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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."22 -
After spending a few months on this site, what strikes me the most, is how unhappy a lot of programmers are.
It kind of makes me sad to see so many of you struggle with office politics bullshit everyday.
I have a confession to make.
I've never had a programming job, or freelanced, yet I have made a very comfortable living with programming and marketing for the past 20 years.
I make my living by finding niches where there is shit software, and creating a better alarm clock.
The first 5-10 years of doing this, I worked my ass off (throughout my twenties)
But during most of my thirties, I barely had to
work to keep it all up. I get residual income still
from stuff I did 10 years ago.
I'm curious if anyone at all would be interested in learning how to do this, quitting their job, for example, or, just having the freedom to write your own code without answering to anybody but your own customers. Many of whom you never have to talk to, they go to your site, they buy, and rarely ever send emails (if you do it right)
Everybody here has knowledge that is so bankable, yet they seem to just surrender to
asshole bosses and clients. It doesn't have to
be like that.
If you'd be interested in this, please ++ this.
I'm thinking of creating an online course about creating and marketing your own software, specifically for programmers like you guys. and girls.
I genuinely just want to see if there's interest. I hope that's ok.66 -
Got basically nothing done yesterday because I was absolutely exhausted the entire day. Thanks, doxxing thread. But I couldn’t sleep anyway so whatever.
Told everyone at home that I wanted a really productive day tomorrow (today) because of it.
Guess what happened?
Endless fucking distractions.
Because of course.
• Cooking since apparently it’s my job.
• Extended computer repair and maintenance, since that’s apparently my job even when it’s not my computer.
• Conversations.
• Children following me.
• People paraphrasing politics.
• People summarizing stupid fail videos.
• People relating stupid prank videos.
• More conversations.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• Endless noises from children’s toys, tablets, playing, etc.
• Children following me when I leave.
• Taking half an hour to order food instead of five minutes.
• Cleaning since nobody else ever does.
• Picking up toys since nobody else will and I’M FUCKING TIRED OF STEPPING ON AND TRIPPING OVER THEM.
• More fucking food prep.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• More conversations.
Is it any wonder I’m so fucking pissed off every workday?
I can’t wait to move so I can have a fucking office with a fucking door and a fucking lock. And you know what? I’m going to splurge and install some fucking soundproofing, too.
WHY IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!? I’M PAYING FOR YOUR FUCKING EVERYTHING. FUCK THE FUCK OFF!20 -
!!politics
My employer held a company wide zoom meeting today. It was officially optional, but like 90% of the company attended.
It started out interesting as they had invited a speaker, but it quickly degraded into a gigantic political circlejerk. It was an hour and a half of bashing everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their views, calling them evil, calling them nazis, radicals, militants, racists, etc. — and I don’t share their views, like, at all, so. That really lets me know how they feel!
As far as I can tell, everyone else at the company has the same ideology. Not only does this make me incredibly uncomfortable and require me to act and pretend at all times, it’s honestly kind of infuriating, too. The amount of insults they throw around and blatant lack of tolerance displayed by these “tolerant” people is just incredible.
To them, anyone that doesn’t hold exactly their beliefs is evil, and often a slew of other things, too. And it doesn’t seem to matter how far removed those views are; apparently libertarians are evil as well? Apparently “leave everyone alone” is evil and gets you branded as a militant far-righty? Like, how does that even work? They ascribe to “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is literally Hitler,” I guess.
Fucking hell I can’t stand these people and their politics. And when they all get going on it together? Just. Fucking toxic.
I’ve been so disgusted today after sitting in on that meeting I’ve gotten practically nothing done. And I was so hoping to finally finish this stupid ticket.
Oh, and Mr. PM wants that screwdriver to do even more things now — by next week, of course. Fucking hell.
Why did I switch jobs, again?
Right, to get away from the politics.
Fucking hell.67 -
The meeting that was supposed to be my onboarding. Their senior developer, the same shithead I ranted about for months, is too busy to talk to me. After several follow-ups by the manager, he asked if we can have a quick meeting. It was just a few minutes before the shift ended. He talked non-stop about shit I don't need or care about, occasionally throwing in some information that I do care about.
Me: "So which tools should I learn?"
Him: "This, this, and that. Actually, we want someone who already knows all of these but these are new so we <insert rollercoaster of passive-aggressive way of saying that they *settled* for me>." I'm the only senior here who knows all these stuff.
