wk87 is a dangerous topic for me, i've been through a lot. I apologise for what I am about to inflict on this network over the coming week.

Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 1, "T".

T was an embedded C developer who talked openly about how he's been writing code since he was 14, knew all the C system libraries and functions like the back of his hand. For the most part, he did ... but not how to actually use them, as (based on his shocking ... well everything) he was inflicted by some sort of brain disorder not yet fully understood by medical science. Some highlights:

- Myself and the CTO spent 4 days teaching him what a circle buffer was and how to build one.
- His final circle buffer implementation had about 3 times as much code as he actually needed.
- When the code was running too slowly on the device, we didn't try find any performance improvements, or debug anything to see if there was anything taking too long. No not with T, T immediately blamed TCP for being inefficient.
- After he left we found a file called "TCP-Light" in his projects folder.
- He accused the CTO of having "violent tendencies" because he was playing with a marker tossing it up in the air and catching it.
- He once managed to leave his bank statements, jumper and TROUSERS in the bathroom and didn't realise until a building wide email went out.
- He once .... no hang on, seriously his fucking trousers, how?
- He accused us all of being fascists because we gave out to him for not driving with his glasses, despite the fact his license says he needs to (blind as a bat).

... why were his trousers off in the first place? and how do you forget ... or miss the pile of clothes and letters in a small bathroom.

Moving on, eventually he was fired, but the most depressing thing of all about T, is that he might not even be top of my list.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

I was asked to present a code I wrote previously. This was not planned. I shared my screen and presented. Things went well.

One employee asked me to search a particular term which was possibly related to an advance topic in the domain we were working on.

I opened Chrome and the first page had a Quora post: "Why my dull co-workers try to act smart and are not yet fired?".

[silence]

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me:, I built you this beautiful site it's super modular, it's really straight forward
Client: urm we aren't tech people if you could..... Set up all the pages for us using the modules so we can just input the data
Me: 😡 yes I could do that or you could take 5, minutes to learn this system. It's simple 😡 see that title there "left image right title module" . I've done the sample for the templates. So if you need to you can duplicate it! There's even a duplicate button!
Client: can you do it I don't want to waste time learning it right now since we are on a tight deadline

Me in head: fuck off you supreme bitch you try to get my mates dad fired! Now I've done you this huge favour getting you out of the shit 😡 and you won't take 5 minutes to just look at the admin section your old site was wix ffs.
My next move(not yet done): here is a word document it outlines what you need to do 😐

If after this see asks again I'm asking to work with someone else or quitting the project

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Worst experience with a higher up?

At an old contract job (around 2013), I was contracted by the company to help guide their developers with me to rewrite their software (it was buggy as shit, they didn't know better.).

So, a month later, we are in the middle of the rewrite and the boss flies in pissed that it's not done yet, he had the audacity to accuse me of stealing contract work with no experience in the area.

I told him flat out, "you don't know what the hell you are talking about. If you didn't hire a JV coding team, you wouldn't need me to redirect your damn rewrite."

He fired me, so I went to his superior and told her the situation. She told me i completely deserved it.

Worse part was I got paid half of my contract. Didnt make that mistake again. 😒😒

Found out later that the company failed, declared bankruptcy. Felt pretty happy.

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

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

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

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

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

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

So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...

I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.

My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.

I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.

Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".

I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?

I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.

Time for a REAL fucking rant.

io_uring manpages say you can set the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to allow SQPOLL to work. You can't, you still get an operation not permitted errno result.

Why? I checked, it says 5.10 mainline is required. Pretty sure I just manually downloaded and installed the Deb's myself. uname reports that I am at 5.10. So what gives?

Maintainer submitted a patch because they fucked up and made the *actual* capability check look for what's basically root permissions (CAP_SYS_ADMIN... c'mon...) and is now trying to rectify a glaring security shortcoming.

Patch hasn't been accepted or even addressed yet but they already updated the manpages with the estimated mainline kernel release as if it had made it into the release candidate. Manpages have made it into latest debs but the actual change has not.

Where the fuck is the Linus Torvalds that would ream the fuck out of shitty developers doing shitty things? The political correctness climate has discouraged such criticism now and the result... this. This fucking mess, where people are allowed to cut corners and get away with it because it would hurt their feelings when faced with pressure.

