*In Office
Coworker raises his head, looks at boss: "I'm leaving".

Boss raises head looks at coworker: "Ok".

All this took 5 seconds,..the weirdest 5 seconds of my life

So, since I hear from a lot of people (on here and irl) that Linux has a 'very high learning curve', let me share my experiences with the first time my dad touched Linux (Elementary OS) without me interfering at all! (keep in mind that he is very a-technical)

*le me boots the system* (I already did setup a user account for him and gave him the password).

Dad: *enters password and presses enter*
Me: "Hmm that went faster than expected."
Dad: "Uhm I know how to login son, it's not that hard and pretty obvious".
Me: "Alright, why don't you try to open up the default word documents editor on here! I'll be right back!"
Me: *Goes away and returns after a minute*.
Dad: *already a few test sentences typed in LibreOffice writer* it's going pretty well :)!
Me: "Oo how did you find that?!"
Dad: "Well, there's a thingy that says 'applications' so I clicked in and found it in the "Office" section, do you think I am blind or something?!"
Me: 😐. uhm no but I just didn't think you'd find it that quickly. Now try to install Chromium browser! *thinking: he'll fail this one for sure* I'll be right back :).
Me: *returns again after a minute or so*
Dad: *already searching for stuff through Chromium*
Me: "wait, how the hell did you do that so quickly, it's not the easiest thingy for most people".
Dad: "Jesus, it's not that hard! I went to the application browsing thingy, typed 'software' and then a sorta software store icon showed up so I clicked it and it opened a windows with a search bar saying something like 'search for applications/software'. clicked in it, typed 'chromium', saw it coming up, there was a very clear 'install' button, it asked for my password, I put it in and after a little it gave a notification that it was installed. Then I went to that application browsing thingy again and typed Chromium. Then I hit enter because it selected an icon called chromium...."
Me: O.o. Okay this is going very good, now open an email client and login to your email address!
Dad: *goes to application browsing thingy, types 'email', evolution icon shows up, dad clicks it, email address setup steps show up and dad follows them quickly. After about a minute, everything is setup.

I expected this to be a hard process for someone who dealt with Windows his entire life but damn, I underestimated it.
Asked him if he found it easy/what he liked about it:
"Well, it's very clear where I can find everything, default browser/email/word document editor programs are easy to find and that's about all I need so yeah, great system!"

I am proud of you, dad!

My employer bought some new 40" 4k displays to the office. The want us to evaluate if they are any good, and if so replace all monitors... No real developers has one, only HR people sitting there with one huge window with office or word open!! It makes me cry! And they will most likely say they are too big!

When everyone left the office I tried one... OMG, i need this in my life! 😍

By day, I'm a developer.

At night, I'm a father of two awesome kids and a husband to a fantastic wife.

Stop fucking asking me to work after hours! Just because you sacrifice your life to the office doesn't mean we all do.

Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.

Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.

Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)

Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).

These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.

Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".

The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.

What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?

Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.

Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.

But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.

So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.

On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.

In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.

This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.

"Turn it off and on again."

Great for Wi-Fi routers and office appliances.

Life support, not so much.

The spam denier
_____

An old phone conversation with a client:

Me : Hello

Client : My website and server are suspended? why is that?

Me : Your server sends spam messages.

Client : We do not send spam messages, we are on vacation, there is none in the office.

Me : Yes, but it is not necessarily you, according to our logs, your server sent spam messages in Chinese and Russian, so someone from Russia or China....etc.

Client : I do not believe you, we do not speak russian or chinese, how could we then write spam messages in those languages?

Me : I told you, maybe someone exploited some vulnerability in your website or server firewall. And if you want to activate your services, please check with your webmaster and sysadmin to secure your ....

Client: I tell you my son, because I am old and I have more life experience than you ... I am 60 years old and I tell you, spam does not exist, and YOU suspended my website and server, and created issues to sell me more of your solutions and services.

I won't check my server, I won't hire a webmaster or a sysadmin, AND YOU WILL ACTIVATE MY SERVER NOW !

(I suddenly realized that I am talking to a wall, so I switched to a robotic tone).

Me : Please resolve the issue to activate your services..

Client : YOU WILL ACTIVATE MY S...

Me : Please resolve the issue to activate your services...

Client : WHAT IS THIS SPAM STORY ANYWAY, I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU ...

Me : Please google that word and you will understand what is spam is...

Client : YOU ARE F**ING LIARS, SPAM DOES NOT EXIST... ACTIVATE MY WEBSITE N.... Beeeep !

I hang up.

Well, I thought about configuring an automatic response for this client, or a for-loop.

His voice was really unpleasant, as if he is a heavy smoker.

My boss is technically restricted shall we say.

As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.

Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.

It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.

Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.

He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.

4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.

He insists.

I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.

He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.

I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.

He insists.

I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.

He then says he wants the air.

I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.

He insists.

That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.

WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.

Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection

To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

My keyboard doesn't look right unless the Num Lock light is on.

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

<rant>
*Rules For Work*

1. Never give me work in the morning. Always wait until 4:00 and then bring it to me. The challenge of a deadline is refreshing.

2. If it's really a rush job, run in and interrupt me every 10 minutes to inquire how it's going. That helps. Even better, hover behind me, and advise me at every keystroke.

3. Always leave without telling anyone where you're going. It gives me a chance to be creative when someone asks where you are.

4. If my arms are full of papers, boxes, books, or supplies, don't open the door for me. I need to learn how to function as a paraplegic and opening doors with no arms is good training in case I should ever be injured and lose all use of my limbs.

5. If you give me more than one job to do, don't tell me which is priority. I am psychic.

6. Do your best to keep me late. I adore this office and really have nowhere to go or anything to do. I have no life beyond work.

7. If a job I do pleases you, keep it a secret. If that gets out, it could mean a promotion.

8. If you don't like my work, tell everyone. I like my name to be popular in conversations. I was born to be whipped.

9. If you have special instructions for a job, don't write them down. In fact, save them until the job is almost done. No use confusing me with useful information.

10. Never introduce me to the people you're with. I have no right to know anything. In the corporate food chain, I am plankton. When you refer to them later, my shrewd deductions will identify them.

11. Be nice to me only when the job I'm doing for you could really change your life and send you straight to manager's hell.

12. Tell me all your little problems. No one else has any and it's nice to know someone is less fortunate. I especially like the story about having to pay so many taxes on the bonus check you received for being such a good manager.

13. Wait until my yearly review and THEN tell me what my goals SHOULD have been. Give me a mediocre performance rating with a cost of living increase. I'm not here for the money anyway.

</rant>

— Hi, lost and found office?
— Yes, can I help you?
— You found two hours of my life?
— It does not compile, right?
— Nope :/

Nothing would make my life more fun than an Office fort!

On Friday I deployed to a life site without going through code review or any testing whatsoever. I am now known around the office as 'Billy the Kid'.

i've been working with my plan to make a small software development company for a while now.

time to implement my plan
Finalizing my plan: Done
Quit my job: Done
Ordering Office Requirements : Shipping
a Server : Shipping
Dozen of Rubber Ducks : Shipping
etc...

so here it is, Day 0; repurposing my bunker to be my small office !

new life, new hope

What kind of music from video games has stuck in your head?

For me it was nearly all music from American McGee's Alice(because that OST is absolutely unique), Bumby's Office from Alice: Madness Returns, along with some other music, Crysis 2 Theme(it stuck in my head for at least a month after having beaten it), some songs from Still Life, the theme for Ori and the Blind Forest, Halo Theme(of course), and others I just cannot remember...

Height of work pressure:

⚠ I was flashing my ID card instead of unlocking the house door with the keys.

⚠Me and my friends went out for dinner in one of the best restaurants and as I finished, I started walking towards the wash basin with plates in my hand.

⚠I don't login to facebook, youtube, etc.. at my personal internet connection at home... thinking it will be blocked anyway. Till I realized that, I was at home.

