What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

Got a phone interview for a backend dev job in an opsec company.

Interviewer:
This is a very serious and prestigious position, we take care of the most important bits of code.

*Proceeds to talk introductory nonsense*

Interviewer:
Do you know what a DNS is?

Me:
Yes, of course! DNS stands for Domain Name System.... Blah blah blah... I explain about the servers, about hosts file, about DNS spoofing and everything else possible on this topic.

Interviewer:
See, I was patient with you - letting you finish. I'm not sure what you're talking about and where you got it from, but a DNS is that line in the browser where you type the site's name.

He didn't ask any more questions, just told me that they'll get back to me. I asked not to do that.

Three weeks later I got an email claiming that I'm not qualified.

My conversation with my wife today, while I was at work:

Wife: The wifi isn't working.
Me: What's it doing?
W: Not working
Me: Try turning it off an on again.
.
.
.
Me: Is your phone on LTE? Or is it connected to wifi and the internet isn't working?
W: LTE. Aubrey (my wife's sister) said she turned it off and nothing happened.
Me: did she turn it back on?
W: Do you really want me to answer that?
Me: Just making sure. What lights are on on the router?
W: (Sends me a picture of the router with no lights on)
Me:...
W: Oh it isn't even plugged in
Me:...
W (after a couple minutes): Its working now!

YES I REALLY WANT YOU TO ANSWER IF YOU TURNED IT BACK ON!

How I've decided to answer the "can you hack" question from here on in...

"Can you show me how to hack this account please?"

"Sure, you'll need a hammer, a blow torch, chloroform, some pliers and couple of bottles of really pure vodka!"

"What the hell?!"

"Oh, it's so much quicker to just extract a password from a person, than it is to break into a system, I'm not exactly trained in inflicting pain on the human body, but I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out through trial and error, good luck!"

So this fucking happened today.

Me: *sees support ticket coming in about some kind of login issue*

Me: *opens issue*

"Hello, I can't seem to login. There's an error"

Me: *sighs and thinks "at least give me that FUCKING error message then." *kindly replies with asking if they could send me the error message*

"Here it is. I don't understand what is going wrong
and what I have to do"

Me: *looks at error message*

"Invalid customer ID. Please make sure that your ID is correct. You can find it in the activation email we sent you when you registered".

😐 😶 😦

Me: *thinking okay what the fuck, are you fucking retarded or something?*

Me: *kindly replies: "It seems that you are not using the correct customer ID. You might want to look for it in the activation email we sent you!"*

"Oh okay thanks, how did you figure that out?"

Me: 😵 😐 😶 😭 🔫

Seriously what the actual fucking fuck.

Morning conversation with wife.

As she puts a stainless steel water bottle on the counter

She: can you make a water bottle for our daughter before school.

Me: I'm not sure, does it have to look like this one, I don't have any training working with metals. But if I have full control over the design. I may be able to come up with something.

She: that not funny, why do you always do that.

Me: do what, that is exactly what you told me to do.

A little later.....

She: I'm running late, can you make sure "everything" up stairs is unplugged..... (She means her curling iron)

I can't wait until she comes home.........;-)

*Manager enters the room quickly*

Manager: Coffe2Code, we have a serious problem on the application, (We are working on a chat app).

Me: What? now just few hours before the Demo?, what is it?

Manager: when I send or receive a media message (audio or video) the sound is not playing, the file seems like corrupted !

Me: that's strange, let me debug it and see.

*Me spending an hour and could not even reproduce the bug..*

Me: Boss, I cannot see the bug, can I debug on your device quickly?

Manager: Sure, here it is.

Me: hold the fucking device, press VOLUME UP, IT WAS FUCKING MUTE. THERE WAS NO ISSUE MOTHERFUCKER.

Manager, oups ok good no issue then, thanks

At the beginning of an interview...

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

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

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

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

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

Corporates are marvelous.

Manager: Why did you clear the data from the database? The client is now specifically requesting it and we don’t have it anymore!

Dev: You told me to.

Manager: Well why did you listen? It’s obvious now that that data was very important and should have been kept!

Dev: Last time you told me to do something that wasn’t a good idea I tried to explain why and told me not to question you ever again and that doing so was “disrespectful” and then threatened to have me fired. So now I just go along with what you say and let you suffer the consequences of not listening.

Manager: Well don’t do that then! It’s obviously not working very well! It’s ok to disagree with me you just have to make sure that what you think is something I agree with!

Dev: …

How do I un-idiot my users when it comes to clicking on dodgy email-links??

Got a forwarded email just there from a user who said;

Good afternoon,
Is the below ok to open?
I just tried but got a popup saying I've been blocked from opening it.
I'm not sure who it is coming from and I am not waiting on anything but as it says its from dropbox and is important, i know it's okay.
Can you unblock the link ASAP please?
This is really impeding my work-day as I need to know what it is and act accordingly.
Regards... user.

The Original email came from a random jumble of letters with a subject line of 'important dropbox program' - not only does it look dodgy but its english is horrible! It said;

"Hi tu my freind,

You tu still read a pending verrry important document sent by one of your own contact to be vieweddd.

Install "Highly Confidential english.pdf" by clickinggg here

*insert link leading to something called 'viral-update-trojan.exe'*"

I mean, seriously... help!!! 😢
We have sent emails explaining how to hover over links and to not to click them if it looks wrong.
No one does it.
We hired a company to send fake phishing emails to train users in what to do.
It made no difference!
We now make people 'verify' their email addresses when opening any sort of link to try get them to actually look at what they're opening.
We also strip emails of original attachments and create 'safe' html copies as we can't trust them to look at what they're opening.
Everyone complains about it but Jesus Christ, this is why!!!

Its so exhausting!! What is wrong with people!!! Argh!!! 😤

Okay okay here's another one

Client:pls put a pop up that asks the users weather they are sure about leaving the page.
Me: I think that would be redundant
Since he clicked the close button to close the page.
Client: what if he is unsure of leaving the page now he will stay.
Me: :/
Client:And another one when his login fails.
Me: pop ups can be disabled it's not good to use them especially for login screen.
Client (now slightly annoyed): Well,put a pop up warning them not to, isn't it obvious.God!!! I thought you were the smart one.
Me:;/

Coworker: hey man, do you know what is the limit for z-index on CSS?

Me: not sure but I think it is the signed int limit.

Coworker: the waaat?

Me inside: GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!

Mam: Hey can I ask you a question about Facebook?

Me: (Christ give me strength) ... sure whats up?

Mam: You know when you get a notification and you click on it and see what someone uploaded?

Me: ... you are not on Facebook, you can't be getting notifications

Mam: well I do. Is it possible to...

Me: No hang on a second, it is 110% not possible for this to happen. Something else is going on that you think is a notification.

Mam: You know when you are on, and you see a message like "12 new notifications"

Me: on? on what? this is happening on your phone is it? Can I see?

Mam: No its on my laptop at home.

Me: ... you have an old laptop with an old windows, you can't get notifications on it.

Mam: OH FOR GOD SAKE! ... you know when you are in your emails and it says "12 new notifications"?

Me: ... right so we are talking about EMAILS about unread notifications and not getting notifications on your phone. So you have an old account then that you don't use?

Mam: Yeah I don't know the password to it, haven't logged in, in years.

Me: of course

Mam: Right anyway. When I get one and click on it, lets say its about you, can you see me reading your notifications?

Me: ..... you can't not read my notifications.

Mam: uh, can you see me reading your emails then smart arse?

Me: ... can't do that either.

Mam: So what the hell am I doing then?

Me: You are reading a post someone uploaded, which you got alerted to from an email.

Mam: Right, can you tell when I've read your POST then?!?!?!

Me: no

Mam: was that so hard?

Me: ... yep

Collegue *yells through the office*:
Hey IT-guy the file is not there, where is it ?

Me: what file is not where ?

Collegue: you know that file i've been searching for 30 mins now on the Google drive.

Me: Have you tried hitting the name into the search bar ?

Collegue: Sure dude, I'm not stupid.

Me -> *one the way to her desk*
Collegue: OH! never mind I found it with the search bar. I swear it hasn't been there before!

*turning around, going back to my desk*
-fml

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

Customer is always right.....

Committed to sustainable productivity..

Misunderstanding between the IT Department Staff member and the Finance Department Staff member in one of the establishments...

User: Hi, our printer is not working.

IT Service: What is wrong with it?

User: The mouse is jammed.

IT Service: Mouse? Are you sure it’s a printer, as they don’t come with a mouse?

User: Do you think I’m stupid? I’m telling you it’s the printer!

IT Service: I'm telling you, it can’t be the printer! They don’t have a mouse!

User: Oh really?... Mmmmm... I’ll send you a picture.

Scroll down...
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The customer is always right.
Listen to him/her and believe what he/she says.

Don’t jump into conclusions!

Today after 1 year of taking shit I sat down with my manager and completely tore the whole fucking company apart.

I absolutely slammed my colleagues, obliterated my team lead, went on and on about how no one understands the basics and how everything we have is copy paste procedural code and the only way to fix what we have is to delete it. I then insinuated I want to quit because I cba with the struggle anymore.

Result? Fat promotion. Not sure what just happened here lmao.

friend: so how are we gonna do this project together? download, edit then upload to google drive again. thats the fastest way.

me: how about git?

friend: what?

me: ill just create a repository and create branches before we merge it with master. no need to go through that process of downloading and uploading multiple times

friend: not sure... what... that.. is.....

me: oh we have a looooong way to go, ill guess ill have to teach u git right from the beginning

"Hey, about that matter from yesterday..."
"Yes, what about that?"
"We need to talk about that again! How often do you trigger that system?"
"Once."
"You sure?"
"Yes, but i can check it, if you like."
*find references*
"See, only once."
"Can it happen at a random point later one?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Can you check it?"
"Okay."
*shows code"
"Look here, as you can see, it will not happen at other times."
"Do you have an idea why it could happen anyway?"
"Maybe that system does the action without my software telling it to do so, wasn't that specified that way?"
"Yes, but it normally does that roughly 10 seconds after you give the command the first time, so we thought maybe you could say what makes it do the action at other points maybe."
"Did you check that systems sourcecode?"
"No not yet. But did that happen with the older version?"
"No. But we didn't try."
"Did you change something between the versions?"
"Yes, the new feature."
"Could that make a change in behaviour?"
"I don't see how."
"Can you remove that feature for test?"
"We can take the old version."
"No, we need the new version, but without the feature you added."
"That IS the old version, there is no other difference!"
"Are you sure?"
"Would you like to see it in source control?"
"No, ~ okay. What do you think causes the problem?"
"I haven't had any new ideas since we talked yesterday."
"Okay. Mhhh,...okay. Lets talk again later."