I'm not just guessing either. The maintainer has already said some of the "tone" of criticisms hurt his feelings. Yes, sorry, but when you claim 90% speedup over a typical epoll application using your new magical set of syscalls, and nobody can even get 1-2% speedup on a similar machine, people are going to be fucking skeptical. Then when you lower it to 60% because you originally omitted a bunch of SECURITY RELATED AND CORRECTNESS CHECKING CODE, we're going to call you the fuck out for fudging numbers.

Trying to maintain the equivalent of academic integrity within the computer science field is an exercise of insanity. You'd be fired and shunned from publishing in journals if you pulled that shit in ANY OTHER FUCKING FIELD, but because the CS scene is all about jerking each other off at every corner because the mean people keep saying mean things on Twitter and it hurts your feelings therefore we're all allowed to contribute subpar work and be protected from criticisms when others realize it's subpar.

These aren't mistakes anymore, it's clear you're just trying to farm clout at Facebook - maybe even FOR Facebook.

Fuck you. Do it right, the first time. Sick of shitty code being OK all of a sudden.

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...

While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".

So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.

It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?

No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.

You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).

To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).

It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.

For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.

That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.

I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.

When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.

He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.

There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.

I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.

My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.

Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...

Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...

First dev job and I've made it to lunch time, better than I'd convince myself I would do.

The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).

While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.

It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.

I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.

4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.

The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.

One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.

TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.

DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.

A bit different than wk93, but still connected and a fun story.

Back in high school when it began to digitalize everything, so began our teachers journey with technology. We, as IT class were into these things, but as far as I can say, others in the school including both teachers and students were like cave mans when it came to IT.

Most of them kept the different wifi networks password on the windows desktop, in a file 'wifipassword.txt'. When we were on robotics seminar, we had to use a teacher's laptop. The wifi network was incredibly fast and powerful,, yet so poorly configured that even the configuration page user/pass was the default admin/admin, because the IT admin wasn't the most skilled one.

We got the idea to sell the password of the wifi network to other students. Not much, for about 1 dollar a week. The customer came to us, we took the phone, took note of the MAC address, entered the password, and if the guy were to stop paying every week, we just blacklisted that MAC on the next robotics course.

Went well for months, until a new sysadmin came and immediately found it out, we were almost fired from the school, but my principal realized how awesome this idea was. You may say that we were assholes, and partially that is true, I'd rather say we made use of our knowledge.

Ever dealt with people who don’t understand a damn thing they’re coding and just copy and paste stuff around and say that it works? It’s amazing how long people can skate by with only knowing 50% of how what they’re working on works.

We had some dumb know it all on our team who would regularly ship half-done stuff to production and then scramble to fix it after the users bitched about how it didn’t meet the requirements.

This stupid person changed an else to an if having no idea what any of the logic did in this section of code, didn’t adequately test it, and it somehow made it through code review because the better devs were out of office.

This bullshit goes to production, fucks up 200,000 records, and users start complaining about it. Shitty developer refuses to revert the offending code until multiple people on the team overrule them. They spend the next week unfucking the data and decides to just take a day off on Wednesday because it’s been “too much mental energy to fix.” The shit wasn’t even fully resolved yet.

Some people seriously do not belong in this industry. This person’s thought process was:
“Changing an else to an if can’t possibly have significant consequences. Let’s just change this so my code change executes to see what happens.”

Still not sure how they weren’t fired when this happened. They unfortunately got to quit on their own two months later.

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

A couple weeks ago I told a now former client that I just "fired" that I had no remaining invoices to send them. Today I discovered a couple of invoices from a couple months ago that it appears they'd not yet paid. This is why I need to quit trying to run a business and just be an employee again. I suck at accounting.

That one client who feels entitled to immediate feedback and response from you, yet they're not paying you on retainer and know good and well that you have other clients. Then they get condescending in their emails and cop an attitude when you (nicely I might add) advise them to find another developer if they want people to micro manage.

Yeah, I just fired that client. Not dealing with this anymore. Good thing about being a contractor is that you have the freedom to walk and have a backup plan. And if they try to come back, I'm hiking the rates if I even take them back at all.

😎✌️

Started new job almost two moths ago..