⚠Once after talking to one of my friends I ended the conversation saying, "Ok bye... in case of any issues will call you back"

⚠Once I went to a pharmacy and asked for a tab. Pharmacist asked whether I want 250mg or 500mg? I replied 256mb. Thank god he didn't notice.

⚠After a hectic week, went to a movie. In the middle of the movie, when I wanted to check the time, I kept repeatedly glancing at the bottom right corner of the Theatre Screen.

😄So avoid working so hard !😄

Have a great work-life balance.

Lastly...

⚠Extreme Work Pressure:
An employee opens his lunch box on the road side to see, whether he is going to office, or coming back from office.😂😂..

Fuck open office spaces.

A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.

During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.

Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.

Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.

I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.

I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....

Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..

Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.

In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.

For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.

We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.

It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.

😅

I've ranted so much, this is where they moved me to. They couldn't fire my because I was too valuable an asset to the project.

Most awkward moment of my life happened 10 mins ago.

I really enjoy playing a sad trombone sound when someone says something stupid. I even have a widget on my phone's home screen so that I can play it almost instantly.

It's actually very funny when I use it with friends.

So, today I walk in the office during a rather heated argument between my boss and a sales lady who has been in the company forever.

I sit on my desk and pull out my phone to connect it to the charger since it was getting a bit low.

As the boss completes his phrase and there is that half second silence before the other person starts speaking I accidentally pressed the trombone button, playing the sound at full volume for a full 2-3 seconds that, needless to say, felt like an eternity.

Don't think I'm getting fired but God it was awkward.

After months and months of unrealistic deadlines, pulling late night shifts coupled with an insane commute and two very small children at home I had a total burnout. Turned up to work one morning, and stared at the Java code I had been writing for the past couple of days and it might as well have been written in Martian. The more I stared, and the more I tried to keep things together internally the less I was able to make sense of anything - just a random jumble of characters on screen that were as intelligible as the green scrolling lines from The Matrix.

My office manager saw that I was obviously in some distress and took me into a meeting room to have a quick chat - and there I was, a grown man of 35 bawling my eyes out like a two year old. Not the most edifying moment of my life.

However, the company couldn't have been more supportive afterwards; one of my colleagues drove the 100 miles to get me home in my car and took a train back up to the office; my GP signed me off work for six months and treated me for severe depression; the office instituted stricter working policies - not on the developers, but the sales/PM teams that were handing down ridiculous timescales simply so they could get a sale.

For my part, I've learnt to push back and say "NO!" - work is not your life, it's an important part of your life, but my no means everything. Don't feel beholden to a company to meet unrealistic targets that you haven't agreed to. Talk.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

Is it OK to make chewing noise when eating in the office a meter away from your colleagues?

I have the answer for you my friend:
.
.
.
ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NO.

The danger of using Windows

Is it weird to like being in the office a couple hours before everyone else shows up so I can start my day with peace and quiet?

As most of you already know, I'm a writer. I've noticed the similarities between writing and programming:

1. Tabs vs spaces.

2. Both typically spend all their time with a single project.

3. Coffee... (Unless you're a tea lover like me.)

4. Both typically have no life.

5. Debugging is hell for programmers and editing/revising is hell for writers.

6. Strict clients for programming and strict editors for writing.

7. Semicolons... They're useful but everyone despises them.

8: Emotions. Programmers are angry at their code. (Why won't you work?) and writers feel depressed about their writing. (Why did you die?)

9. War of the programs. For programmers: Vim vs VScode vs Atom vs Sublime and etc. For writers: MS word vs Google docs vs Libre office and etc.

10. Online forums. Stack overflow and Writer's digest.

11. Typing... Typing... All day long.

These are only a few similarities. I've noticed a lot more than this.

In the school we were using slow PCs for learning MS Office things. Every single step we did took ages. There were one guy who was an informatics antitalent: he never were able to work fluently with any electric machine from a microwave to anything smarter. In addition he was a semi-pro athlete and he had some kind of anger management issues, sometimes yelled to the teacher after a bad mark or with us when we lost a in-school soccer match. You know, he was that competitive guy.
One time on computer science class he was very focused. He tried to follow every steps precisly and his machine seemed faster than as usual. He felt like he broke some kind of wall which was between he and the machine.
When we had a break and he went out we tought that we should make a prank. We made a fullscreen screenshot from the desktop and set it as the wallpaper, then killed explorer.exe. As a result the icons and the start menu was only on the screen by the wallpaper.
When he came back he said that there were some bad news from some of the sport event he wanted to go, so he was angry. But then... You know the gif when the guy first hit the side of the screen multiple times then throws out the machine? Yeah, we saw that in real life, but not in that office. First he was just clicking everywhere, we just watched how his face just transforming. Then he started to talk just in himself as the machine could understand. After two minutes he just yelled to the machine why did it freeze, but the last drop was when the teacher said: You'll have to send me your work and it will be marked. In this moment he was just roard a huge and droped the CRT out of the window from the second floor. Luckily the window was facing to a brushy part of the garden so no one was there. He just standed there, looked out to the CRT sitting in a brush for a while, then he turned to the teacher as "Mr, I think something is wrong with my machine"

Being a programmer on a non-tech startup company is not too bad. That means aside from coding:

- You have to check if the office printer works
- You need to figure out why the phone lines aren't ringing
- You have to teach a stupid colleague on how to unzip a file
- When they give you a task, they'll say that it's "not urgent", but, they just "need it by tomorrow"
- You have to be a "mind-reader" because if something goes wrong, they don't know how to describe what's going on. Or probably, they're just too lazy being specific. They'll just say, "Hey, I have a problem.", and you will be like "What problem? Your dog is sick? You shit your pants? You lost your faith in God? Fuck what?"
- You don't have a time to "focus", because everyone interrupts you for just about anything related to "technology". Yeah, because you're the IT guy
- You always have learned and applied the latest practices/stacks, but no one gives a fuck
- You will start to re-think your life and devrants make you feel better

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

My office pranks always involve this life sized doll, hidden around the office...

We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.

The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.

The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.

He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.

I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.

"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says

Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.

This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)

I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.

He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"

The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"

He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.

(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)

Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.

"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"

This goes without saying.

So the Microsoft rage continues as I tell a story about my father, the company that he works for and that companies whole IT structure.

So my father is forced to use Windows because, get this (he hates W10 with a burning passion, like me).... Office and other crap. Cool cool
Seems like Libreoffice isn't enough for you.... YES IT FUCKING IS. MY DAD GAVE ME EXAMPLE DOCUMENTS FROM HIS WORK AND GUESS WHAT, THEY ALL OPEN WITHOUT A FUCKING PROBLEM. But OK, maybe not all employees are familiar with Libreoffice/Openoffice, JUST KIDDING THEY ARE SOME FUCKTARDS WHO WORK FOR THEIR COMPANY THAT DON'T KNOW HOW TO FILL OUT A FORM IN EXCEL (aka. PROBABLY NEVER USED AN COMPUTER IN THEIR LIFE/OFFICE SPACE AMNISH). Okay, some employees might be incapable, but their infrastructure might be alright.

IT RUNS ON MICROSOFT SQL AND DIVX (YES, FUCKING DIVX, CAUSE THAT MAKES SENSE) FROM..........2008.
At this point I just feel bad for them. Because there were no IT guys at the company (they didn't understand shit that I said half of the time). I've warned them that their infrastructure might have more holes than fucking swiss cheese. I see they value their data since the front door is a 60 kg one (that's 132 lb in retard units). And there's a 1.8 m fence around the building.

And they've told me that the parent company, which hosts the server also hosts for 100+ other companies around the world.

100+, you say. I'm legit scared for them right now.

So naturally, I've asked them if they have backups... they do, thank god.