Blah, blah, blah..
I taught everyone you see outside this room and I passed the certification.
Blah, blah, blah..
I was actually surprised that you're here because I do the interviews but then I went on vacation and when I came back, you're here."
Just an hour of this "meeting" where it's 10% onboarding and 90% "look how great I am, you'll never be as senior as I am, and these people owe me their careers." It's like watching a really good documentary that's full of ads. You want the fucking juice, nothing but the juice, and you wish you can pay premium so bad.
Then he went on and on about office politics and how I should avoid that one manager he hates because he's a liar. It cut off there when someone entered the meeting room. After some time of working with him, I found out who the bad guy really is and apparently, the team was separated because of his drama.
The first person to talk so much shit to a newcomer is the most toxic person in the organization. People who should have left a long time ago.6 -
!dev
After almost a year of watching and experimenting (and not wanting to believe), I’ve learned something about the people i work with:
They don’t consider ideas based on the idea’s own merit, nor does a good idea improve their views of the person proposing it. They instead give the idea merit based entirely on who proposed it. It’s backwards.
• If they like or revere someone, their ideas cannot be bad, and they are never questioned even if they don’t make sense.
• If they sort of like someone, but that person challenges someone they like more, the ideas are dismissed and picked apart, and sometimes even reworded by the group and then accepted, with credit then given to the group. The person is still seen as wrong.
• If they dislike someone, none of their ideas are good, or they’re ignored, or ridiculed for reasons such as stating what is (only now) an abundantly obvious good idea.
(There is some overlap from the execs, where they occasionally consider an idea for its merit and then restate it, which means the idea is now coming from an exec, and is therefore readily accepted. Occasionally the original person gets some credit for this.)
It also applies to pictures of food in the cooking channel. If people like you more, they like your food more, while a professional-looking plate from a social leper gets ignored.
It’s like office politics, but applies to virtually every aspect of company life instead of just promotions, requests, and project assignments. It’s like replacing common courtesy and reason with a social FICO score: your contributions are only acceptable if you agree with your coworkers, laugh at their jokes, etc. And if you appear to like the same music, have recently posted more pictures of tacos or brownies than usual, etc.? Well, you had better do that before suggesting something you actually care about.
It’s social credit.
And it’s stupid.51 -
Yesterday the web site started logging an exception “A task was canceled” when making a http call using the .Net HTTPClient class (site calling a REST service).
Emails back n’ forth ..blaming the database…blaming the network..then a senior web developer blamed the logging (the system I’m responsible for).
Under the hood, the logger is sending the exception data to another REST service (which sends emails, generates reports etc.) which I had to quickly re-direct the discussion because if we’re seeing the exception email, the logging didn’t cause the exception, it’s just reporting it. Felt a little sad having to explain it to other IT professionals, but everyone seemed to agree and focused on the server resources.
Last night I get a call about the exceptions occurring again in much larger numbers (from 100 to over 5,000 within a few minutes). I log in, add myself to the large skype group chat going on just to catch the same senior web developer say …
“Here is the APM data that shows logging is causing the http tasks to get canceled.”
FRACK!
Me: “No, that data just shows the logging http traffic of the exception. The exception is occurring before any logging is executed. The task is either being canceled due to a network time out or IIS is running out of threads. The web site is failing to execute the http call to the REST service.”
Several other devs, DBAs, and network admins agree.
The errors only lasted a couple of minutes (exactly 2 minutes, which seemed odd), so everyone agrees to dig into the data further in the morning.
This morning I login to my computer to discover the error(s) occurred again at 6:20AM and an email from the senior web developer saying we (my mgr, her mgr, network admins, DBAs, etc) need to discuss changes to the logging system to prevent this problem from negatively affecting the customer experience...blah blah blah.
FRACKing female dog!
Good news is we never had the meeting. When the senior web dev manager came in, he cancelled the meeting.
Turned out to be a hiccup in a domain controller causing the servers to lose their connection to each other for 2 minutes (1-minute timeout, 1 minute to fully re-sync). The exact two-minute burst of errors explained (and proven via wireshark).
People and their petty office politics piss me off.2 -
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.5 -
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!!5
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Well, fuck. The CTO of our startup decided to migrate data of our hundred thousand customers from a stable functioning platform to an in-house unstable platform with severe performance issues, to "save" costs, despite our repeated requests. He made us not have any contingency plans because he wanted to "motivate" us to complete the migration.