YES SURE! BRING IT ON! I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT! PLEASE COME BY OR CALL ME AGAIN! AND BRING THE BOSS WITH YOU, TO SHOW HOW SERIOUS THE MATTER IS! LET ME TELL HIM THE STUFF I TOLD SEVEN TIMES LAST WEEK!

My first testing job in the industry. Quite the rollercoaster.

I had found this neat little online service with a community. I signed up an account and participated. I sent in a lot of bug reports. One of the community supervisors sent me a message that most things in FogBugz had my username all over it.

After a year, I got cocky and decided to try SQL injection. In a production environment. What can I say. I was young, not bright, and overly curious. Never malicious, never damaged data or exposed sensitive data or bork services.

I reported it.

Not long after, I got phone calls. I was pretty sure I was getting charged with something.

I was offered a job.

Three months into the job, they asked if I wanted to do Python and work with the automators. I said I don't know what that is but sure.

They hired me a private instructor for a week to learn the basics, then flew me to the other side of the world for two weeks to work directly with the automation team to learn how they do it.

It was a pretty exciting era in my life and my dream job.

Data scientist: we need to whitelist a pod to connect to a database
Me: Whitelist? We don't use whitelists on private databases
DS: It's the new data warehouse database
Me: is it on <X> VPC?
DS: I'm not sure what that means but its ip is <real world ipv4>
Me: Are you hosting a publicly accessible database with all our end users information?!
DS: ...
Me: There goes our SOC2 audit controls...
DS: how long until you can white list it?
Me: I won't be whitelisting it. You need to put it on a private VPC and peer with the cluster, you'll have to rebuild all the Terraform and redeploy
DS: We didn't use Terraform because it takes too long, just white list the pods IP.
Me: No. I'm contacting the CISO and CTO...

$ rant --not-a-rant

I made it guys

I know this might not be a rant but Im sure nobody will understand this better than my fellow ranters/devs

Four years ago (16yo) I learned about a software development company in my city and Ive been wanting to.work for them ever since, at first I couldnt because I need half college credits, after because I landed a way more comprehensive job, but now I start on monday. The thing is few people have landed a dev job there as students because of what they ask but I MADE IT.

Thanks for reading this far.

I have had this conversation well too often:

- (him/her) Do you mind helping me with this problem I have on my computer ?
- (me) Sure, what is it ?
- (him/her) *proceeds to explaining the problem*
- (me) Ok, I don't know about this particular thing, you should try googling it.
- (the pissed off version of him/her) Never mind, I'll find someone who's willing to help me.

Please stop taking that as me not caring about your problem.
Googling things is basically what I do all day as a developer.
You really should try it. That thing is actually pretty useful.

when you have to do this because the code looks correct but you're not sure what the heck is wrong because it doesn't make sense

Marketing coworker: We MUST integrate with XYZ

Me: sure, they have a REST API and OAuth2. What part of our system do you want to integrate with XYZ?

coworker: Emmm... I don't know. Everything

Me: ...okay. What does XYZ even do?

coworker: Emmm... our customers use it, so we have to integrate with them.

Me: fine. I'm reading that XYZ has function ABC and PQR. Which one do our customers use?

coworker: ABC, definitely ABC

...

coworker: Our customers say nothing is working!

*looks into the problem*
Me: That's because they're using PQR and not ABC.

This kind of research is NOT my job, it's YOURS

Coworker: "can you help me with this thing?"
Me: "sure, what have you tried so far"
Them: "nothing yet"

Hdhajsgrbeiry JUST TRY _SOMETHING_ AT LEAST BEFORE ASKING FOR HELP.

It's literally your job to solve problems, not get other people to solve them for you.

Asking for help if you don't understand something is one thing, but constantly trying to get people to show you exact examples is not doing your job.

This has been a chronic problem with one of our devs and despite advising them multiple times on it, it continues to happen.

Why is the ternary operator such a hated thing? I constantly hear people saying it's less readable, confusing, etc.

I think it's a beautiful, useful, and important operator and I use it constantly wherever readability won't be much affected.

How can you justify a repetitive if/else structure over a ternary, given that you're sure you're not going to put anything else in the ifs?

Whatever happened to DRY?
Whatever happened to KISS?

If those guidelines are what you code by, what's the excuse not to use it?

Because you can't read it as well? Familiarity breeds comprehension and legibility, my dudes.

Client: I want you to build me something, I'm not sure jet what is is exactly but it is supposed to be round and be able to fit on a car.

Me: you mean a wheel ?

Client: noooo, this is completely different and original idea like none has ever had.

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....

Just wow. I am amazed by what just happened.

A year ago my parents decided to switch from desktop to laptop for convenience. Knowing their needs, i bought them one without an OS and installed Ubuntu 16.04 on it. The thing is that if you do a regular maintenance of the laptop once a year at their partner company, you get additional 4 years of warranty (this offer is amazing).

So today was the day I brought the laptop for this maintenance for the first time. They make you a profile on their support website where you can track shit regarding your device, super convenient. First thing I notice that the login page was not https. Awkward, but there is no sensitive data here so i let it pass. Naturally i forgot my password, so I requested a new one and guess what? I recieved it in plaintext via mail. A tech repair oriented company does this, my god.

I went there, gave them the laptop in question and got a piece of paper, where they wrote that the laptop is in their hands now, and the current physical state of the laptop, and blabla.

I got home and I read what the guy wrote among other things: THE OPERATING SYSTEM IS NOT LEGAL.

How the fuck is Ubuntu not legal??? What the fuck is this shit? I sure as hell didn't torrent it or bought a booteged copy on the streets.

Cleaning lady: *wants some tunes during work*
Me: "Sure, I wanted to listen to some music as well.. not sure if our genres match though 🤔"
Cleaning lady (CL): "So what kind of music do you listen to?"
Me: "Synthwave"
CL: "So um.. synthesizers?"
Me: "Well yes, but it kind of ties in with the dark side of technology.. the whole 1984 dystopian future etc. Privacy, lack of user freedom, etc."
CL: "So essentially cult music?"

TIL that the tech community is a cult for listening to synthwave. I bet she believes that tech peeps are lizards too.
*mentally slaps cleaning lady* - User!!

Series of events between me (Mi) and dude in office (DIO).

Instance 1
DIO: There is not psql installed on staging.
Mi: Install it.
DIO: YUM is not working.
Mi: *tries yum it works* It is
DIO: Oh. Didn't work earlier.
Mi: *blank* Make sure you install 9.6
DIO: Cannot find psql
Mi: *types psql, it is already installed*
DIO: Oh, didn't work earlier.

Instance 2
DIO: Made this change to the API, the endpoint is not returning the right value
Mi: *restarts server, shit starts working*
DIO: I am pretty sure I did that, don't know what happened.

Instance 3
DIO: Cannot alter role to give login to this db user.
MI: *runs alter role db_user with login* works
DIO: Don't know why it wasn't working before.

Instance 4
DIO: I have been stuck on this test for the past 1 day, cannot get the API to return the right data while the Rest Endpoint works fine.
Mi: You are hitting the wrong endpoint in the test.
DIO: Oh, I put an extra 's'
Mi: BTW you are testing Spring-Boot with that test and nothing else.
DIO: Yes but what if Spring Boot has a bug?
Mi: ok.

I built a feature. I asked questions for days. Nobody helped. I built it anyway, and while I'm not sure it's quite right, it works.

During a code review, I asked for clarification on who the fuck it's for. Simple fucking question. Didn't get an answer. I did get the same crap response twice, though. It's great because it both doesn't answer my question and makes things worse.

Let's refer to this as "branding." Here we go!

------

Root: "Should this be changed to blue? I'm not sure who the end-user is."

TC: "should be purple, then call it something more convenient" (...what?)

Root: "Better phrasing: if we use the feature, it should match our colors and be blue. If customers use it, it should match their colors and be red. It shouldn't be both. I looked through everything again, and i'm convinced that it's only for us, so it should be blue so it matches everything."

TC: "this should be purple, and then call it something [sic] red" (...what!? also: lolcopypaste)

------

But like, that's wrong in every single way. It's internal, not external. Doing both makes it confusing. Doing both and calling it external is fucking stupid. Did she even read the PR? or any of my questions? ugh.

I swear, it's like arguing with a boulder and expecting it to listen. An ugly, oversized boulder that comically resembles Jabba the Hutt. No joke.

Whatever, it can be purple. Later, if someone complains that it's confusing, I'll just link them to the damned PR. Then again, almost everything here is confusing AF, so I doubt anyone will actually notice.

Screw this place. So glad I'm on my way out.

Team Lead: "Today we're going to discuss how we can be more inclusive with getting people on board with XYZ organization. StackODev, what ideas do you have?"

Me: "Uh. Not really sure. I mean, it's not like we're being 'exclusive' in any way. People can join the XYZ organization without any restraint or discrimination. They just sign up on the website and they're done. There are no litmus tests of any aspect of their demographics or beliefs."

Team Lead: "Yeah, but how do we make sure we're getting more of Wanted Group A so that it's not as much of Less Wanted Group B?"

Me: "Well, that's a different question, isn't it? That would maybe meet the diversity and equity goal, but wouldn't that defeat the inclusion goal? Isn't it 'exclusive' to put more effort into attracting Wanted Group A people and less effort into attracting Less Wanted Group B people? And at what point do we draw the line between creating an enrollment system that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive and one that favors Group A over Group B explicitly?"

Team Lead: "Why don't you shut up now and we'll get ideas from some other team members."

Client: We are tired of having to go only to specific users to get things actioned, we need everyone to be given admin access so that we can get work done efficiently

Dev: Highly do not recommend that *outlines the likely consequences*.

Client: We don’t care, we DEMAND you do this. We’ll make sure everyone is careful.

Dev: Ok but I warned you. Please submit this request in writing.

Client: Ok, not sure why you would need that. I told you everything would be fine.

*Not even two days later*

Client: HELP!!! OUR DATA IS NOW COMPLETELY MESSED UP. WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WOULD HAVE CAUSED THIS IT’S AS IF EVERYONE IS RANDOMLY DOING WHATEVER THEY WANT HOWEVER THEY WANT IN ORDER TO SUITE THEIR OWN NEEDS. IT MAKES NO SENSE HOW THIS HAS OCCURRED. I TOLD EVERYONE SPECIFICALLY TO NOT CAUSE ISSUES!!! WE NEED THIS FIXED A.S.A.P!!!!!!

Dev: …

A lot of Project managers are idiots.
Here is what happened: I am a backend developer and was asked to replace some images on some website (not even sure this is supposed to be a backend task). So i did, changes went through review and then they were live.
A few hours later they come to me saying i made a mistake because the image has wrong color tone in one of the browsers (internally facepalming myself)... I didn't design the images nor made any changes to them... I just fucking uploaded the files that were sent to me... That's fucking it.
They blamed me for a design issue and how I should've noticed this issue blah blah blah... And i had to spend an entire fucking hour to explain to them step by step what i did, how i did it and why the color tone was wrong even though i am not a designer and my main tool is VISUAL FUCKING STUDIO AND NOT PHOTOSHOP.