But still they use 2008 shit in 2018 and expect it to be secure. Fun fact, logging into their server (which is an HTTP running on Windows Server...... 2008 (that hurts to say)) with a browser other than.... not Edge.... but IE, *drum roll* breaks it, since... it runs authetication dll's (YES FUCKING DLLS) on the host system. THOSE POOR MOTHERFUCKERS COULDN'T EVEN SETUP SERVER SIDE AUTHENTICATION. EVEN CHANGING THE PASSWORD REQUIRES A FUCKING SYSADMIN TO BE CONTACTED, OH YEA YOU CAN'T SINCE THERE ARE NONE.

GOOD DAY TO YOU <INSERT COMPANY>, SORRY BUT YOU'LL GET FUCKING OBLIRIATED IF SOMEBODY DECIDES TO HACK YOU.

Don't apply for a job that you don't like. You're gonna hate your life.

Don't ask for a salary you know you're not worth.

Work in a tech company as much as possible. If you don't, you're gonna be treated as a powerpoint presentation expert, office installation expert, video editor/movie maker expert, IT support guy, loose plug/broken headset repairman, facebook hacker, and a dark magician all at once. Most (not all) tech companies know who you are better. They understand your needs better.

I just had the most bizarre experience of my life. I handed in my resignation letter today. About an hour later, the CEO comes and collects me, takes me into his office, and rants about me leaving and other random not even tangentially related bullshit. Accusing me of not believing in the company and not talking to him. I have no idea if I'm fired.

So there is this thing @ the office that everyone has to bake 50 pancakes once.

Its 2 am, i just got done, i cant cook to save my life.

Guess what.

Its 49.

Welcome to Corporate Prison where all hopes and dreams gonna die 😢

So... my girlfriend has a very random work schedule. Sometimes she works 4 days a week sometimes only 1, sometimes only at the weekend sometimes not at all. If only there would be an app to track that... 🤔
She tried quite a few apps on the app store but they were shit/ugly/too complex..etc
Wait.. i’m a developer, i can do that.
So i made a dead simple calendar-like app in javascript+fuseopen.
She selected the colors, background, layout etc..
If she taps on a date it turns red indicating that is a workday, if a workday is tapped it turns back to normal color.

The main logic is:
Main:
If(AppHasSavedWorkdays){
//check if save is current month
LoadCalendarWithWorkdays();
}else{
CreateEmptyCalendarAndSave();
}

She likes it.
Cool, so let’s build this! She has an iphone and my mac is still in the service center so i can’t build🙁
But its okay, i have a mac at my office, we can build there, the only downside is that is 40min of travel.
We take the subway, go to the office, build the app, make a certificate, install to her phone, everything goes as planned.
Coming back we were lucky enough to catch the bus that goes in 30 min intervals, we only had to wait like a minute so life is good 😃
I enter the house, chill down on the bed, pull out my laptop to close the project when a FUCK ME!!!!
I completely forgot to implement a whole else branch on start!!!
Soo the app does nothing when is opened on january 1😂😂
I guess that’s why we have testers and qa.. 😃

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Almost 3 years ago I contacted an IT company that was looking for developers. The job listing was vague at best but it was a 10 man company with huge international clients for content migration and improvement.

I had basically no prior development experience but got invited to the interview regardless. I took a test in Java, first time I had seen the language but I finished it with some help from Google. At the time I was still a student so I couldn't work full time either.

Disregarding all that, the team lead advised the CEO to hire me regardless, so he did.

Forward to today.

I still proudly work for this company and have been responsible for a complete redesign of their flagship product. I learned a great deal about software development and developed an amazing relationship with most of the employees. The company has quadrupled in size since and we are moving to a bigger office start of next year.

Sometimes life gives you gold, not lemons.

My father thinks I’m lazy and have never worked a day in my life because office jobs aren’t real work. So he also thinks I’m never busy and can drop whatever I’m doing and come help him with anything whenever for however long. So when I say I’m busy he thinks I’m lying and just hate him and don’t want to hang out with him. Sound familiar?

Things you can enjoy when working in an office with other people:

- listening to everyone chew gum with their mouths open.
- being constantly interrupted by coworkers asking for help, even when wearing headphones.
- getting distracted by someone bursting out in laughter of some private joke.
- having to take a break when everyone else does, because everyone is so loud you just can't focus.
- being hit on the back of the neck by a nerf gun bullet, right when you're most focused.

Why would anyone ever want to work at home?

Let's see here, we have:
🤡 Creepy Cackle Guy: watches videos all day and cackles like a hyena, plus constantly farts, and complains a lot. He gets everyone gassed up, no pun intended.

😤Bitchy PM: argues with you about every little thing, lies to pad her metrics while screwing the dev's metrics over. Also lies about what clients say to force launch or what she feels client should do. Rude to clients & co-workers. Runs and tattles to higher ups when people call her out on her shit. Nobody can stand her, she get's the entire office upset.

🙉Darth Vader: I don't think this one needs explaining. He breathes SO freaking loud you can hear it across the room. He also won't talk to anybody. Ever.

🤐The Non-Stop Flapper: nice person, but chats you non stop about their mundane life events, even when your status is set to busy or they know you're swamped. Asks irrelevant questions all day, every day. Heart of gold but needs to reel in the chatting.

🤬 Mr.Rage: whines about EVERYTHING. I mean everything. Has also thrown his food on me once over a joke about pizza. Wants to move up to programming but cant program.
---
So between them all, I scream on the inside daily. 🙊😫😢

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

At one of my previous companies, there was a guy, let's call him X.
X was the ideal employee.
X used to come to office at 8.
X used to go to sleep in AC office.
X used to wake up at 10 when everyone started coming in.
X used to play Uno and Pokemon Go till 6.
X was a master in Uno and Pokemon Go.
X used to wait till 8 to get free cab facility.
X didn't do one single productive piece of shit whole day.

My boss loved X Because he came early and left late.
My boss didn't give a damn if that person even switched on his laptop or not.
My boss didn't care about productivity.
I didn't come on time and didn't leave on time (I travelled in non-traffic hours)
I slogged my ass off because I really wanted to learn.
My boss scolded me, asked to be like X.
This was the last straw.
I resigned the next day.

I never wanted to be like X. Seeing him daily, motivated me so much.
When I worked, I focussed on it, I didn't keep checking the clock waiting for it to hit 5 pm.
I aimed for productivity, set realistic targets and always achieved them, no matter what.
My boss was an a--hole. I met X and Boss recently. Both are still in the same role, just scraping through.
Felt really good that I worked hard and have achieved something in life ^_^

A story from back when I was about to quit my first job,

I was the only front end in my first job after I graduated, it was a small IT company which needless to say, the pay sucks, the boss sucks, the manager sucks, everything sucks.

Despite that, I learnt a lot of things, but that's a story for another occasion.

So one day during my one month notice period, the HR asked me to help her in selecting candidates for my replacement. Being the good samaritan I am (trying to leave on good terms), I helped her by creating some practical test for the applicants.

It only took me an hour or so designing the tests, and another hour to try it out myself, and making sure it fulfill certain traits I'm trying to dig out of the candidates.

The test itself is pretty simple (in my opinion at least), in a sense that if someone are applying as a "front end", these are definitely the basic skills they should be having.

These may not be the exact wording as I remember, but the tests are,

1. Construct an HTML container which contains 4 other container, and responsively scales it's width on x screen size, x screen size ... and so on

(Requires a very basic media query)

2. [a screenshot of an HTML table], recreate the table in HTML, _as similar as you can to the screenshot provided_

(To check their attention to detail)

3. [similar HTML table screenshot, some javascript objects], create the table in HTML and use the data from the provided js array to dynamically populate the content, and sorted based on one of the column

(Basic javascript knowledge)

4. *I forgot this one but more or less it's about javascript also

*the test are to be done in 90 minutes, which is I believe is very plenty
**I only had 1.5 years experience at the time, from working at that company

In that one month period, 9 people applied as front end, 7 are fresh graduates, 2 applied as a "senior" front end developer

... none of them can finish the test

1 "senior", managed to finish 2, but the HR said he's too arrogant, so not preferable

1 freshman managed to work on all of them, but only finished 2, and the code looks better than the one above

In the end, the freshman was hired

Upon my last day, the new hires were assembled to be given a crash course, there were 5 backend devs and 1 front end devs, all of them are fresh graduates, and the boss decided to pay a visit (the devs worked in a different office from the administratives)

Just as I was passing my knowledge to the new guy, I can see that he is really new to coding (he doesn't even know stackoverflow), and I tried my best to be supportive, then the boss suddenly decided to "share" his wisdom, and started talking about how I managed to work on several different projects alone, and how he got new interesting projects in the future and such.