For almost 3 years I was developing custom themes, plugins, and widget for WordPress using PHP, jQuery/AJAX, and MySQL.

The new company that hired me brought me on as a backend developer to help rebuild their custom PHP Framework, and other web based software/products as their moving toward Google Cloud Platform.

When I started, MVC and OOP was new to me... took a couple weeks to get the hang of things, and understand their system.

Just when I was getting comfortable, I had a task assigned to me that was all NodeJS...

Had a 30 check-in the week I started the Node task, and was feeling pretty beat down because it was all new to me and I wasn’t making a lot of progress, and still not comfortable with Promises yet, and some other ES6 features but finding my way around slowly but surely.

Manager reassured me that I wasn’t going to be fired and it wasn’t unique to myself. Very encouraging to hear, but I’m my own worst critic so it’s frustrating not being able to make progress like I would with PHP projects.

Fast forward to this week, I started to review another task for a feed and found it’s all Ruby! Another language I have no familiarity with... and started to question if I’ll every get the hang of all these languages and be a solid team member...

Not only do I have to get a grasp on NodeJS and Ruby now, but then I’ll also have to get familiar with GCP and whatever else comes along with it...

Oh and I’m using Linux now instead of Windows/ OSX... so there’s that too.. plus the other command line tools the company built, and uses..

I was comfortable developing in PHP and know I needed to take a step and accept this job to move my career forward but it seems like I’m always behind the 8 ball...

Some days I wonder if it was worth staying a Wordpress developer and just focused on learning ReactJS and stay more Front-end than Backend..

I enjoy working with talented people but I don’t like being the low man on the totem pole knowing I don’t have the experience yet.

Does it feel like this for all devs?!?!

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

I just oversleeped...
Im not a dev yet, i have a contract job at the factory.
I have worked 1month already from 3 that i singned up for.

The worst thing is that i said i need a day off to give specific papers for my university. It was supposed to be today but i moved it tomorrow due to the problem with transport.

Well my superior is propably realy angry right now... On the bright side i will have 2 days off...

I wont get fired (hopefully) because as contract job they should only substracy the daily pay from my monthly salary.

This is my first time that im late for a real job. My intuition says that i should go but i wouldnt bear the shame... If i were to go i would be late minimaly 2 hours. I have no idea what to do... I will propably stay home and lose the daily payment because im not strong enough to bear the shame today. It would be very difficult to get in the company as well. Ahhhhh! Its difficult to make decisions when you are shy, lazy and scared.

For hours I spent my time debugging my code, trying different approach to the same code function. Looking for one simple invisible mistake, that is when I want to make a delete request to the IndexedDB.

The request are fine without running a single error, the success event fires perfectly. But one thing which is unexpected, the object inside IndexedDB did not vanish at all. The data stay the same without any flaws (but how can that be, when the 'delete success' event fired? IT SHOULD BE GONE BY NOW!). No kidding, for hours I debug my code, yet found nothing's wrong!

Until one moment I found out the datatype of key I gave the request are different from the object I wanted to delete, the object has a key of 4 and I gave the request "4". I'm so pissed at this moment making me googled 'developer rant' and found this site.
Really! God Bless 1 !== '1'.

Got a PROD issues caused by missing data from upstream. Told them about it last week. 3 days of no replies.

Finally got a reply that they will look into it. It's been almost a week since I first told them but no responses and no solution yet.

I couldn't fall asleep because I guess I drank too much coffee but also cuz the thought of this pissed me off.... So got up and sent a work email basically threatening to escalate this all the way up, put their asses in hot water.

Though not sure if I can but.... Maybe I can take a disability leave for needing to mentally recover from going mad at other people that can't do their jobs but aren't fired...

I haven't turned off my work laptop since over a month. I restart occasionally when Windows update demads it.

I have TeamViewer running in this and since workplace has 24/7 electricity and highspeed internet, i use it if i have to download something huge and important.

In addition to that, I'm using it for something else, which will get me fired if found out.