The shit part is that the images were sent to us by the client, so really, it is their fucking fault not mine.
Oh, and they tried to guilt me by saying the client won't pay for this since the images are wrong.

Lost an hour to this bullshit.

- WE NEED TO KNOW THE VERSION OF THE SYSTEM THIS INSTANT!
"what? version? wtf are you talking about"
- THE CLIENT HAS I.T. GUIDELINES TO STRICT CONTROL THE VERSION OF EACH SOFTWARE VENDOR'S SYSTEMS!
"We are not a 'software vendor', we provide them consulting on logistics!"
- THEY USE OUR WEBSITE! THIS MAKES US A SOFTWARE VENDOR!
"Wouldn't that make 'google' their vendor too?"
- IM SURE THEY STRICTLY CONTROL GOOGLE'S VERSION TOO!
"I'm pretty sure they don't. But, whatever, that do answers the question of what they want. Some paperwork jockey wants a meaningless number to fill a form, let's give'em one"

I just had someone make an API endpoint where they can ask "the version", and it is just the number of commits in our production branch. For lols, we even 0-fill and split every three magnitude orders with a dot, so we're in version 0.012.345 or something.
Major version upgrade every million commits!

Fuck those guideline-parrots who are unaware that words sometimes have meaning, and sometimes not.

Had a job interview back where I want to move(2300 miles away), doing exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately it was for a senior developer, a bit over my pay grade.

First Interview: "It is above your skill level, but I like you. We will make it fit you."

Second Interview(technical): " You did super well! I will make sure to pass the good news onto the boss! I am excited to work with you soon!"

Response to my thank you email: "We decided to not persue you further for this position. We are going with someone who has more experience."

Why string me along?!?!

Found a post by G.R. on Linkedln:
"A lazy programmer is also often a good programmer:

- Writes little code to achieve the goal
- Automates all boring jobs
- He does not develop things he does not know yet
- Sleeps at night, then make sure that if the shutdown occurs, the system will restart
- He knows he forgets things, then writes readable and not cryptic code
- Try to reuse what he did
- He does not like copy-paste (too boring to keep)

It takes training to be lazy"

Love this quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can you tell if someone's a node.js coder?
Don't worry they'll tell you.

What do I dislike about node.js?
The fanboys.
Seriously you guys need to chill out. Your language is not the end of all other languages. It isn't going to replace PHP or Python or Ruby. It's not going to be the only thing around in 4 years.
I'm not a fan of JavaScript, I just don't like the language. I don't care about all the advantages and the other bs you're shouting about. If I want that feature I'm sure I can find a way to get it in my language.
Now shoo fly you're bothering me

Dude: Hey, can you help me with my website? It's for the final year project (IT and Hardware related degree).
Me: Sure, let me see.

Sends a .txt file with two <html> tags, not even closed.

Dude: Can you fix it so it appears with a menu on the top and news on the middle?

This guy got his degree and I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know how to enter to the BIOS of a computer.

He probably doesn't know what a BIOS is.

Me: ya hi, we integrated with your API and I'm receiving error x
Provider: ok we'll disable validation, plz check
Me: ya it works, what's the problem? I used a GUID for id and I'm sure it's unique, here is URL and request body
Provider: you have something wrong in your implementation. Fix it and it will work
Me: aaand what's the wrong part of my implementation?
Provider: id is not unique, fix it. *Hangs up*

I sometimes sit and wonder, how and why does this kind of people get hired, FOR FUCK SAKE YOU ARE THE PROVIDER AND YOU DONT KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG!
fucking useless ...

Can we talk about this for a second? I mean WTF, how is Windows XP still a thing. Wasn't there a ransomeware attack recently, so every last sys admin should have some motivation to upgrade their shit?
Sure, I hear you say, it's just an information display. No critical stuff.
Well guess what, it was at an airport. Most likely not connected to any critical infrastructur, but still it's a computer, stuck at the boot screen at 11 a.m. running windows XP, connected to an airport network.
And I was standing there like: fuck me!

Weekend projects are fun! Although front end is still a challenge, it looks good enough.

Suddenly got the idea to do something with letsencrypt/nginx wildcard subdomains (*.example.com) so created a project around that now through which you can check what your ip address/user agent/operating system/ip version is (maybe more to come) but due to the wildcard part you can enter quite a number of subdomains which all show the related info.

I'd find it very useful myself, not sure if other people would but oh well!

Customer: (calls emergency hotline) We have a really bad bug!
Rep: What seams to be the issue?
Customer: I need to talk to Sam, he knows what to do, tell him it's urgent.
Rep: can I tell Sam what the issue is?
Customer: Well, Sam built a newsletter program but I don't have a way to import mass amounts of emails addresses.
Rep: That sounds like a feature, not a problem.
Customer: why wouldn't it do that? Would you build a car without a steering wheel?
Rep: I am not sure that's relevant to the problem.
Customer: what do you mean?
Rep: I would say it is more like, "would you build a car without a pair of jet skis attached to the back." And we would respond with, "we would be happy to add Jet Skis, but it's going to cost you additional money."
Customer: So, how are we going to fix this bug in YOUR software?
Rep: :/

!dev
I am about to move into my own house. Yay. But every ISP I called is very insistent that there is no house there.
"Are you sure you entered the right building number? The entered house does not exist." Yes it does! And it has existed since 1912...
Stupid Germany with its stupidly bad internet infrastructure. I guess that's what you get for privatizing the network.

Fiverr, so for those of you who are fortunate enough not to know what it is, fiverr is a freelance platform that takes 20% profit from well, profit made using the platform. That includes tips from buyers. It has nothing to do with what the rant is about, I just wanted to mention it.

So I had a "gig" that was doing really well, new customers every week, the analytics stated I had 2.1k impressions(and I dont even advertise). Then recently I gkt a push notification that said I needed to edit my gig, I was a bit confused. Then almost immediately after, I got an email saying my gig was taken down for copyright infringement. That made me really annoyed because all I ever made for buyers was my own code and screenshots. I contacted customer support, still waiting for a reply.

P.s. I am pretty sure this is my first rant😀

A LOT of this article makes me fairly upset. (Second screenshot in comments). Sure, Java is difficult, especially as an introductory language, but fuck me, replace it with ANYTHING OTHER THAN JAVASCRIPT PLEASE. JavaScript is not a good language to learn from - it is cheaty and makes script kiddies, not programmers. Fuck, they went from a strong-typed, verbose language to a shit show where you can turn an integer into a function without so much as a peep from the interpreter.

And fUCK ME WHY NOT PYTHON?? It's a weak typed but dynamic language that FORCES good indentation and actually has ACCESS TO THE FILE SYSTEM instead of just the web APIs that don't let you do SHIT compared to what you SHOULD learn.

OH AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE CAKE, the article was comparing hello worlds, and they did the whole Java thing right but used ALERT instead of CONSOLE.LOG for JavaScript??? Sure, you can communicate with the user that way too but if you're comparing the languages, write text to the console in both languages, don't write text to the console in Java and use the alert api in JavaScript.

Fuck you Stanford, I expected better you shitty cockmunchers.

Avoiding bad companies starts at the job interview. Remember that the job interview is not only for them to evaluate you, but also the other way around. Make sure to ask a lot of questions. What are they doing, how are they working, what help is there if you get stuck, are they doing code reviews, what will you be doing etc.

The job interview is the opportunity for you to get an inside view of the company. Don’t just accept any job because you are desperate. Luckily qualifies devs are much needed in companies.

Also, make sure to go to multiple job interviews so you can see the differences. I think it can be difficult to avoid in the beginning, but as you get more experience, you can sort of tell whether it’s a good or bad company at the job interview.

Though sometimes you are just unlucky. In that situation: leave. It is so good damn easy to get a job in this field.

Client: Can you build me a custom Wordpress site to look like this WordPress template..
Me: Sure, but why not buy the rights to the template?
Client: I want it custom.
Me: what do you want custom?
Client: the content on all the pages. The template is all in french or something.
Me: kills self.

No, I do not wish to work on your Scrum-managed project.

I do not wish to contribute to the Taylorism of my profession.

I do not wish to be an interchangeable cog in your software sausage machine.

I do not wish to be tracked by some pointless metrics like a call-centre worker.

I do not wish to bust my tight, cute ass to sprint after some idiotic management request that could have been factored in earlier.

I do not wish to obtain some piss-ant qualification that "authorises" me to do my job.

I do not wish to be party to your lie that technical debt will be avoided by refactoring---whatever the cost.

I do not wish to contribute to the death of software engineering to have it replaced by software development.

Agile? Sure. I can pick up the phone and talk to the client, users and fellow devs. After all, that's what it FUCKING MEANS. Communi-fucking-cation.

See that burndown chart? See your anus? Know what's happening next?

Fuck Scrum and every fucking bottom-feeder that is scamming a living by promoting it. You're killing this business.

Hugs and kisses,

Platypus

Real fact: 1999

IT: IT, how can I help?
MrB: I'm Butcheek. This program is shit, I can't even log-in!
IT: oh.. Ok Mr. Butcheek, let’s see if I can help...
MrB: of course you can: fix this shitty program and made me log in!
IT: I’ll try to do my best to assist you, can you...
MrB: I just want to log in! Can you speak my language? This new program is ridiculous, I wonder why you IT guys changed the old one, it was a mess but at least I could log in...
IT: I'm sorry you are experiencing this problem, but to assist you I need to know exactly what's the problem
MrB: I CANT LOG IN!!!
IT: ok, I understand this, but can you please provide some more information? Do you receive any particular error messages?
MrB: it says “wrong password” but it's not true!
IT: Ok, that's strange. Look, I'm resetting your password and then you will try again. At the first log in you will be asked to change it again, ok?
MrB: just be quick, I can't waste any more time on this!
IT: sure... Ok done. Please, can you try again? The password is “butcheek”
MrB: it asks for the username. What am I supposed to write here?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB: oh... Ok. And what's the password?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB:... No... Wait... Ok, “butcheek” is the password but what's the username?
IT: “butcheek”!
MrB: you don't understand, I have to put both username AND password!
IT: I know! “butcheek”! For both username AND password!
MrB: so I have to write “butcheek”-”butcheek”?
IT: yes, “butcheek”-”butcheek”!
MrB: so... “butcheek”...twice? Sounds weird... are you sure?
IT: yes I'm sure! However, you can choose either to write “butcheek” twice or “ASS” once, if you prefer...