I could see the new guy is getting pale, and his life force seeping out from the top of his head as the flashbacks of his entire life up to that point passes right before his eyes.. Because that is what I felt on my first day joining the company.

But if I could survive that for 16 months -most developer only last a year at most, 14 devs has come and goes during that 16 months- why couldn't he? I passed the Friday of my last day peacefully, and went home for the evening.

2 days later on Sunday, I got a whatsapp message from the HR.

...the new guy sent his resignation yesterday.

This is more on work and life balance.

1. Don't do hard work, but do 'Smart work', else you will end up burn yourself 100%.

2. Don't think your manager is your guardian angel, even though it seems like sometimes. He has his own goals to achieve.

3. Spend considerable time daily in and out of office/work, for your own development/improvement.

4. Learn new languages and technologies.

5. Stop making things perfect, 'good' is enough.

and it goes on ............

Those developers working under non-technical bosses, i understand your pain.

1. Pain when they don't realise that output != number of hours put in. Aaaaaaand that acting busy doesn't mean someone's working.
2. Pain when chilling out in office is necessary, because mind jobs don't work same as other jobs. Wherein if you don't vent it out you're gonna screw up the code. Them not getting that.
3. Pain of "meetings".
4. Pain of changing the feature when you're done, and them acting as if its a minor change.
5. Pain of vague requirements.
6. Pain of a product not thought through, and them trying to blame the implementation.

If you need to learn/teach object orientation, these are my approaches (I hate that classic "car" example):

1) Keep in mind games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Civilization, Age of Empires (yes, I am old school). They are a good example of having classes to use, instantiating objects (creatures) and putting them to work together. As in a real system.

2) Think of your program as an office that has a job to do, or a factory that has something to deliver. Classes are the roles/jobs and objects are the workers/employees. They don't need to be complex, but their purpose must be really (really, really) well defined. Just like in a real office / factory.

3) Even better (or crazier), see your classes and objects as real beings, digital creatures in a abstract world, and yourself as a kind of god, who creates species (define classes) with wisdom. Give life when it is the time for them to come into the world (instantiate object) and kill them when they are done with their mission (dispose an object). Give them behavior, logic, conditions to work with, situations where they take action, and when they don't. Make them kinda "smart". Build them able to make decisions and take actions based on conditions. Give them life. Think on your program as an ecossystem. There must be balance, connection, species must be well defined and creatures must work together to achieve a common objective. Don't just throw code and pray for it to run. Plan it.

-----

When I talk about my classes like they are real beings, and programs as mini-worlds, some people say I am crazy, some others say that's passion.

It is both! @__@

The louder you type, the more productive you look.

My office has blocked access to all external websites. Only internal, self-hosted sites under our domain work.

P E A K. S E C U R I T Y.

Special Awards: In a previous life, I employed a South African gentleman by the name of Jack Howell. He had a thing about finding other South African ex-pats, and could often be heard asking people on the phone “Are you by any chance from South Africa?”.

Jack Howell would also do very stupid things. Like forget to come to work. When asked, he’d come up with random excuses - “It was my wife Gwyneth’s fault”, or “I was confused, I took wrong turnings”. Generally, he was a bit of a twat, and had a weird kind of smile he’d give you.

After he left the company, we came up with the idea of having an award for whoever acted the most like Jack Howell on a given day, or week. It was known as The Jack Howell Award. The award itself was whatever shitty thing we could find at the time - a construction made of folded paper and paper clips, or a weird 3 inch statue from a charity shop, or whatever really naff-beyond-belief item we could find at the time.

Where I work now, we have a shitty 12 inch statue of a woman with a dog that turned up in our office, courtesy of our Maintenance Manager. This is the new Jack Howell award. Currently awarded to a senior dev colleague who spent a day chasing a missing variable.

I called in sick on Monday. Worked 6 hours from home. Took today off for the holiday. Worked 3 hours in the office.

I really need to get a life.

Walk into work.
Sit at desk.
Open Outlook.
*Sees 3 meeting invites for today*
...This is why I drink...

So this client wanted a demo on Dockers. So I gave the demo with some microservices running on different containers. Later the clients come back and say, "Docker is good. But please fit all the microservices in one container." I say but that defeats the purpose of microservices. But no, the client say. I tried explaining but no is no. Shit!! Fine! Have it your way!!

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

Hey guys and ladys. I've got another little rant about my teacher.
As some of you may know, i finished my final exams last week, so basically every relevant grade is done. Every teacher except of my special snowflake programming teacher spends the lessons casually talking with us (some even say we dont need to show up anymore).
Little backstory: Grades need to be done on 18th, June and i get my certificate on 22nd.

Back to my rant. Special Snowflake is different. He wants ANOTHER project. This is totally his idea and is nowhere mentioned in our curriculum. It has to be done until next friday, it has to be C# and we need a detailed documentation. This wouldn't be a problem normally - if I wouldn't be moving at the moment. Special Snowflake knows this but doesn't care.
Except from the criteria above he wants it to be:
- fancy
- loved by everyone. Literally we need to make something EVERYBODY wants in their daily life
- good looking
- everyone should want to pay money for this

How am I supposed to come up with an idea and program the shit out of it in less than 2 weeks, which i need to paint my new office and pack some more stuff.

It's the little things in life, like getting a plant for your desk at work 👌

Lost 6 hours of my life today due to a comma. Just another day at the office.

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

Project manager: I haven't seen an automated email go out in a while.

Me: ok let me check. Can you provide me a previous email for reference?

Project manager: no
*Itterate 3 times*
Me: ok, does this template resemble the email you're missing?
PM: no
*End itteration*
PM after 3rd attempt to identify the email they're missing: comes into my office and tells me he's not even going to answer my emails anymore cause I can't find his missing email.

Me: finally nails down the email he's *missing* and there's nothing wrong with it.

PM: doesn't believe me.

I fucking hate bad PM's. Asshole can't be bothered to provide usefull information to save his life then questions everything I tell him and thinks I'm the idiot when it takes me 3x as long to fix/find something.

Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:

People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.

The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).

Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.

Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.

Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.

I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.

I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.

I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).

I'm so close to giving up. Yesterday, I travelled 4 hours in one direction for a job interview for a graduate position as a web developer. As I arrived at the interview, I was welcomed by a senior dev and one of the HR people.

I sit down and they start explaining how everything will commence(standard procedure stuff) and afterwards hand me the technical test. At this time I am super calm cause I did my homework, checked out their products, their websites and knew right away what I was going to work on. As I turn the page, I see at the top with huge fucking capital letters "JAVA OOP test".

I take a minute and look back at them, like wtf is happening. Turns out that they are looking for a java dev. They picked me for the role because I had literally 1 fucking sentence in my CV and where I have said that I studied java in one semester of uni. FYI my entire portfolio, cv and cover letter are focused on JS, html, css both for client and server side.

As the fucking HR guy stood there and asked me "is there something wrong", I felt broken inside. For the first time in my fucking life I felt like I was done and couldn't continue anymore. I felt like this is some bitch-slap from karma about something but I still can't figure out what. I just walked out of there being unable to realize what happened.