Believe it or not, nobody has yet noticed since last 6 months that I leave my system running 😂

How do you define a seniority in a corporate is beyond me.
This guy is supposed to be Tier3, literally "advanced technical support". Taking care of network boxes, which are more or less linux servers. The most knowledgable person on the topic, when Tier1 screws something and it's not BAU/Tier2 can't fix it.
In the past hour he:
- attempted to 'cd' to a file and wondered why he got an error
- has no idea how to spell 'md5sum'
- syntax for 'cp' command had to be spelled out to him letter by letter
- has only vague idea how SSH key setup works (can do it only if sombody prepares him the commands)
- was confused how to 'grep' a string from a logfile

This is not something new and fancy he had no time to learn yet. These things are the same past 20-30 years. I used to feel sorry for US guys getting fired due to their work being outsourced to us but that is no longer the case. Our average IT college drop-out could handle maintenance better than some of these people.

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

It seems like there is a whole another grade of fear — Basilisk grade. It’s impossible to experience it and walk away without serious consequences.

Imagine: I’m barely 20. It’s my first real, official, high-paying job. I’m already a team lead. A big Russian non-govt company with a blue logo. Huge new office in Moscow.
My “childhood” is officially over — I’m not playing around anymore. I’m an adult in every sense of the word.

Several weeks go by. Maybe even a month. Just a regular day at the office. I’m waiting for the coffee machine to heat up, and suddenly, it hits me. I’m here, at the office. Moscow, a city of 10 million people, is beautiful in the summer, yet I can’t just leave the office and go for a walk whenever I want to. When the day is over, it’s already evening, and I barely have time for myself. There are other people around me, with way higher positions, but their schedule is just the same as mine: nine-to-six. My adult life just started. I have forty years of this ahead of me. No matter the company, no matter the position: unless I’m the CEO, I’m doomed to get to work in the morning and go back home in the evening. And then I retire, old and not that beautiful anymore. And then that’s it.

I was never the same after that day. People are plotting my betrayal behind my back. They all act as one. Just out of my frame of view, their heads are turned to me, and they all look at me with the same devilish grin. There are no people — it’s all one huge shoggoth that lives under the office floor, and my colleagues are its ugly tentacles wrapped in human skin. I start missing deadlines. I become paranoid. Next thing I know, I’m at the psychiatrist’s office, being prescribed aripiprazol — a strong antipsychotic that is designed to literally make you slower. Anxiety worsens. I develop restless legs syndrome. I lose my ability to sleep. My intelligence is slipping away. I’m fired.

I have the return to Saint-Petersburg, cariprazine prescription that felt like lobotomy with extra steps, losing my ability to read, delirious manic episodes ahead of me.

It is only now that I kinda-sorta tuned my medication scheme in by going through countless psychiatrists of all sorts. But I sure as hell work at a place where I can do whatever I want if I meet deadlines.

Sooo as of January of this year, I have a new boss, this dude basically acted as my “mentor” for the last year so he’s already tried micromanaging me but bc he wasn’t my boss, I could push back.

Long story short, he is now my manager, he’s the global marketing leader and I’m the marketing director for the Americas (been doing this role for two years) yet he treats me like I’m an idiot, in his words he wants to make sure I’m in control of my team before he lets me lead fully while simultaneously telling me that I need to step up and lead.

I politely asked him to let me lead and stop attending all my team meetings, stop delegating tasks to my team directly and instead consult w me so then I can delegate, and basically to respect the fact that clearly I’ve been successfully doing the job for the last two years.

He said no, that he won’t leave my meetings until he feels I have full control of my team, continues to over involve himself in all my projects, pulling my team in a bunch of directions w new projects and ideas left and right, and burning us all out.

To add insult to injury, he sent me a very “helpful” email detailing how I need to work better and faster and how he expects me and my team at full speed, my team is made up of me, two new hires that are a month old, my marketing manager, and I’m currently hiring for another team member. (This after he led a company restructure of my previous team that resulted in me losing 4 team members in December so I’m rebuilding my team).

I’m already overwhelmed and demotivated, pretty sure he wants me to quit and he has a proven history of bullying his staff, he was actually fired from our parent company for this exact reason a few years ago, he also happens to be European so not sure how rules work over there, but he was rehired by my company. My European colleagues hate him too, but they’re too scared to speak up.

I used to love my job and now i dread it, I drink every day after work and I get anxiety everytime he emails me which is at all hours if the day. Is it worth it documenting his bullshit for HR or should I just cut my losses snd leave?