I'm a lead engineer, I design, I code, I debug, I test, I struggle, I deliver, I'm just a basic building block in my company, hardly involve in product roadmap planning. This is pretty clear in my LinkedIn profile. Jp Morgan recruiter called me for Vice president role. VP? Seriously? me skipping 4-5 levels, just with an interview process? Are you kidding me?
I asked her two times "...are you sure?", I lost my words, somehow gathered courage and asked, "what's the portfolio looks like, how many people will report to me?" Then she, calmly revealed that it's just an ic dev role and they name it that ways in their company.

What the actual ducking-duck-duckkk!

P.s. not sure about jpmc rest of the world but that's how it is in jp Morgan india.

(backstory -> I have 10 years of experience as a software engineer)

Me: So I would like to develop myself to become "officially" a senior engineer

Manager: sure, you basically need to show consistent behaviour

Me: ok, but what specifically? on what criteria do you determine when it is time for promotion?

Manager: there isn't anything like that defined yet, we would like to work on a definition of roles and responsibilities, but we're not there yet

Me: ok but how did you do it so far?

Manager; well as I said, you have to show consistent behaviour that characterises you as a senior.

Me: ....

27 years old, been in 3 jobs. Hired in a new job. Confidence has went up and down like shit. Life has become more real than ever before.

What have I learned through all these bumpy rides?

Life is journey, it goes up and it goes down. But what you may not realize is that everything that happens to you, is for you to learn.

Happy Friday to everyone in this unknown path, just enjoy that you are alive, can breathe and see things with your magical eyes.

God exists for sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m updating my résumé, and want to redo it from scratch — I’ve just been migrating the same document between OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice) versions for 15+ years, so it’s pretty buggy now.

As I’m redoing it from scratch anyway, does anyone have any suggestions on what I should build it in/with instead? Is there anything that works particularly well?

I’ve been considering learning and using Latex, but I’m not sure.

User: Hey, we got a big issue with one of your tools. One of your pages isn't loading.
Me: Ok, so when did this happen?
User: We don't know? Its been like that for a long time though, so we thought it was normal 😃
Me: ....ok. So do you know what data is supposed to appear?
User: Uhhh we're not sure as well. Since, you know, its been like that for a while.

Just great 😑

I don't understand why so many devs complain about not having money or complain about the company that they work for. We literally have the skills to do whatever the fuck we want in today's world. Literally everything is structured around what we do. If you hate your life so much, do something about it. Granted, I understand if you live somewhere that doesn't allow you to control your own destiny but I'm pretty sure that the majority of the people on this app has the ability to do so. The rewards are endless if you decide to think outside the box just a little bit. Sorry, this has just been on my mind for a while and decided to rant about it here since that's what this app is for.

Which do you think designers are tired of hearing?

"Make the logo bigger"
"Looks great but can you make it pop"
"Can you make it pretty"
"Something is missing in the design but I'm not sure what is."

After 15 Revisions
"I think the first design you made was better."

Manager: I want you to make an architecture diagram for this system
Me, not sure what diagram but ok asking my senior then
Senior: You know those diagrams you learned in uni? Yeah, do whichever you think is suitable
Me, left to my own devices, makes a shitty use case and sequence diagram
Manager: We don't actually do diagrams like yours here. But I like it so lets stick with it.

😱 Ok. Cool.

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

I hired a coder to write a WordPress plugin on my dev server. He no longer works for me and is unreachable. The plugin does most of what it needs to do. But when I dig into the code and the database to find what should be obvious bits of code that do obvious things? None of that code is found. Not even with a recursive directory keyword search for that should be easy to find like CSS class names and IDs. Even the data that comes from the database and that I see on the screen is not actually present in the database!!! Yet it all works. I'm pretty sure at this point the code and data reside in a parallel dimension only the coder can get to. How do I debug code that doesn't actually exist?!

Our project schedule is quite full at the moment, we are basically at the limit for the next three months.

In comes one of our sales people: "Hey, can we squeeze in a little project, nothing fancy just a very basic static web page." (No question mark there, it was not a question...)

I say no, we are full, the deadline is to tight (3 weeks), can't do it.

In comes boss: "Sure you can, just push everything else back." (We won't change deadlines, what he actually means is for us to do unpaid overtime for two months so he can barocke make a few thousand extra bucks...)

So I cave and allow it. It were just 4 hours of work, we can squeeze it in, maybe do a little less R&D this month.

Next day, the project scope changed, suddenly we are not taking about 4 hours but 80. Sure, we can squeeze two extra weeks into the month.

That is when I realized, I don't hate my work, just my work environment.

This was my first real programming bible. I remember reading it chapter after chapter in the car on long car trips as a youngster and being so excited about the stuff I was learning I would explain it to my mom in the front seat as I was learning it. I'm sure she didn't understand a word of it.

Funny thing is I still do that today, 25 years later. And I'm sure she still understands not a word!

So, what was the book that really got you into programming?

Do you have a ‘Drama Queen’ on your team?
This happened last week.
DK = Drama Queen
DK: “OMG..the link to the document isn’t working! All I get is page not found. I’m supposed to update the notes for this project…and now I can’t! What the _bleep_ and I supposed to do now?!...I don’t understand how …”
This goes on for it seems 5 minutes.
Me: “Hold on...someone probably accidently mistyped the file name or something. I’m sure the document is still there.”
DK: “Well, I’ll never find it. Our intranet is a mess. I’m going to have to tell the PM that the project is delayed now and there is nothing I can do about it because our intranet is such a mess.”
Me: “Maybe, but why don’t you open up the file and see where the reference is?”
DK: “Oh, _bleep_ no…it is HTML…I don’t know anything about HTML. If the company expects me to know HTML, I’m going to have to tell the PM the project is delayed until I take all the courses on W3-Schools.”
Me: “Um…you’ve been developing as long as I have and you have a couple of blogs. You know what an anchor tag is. I don’t think you have to take all those W3 courses. It’s an anchor tag with a wrong HREF, pretty easy to find and fix”
DK: “Umm…I know *my* blog…not this intranet mess. Did you take all the courses on W3-Schools? Do you understand all the latest web html standards?”
Me: “No, but I don’t think W3 has anything to do the problem. Pretty sure I can figure it out.”
DK: “ha ha…’figuring it out’. I have to know every detail on how the intranet works. What about the javascript? Those intranet html files probably have javascript. I can’t make any changes until I know I won’t break anything. _bleep_! Now I have to learn javascript! This C# project will never get done. The PM is going to be _bleep_issed! Great..and I’ll probably have to work weekends to catch up!”
While he is ranting…I open up the html file, locate the misspelling, fix it, save it..
Me: “Hey..it’s fixed. Looks like Karl accidently added a space in the file name. No big deal.”
DK:”What!!! How did you…uh…I don’t understand…how did you know what the file name was? What if you changed something that broke the page? How did you know it was the correct file? I would not change anything unless I understood every detail. You’re gonna’ get fired.”
Me: “Well, it’s done. Move on.”

preface context: I was recently asked to make a website for an event I participated in before

client: okay I heard you can make a website for our event? that’s great!
me (dev): yeah, do you have any requests or expectations for me?
.
client: not really, but I was a developer before and I can code a bit so I’m wondering in what language would you code or develop our website in?
me: oh I would be using JavaScript, specifically nodeJS
.
client: oh really? i’m not really familiar with that language, so is it okay if you code it in a language I understand and used before?
me: sure, what is it?
.
(lol I wonder if you can guess already what it is at this point)
client: HTML
me: ... (*uh oh* html isn’t a markup language *sigh*) :——)

This will be long and it's more of an IT rant, but I think it still fits.

So a user comes to me and says "hey on my phone I can't see anything in my junk email folder but there are a bunch of emails in there on my PC." I take a look at the Outlook app on his phone. The "Junk" folder that he has open is actually in his deleted items folder. So clearly it's not the real junk folder. There are no other folders named "Junk", but there is one named "Spam". I open that and there are a bunch of emails in there.

ME: "Does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "Oooohhh so you think it's called "Spam" instead of "Junk" on my phone?"
ME: "I'm not sure, does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "See, I always thought junk and spam were two different things."
ME: (grinding my teeth and taking a deep breath) "Does. This. Look. Like. What. You. Were. Expecting. To. See?"
USER: "Yeah, looks like it."

OK THEN FRICKING TAKE YOUR PHONE AND GET OUT OF MY OFFICE.

I didn't really say that last bit, but I sure was tempted to.

for real i can't imagine what all you people are doing wrong getting those blue screens in windows all the time reasoning your change to Linux. been using it like forever and had experienced some in the early days, very few in windows 8.1 when i was messing with some drivers and shit but not a single one since windows 10 while using it normally on a daily base.

sure, there is a lot to rant about in windows generally justifying a change to Linux but are you talking about windows 98 or fucking raping your system till it BsoD's just to point at it and say: oh Linux is so much better because i don't get BsoD's all the time? or are you using 10 year old hardware?

enlighten me pls

Internship Company employee: Hey, we need 600 images uploaded to a wordpress site, you'll have to do that for me.
Me: Alrightyy, can you give me some FTP or SSH access or something?
Employee: Nope, not allowed to.
Me: Uhm, I could write a shell script and run it?
Employee: The server is windows....
Me: Mother of god, I'll have to do it manually then?
Employee: You could ask John (my technical guider, not his real name) if you can borrow some fellow interns!
Me: *walks to John* Hey man, can I borrow some interns?
John: What for?
Me: Manually uploading 600 images to posts :).
Interns: *looking at me with a deadly view*
John: Sure!
Interns:

"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.

I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.

When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).

The answer I got was following:

Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"

Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"

Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"

Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."

Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"

Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*

What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."

WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???

But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.

And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.

Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.

And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.

Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.

Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.

For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.

I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"

Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"

And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.

the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.

Plus, you learn more when you teach others.

My boss says to me this morning.

Boss: Can you add these links as a redirect 301 to this link.

Me: Ok, I'm not the developer for that domain but I guess I can do it. Let's try to update apache htaccess for that domain through my account.

(After a swift ssh connection to the server to check out that domain.)

Me: Er...boss, we don't own that domain. We cannot redirect it's links to our other domains.

Boss: Why? What do you mean?!

Me: well if we don't own that domain, than it is not on our server and we cannot update it's server config files. So we cannot redirect that domain to our other domains.

Boss: Are you sure?

It went on like this for a while. I had a laugh break after.

As a freelancing student my customer (CEO) asked to build a project management system.
I was like: we can smoothly get to know each other by setting up a simple .xlsm
ENGAGE™.gif

On 2/3 of project, shareholder comes in: make it like office. I want the same as ms office but built by you.

Me: sure. Why not. I'll a have a little chat with friends being experts on this.
FuckThisRage.webm

Who does he think he is. What does he believe one single human is capable of. What a jerkTard

Forced a high expense allowance and gave them some gibberish copy pasta, sealed .xlsm containing 3 languages all but macro

#peaceout

Yesterday
Boss: Can you export the foo data and send it to me?
Me: Sure
Me (later): Ok, just shared foo.csv with you. It should have everything you need, just let me know if you need the bar data.
Boss: OK, thanks.