I just feel like I should end my developer career before it has even started, just go do business analysis or something. Why the fuck would someone put a job description entirely talking about Angular, Less/SASS, bootstrap and jQuery and then say that is a Java dev OOP role. Who the fuck allows those people to take good salaries yet still deliver the up most shittiest quality service.

Before the interview, I checked out their websites which are simply horrendous with the comparability of a fucking baked potato. Idk really what to do, I don't mean to sound as a whiny little b.... but as I walked out of their office, I felt broken inside. Sorry for the long rant.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Passing by one of the most beautiful girls i’ve ever seen every time i walk around the office. Id need 5 mins of rethinking my entire life before i can focus on my work again each time i look at her. This is really disturbing, please can someone fire her?

So we started looking into docker. As always I needed to do the research and I was fine with it.

We have 4 projects that are sold into one suite so logically I follow the microservices build structure.

3 months later after everything has been set up, we get called into a meeting. The whole suite should be a monolith as microservices doesn't make sense to the people planning everything.

Ok pulled my current plans out abd made everything a monolith. Just note I also get pulled away to other Business Units to do work for them.

Get pulled into another meeting 2 months later. Why isn't the docker containers in microservices!? It is stupid running as a monolith and we should've done our jobs better etc...

After the meeting my manager and I just sighed and walked to the office. So basically 5 months doing the the exact same thing we did in 3 weeks.

Now they want to develop other services and want to strip every method into a microservice and bundle it together.

Life of a DevOps engineer right!

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

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

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

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

Fuck your mediocrity.

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

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

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

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

So today I got a new CPU after the old ones were decommissioned. A fresh new desktop.
"Where is my chrome I think."
"Oh ya", I open Internet Explorer, type Google.
Google delightfully asks," Want to try chrome?."
"Yes sir I do."

-This one never gets old!!

What a shit fuck of day it was.

I had a terrible pain out of infection and my system is taking months to recover.

There's absolutely no work at office and I have to just wait to another month to be released so that I can join my new team.

I am bored out of my skull these days with absolutely nothing to do and just deal with office politics.

Friends are being dick to me because they think I betrayed them and switched roles.

Absolutely nobody to talk to when I want to share stuff and all my other personal tasks require time to complete which I spend slogging at work.

My stupid sister never listens to me, keeps blaming me, complains all day and makes my life worse in front of everyone. I am losing my temper with her.

God damn it. I am so fucking angry today.

And you know you day is fucked enough when you reach home, open your laptop and this shit happens.

Don't fucking tell me to switch to Linux. I WILL NEVER DO THAT BECAUSE LINUX IS UGLY AND COMPLEX.

Now just stop reading and fuck off, because I am pissed enough to break bones.

The feeling when you type "ls" in Windows CMD and wait for output. But it's say, "ls is not recognized as internal or external command".

So today I realized that Im not happy.

When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.

I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.

After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.

However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.

At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..

Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).

Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.

Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?

I got a Job!

I was talking with my boss after my first week and a half of working. I tell him that I enjoy having an office and whatsoever, because that way work stays in work.
My boss tells me "Yeah, you have to do something else besides working, do something else with your life"

Damn, that's one conscious boss tbh. So happy to be working there, but you know, everyday the imposter syndrome kicks in...it sucks.

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

!dev !rant but still funny story

As the goth of the dev team, sometimes people ask me several things about me.

I was working on my code. It was 3 or 4PM and a bored dev asks came to me

He: Have you ever tried to be a vampire?
Me: No, I’m just a goth
He: Do you know a vampire?
Me: Unfortunately no, but I’ve heard of them.
He: Do they suck blood?
I don’t know if he was asking because of curiosity or in a sarcastic mode. As usual, I answered in a polite way explaining him what means to be a vampire, the types (blood and energetic) and the difference between a goth and a vampire.

While I was explaining to him this, the boss came into the office, heard me talking about the energetic vampires and said “Wow wow wow! What is coming on here?!” 😂

Quitting my last job. I had been there for about 3 years and had a great time there.

It was only my boss and I, we were developing software and websites for events so we were quite often out meeting and partying with people, it kinda became a part of the job. We had a fridge always stacked with beer and champagne which was for us and our friends to use. The office was located in the middle of the most exclusive business and club district in the city, so I could use the office as I wanted during evenings to meet up with friends and drinking beer.

But it was expected to work a lot of overtime. I was single and young and really liked what I was doing so I didn't mind. But then I met the love of my life and started to spend more time with her. I couldn't stay and work as often and would rather be with her on weekends.

It became quite hard to live up to my boss's expectations and it always felt like I disappointed him if I didn't (or couldn't) stay for an after work, and when I did, it felt like I disappointed my new girlfriend instead.

Ultimately I felt I had to choose one of them, or I would definitely loose her. It was a no-brainer since I knew I couldn't keep working like that forever, and didn't want to risque a relationship because of work.
It took all of my courage to do it and I felt so bad because I knew my boss (and my friend) would feel like I betrayed him, but I knew it was the right thing to do.

I can still miss it sometimes, but I don't regret it.

I messed up carelessly in production. Learnt how SQL queries bite you in the ass when it knows you are under pressure.

Was hosting an online quiz kinda thing during my college techfest. Tens of thousands of people participating.

Using MySQL as database and thousands of queries were being executed. Everyone were pretty excited as the event just opened up.

None of the teams could solve one particular level. Turns out the solution was wrong and was asked by the organisers to change the solution for that particular level. Usual stuff, right?

Was too lazy to open up the web UI for the back office and so, straight ahead logged in to the MySQL server and ran the UPDATE query on the table consisting of the solutions.

It had been a couple of hours and the organisers came to me with a weird problem. There were no changes in the scoreboard for the last two hours. Everyone were stuck wherever they were. Weird, right?

I then realized.

Fk.

In that dreaded query, I had only run

UPDATE 'qa' SET answer = 'something'

leaving out the where clause, specifying the question to update, like

WHERE qno=13

As a result, solutions to all the questions were updated to the same answer. After hastily fixing everything back, I had the dreaded conversation.

Org: What was the problem?

Me: It was the cache.

Org: Damn thing. Always messes up.

Me: *sheepishly* yeah

Probably the most embarrassing moment in my life, wrt coding 😑

And I'm joining new company today!

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


#newlifenewhope -> update no. 0 / Day 0

it's about the end of Day 0, front office is taking shape. the pantry is cleaned.

can't wait to see how my repurposed bunker will look like.

Order and Shipment progress :
- My Server supposed to be arrive tommorow
- Rubber Ducks Package Delivery is accepted by courier
- 2 weeks before my Office Requirements Arrive

Further Update for my Little Office Installment will be tagged as : #newlifenewhope

Stay Tuned !

!rant

I started my new position in Ireland about a month ago (relocated from Switzerland) and it‘s amazing how awesome life can be despite working full-time..
I have a 8-5 job, I usually get home around 6PM and have 6 hours left for myself every evening.. no calls, mails or similar after I leave the office.
Im actually not allowed to do overtime..

Everyone in the company is super nice and the Irish people are so incredibly welcoming and are happy to help if you need something..

So thankful right now..

Have you ever had a problem with a partner, but you cannot prove at 100% that he has something against you? But you cannot stand him?

Well, this happened two years ago. I was working as a tester, and “John” (I won’t say his real name) was the dude who tests my tests, but in production.

I ‘m a sociable person, and I don’t mind talking with another people. Suddenly, I noticed that my co-worker started to behave a little bit... rude? Plain? I don’t know, but sometimes he didn’t answer my conversations/questions, or sometimes answered with extra-negative stuff.

“Well, his life is not easy” I said to myself. “Everybody haveproblems”, “I have to understand him and calm down”.

Two weeks later started to report really REALLY absurd production bugs, and with absurd I mean, for example, that he didn’t like the color of a button, a point next to a phrase, etc., things very very simples, but sometimes he ignored big errors.

