that you're gonna end up despising a programming language just from having an extremely shitty first experience with it.

About ten weeks ago I was forced to, despite that I was SUPPOSED to be able to choose the language myself, to learn C++ for this course when having literally not a single fucking bit of experience with it whatsoever. And that's pretty soon after already having a beyond shitty experience with the very same school AND the same teacher. (The school I study at "rent" courses from other schools, this is one of them.)

I have the final exam on Monday and I'm allowed to have a book on C++ with me to use as reference, as (I'm pretty sure) I won't have internet access on the computer I'll be doing the test on. I ordered a book with express shipping to be here during this week, Friday at the latest. Never arrived. Called customer service at the book store and apparently it was supposed to have shipped yesterday but hadn't and they didn't know why (fucking awesome girl at the customer service btw, 11/10 quality service). So we cancelled the order, sure, we get the money back, but I still won't have a reference for a language I barely know at all. (No need to mention libraries, did that, dead end.)

Oh, and about that school and that earlier experience I spoke of, because if their inability to do their motherfucking jobs, earlier this year I ended up struggling with money for a couple of months. I really want to fucking strangle these assholes and have them pay my fucking bills to cover the shit that THEY caused.

TLDR; I'm gonna end up hating C++ because of shitty fucking teachers at an even shittier school.

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

I work on a telecom sales line but most of our calls are customer care or technical that end up pressing the wrong buttoon because they use a super strange phrasing so people get confused and we are obligated to try to sell them things. So most of the job is just transfer call to other lines.

So this lady calls

Lady: "I want to know how many MB I have on my plan"

Me: "well, you apparently have 16 GB"

L:"But in my contract it says I have 500MB"

M:"Yes, but when you subscribed you must have gotten some special deal, but don't worry 16GB is a lot better than 500MB"

The lady then gets really upset screaming if she pays for 500MB that's what she wants to have. I ask her to wait till I transfer, I talk to my colleague in customer care before transfer just to tell her that this is what the customer wants and to her not even bother to explain that 16GB is better than 500MB.

Out of curiosity I took a look at her data usage and most of their cellphones expend somewhere between 2 to 4 GB, so she will pay at least 20 or 30 Euros in extras from now on.

Does anyone here use Payoneer here?

Let's say (hypothetically speaking) that a dev gets paid through Payoneer, and does not declare that money in taxes in their residing country (and that's the deliberate choice of using Payoneer in the first place - perhaps taxes are so high and makes the business not worth it).

That country does not exchange information with USA (which is where I would assume Payoneer accounts are). The customer that is paying through Payoneer is US-based.

At which point might the developer be accused of money laundry or similar by Payoneer? Even just for avoiding taxes, if anything

Of course, this is a very hypothetical question, none of this is actually happening.

I got my first developer job three years ago. I’ve always had a great eye for detail, and getting things done while following best practices. I learned that a few years ago from typography, which I think is a fascinating subject, which has a lot of shared ideas with software development.

In my first job, I immediately took a lot more responsibility than what I was assigned to. This job was as a React Developer, but I quickly got into backend development and set up kubernetes clusters, CI/CD.

Looking back, this was to me quite an achievement, considering I had never done anything even remotely close to it.

I did however, work my ass off. 18 hours work days without telling my boss, so only getting paid for 8. Plus I worked weekends.

I did love it. After a while, I got promotes to Senior Developer, and got responsibility for everything technical. I tried asking for help, but everybody else was either a student, or working purely front-end or app-development. Meanwhile, I was Devops, API-design, backend, Ci/CD, handling remote installations (all our customers are Airgapped), customer support, front-end and occasionally app-development when the app-developers could not handle their shit. Basically, I was the goto-guy for every problem, every feature, every fix. I don’t say this to brag.

I recently quit my job, started working as a consultant, because I almost doubled my pay. However the new job is boring as shit. I’m now an overpaid React Developer. And I really hate React. Not because it is shit, but simply because it is boring.

I’m thinking of going back to my old job. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. However, after I quit, they have changed their whole stack. No more Golang, Containers, Kubernetes, webRTC and other fun new technologies. Now, it is just plain, PHP without any dependecies. It is both boring, and idiotic. So I’m thinking of just quitting. Either doing some personal projects like game-development. I dont know.