Today
Boss: Did you get the foo data exported?
Me: Yes, I shared that with you yesterday
Boss: What did you name it?

This is all in a chat, by the way, not in person. Scrolling for 1.5 seconds reveals all the relevant information.

How do I respond in a way that is not sarcastic and does not belittle my boss? I'm not sure it's even possible.

Our HR guy is a tool. He requested I help him extract some data from our database. Which based on what he requested I supplied he then started trying to bully me because the data I gave him wasn’t what he wanted. Ringing me every 5 mins asking if it was ready, comparing me to another colleague who wrote the system.

When we blew up at him telling him to back off he continued. Anyway he still works here and persists in being a tool. i on the other hand ignore him.

I’m pretty sure that the HR bullying an employee is wrong, not massively worried about it just annoyed

Majority of the hacking tutorials:

Tutor : Now we are going to set up two virtual machines to practice our hacking.

Me : Yes finally some useful practicals

Tutor : First one is Metasploitable

Me : What? This OS literally has its name derived from exploitable! How would it be useful in real life! But its ok, there is one more OS for practice, i am sure that one will be better.

Tutor : And the second one is "Windows XP"

Me : *MOTHERFUCKER!*

P.S.: I understand its not the case for all tutorial and it is somewhat necessary, but still it gets me a little.

This is just straight up a joke. Head of data science has had us implementing something based on a paper.

I raised some "concerns" about it a while ago. Found out today they'd not even read the paper. We're pretty sure what we've been asked to work on doesn't solve the problem it's meant to solve...

Owner of the company I freelance for: The proposal I sent yesterday to [PR Company we do work for] got bounced back. They said it was incomplete.

Me: Well no shit, they didn't provide us with a detailed itinerary of everything they need, nor did they give us access to sections that they want copied to the new website. I can't and won't provide a full quote when I don't have all the information needed to build one. I would be guessing at this point and it would be shitty guesses.

Owner: Here's a proposal they got from another company. We need to make it like this [sends file].

Me: They mention a one sentence footnote about what I laid out. Everything else is marketing jargon that I don't know, because I'm a developer, not a marketer. I'm not sure what it is you want me to do, because you're asking the wrong person.

Owner: Are you going to help me or not?

Me: Help you with what? You got my notes. Paraphrase them if you need to, but I have more important things on my agenda, like being a web developer, not a proposal drafter.

My boss just called me and asked to write a email informing our clients to not to download the update we pushed this very evening because Application is crashing when you will open that particular page.

What went wrong? One of our senior Developer, let's call him Mr. X, is totally against of testing the app before deploying it to clients. He believes that as i have created the application, i know exactly what to change to accomplish a requested feature or bug in application.

When a ticket assigned to him about a bug in the application, he simply make some changes in code, create the package and send it to test department. How do I know? He even boast it in front of us.

Most of the time it works but not every time like today. And I am pretty sure my boss is not going to ask a explanation about this to him.

I have great respect for him. It's okay to have confidence but testing before sending it to anybody will not make you junior. Will it? Being a senior You are making others to be careless about his job.

That's what happen today. Mr. X failed so does the testing department. So am I. I am the head of testing department as well.

I am not blaming him. I just cant. It was our job to test app thoroughly. I am feeling pretty bad now. His confidence made me vulnerable. Say his confidence made me clearly a fool. Lesson has been learned though.

Friend: i have an idea
Me: what is it?
Friend: uber is not yet here, lets do the app exactly like uber only for the city, can you do that like in one month?
Me: uber is a billion dollar company with several and the best engineers in the world
Friend: so what, just copy the exact same idea, of course the money comes when the app is done
Me: sure... ill call you in a month. (delete conversation)

Am I the only one, who likes to hate the tester for sending back your code, when I should be greatful for him/her for finding bugs?
Replies from me by the amount I get my ticket back:
1: okay, sure, thanks
2: all right
3: oh, okay
4: what? still not okay?
5: how did you even catch that?
6: what the fu** is wrong with you?
7: you again???
8: die already!
9: <singing the frozen theme> Let it go, let it go!

Boss: oh so you are working on that unrealistic 3week project ? Let me also assign you some completely unrelated office work.
Me: But I'm a programmer, researching other companies and contacting them looking for new projects is not part of my job descrip...
Boss: oh don't worry I'm sure you'll do great!
Me: that's not what I'm sayi...
Boss: ok I have to go now, have it ready by tomorrow!
Me:(crying internally)...ok.

Guy I work with messaging me: Hey could you check my SQL syntax to get the date part for the month and year.

Me thinking: Ughhh this is going to be something stupid I know it. Why doesn't he just check it himself?

I check it... 2 queries that are very, very, very... simple... and similar except one returns last year (2017) and the other returns the current year (2018)

Me: Not sure what your issue is... I'm not getting any syntax errors. They are executing

Him: Well it shouldn't show 2017, it should show 2018

Me thinking: learn to debug you lazy fuck

Me: Well you're adding a -1 to your year...(Not sure why your even adding to it if your just getting the current month and year)

Him: Oh you're correct! That makes sense

Waste of my time

Arguing with my girlfriend (recalled from my mind, not 100% accurate)

she: What do you expect when you buy an android?
Me: sure thing apple is more "unpack it, use it", easy to use - but android is more like an empty canvas. The first thing when I buy it is setting it up to my needs.
she: You don't understand, what do you expect from your android device?
me: It has to be affordable and work for a certain time
she: No I mean, do you.. when you unpack your phone, expect it TO WORK?
me: Sure, it's not like I buy a pile of trash, I expect it to work
she: you're too stupid, baka
me: ... ? *confused*
she: When you say it is like a canvas, isn't a canvas someday full?
me: yes, every phone, iPhone, Pixel, Samsung, every phone has a limited memory
she: *mad* you don't get it, silly
me: I want to but heh, I don't get it

So I promised myself some down time this weekend since I usually end up working all night and in a blink my weekend is over. I also declined going out for better 'relaxation'. Here's how it's going so far...

>Gets home. Hmmm what should I do I can do anything! *thinking*
>Pours a stiff whiskey
>Trys watching something as well as playing a game, gets bored of each and abandons them.
>Opens a dev newsletter
>*blinks*
>Realizes I'm elbow deep in some repo... starting to feel inspired.
>Decides to code something "fun"
>Uses "Well as long as I'm not *working*" to justify his addiction.

I'm really not sure what I did for fun before I started coding. It ruined things by being so damn enjoyable and ultimatley many other things became well... less fun.

This is what addiction looks like.

Customer: as soon as you get a proof of concept could you send it to me?

Me: sure *sends app to test* here is what it currently does and does not do.

Customer: thanks, here is a list of 59284 things that dont work or need changed.

No shit sherlock. It's not done, you wanted a very early version, and of the things you listed I already mentioned half of those.

Yeah, maybe I can solve your problem in 5 minutes with you. But first you have to spend 5 minutes explaining it to me, and I need to spend 5 minutes listening, and after we're done, it takes 5 minutes to remember what I was doing in the first place.

So you better be sure you could not have solved it in 25 minutes googling on your own, or you're effectively saying your time is more valuable than mine.

And if you spend another 5 minutes forcing me to spend 5 minutes listening to your goddam stories about what it was like growing up on your fucking farm, so help me jebus, I will take that idiotic thing you call a mouse and shove it so far up your ass you'll be scrolling with your duodenum.

So this one day I'm at work and the manager peaks into my office and just says "can you check that platform X is building, pretty much done just a basic bug check" (this bloke had negative 1 technical experience)

I'm not sure what he means, the whole thing is built in Java and I know nothing about that...

I log in the platform on dev server, sure enough it seems to work, charts are drawn, no errors, then I try to log out; this button does nothing...

I don't bother telling the manager, I just go to the dev who's a friend of mine and tell him about it.

A week later, manager jumps in the room all excited "we're launching this product tomorrow, mind checking again?"

Sure, I log in, ... There's no log out button, it's gone... I ask the dev.

"Yeah I fixed it, it's gone now!"

Working on a new project at work; all_of_a_sudden boss goes:

"A client needs the current software to do this thing, can u do it"

Me: "Yea, sure"

One week later: "Yea, Im not feeling this, can we change this, that, and--what the heck is that?"

Me: "😑 aaaaa the exact changes u wanted"

Boss:"Well, lets change (A list of stuff and new things added)

Me: Sigh....

This rant is not about avoiding bad company but instead: If you find your self in a bad company make sure to note what is bad in terms of:
1. What is wrong?
2. Is it wrong by your book or by everyone's book?
3. How things should be done if you were in charge?
4. Are you able to be productive if those "wrong" things where done correctly? For example if they should have used gitlab cli for auto deployment, do you know how to do that? No? Learn. Yes? Move to the next item in the list

There is no way to avoid bad companies unless you are really lucky, just make the best out of where you are now :)

> phone has OEM unlock disabled
> phone is vulnerable to like 300 race conditions
> reboot phone, get to menu as fast as possible
> sure enough, what do you fucking know, option is unblocked for a split second if I get to and open the dev settings perfectly
> manage to pull it off again
> SETTING STAYS ON AFTER REBOOTING we have ourselves a winner

it's never this easy, i have yet to check if it has a key or not, will keep you posted, but if this all works this will have been the most retardedly-simple unauthorized bootloader unlock ever

"Can you review this pull request?"

Ok, sure

- Description in broken English
- HTML/CSS changes seemingly just for the fuck of it
- No user story listed OR
- User story listed has no description
- Mockup does not specify what should be changed
- Owner is offline because this entire team operates out of India
- Requirements said to exist but their location is unknown

Ahh boy, uni sure is fun...
I missed my comp-sci class last week when we got a project assigned. No big deal, right? We have an online student portal where teachers can post assignments for everyone to see. I'm sure it's in there.

It's not.

Okay. How about the syllabus? Professors are supposed to create a weekly schedule for students to follow, it's probably in there, right?

Nope. Nothing.

Alright... I guess I'll email him. At this point about two classes have passed and I haven't heard anything in class, so I fire off a quick email to the professor asking for the details to be posted to the web portal so I at least have some idea of what I'm doing.
Surprise surprise, I get a response in about an hour.

"I'm not posting anything online. You should have been in class. Talk to a classmate."

*sigh*

So, from what I can gather from my classmates, we have to design a game using python. It might be a quiz, maybe. We have a week.

Are you fucking kidding me? Is it really that hard to take 20 minutes to type up a few requirements so your students at least know what you're grading for? I barely have any idea of what you even want, and from the three people I talked to it wasn't very clear even when he explained it in class. Post your assignments online, asshole!