Once I had to went out of the city for few hours, and asked to permission to go out. I had pending tests, but I left a document with specifications in case of emergency. Even passwords. Before I could finish the thing in the other city, my partner called me two times, and asking me obvious things! I had to go back to the office ealier that I had planned, so f*** angry 😡 and when I arrived to the office, John said “no, forget it, let’s solve it tomorrow” 🙃 WTF?!!!!!!

I decided not to argue with him.

Also noticed that his headaches suddenly increased, and looked so tired ☹️ I felt guilty to judge him

I felt so guilty, and even today I don’t know what to feel about that or what to think. I don’t work there anymore, but, What do you think? What would you do?

Every standup, we had to make a skype call to the other office in UK. At that office was the QA lead and for this project she was on our team. One day she came in late to the standup and just looked pissed or sick or SOMETHING. This was particularly strange because usually she was incredibly cheery and "the life of the meeting" in a sense. After everybody's update, she was asked if she had anything to say. She started fucking mumbling some shit I couldn't hear because of the bad audio quality, then she progressively raised her voice until finally she was yelling and cussed out the PM, ending it off with "ALL FUCKING BECAUSE OF YOU, <PM>!!" Everybody was just fucking speechless and confused as fuck. Nobody understood what her fucking issue was, but the PM (on my end of the call) was not taking that shit! "LOOK LADY, I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR COMPLAINT IS BUT THIS IS COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE." Blah blah, he gave it to her good, told her they needed to take it offline, ended the call abruptly and then turned to all of us and said, "Jesus Christ, what drugs is she taking?" To this day I have no idea what the hell happened but it's still one of my funniest memories at that company.

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

Manager in December: Things will pick up soon!
January: I know things are slow, but they’ll pick up!
February: Just give it a couple months!
March: Things are about to pick up, trust me!

All the while I have been twiddling my fucking thumbs with probably half a day’s work to do, either working on my own studies/projects or just wasting time.

And the reason? Because Manager hasn’t been able to decide the budget for the project, so we haven’t been allowed to begin.

We are asked to waste time rather than use it effectively because of a spreadsheet that Manager has been putting off for four months.

Dissatisfaction is the understatement of the year. Some say I complain about a good thing, meaning less work, same pay, but that’s not why I applied to this company.

Alright, I have no idea who to blame!
Me and my Linux group at college hosted a Firefox Quantum Sprint with about 30people. And we promised them Firefox swag coz Mozilla promised us! Its been more than two fuckin weeks since we were supposed to recieve them... no swag!
Well, guess what? The local post office says "Insufficient Reciever Address". I specifically remember giving u morons More than sufficient sender address! My name, college name, college address, my number... thats enough to get me assasinated if u want and u cant send a package of stickers?!!!
Well shit.. after five more emails I havent even gotten a reply from Mozilla.. or maybe its the weekends... fuck! Why am i defending these assholes?!!
Send me ur swag Mozilla! Or I ll... I ll...
Wait.. i cant do shit!
Fuck my life! 😣😣😣

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I cost the company half a million.

We recently got incubated and signed up for an accelerator programme, it was a life changing moment for me especially after having worked with my startup unpaid for almost a year. So naturally, it meant a lot to me.

But my friends / colleagues had to leave for a trip leaving me to work along side this other startup in the same batch. They needed a front end guy for their web stuff so we naturally offered our services except they needed me to work on Angular and I didn't know jack shit about it but pretended I did.

I couldn't reach out to my friends for help because I felt bad and wanted to prove my worth, and I pressured myself to the point where I called the client our batch mate brought on board making him leave.

I lost credibility as a professional, trust as a friend and my place at the office because it's gotten extremely awkward to go back there.

I fucked up my one way ticket out of my current certain household circumstances and realized I'm just a shitty developer who's all talk and no show.

One place I worked full-time they were gonna teach me assembly in exchange for me playing receptionist occasionally.

Then they hired an external programmer to debug some horrible mess in C despite me telling them I was quite capable of doing it. No, it was for tax reasons (ie rorting the system) so it had to be outsourced.

Then they said they couldn't afford to teach me assembly because it meant other programmers would have to do overtime (that they weren't gonna pay for).

Meantimes I was doing unpaid overtime almost every day.

I gave them lots of chances to do the right thing but after 6 months I gave my notice, only to have them begging me (on my second-last day!!) to stay and actually offering more money.

But I was smarter than that.

This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!

Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.

I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.

I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.

Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).

Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.

We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).

When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.

I see loads of students here.. and loads of freelancers and startup joiners.. all varieties...but one.. Anyone has a 'normal' 9-5 or sth (dev) work? Does that even exist?! Anyone stands up when the 8h are up and can leave the work behind?
I can't.. even when I leave the office I have algos & code stuck in my head..trying to solve the problem I worked on..

How do you handle non dev life? Is there anything left in a day?
I usually work monday-friday on avg 9h/day and have no idea how to manage not being fucked up at the end of the week. :\ I am trying to get back climbing, but usually I am just soooooo tiiiiireeeeeed after work.. I wanna sleep but when I close my eyes I see the code.. at least one core still left working..

It is time... to rant about macs!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rant over.

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

Happened to me - an experienced dev with most of the experience on the web.

I apply to this company that I had no idea what they do (big mistake on my part). I ace the technical interview, and they follow up with a request for a presentation on a topic, to see how well I can prove a point or understand a technology. So I do that. Everybody is listening carefully. Most people at the office didn't know the basics of what I was talking about, but there was a guy who knew more and asked the tough questions, but I didn't let down.

So we talk again, and again, and all is going well, we're out for a coffee, talk about the future of my career and the company, in a more casual setting. Got to know the CTO, etc. Everything was going stellar.

I was waiting for the offer, but instead I got a generic "We can't continue with your application" together with a notification that I was being blocked by the contact person.

Weirdest interview ever. And this thing really put me down and struck at my self-esteem. I mean was it really hard to mention whether you didn't like my expectations, or my skills, or my "fit for the team"? Or at least not block me like that, it's not like I'm gonna stalk you or anything. I still get birthday notifications on Skype from people I've interviewed with before, and I haven't written them since because they have other stuff to take care about, as do I.

Anyway. I got up and started again. New company. High expectations. High salary expectations. Rejection. Fuck.

Ok, start again. 2 companies this time. Both at the same time. Both make me an offer. Have to turn one down. Harder than I had imagined. The choice that I made literally changed my life for the better. I'm glad I didn't end up at any of the other 2 companies that rejected me.

Even experienced people get bad bitter rejections. Don't have high expectations, and that will help you keep your emotions in check, and fight on.

Hi,

Finally today I resigned from my job 😌..

Reasons for my job change

I got bored by doing same work.
They put me in management. I want to be in development only
and ofcorse financial growth too.

just worried till when I can join my new opportunity

I finally got a job at a tech company (although it's not a tech job) with a very good work/life balance.

Therefore, I plan on getting more serious about properly learning how to program in my spare time, also because, being a tech company, programmers are all over the place and are generally willing to talk about code.

I must say that while job hunting, devRant has been very useful to me since it allowed me to understand what kind of environment I'd like to work in. So far, the first few weeks of work have been great.

Ah, and the view from the office is unbeatable.

Within his first 3 workdays, my new colleague witnessed my colleagues' false singing, the Christmas tree decorated with broken key tags, and the Friday afternoon beers + online fail videos - and a little of our workflow too. I think he's gotten a good general impression now 😂

Unscheduled meetings are the worst.

You preparing whole day to leave early for the day, then manager suddenly puts up an unscheduled meeting. Oh great isn't it!!

There was this senior designer many years ago that used to come in late everyday, do fuckall except piss everyone off and then spend the majority of her day on the phone organising her social life. We all hated her, and she knew it. This one day she came in and resigned. As we were all Mac, we quickly invented a nickname for her which was "Type 11" in the old Mac days this error was "Unexpectedly Quit". The sad thing was she was best mates with the owners wife. Everyone in the office was questioned about their meanness and nasty vibes. She didn't quit it was just to get back at us for hating her. 12 years on, I'm self employed and she does marketing in a manufacturing co. We get on really well and she gives me good work. Moral: I have no fucking idea what life is about.