Appreciate the advice!

This is probably the worst place to start my Rant saga but this is recent (this is one of the last few episodes of a 3 series cluster fuck of a job so you're missing out on all the straws that go into breaking the camels back and making him unaccommodating)

TL;DR I do good work, management dont like me and go out their way to try and fuck up my days

So, lets start, I'm a contractor, got funeral Tuesday, book leave, book WFH for day after.

I leave in 3 weeks, woman who is the CIO's right hand bitch takes me into a room the next day or so in the morning to discuss my WFH day. Leave on tuesday is cool but this WFH day...there's only so long until I'm gone so they want me to stay in for more face-to-face time blah blah blah (considering this woman isn't even part of the project I'm working on anymore because she decided to deflect it onto a underqualified junior with no PM experience)

So I sit there, thinking of all the blood and sweat that I have shed, the mountains I've moved just to be told to move the mountain somewhere else and whether coming in would kill me (in other words im fucking burnt out!!! I have built their GDPR database and app backend single-handedly with no requirements, project managers who can't plan and being chastised for asking for documentation/plan/anything written down and having the CIO who is also the fucking DPO ignore any emails/slack I send him relating to the project and having to keep up with a team of devs....).

So because there was a momentary silence, she decided to fill the gap

"Oh, you've done some good work so far and I wouldn't want you to ruin it all in these last 3 weeks. So just come in on the Wednesday so that we can have you here."

Hmm....yeah...i didn't notice what she had ACTUALLY said there, still thinking about can i be fucked? So she decides to add

"...there's only 3 weeks left, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges. Remember, we still have to give you a reference"

....Okay....shots fired. So i respond

"You saying, if I take a WFH day, you'll give me a bad reference?"

"Noooo no no no, not saying that, just that you've done good work and we wouldn't want you to ruin it"

"With one wfh day?"

"We just want you to come in because the developers might be coming here that week"

"Oh... I hear that...what day?"

"I dunno, it's not been booked yet"

".............................I'll think about it"

"There's nothing to consider"

*Start leaving room* "I'll think about it...."

So cool, obviously, had a think, decide to shoot over an email (or more accurately, a collection of bullets). Which basically said, in devRant translation, "Fuck y'all, I'm WFH on that day, I wish a motherfucker would fuck up my reference, we can go that way if you want it. *snaps fingers* I. WISH. YOU. WOULD! "

Woman says "I wasn't threatening you, was just saying...dont ruin your last 3 weeks, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges and that we still have to give you a reference"

What kind of Godfather comment is that?

Come in today, the CIO, who is a prick who don't like me for whatever reason, sends me long email trying to disrespect me and in the midst says "I’m sorry that you have chosen to react like this, I’m sure that [my bitch] was conveying a position that your last three weeks of contract are crucial for a smooth handover. I have made the decision to not require you to work from home on Wednesday. I understand you are on leave on Tuesday and therefore this is now extended to include Wednesday. I look forward to seeing you back in the office on Thursday. I hope this will make the situation better for all parties."

.................................thought you lot needed me in the office to ensure a smooth handover................logic..........people.............where the fuck do you get yours from!?!?!?!? All this just so they can say "We made the decision at the end :cool:"

Released the product to customers without realising someone had pre-filled a production test accounted login at the login screen. Obviously it was used for testing purposes and the dev forgot to remove it before committing.
I loled when I found out about it, and some customers started to login and made transactions.
When I checked the commit history... It was under my name :/

Sooooo I came in to work yesterday and the first thing I see is that our client can't log on to the cms I set up for her a month ago. I go log in with my admin credentials and check the audit logs.

It says the last person to access it was me, the date and time exactly when we first deployed it to production.

One month ago.

I fired a calm email to our project managers (who've yet to even read the client complaint!) to check with ops if the cms production database had been touched by the ops team responsible for the sql servers. Because it was definitely not a code issue, and the audit logs never lie.

Later in the day, the audit log updated itself with additional entries - apparently someone in ops had the foresight to back up the database - but it was still missing a good couple weeks of content, meaning the backup db was not recent.

Fucking idiots.

My manager had someone else manage me for my whole time at the company so far. Nearly two years now. Anything I’d come to him with, he’d direct me to this other person.