TL;DR;

I was asked to give estimation on an app, that:
1. No one has a clue what it does, even though there is v1 on the store with almost 10% of functionality working
2. No one has a clue what should be in the new rewritten version
3. We are already behind schedule and I have no clue why, I've just been told that
4. They need UI flow that shows how the app will work with static data and when API's are ready (because ya know, writing code is easier than creating wireframes and modifying them accordingly) I will then need to link app with API as if it is as simple as drinking a cup of water, especially that: 1. What is water? 2. Do I have a cup or is it given, and 3. Relax bro, drinking water is like eating a burger, piece of cake!

I'm not sure what to do, not enough that it's React Native but also spaghetti requirements that no one was able to answer my simple question: What is the app responsible of?

P.S.: Some say I must rewrite the old app ONLY, no new features, others say: Turn the new web portal into mobile app, I say: WTF is going one?

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

I'm working on this project; it's for a large organization that desires to use blockchain simply "because it the feature" and not for any actual use-case; anyway, after a week or so we had a team meeting and my supervisor asks what have we accomplished so far, I was dumb enough to state that it went fabulous but I can't see how the use of blockchain is beneficial to the project, his response was "OK, I'll let you know what more features to implement to make sure you use blockchain well". And I'm just looking at my co-workers like "plz don't hate me".

Ya sure 0-2 yes experience with all those requirements + 5 more items hidden cuz of my tiny screen.

What is even more interesting they would like that person to know Swift UI.... It's not even out of beta ....

Also must know C#? For real... Those people do xamarine and native projects and they r not even a software company, they sepcialize in architecture

I hate it when people do this, like take the best at lowest price, that poor Dev is busting his ass to get your job done and you take the profit and give him the remaining change?
Hope this world doesn't get worse than it is....

By the way, job is for Full stack iOS developer 🙄

I don't need you to reiterate what the problem is. I am aware. I was the one who told you what the problem is. Via email and Slack. Why do you keep restating it to me like you are the one who figured out? I know the table isn't syncing with the third party object. I'm trying to figure out WHY. No amount of "I'm pretty sure the sync process is broken" will trigger a solution. Stop coming into my office every 5 minutes with a new "revelation" that wasn't even your own. This isn't my code, and since the owner of said code is not here to fix it, I have to spend some time figuring out how this damn thing works. SO PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET ME WORK SO I CAN FIX THIS

Is it so hard to comment your code?

I work on collab projects here and there and both the comments and documentation are both awful, nearly always, there are some exceptions.

This is a plea to all those who teach anyone to program. "This performs a loop" is not a helpful comment, nor is "This sets variable x to 1" where the line below is "let x = 1".

The last piece of code brings me on to my next point meaningful variable names. If x is a variable that stores the age of a machine call it ageOfMachine or age_of_machine. Not aom, not x but what it actually is, modern IDEs and text editors will fill this out for you.

Finally documentation, a good friend of mine sent me this quote a while back, I can't find the image but "Documentation is like sex, when it's good, it's great. But when it's bad it's better than nothing." Your documentation should be good, a good pattern to follow is the Node.js documentation, it tells the function, what it does and what parameters it takes.

Anyway rant over; and I'm sure that this applies to people outside of this community only.

kinda long but please read (skip to the bullets if you're lazy):

hey dR. I stumpled across a search engine that aims to help the environment. it's called "Ecosia" and it will plant a tree for every ~45 searches you make. just think, one stubborn bug could make you the reason for a new forest! I'm not sure if it's legitimate or not, but apparently it uses 80% of its profits to plant trees, and makes that profit from ads. is it safe to use? I'm not sure.

here is what you should know (some are based on claims by ecosia and aren't proved, but probably true):
- they plant a tree for about every 45 searches you make
- they are able to plant trees by using money from ads
- they "respect privacy"
- they're "fully transparent"
- they're a "social buisness"
- [I hope this isn't a turnoff] the search results are powered by bing
- since 1.9, vivaldi has included ecosia as one of the preset search engines (I'm not sure if it's the default)
- it has opera, firefox, and chrome extensions

thanks!

That the most important thing in any project is to first make sure YOU have understood what the customer/management wants and that THEY have understood what you are going to do.

Seen so many projects (other people's and my own) go down the drain because people had false expectations.

Also, good management is enormously important for any medium-sized endeavour. I cannot count how often I have seen mediocre to bad middle management screw things up, and devs pull off overnighters and 60+hours work weeks for this super-important project that then goes to the bin because "it turned out to be not so important in the end, sorry."

"OMG WE MISSED SOMETHING WE NEED AN EMAIL SENT TO EVERYONE IF X HAPPENS AND NOBODY DID A THING WITHIN AN HOUR!"

Ok done.

"OMG WE NEED IT SENT IF NOBODY DID A THING EVERY 30 MINUTES"

Um... not sure we're solving this problem right way ... but there you go done.

"OMG SOMEONE GOT AN EMAIL AFTER 45 MINUTES AND NOT 30 MINUTES"

Bro who the fuck knows why that happened, it's email not instant messenger .... that's what I meant by us solving this in the wrong way, email for this is dumb... how about we solve this process problem in some other way or you just fuck off ... this isn't a coding issue this is something else...

!rant, but some kind of story

I work as a lead dev on a gmod server of a pretty big german community. With the fun stuff, there come the duty‘s to help Jr. Devs or even help people get into Developing. The part, where you help junior devs is always fun, but what I find interesting is the part where you help people learn coding. It’s not easy work, but you learn more every “lesson”. I catch myself exploring and learning something new, even if I know the topic. For me it’s a new journey every time.
Not sure if there are many people who can relate but I just wanted to tell my side on it.

People: "Well we could put this data in the address book.....?"

Me: "Wait, what does that data have to do with the address book? Does a given address need that data / is it specific to that address?"

People: "No it's not related to addresses ... we just thought we could put it there."

Me: ....

Me: "So if you use that address you always want that specific data you want stored in the address book?"

People: "Oh no it's not tied to addresses."

Me: ....

Me: "So help me out here, when do you use a given piece of data? In the example here, what made you add that information?"

-Silence-

People: "Um, I'm not sure."

Me: "I think it would be a good idea if we found out. That might provide us some important guidance here."

Spent the last half hour helping my wife over text trying to "fix" FireFox. She said any site she tries to go to just "spins and spins". Chrome, Edge, all work fine. Tried the trusty 'ipconfig /flushdns'.

Me: "Open the command line, by selecting Start and start typing cmd. You'll see the Command Prompt application. Right click and run it as an administrator"
<15 seconds later>
Her: "Do I left click or right click to run as adminstrator?"
Me: "Left click. You'll get a pop message, just click yes"
<about 10 seconds later>
Her: "This thing popped up, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
<more waiting>
Her: "Says something about making changes to my computer, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
Her: "Is it going to make changes? Are you sure I should click yes?"
Me: "YES!!"
Her: "Don't yell at me. You're supposed to know how to do this, not me. What do I do now?"
Me: "Type ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'Type ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, just ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "Yep, just put a space between ipconfig /flushdns and press enter"
Her: "Is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of ' ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, the space goes between ipconfig /flushdns, not before."
Her: "You're not making yourself clear. OK, now what?"
Me: "Press enter"
Her: "It didn't do anything."
Me: "Did you press enter?"
<more waiting>
Her: "OK, it's done. Now what?"
Me: "Restart FireFox"
Her: "Still not working. Just spins and spins."
<not 100% sure restarted FireFox>
Me: "I'll look at it when I get home."

What is it with certain colleagues who "wanna write C, not C++"

Motherfucker if I see another malloc in the code I will physically asssault you.

Like damn we're failing to teach people C++ badly when a newcomer from university, who had 2 semesters of "C++" doesn't even understand RAII.

And how in gods name do software engineers with *decades* of experience get so stuck on old technologies?

Like I've seen them write 3 nested try-catch to make sure a delete is called or some mutex is unlocked....

If youre in the position of teaching others C++, please stop teaching C first.

I work in a dev company. One of our clients hired us to help them out as their devs are failing with their deadlines.

I had to expose app services via an api. I did it. Client company devs didn't like the way I did it as I rewrote their datamodels and declared them as api-use-only. I was demanded to return bkend services' data structures.

I didn't agree and waited until deadline to submit my code.

Now they are honestly thanking me for what I did as I've saved them from a forever-mutating-api-and-angry-integration-customers hell.

Not sure whether should I be happy or worried. I forced my solution onto them. It's not proffessional. But yhe customer is happier now than it would've been.

What do you do in such situations?

So my coworker is gonna change computer and for the past two weeks is "annoying" me to install Ubuntu for her...

Look ... I'm a dev just like you... Get your shit together and do it yourself or wait.

So Wednesday I gave her the task to backup her shit because I'm gonna do it today... Guess what she told me? That I'm better at it and if I could do do for her...

Sure.. Yeah... Gonna rsync your /home/user folder to the new machine and fuck you if you loose anything, that's not my fucking job you useless piece of shit.

I just had a boys-out night with my son. Went to some restaurant, found a parking spot in a confusing parking lot (half is more expensive than the other half of the lot, not sure which fee applies to the middle row... confusing), started paying for parking with the app (pays every 15 minutes until stopped).

Went inside, ordered a pizza, some ice cream. Chatting, playing, eating, having fun,... An SMS comes: "You have outstanding fines" and a link to the gov taxes' website.

wtf.. I must have parked in the wrong spot. FUCK! Oh well, it should not be a large fine anyways, it's just for parking....

Click on the link, login with my bank/SmartID creds. Another SmartID dialog pops up asking for a PIN2.
What? PIN1 is for authentication, PIN2 is for Authorization. What am I authorizing...?
Reading through the Auth message: "Paying 2473€ for Boris SomeLastname".

what.....?

Thank God my muscle memory did not kick in and I did not enter that PIN2.
And thank God I know what PIN1 and PIN2 are for.
It would've been one expensive boys-out evening... Even a strip club would've been cheaper.

Stay sharp, guys!

P.S. Later I checked the URL. It used all the right keywords, and it was registered as an .info domain. It was somewhat off, but gov websites trying to be lean do sometimes use some weird ass domains.

Not a rant but I'm not sure if I made the right choice. I got really curious this year in cloud infrastructure and started studying for my AWS Solutions Architect Exam. The company I work for (large company) allows me to switch roles/teams. Last week I was so bored with frontend I requested to switch to the Platform engineering team. The Engineer manager slacked me this morning....

PE Manager: I'll see you at standup this morning.

Me: Cool ill be there at 9, where is it? By the cafe?

PE Manager: No, in hell. Glad you joined the team 😃

What did I get myself into.

// My First Rant

We have a developer that almost everyone adjust to what he want to avoid talking or working with him.

I have office mates that doesn't want to give tasks to him just to avoid working with him.

Even our devOps guy just did what he want so he would stop talking.