I'm in the process of changing jobs and at the point where I need to sign the contract with the new company.

The concern I have is that of work life balance. There is a clause that obviously speaks to overtime and renumeration thereof, etc. But, there is also a clause that mentions that their office hours extend to Saturday mornings.

Speak to my wife about it and all I get is "That's how it is in your industry. I know of my other programmer friends who work late and long hours, so the fact that you don't currently work overtime seems very rare."

I don't think it's rare nor should it be the normal to have to constantly work extra hours. This is not a thing of being lazy or not dedicated to your job, but rather that you put in the time that is required and that alone should be enough to show your "dedication" to the job. Personally I feel that if you're fucking there everyday, giving your best, and you leave at the end of the day, no questions asked, that it is good enough!

Oh boy, finally something to rant about.

I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.

First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.

Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.

Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.

When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.

In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.

The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?

A delicious Sprint Planning 😋

It was a hard sprint (SCRUM methodology), but finally we were on our next’s sprint planning meeting. We had a lot of tasks to define and estimate. For the first one, we all estimated the task with 5 points, and for the second one we voted for 3 points. We were coordinated XD so, our boss said “let’s do something, if all of you vote, let’s say, 5, and another votes for a different number, he or she’s gonna buy us a six pack of beer”. Challenge accepted.

Two partners and I have to buy beers for this friday after work 😂 I don’t even mad 😋🍻

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Not a rant, of course, as life is amazing but...

... Here is a rare, beind the scenes look at what happens on the back end of our office.

Wishing you all a brilliant fucking' day from Bulgaria's Black Sea coast...

I hate coming into the office! It's cold, people microwave smelly food, and I can't break up my work sessions with some gaming or anime. I wish remote work wasn't seen as such a scary thing for companies.

I'm 19, and I was given a $1500 scholarship to take 80 hours of Office 2016 classes. It was going to disappear if no one used it. I get to stay home for the online courses, and it doesn't count against my vacation time.

I get paid for 8 hours a day while I take each class, even though I get an hour lunch and usually get out of class an hour early.

I know 99% of Office capabilities already, but this is a good stress reliever. Life is good

Yesterday evening my family were watching his favourite tv show. Have nothing to do i too sat there with them.

The scenes on television were going like : The leading lady of the show were trying to convince her family that her husband is not involved in the molestations which police has charged on him. Person can be look alike of her husband. In fact my husband was some where else when the molestation was happening. She also had a proof and that was CCTV camera footage in a Compact Disk. So she started playing it in the TV presented in room with CD player. But it turns out that CD can't be played because villain hired a hacker to corrupt video quality playing in TV.

I laughed because in my knowledge that was not even possible in real life. Every family memeber started staring at me.

My mother : That's what you do? No? That's what you do whole day in your office?
Me: No, no. I....
My mother: See her face. Poor lady.
Me: But mom, that's impossible. It is just fiction. In real life it is not possible.
My mother : Get out of my sight.

My mom did not dine yesterday. These fucking serial maker. These women's.

!dev

Based on a very reliable source (I know a guy) that told me that I'm "tentatively" set to be deployed on the new project just TWO days after the release date of the current one,

Let's say my last day is set on Saturday, which will include death marches (and probably even sleeping at the office) the following week, and I'm supposed to move on to the new project on Monday, 2 days after, which leaves me only 1 day to recuperate,

So much for the motto of "{company-name}life", work life balance my ass, but well, I still have some mandatory leave days saved up (which according to the policy, are to be used before entering a new project), hopefully that'll help me avoid/prolong the "1 day recuperation treatment",

It's probably not the "company's" fault per se, because the managers already got a lot of infamy for pulling this kind of shit all the time, besides, I did agree for another client site project, just didn't expect for this kind of behavior,

newlifenewhope Update No.1 / Day 2

It's so hard to formulate company's Vision and Mission, even rubber ducks is not helpful. I need my vision to be unambiguous. this will take a while to finalize

My Server arrived and not opened yet
The Dozen of rubber ducks is delayed for another 3 days.

If you keep seeing your watch, while ignoring your laptop time display, then it's time for you to logout of office.

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

[Warning! - Sob story ahead, you've been warned]

Dear devRant,
today someone who interviewed me in the last days, said they want to hire me.
Good news, right?
Professionally speaking yes, but... i don't know.

I always been a freelance: never had much work, but i was always free of doing whatever i liked and whenever (no fixed working hours).
I have a room in an office with 2 other people. People i love to hate (it's complicated).

But now i'm thinking about this new work they are offering me: no more freelance, no office, no flexibility. All with a 6 months contract.
What really scares me is that i will lose what i have... even the 2 co-workers that i hate/love: i have never been able to make friends, they are the thing that comes closer to friends in my life.

I'm feeling a void in front of me:
being an adult (35 years old...) and choose a work that pays, but loose... essentially what i am, what i have hardly build...
OR decline the job, and going on "Peter-Pan-style", living at my pace: free but constantly hoping of something good to happen to me

I don't know, really don't know... so many feeling are overwhelming me now.
And tomorrow i have to make a decision

Is it weird that I avoid forced socializing in my office? On mondays in the mornings we have a breakfast where essentially people gather (its a small gathering with 3 founders 1 cto and 3 employees), they have some pastries and juice.

And then they are talking about some bullshit for one hour.

For me personally monday mornings are for coffee and contemplation. I dont want to listen how boring their weekend was and try to impress them with my boring weekend. All that interaction feels so fake shallow and politically correct.

Dont get me wrong I care about my colleagues and what goes on in their life, but this forced monday morning and forced friday afternoon 1 hour gatherings are sooo draining and useless for me. I feel that only couple people are actually open during them and others are never sharing about their life, so esentially that gathering becomes an interrogation of 2-3ppl and topic revolves about them.

Gosh its draining. Gonna “be late” tomorrow again bcs I dont care. I would rather come in and go straight to work.

Having a beer after working means 100 times for me than that shallow and pretentious forced socializing that these guys are pushing so hard. Almost feels like micromanagement on personal level.

I saw that a co-worker had left their office email open on their machine, so I typed out a huge hate mail of the upper management and then announced resignation for the poor work culture that the company provided. Then I edited the email to be a bit more nice. I added some praise about the company - about having the opportunity to work in the company and for the amazing colleagues (and mentioned my own name) in the first paragraph. To close the email, I wrote :
"PS : This is what happens if you leave your machine open for the office to do as they please"

I first sent out a copy to myself (as proof) with the cover :
" Hey, check this out, I'm sending this out to everyone@company.com in a while. I want to let you know that none of this is directed at you. You've been an amazing colleague and mentor. You've been my inspiration from the start; from the time I joined the team. I'm honoured that I got to work with you. I hope we can remain friends as we are now, meet up once in a while outside work and discuss life. "

And then I put the actual email up in the compose window with the to field addressed to everyone@company.com. I didn't hit send.

Funnily, enough, this person never found out that it was me who actually typed out the whole email for another 1.5 months. They probably looked into their Sent folder later on when they saw the email that I sent to myself. They replied to it saying :
"Thank you for not sending out that email that day. I've been very very extra careful (I didn't understand the "very, very, extra" part) since that day"
I replied that it was only to prove a point and that I thought the point was well conveyed.

I had a good laugh that day. Since then, every time we crossed paths, we had that look in our eyes that met and only the 2 of us understood.

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

I've been toying with the idea of making a change to my working life for a while now. Its a big decision, and could affect something thats been working well.

But today I've made that decision ... and i'm going for it ... i'm going to leave my headphones in the office and stop carrying them in / out everyday.

Its a scary thought, but i'm ready for it. Wish me luck, see you on the other side!