Fair enough, dude’s really good and I learn a lot from him. I see why they trust him with so much. I think he’s a genius. I’ll never be that good. Embarrassed I’m only a few years his junior. Wonder why he’s okay with being a manager for employee pay. Don’t think about it much, normal corporate BS.

Well it got way more “normal” when his ass got laid off without notice. Feel terrible. Him and 70% of my branch’s full timers. Wonder how I got so lucky. Everyone’s gone. We barely have enough people to do a standup. They all had 5+ years on their belts minimum. Only the contractors are left.

Manager emergency meets with me. Tells me all his best staff are gone and I am now the only front end guy on the team. He tells me he is not confident in the fact I am responsible for all of the old guys work and he is worried. He thinks I can’t do it cause he thinks I suck. Fuck me man.

My manager is pissing himself realizing he has lost the only people keeping HIS job for him. He has no clue my skill level. He sees my PR’s take a bit longer to merge, yet doesn’t realize I asked that friend of mine who was managing me to critique my code a bit harder, mentorship if you will, so we’d often chat about how to make the code better or different ways of approaching problems from his brain, which I appreciated. He has seen non-blocking errors come through in our build pipelines, like a quota being reached for our kube cluster (some server BS idfk, all I know is I message this Chinese man on slack when I get this error and he refreshes the pods for me) which means we can only run a build 8x in one day before we are capped. Of all people, he should be aware of this error message and what is involved with fixing it but he sees it and nope, he reaches out to me (after the other guy had logged out already, of course) stating my merged code changes broke the build and reverts it before EOD. Next day, build works fine. He has the other guy review my PR and approve, goes on assuming he helped me fix my broken code.

Additionally, he’s been off the editor for so long this fool wouldn’t even pass an intro to JavaScript course if he tried. He doesn’t know what I’m doing because HE just doesn’t know what I’m doing. Fuck me twice man.

I feel awful.

The dude who got fired has been called in for pointless meetings TO REVIEW MY CODE still. Like a few a week since he was laid off. When I ask my manager to approve my proposals, or check to verify the sanity of something (lots of new stuff, considering I’m the new manager *coughs*) he tells me he will check with him and get back to me (doesn’t) or he tells me to literally email him myself, but not to make any changes until he signs off on them.

It’s crazy cause he still gets on me about the speed of stuff. Bro we got NOTHING coming from top down because we just fired the whole damn corp and you have me emailing an ex-employee to verify PATCH LEVEL CHANGES TO OUR FUCKING CODE.

GET ME OUT

Okay, my first serious rant.

An acquaintance of mine when needed my help always explain his problem equivocally. Like, he would explain laboriously of the method to achieve what he needed when the thing he only needed is just a simple API call. Im not saying im an expert in this area but his explanation doesnt help me to understand his problem. If i do not understand his problem, how can i help him? At least if i know what his problem is and i cant help, i can seek help from others.

And hes not even working in the same company as me. And he wants it solved ASAP. I dont know your problem, yet you want me to solve it? I dont even know if im capable of solving it! And I have my own job to do..

He always try hard to explain it. He tried to sound professional. And he always ask for my help first because I knew he doesnt want others to know that he doesnt know how to code. Why do you apply for the position if you know you cant handle it?! Everytime. He's been fired before. And he did it again. I cant. We are fresh graduate. Apply for a fresh grad position. If you dont know anything, just said you dont know unless youre very quick to learn..

I remember once we need to submit a linux commands or something homework. We need to code it during the class and submit it by the end of the class. He asked me to code for him while mine is still half done. "Quicker please!" he remarked. There were still plenty of our classmates still doing it and some even havent done it yet. What the f are you rushing i felt like slapping him in the face with the keyboard at that time but because i am a matured adult i did not do it.

Hes not even a bully he just always get panic without reasons. He wants things done early and then he can post on social media. "Oh so tired this program is so complicated" or like "Oh damn, they want me to lead the group again (roll eyes emoticon)"...

Please somebody run over him.

Hes making me bald everyday and i think this is unhealthy. If he wants to get bald, get bald alone. I was just starting to work but my hair has been falling everyday.

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

MyClass<T> where T: class {}

he does this:

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

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