One bad experience of our devOps guy with him is that his infrastructure or other AWS stuff was blame why his APIs is not working. It turns our that his url for the database has FUCKING SPACES.

Not sure if a good practice but he wants the base url of our Endpoint to be set in environment variables instead of having DEV/PROD/TESTING and base the endpoint from there.

He said that he was given permission to study a language but he doesn't even ask for permission.

Could not fucking sleep at all.

Spent the entire night in a combination of:

Weight lifting
Playing with NestJS(its fucking beautiful)
Watching seven deadly sins on Netflix(current fav anime)

And i am still not tired. Even then I am not in the mood for going to work.
Not sure if I want to risk it and drive there since I know I will be crashing at around noon.

I hate it when this happens.

During the week I would do crazy shit to try and get me to fall asleep.

I would wake up early. Work out, go to work, get back from work, kill myself at the gym and nope.

Still wide fucking awake.

To make it better, my stomach begins to act up and fucking kill me the more I don't sleep for some reason(although it could be related to me piercing my stomach years ago)

I really dislike being human. Such fragile bodies.

But yeah, NestJS is frickin amazing. Typescript is sexy as all hell with it. Just what i was looking for in terms of out of the box architecture for JS apps

C and C++ want people to use them, but make people pay for the standards. Sure, you can download a draft, but it's not guaranteed that's what's in the standard.

What is the point of a standard if you disable people from conforming to it?

Not sure if I'm disappointed or relieved.

Just spent 5 years trying the get into this class. Studying and asking and getting recommendations. I knew it had less than a 5% pass rate but it's all that I've been aiming for for years.

Finally got into it, and spent 4 months working my ass off. Today I got told that I'm maybe being dropped. And honestly, as disappointed as I am, and I might need a new dream to aim for, I'm actually pretty okay with it.

I've been so stressed and annoyed and unhappy lately. I was starting to debate if this is even what I want. And for the first night in a while I can just drink whisky and not worry about the next test or doing classwork at midnight instead of sleeping.... I can just relax and whatever happens happens. I can't control how tomorrow goes.

Not sure if "oof. I need a drink" or "thank god, lets celebrate with a drink!"

When you get a summer job at the university to improve internal tools and asking your guarantor why the crappyness of his code is evident even to a noob pythonista like me and getting the answer like "I'm writing this only until it does what I want" kinda frustrates and demotivates. I'm sure this is NOT how things should be done.

When a manager asks if you can implement a feature (their are legitimately not sure if it is even possible) and you say yes and they say, "Good, 'cause I already assured the client that we would provide it on the next release"
Like, what the actual fuck...

so, flexbox.

and my only question is: why did it take CSS 30 years to get the features which it should have had from the start? now because of that, even this awesome thing is messy due to how the old features collide (or don't collide, i'm not entirely sure tbh) with it.

but maan, flexbox! now at least a part of css feels like a tool made to solve the problem it's supposed to solve, instead of layers of hacks that you can somehow hack into having the side effects which result in it doing what you want it to do!

I've had my share of "Hey you know computers, right?".
When I was getting my degree I drove a taxi on the weekends.
My boss calls me:
"Hey, my laptop is acting weird, could you have a look?"
Curious; I ask what it's doing.
"There's a pair of sunglasses covering the entire screen. Maybe it's a bra, I don't know."
Wtf?
When I left the taxi at his house, I had a look. I start the computer, Windows boots up, and sure enough, it looks like a pair of sunglasses is covering the screen, kind of.
I also notice a crack in the screen from top to bottom.
"So what kind of virus is this?!"

He felt stupid when I told him what the problem was. I ordered a new screen and replaced it for him and told him not to sit on his laptop again. 😜

We are a small company, and our CEO and CTO attends our daily standups(not sure why)

At the end our CTO, after a little discission with our PM, goes: “This” is more importent and should be gone first - its money to the company.

Pm: Fine but then “that” wont be worked on for now.
Cto: ohh okay, but “this” is really importent, so do it first.

Standup done, people returns to work.
1 minut later, Cto comes into the dev room.

Cto: “something else” is also really really importent.
Pm: ok, so then we do “something else” instead and we will put “this” on standby for now.
Cto: and remember “operation” has the highest priority of all.

For fuck sake... just pick one or decide what it is you want....

Cto has no clue to what he is doing. Does not have a long term plan, other then get money into the company based on really short term goals.

Easy to say im not his biggest fan, and I am a 100% sure he knows this.

I have some phone interviews coming up next week but I've never had these before. Usually I do online tests, shared code, or in person as I'm deaf.

This time I just want to try using a voice relay, so v basically whatever the person says it's transcribed... So wondering what do you actually talk about in these "quick calls"?

Party of the reason I don't like phone is because there are a lot of technical terms which will probably screw it up... But just wanted to give it a try and not 100% interested this time...

Was intending to, applied, then other things came up so now not so sure, some came back so just gonna wing it for the experience I guess

What flavor of Linux is everyone using? Why do you think it works well for developers? Got a new laptop and I'm trying to decide what to put on it. My other laptop has a dual boot of windows 10 and Kali Linux (my sudden interest to become a developer came from a desire to be better at Infosec/netsec stuff)

Curious to see what everyone uses from a developers perspective. Not sure I want to develop on Kali and windows is shit.

Great week, been super productive and very happy about.

*wild junior boss appears*

"You should have done it differently! You didn't know it and it's your fault for not asking me about stuff you didn't know existet. I often screw things up and blame others, but i made the boss like me so it's okay. And since i lost my spine some time ago, i will now go suck my own dick and feel awesome . "

Not sure that is exactly what he said, but he meant it.

Why won't you just approve my PR???

Whats wrong with you?!

I don't understand your cryptic one-sentence feedback. I'm not even sure you understand what you're asking yourself.

What the hell does "make it a transaction" mean? Don't give me pseudo-code examples that don't even work fucking asshole!

Its a small change that does NOT need a canary build dammit. Don't go testing the ORM, its a goddamn standard library. Why does working with you make everything so complicated?!?!

The code fucking works! There is no need to make it comply to your specific tastes goddamn it. Working with you is like pulling teeth!

/endrant

Been writing some Python apps for the last weeks and I really enjoy the language. I got all the basic stuff down but not sure how to progress to learn the more advanced stuff. What even is advanced stuff in Python and where can I find information about it?

I'm thinking about creating an API, any advanced techniques I could benefit or use for that?

The marketing dept comes to me and ask for an important project to be done ASAP. Builds pressure on my PM to get it done fast. After I complete it, I ask them to complete UAT to make sure it is what they wanted so we can go live. They seem to not have enough time to test it. After one month the whole dept gets divested! Is this common or I am unlucky? They never used that very important app ever!!😢😠

not sure if this totally classifies as a rant, but here goes:

so my Pi is giving a lot of problems. can't install software, keep getting weird error messages. so I try DD a new image onto the card. does not work at all. tried on three different machines :D
next I try run rm -rf /
it's obviously totally fucked. nothing works. pull the plug and plug it in again to see what happens.... it boots up again :D all the commands are back. no files are gone.

and that's when I was like fuck this and I returned the sd card :D

So I'm struggling to finish this library which among other things is supposed to write flowing text. And this one's taking foreeeever and I'm hating it so much already.

I just keep daydreaming of starting a "simple" platformer. And then I go, "hm the parallax must be nice, it needs to have as many layers as possible, oh and look at this video, here they're even zooming and each layer rescales differently, good effect, I need to add that too. Also a plain platformer is just boring, it needs to have adventure elements, and even RPG too, yeah why not. Hm, it needs to have some motion blur, but oh I need this 1/48 shutter speed to make it look cinematic. Okay how do I go about adding this blur effect? What? Libgdx doesn't provide one out of the box? I need to use opengl shaders? A shader, eh... I'm not even sure what that is. Okay, let's see how to do it. Wow that's a total mess and resource hungry, and how will I calculate it all as to make it match the 1/48 thing?"

You know... Simple. And in the end, I'll abandon the library and won't get anywhere with the platformer (as usual).

Tsk tsk tsk

[Hardware geeks, microcontroller geeks, please come]

Yet another Hacktoberfest tshirt...

Gotcha? (I bet you know who I am)

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

It is essentially a usb external storage
About 32gb

And has a lcd that shows available storage space

And some buttons to play snake. (Yup)

Is it possible?

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

TLDR boss is an idiot.

Boss has an issue. Sends screenshot, and a one sentence explanation, boss-style (not really clear, but the screenshot helps).
I set to solve it, not a minute passes, the boss os calling.
Explains the issue, i tell him I'm working on it, will msg when done. He explains the problem again, and tells me to hurry. I tell him, sure, let's hang up, give me five minutes, so he starts explaining again, that it's IMPORTANT.

Finally hangs up, it didn't take more than 3 minutes to solve it, msg him, it's done. test it, screenshots for the two parts i solved (of the one he wanted corrected and one where a similar case is still as it's supposed to be, not altered).

He calls me, I start telling him this us what I did, the screenshot.... *Interrups*
This is not what he needed, it's important, IMPORTANT i say, and tells the problem again.
I'm pretty annoyed by now, and just calm fuckoff mood comes over. I practically told him to click the link and see for himself....

if you want to take 10 minutes for something i would explain in 2 sentences, is it really that important....

I DIDN'T SIGN UP FOR THIS !!!

After seeing bunch of posts about Enki, decided to give it a try,

enters my info on the sign up page
*email address is already taken* : WHAT !!

changes email address
*your username is already taken* : WHAT !!

goes back and search if there's any mails from Enki
*no results found* : Dafuq !!

Requests password reset
*Receives first mail from enki ever, with a reset link*

Did they change their name from something else to Enki or they have bunch of emails in their database to showoff user base ?

Can anyone shed some light on this, cause I'm 100% sure i didn't sign up for this before.

after resetting the password I'm able to login, but in the Notification section it says
*your email is not confirmed*

well i would confirm it, WHEN I GET IT !!

!rant

Does anyone know what the **day-to-day** differences are between working in IT (banks, hedge funds) vs tech (Google, Facebook, Netflix).

In my mind, I see Hell and Heaven. And there's a giant wall in between called "technical interviews + algorithms and data structures".

I'm on the Hell side... And not sure if I should climb the wall 😔

Is the wall even that big?

!rant

Guys, I had my first REAL developer interview today. Without jinxing myself, I'd like to say it went really good. We discussed the companys upcoming projects, what they expect from a new developer, etc. but some thing that bothers me about it is there was never any discussion about my expected compensation. I'm not sure if this is common or not, but we'll see.

So what's up with some devs, QAs and managers that create bug tickets with little to no information on what is the actual bug? I can semi-understand in the case where you document it only for you to read later.

Fuck you if you think that a ticket with only a title saying "fix all the bugs for this release" or "this feature is not working" is an appropriate way of documenting a bug.