Shout out to all the Indian Devs who are stuck in their corporate jobs, AC and drinking water are the only two things that are free in office, always dreaming of getting a job in Silicon Valley which unfortunately seems almost impossible, and lastly as they silently suffer at hands of their managers who know nothing more than entering numbers in an excel sheet.

!dev

I’ve been ranting & posting a lot about my career, relocation, work life balance etc. in the last year.

Just wanna say, relocating was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. Professionally and personally..
Although it was a bit scary and I didn’t have any money left after relocating..

It’s 6PM, I’m sitting in the garden, listen to some classical music and don’t spend a single thought on work.
Tomorrow I will arrive in the office around 7:45, I will do my work. My boss recognizes my teams effort and thanks all of us for the work on the end of each sprint.

There are no personal fights in the team, everyone is getting along with the others.

I do some good work, get a good salary and don’t have to mix up work and personal life.

The people here are awesome, everyone is welcoming and supportive.

If everything goes as planned, I’ll be able to buy my dream car by the end of summer because the government doesn’t take all of my money. They take their taxes before I get my salary and the money I get is the money I HAVE..

Ireland is awesome.
At this point: thanks for the Irish guys here who provided information about work and life over here! And also to the other devs who supported me here👍

Late update to the party, but I’m temporarily occupying the newly decorated living room while my room / office is being prepared for a swish new look.

Obligatory code included.

I am fucking addicted to devRant.

I am addicted to people here.

At office, at home, while commuting. every-fucking-where, all-the-fucking-time

What have done with my life @dfox???

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

Me and my friend were having a coffee in a coffee shop and then she told me the story of how she got fired.
So back then storing data on cloud was not that convenient and employees in her company used to carry softwares and other stuff in pendrives.
This one day after completing a MAJOR project for a very irritating client, my friend and her team decided to take the day off and celebrate this victory in a pub.
She got drunk and then came the call of her boss saying that they needed to showcase the software right then to the client.

Being always responsible and committed to her work my friend had decided to keep a backup in her pendrive which she kept in her breast pocket of her shirt.

So she goes into the washroom to freshen up, bends down near the toilet to vomit out liquor and lo!

The pendrive slid all the way down from her pocket into the toilet sink.
She didn't notice and flushed and down went the whole project into the sewer.

Moral - life fucks you in ridiculous ways.

Ps. She left her laptop at her home which was very far from her office and the pub. The team had to go to her home first to retain the project and eventually got seriously late. Boss didn't like it as the client was a real pain in the ass and this was a big project too and being the team lead my friend was supposed to deliver as expected.
She got fired.

Ranting after many light years (oops that's a unit of distance)

Damn Damn Damn.

There is complex workflow engine, and the only thing I know is once you fix and get success response from method A(), call method B().

After 2 days and nights effort, method A() is fixed and I am getting success response.

Now, when I pass this response to B()

One data is missing and hence failing.

Where the hell is that data getting kicked out...

I am in a dead end. I don't even know where to look.
Pinged engineers for help but all in vain till now.

Working on one of world's largest system, and I am miserable in debugging with this system.

And the worst part is there is nothing that I can turn off and on so that it works.

(Don't blame me. I am not that dumb. I just started using it since 3 days)

Food and Programmers life:
Spaghetti —> My Code
Pizza —> We are spending the night working in the office
Power Drinks —> delivery date is tomorrow morning
Candy —> extra task
Coffee —> bug massage
Water —> wash your face, we have meetings in five minutes
Truffle —> fu** BlockChain
KitKat —> upgrade your phone please
Lollipop —> one more time please
Marshmallow —> do you like some Nougat?

I was flash developer once, it was great when macromedia was around, then adobe acquired them, now flash is gone.

Years are passing and most of industry is the same as always. Trying to drag you into this rat race of learning new amazing technologies, amazing projects that are actually doing same job as 50 years ago but using more memory and cpu cycles. Because all has it’s roots in algorithms from previous centuries.

So youngsters loose your best life time, be innovative by doing nothing more then copy paste from stackoverflow and duck typing shitty code.
Be a slave and sit in the amazing office, that has everything but not your real life that meanwhile is sucked by corporate squeezer till your last breath.
Be piece of shit that can be kicked around.

Watch youtube, facebook, instagram or whatever social network that shows you pictures that are fooling your mind that you’re someone special and you need this stuff.
Then be ready to suck some dicks to earn money and buy stuff you don’t need, live where you don’t want and do what you don’t like. You piece of shit.

Well that’s what disappoints me from my tech stack.

Now chill out, turn off your electronic gadgets, go out and enjoy real world.

10 years ago I was learning how to program in college,
Now working in IT company I stare at Excel Sheets and scratch my head.
#10yearschallenge

!rant !dev Still funny office story

This happened last november. I decorated my desk for halloween (plastic bats, vampire stickers, more bats, a plastic raven, a little skeleton, etc). I also put a photo of Chris Pohl (vocalist from Blutengel, a electro-goth band).

I decided to remove all the decorations except for the raven and the Chris Pohl‘s photo.

One day, a partner and I were cheking out the code, and she suddenly saw that photo.

She: Oh, who is he? is he your boss?
Me: What?
S: Yes, is he your direct boss?
M: No, you‘re my boss
S: No, no, is he the vampire who you report your activities with?
M: Oh! XD No, it‘s Chris Pohl, Blutengel‘s vocalist
S: Mmm... he‘s pretty weird... his eyes...
and then, she got back to her desk.

That‘s it, continue reading rant stories 😅

P.D. What‘s the weirdest thing you have on your desk? 🤔

What's the right thing to do as a junior dev when your boss acts too intimidating and gives you feel like you are unwanted?

As I sit and stare at code, and then stare at the Bills I need to pay as the month starts. I began to think, what if I too was part something new in Tech. Everytime, I see people creating new Tech, getting noticed, I wish I was there on forefront.

Then it gradually dawns on me, "you are just here to make ends meet, survive in the corporate world. Why care about the world. Let it go as it is."

"A shitty life".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there were many other short stories like that.

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

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

Bloody Office politics :|

Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.

I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".

A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"

The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.

When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"

Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕

I work 3 PM to 1 AM as a daily office job. Then go home and try to learn programming. Wake up next day at 8:30 AM for kind of another work until 1PM. Doesn't pay as much but I have to try. Then if I get free time do some freelance on UPWORK with whatever little graphic designing I know to help pay the bills.

And the fact that even my laptop is dying is a huge blow. Don't know when it might give up. Has 1st gen core i5 dual core, takes ages to load Adobe softwares. I have wanted to hulksmash this shit, but can't.

If I'm lucky, I get a stress free 6 hours of sleep a few days a month. And my depression doesn't help. More sleep should ease me a little, but I can't afford to waste any time. But this is life, isn't it.

Today I don't have much of work. Should I :
1. Start reading about Machine Learning
2. Read and understand Rust( is it being used actively and does it have scope? )
3. Check out some new imnew-tryme.js framework.
4. Crib about my ex dating someone else.

I have a really old Toshiba NB200-10P notebook with Intel Atom CPU and 2 gigs of RAM and 32 bit architecture... It was made for Windows XP, and now it barely runs Windows 7... So I'd like to give new life to this old piece of hardware with Linux (for basic tasks like Office, and maybe coding with Notepad++)...
I really like Manjaro, but after they ditched 32 bit support, the Manjaro-32 community project seems a bit unstable...

So, could you devs please recommend some reliable - and somewhat good-and-simple-looking - Linux distros?

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.

Just drove home after working late at the office. Was kind of in the zone and didn't wanna stop.
On my way I see the police closing the road in front of me, because of a pretty bad accident that happened a couple minutes ago.
MFW Coding saved my life!

When people get their fuckin dicks hard when something minor and petty happens to someone / some people in the office... And the gossiping that ensues.... Some fuckin people need to get a fuckin life.