Fuck you even more if when you are being asked to provide more info to reproduce the issue so someone else can actually be sure it is fixed or not (environment, steps, expected result, actual result, etc.), you simply say that you don't have the time for it and documenting tickets is a waste of time.

Hiring YOU was a waste of time!

So a problem end client of mine made my life hell for 3 months.

She hired a design agency to design her a bespoke site, she signs off on it and then once I've made it she decides that it's just a draft.

She then spend the next 3 months emailing me multiple times a day, calling the office and calling my personal phone. I'm still not sure how she got my number.

after 3 months on a two week project, many conference calls and changing every single template so that the site is unrecognisable it is finally live.

This woman literally went around her whole office, building and street asking them what they thought should be changed.

Not only that but half way through she suddenly told me she wanted it live in 2 days with a list of changes as long as my arm. I managed it and she wanted more changes anyway so it didnt go live...

The moral of the story is, never go the extra mile for a client more than twice, make sure you charge them for your extra time, try not think about how someone so retarded is the head of marketing at a huge company and that a true rant has no structure.

PS she also complained to me often that the changes had not been made less than 24 hours after requesting them, showed a half built site to her board of directors and then moaned at me that it didn't look right.

Working on a team to take functionality from the latest version of an old executable and put it into a new web-based app.

Coworker: I can't get the results to match so I'll just change the options I'm using in the original program until they match.

Me: That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Same options on both source and new app, and you should get identical results. Otherwise, there is a defect.

I walk over to look at what CW set up.

M: "Why do you have this box ticked? That option doesn't even exist in the new version."

CW: I don't know. It was there?

M: (trying not to lose my cool, sets up options the way they are supposed to be) This is actually a pretty simple program. It just queries the DB, so we have to make sure the queries and results are the same.

CW: (runs it) Still doesn't match.

M: What version of the source app are you using? Make sure it's the latest.

CW: I can't tell. There is no help/about menu.

At this point, I kinda want to quit and live in a cave.

M: You don't need that. Check the executable in Windows Explorer.

CW: What do you mean?

At this point, I'm sure I look like Anger from Inside Out. I show them how to do it (right click file, properties, etc), wondering how they got this far in their career without knowing how to do the simplest things.

M: (surprised and irritated) This... isn't the current version. It's two versions old.

CW: Well, I couldn't get the newest version to return the results that matched the test cases, so I used the version that did...

M: You can't do th... Why wou... How is that acc... (turns around and walks out to tell the manager he hired a moron)

for the first time in my life I'm in a mentoring position and it is fucking exhausting. we have two interns now, and idk what the hell is the boy's deal. can't seem to do simple tasks, doesn't google anything, stares the ceiling if we're not monitoring.
the girl idk yet. she seems more active and engaged at least, but i have a lot of teaching to do and i don't really have the time for that. i hope that one can at least float by herself, cause I'm pretty sure the other one is drowning

So I'm at a hospital (everything is fine as long as I'm concerned) and there's this pregnancy sign... But it just hit me (not sure how to start this idea) sex is this amazing interaction between softwares so good and well coded that we already know what can create, not only that but the hardware (with some flaws here and there) makes such great UX! Seriously, the join of code (one of the hardest code I know) to make a better code and the interaction thanks to the hardware is great! Thoughts?

Still not sure about this new guy, not trying to be rude but everytime we're talking about code he says shit that makes me wonder how he got hired. (btw he is hanging with the IT department all the time) He's a very nice guy, but talks massive shit when it comes to bugs/new features/etc.

Should I have a look at his pc to see what he's doing when in office or is it none of my business. Help me out here, I'm really curious but don't care if he's a fake at the same time lol.

me making new dev friends

[...]
me: yeah that's cool what IDE are you using for C++?
guy: like an editor where I write the code?
me: ......yes?
guy: hold on, I don't know what it was called
> taps around his desktop
> guy shows word 2007
> I'm laughing a bit uncomfortably because I'm not sure whether he is serious or not
> guy opens up .cpp file in word
> so many questions
> mfw

Not really in work as a job, these people inspired me rather in lifestyle and thinking: (these are not quotes!!)

Richard Stallman - you can't be sure the program isn't harmful unless you see and understand the code.

Linus Torvalds - doesn't matter if you like the person or not, let the code speak for him/her.

Raymond Hettinger - there are both stupid and smart people. It doesn't matter. What matters is asking the right questions and providing clean and explaining answers.

A: Please build a Website for our new product.
A: Please use fancy technology, Animations and stuff!
B: OK, but $_things won't Work on mobile
A: mobile is Not our target audience. No Problem, optimize it for big Screens only.
B: it's 2017 - we need a mobile optimized Page, are u sure?
A: yes, so what i say

A week later...

B: hey a, here is Your preview. Optimized for big Screens, and i didn't Care much about mobile.

A: HEY B, YOU NEED TO FIX $FUNCTIONS ASAP!! THEY DON'T WORK ON MOBILE

I fucking hate it when professional rivalry affects the students. I am a student and for some unknown fukin reasons there is some kind of professional rivalry in the higher ends of my college. The effect of this is unwanted criticism and loads of pressure on us, the students, to outperform the students belonging to the other part (of the rivalry). What the fuck.

If you are in such a field, make sure that your rivalry with someone else does not affect the ones who seek knowledge and learning. It is not right to harass and exploit people who respect you and come to you for learning. It not only affects you but also whole lot of people who look forward for some kind of professional behaviour from you. Keep rivalry away from students. Work for what is necessary and get the things done. It is as simple.

I am going to stab a brick wall. I am at my university trying to install Arch Linux, but the connection is WPA-EAP and wifi-menu does not work. I need it installed by class tomorrow or else I'll have to use Windows. I don't understand how to set up a wpa_supplicant file. I'm sure it's simple for PSK's... But I don't know what to put for "eap" Linux is making me so pissed today. (but I still love her) I am really done with this

As a junior developer, I am not invited to most of the discussion. Lead comes to us with requirements and we need to build it. My lead is really helpful so no people issues.

I am not sure if it's good for my growth/career. I have recently ( 6 months) joined here. Do you folks have any experience like this? What did you do? Do discussions/meeting help to grow?

So I am young 14 year old programmer that just started high school yesterday. What are some good things to try and do for a future job? Should I stop coding until hs is over, do I code casually with free time and then after High-school I will know a lot more? Not sure how it all works

Question, have you ever felt like you have been pigeonholed into specific languages? I am feeling more and more like I am getting forced onto projects because to few people know the language (LabVIEW). getting tired of it, and not sure what the way out is.

I've seen a lot of people design great websites here on DR. Since I'm being dragged into quite a bit of front end, I've decided to quit complaining and up my design game. Suggestions and advice on good design considerations?

Our creative lead sent me a few reference websites that had a lot of "wow factor". It had stuff like trailing text animations, slow motion menus and what not. For some reason, I found all of it to be annoying and pointlessly bloated. I'm more into minimalist design and simple transitions but idk if this is just my taste or lack of competence in making such fancy ass design that makes me not appreciate such sites. I need advice and I'm not sure on what. You'd probably know what if you've been in a similar situation before.

Why does noone implement autoupdater, especialy on linux side? Is there a reason i dont get? Sure, most system stuff is better in apt, but if i install servers, i do not want to wait for these stupid linux release timings! If it were hard, id understand. But most of this is possible with something like GitHub API and 20 Minutes of time. I mean, yeah backwards compatibility and what not, but then handle that internaly.

Example: I use dnsmasq on a raspberry pi. RPI is running raspbian. Raspian is debian 8. Debian 8 has a version of dnsmasq with a pretty annoying bug, which prevents me from using dnssec, as i cant open any cloudflare pages. Why, o why isnt this updated at MY will? Then, if it isnt, why is it so impossible hard to compile this myself, no docs for that, no binaries, NOTHING? Dear server devs, please add atleast basic autoupdate functionality without having to rely on the base os.

Or, give me easily deployable binaries, if you cant write something integrated.

!Dev

So I'm at Brazil Day in NY, took me $6 and 1.5hrs to get here but know what I'm here I feel spending $5 for street food snacks is too much... Like they're price gouging too far...

But in other contexts, I have no problem dropping $$$ for food... Pretty much daily...

I'm not sure how I should make sense of this or justify it. Maybe that's the difference between paying cash and swiping?

I study both mathematics and computer science at Delft university. There's a difference between the approaches these two studies have.
Mathematics is usually about going to lectures, learning complicated stuff there and then using the obtained knowledge in a exam at the end of the course.
The CS courses are kore about engineering. They have practicals way more often than the math courses and the exams usually are of les importance.

It feels as if the "academic level" of the CS courses is lower. In math, we learn the real deep, abstract matter, while CS is more about "tinker up something nice in the practicals and you'll be fine."

I'm not sure if either approach is better, but I'm sure I like the maths version more. The CS approach is more HBO-like (HBO being the lower-level universities)
It is even that, generally speaking, the people who study maths seem more serious about studying than the cs people.
Not all of them, and no offense meant, just an observation.

Well, that was not really a rant. If you read up to here, I'm curious what you think about this.

Quite a few years ago (late 90s, early 00s maybe) I remember watching a TV show where they demonstrated what virtual reality might be like. It was all rough polygons, no lighting or texturing etc.

I'd heard about the Oculus Rift and considered trying it. I get motion sickness sometimes from certain 3D games (Deus Ex, Portal, sometimes even Minecraft) so was hesitant. Last week, decided to just get one and see how it went.

Didn't expect it to be as good as it is - compared to what was envisaged ~20 years ago. No motion sickness. Not only was the graphics detail amazing but the responsiveness is insane. In another 20 years time what will there be?

Anyway on dev topic: Now it makes me want to play with a 3D/VR engine. Considering Unreal Engine but not really sure where to start learning. Maybe a book? Though reviews tend to say they go out of date quick, I do prefer a physical book for learning tech stuff.

In all the companies i worked at so far, never seen any employee (in any department) above age 50..maybe the ceo or some lawyer, but thats it.
Where do all the 50+ ppl go in tech?
I'm not sure the tech world will be what it is now even in 10 years.. but I'm just wondering do any of u guys think/worry about where we'll work when we stop being young and cool?
Looks like it's either u start your own business, which not everyone can, or..
what is option B exactly?!?

So this is truly something random. A dude I work with randomly slapped my ass today. It was around other people. I simple looked at them and said, "I feel uncomfortable." He started saying: "We need to get uncomfortable..." I said: "No, we don't." I am pretty sure he meant this in jest, but I hope I made it clear it will not happen again.

I am not comfortable with people randomly touching me. I don't care if you are male or female. Keep your hands off. I will shake your hand at work. I don't understand what would make someone think slapping your butt is okay. He is older than me I think. In his 50s maybe.