Result- we have a thousand customers reporting major issues daily, which is causing loss of revenue to both us and them. The company ran out of funding. Most of the team members were fired. And he's expecting the rest of us to magically fix everything. Dunno what kind of office politics is this, in which you're sabotaging Your Own company.
Looking for a new job now to get out of this hellhole. I really used to love this company. Feels sad to see it ruined like this.4 -
1. Slack. Pretty good chat app for dev companies, I use it to prevent people standing next to my desk 40 times a day.
2. Unit testing tools, especially when fully automated using a git master branch hook, something like codeship/jenkins, and a deployment service.
3. Jetbrains IDEs. I love Vim, but Jetbrains makes theming, autocompleting & code style checks with mixed templating languages a breeze.
4. Urxvt terminal. It's a bit of work at the start, but so extremely fast and customizable.
5. Cinnamon or i3. Not really dev tools, but both make it easy to organize many windows.
6. A smart production bug logger. I tend to use Bugsnag, Rollbar or Sentry.
7. A good coffee machine. Preferably some high pressure espresso maker which costs more than the CEO's car, using organic fairtrade hipster beans with a picture of a laughing south american farmer. And don't you dare fuck it up with sugar.
8. Some high quality bars of chocolate. Not to consume yourself, but to offer to coworkers while they wait for you to fix a broken deploy. The importance of office politics is not to be underestimated.1 -
Beware of office politics. Take it from me. Beware whom you trust in the workplace. Sometimes you won't detect it and they will prey on your innocence. You thought they're good but really is not. Back stabbers.10
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So everyone is complaining about working from home. Fuck it, I love it. My productivity was never higher than now.
I didn't have an office space before at home, so I created one. I spent money on it but that's good because this whole corona thing made me realize how much I don't miss:
- company politics, who said what said
- commute
- people bothering you in the middle of you doing something
- catching-up breaks with people I hardly care about asking about holiday I took last year but they "ahhh thought it was just last week! so did you eat anything nice?"
- answering forced "any plans for the weekend" questions
- participating in conversations about nothing
The worst thing is that I'm actually a very sociable person 😂 so working from home means I can go meet my friends at 1630 sharp instead of 19.
I just don't need those fake relationships at work I guess.
Im already discussing with my manager possibility to work from home most of the time and I think I'll soon start to search for something 100% remote.17 -
Two places: At a major NYC firm, I was in charge of social media. I was also involved with an intranet community. Something went bad with the intranet community project politics and I got blamed for it even though I had emails to prove I hadn't said/done what I was accused of. But to assert their dominance, my bosses called me to their office, sat me in literally a corner of the room, and interrogated me for 2 hours. The only thing missing was the bright light in my eyes and the "good cop" part of the routine. I'm ashamed to say they "broke" me and I just gave up and did what they told me to do to "fix" it even though I hadn't done anything wrong. The bosses were old enough to be my parents, so I wonder how much of that worked its way into the psychology of it all.
The second toxic workplace was where each month the boss would come from his home by the beach to tell us plebes what new ideas he wanted us to work on. We would just get done reporting on the results of his delusions of grandeur from the month prior and he'd pull the rug out and start us on some new thing. Never got any consistent traction on anything. He was the ultimate seagull manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, poop all over everything, and leave us cleaning up the mess. Oh, and we had to change the locks because we had to fire a customer service guy who was a little bit on the ragey side of things. Because of high turnover, I had seniority within 4 months of starting there.1 -
Fucking hate when "senior" and "lead" devs ignore the advice of numerous junior devs when it comes to technical and process driven decisions. Especially when said higherups don't even code anymore and don't really understand the consequences of their decisions.10
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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!8 -
To anyone new to the corporate world I have this advice: there's a game no one tells you about in school or university. It's a game of politics. The good news is that you can choose not to play the game. The bad news is that others who do can change that decision for you, if you give them a reason to. So here's my tips to keep yourself from common bad situations:
* Some people will say they'd "prefer that people were honest". This is an outright lie.
* Be guarded - if a scenario could be taken out of context assume it will be.
* Mimic the office culture, don't try to rock the boat.
* Be polite, but always stay neutral between colleagues, picking a side means you're playing the game. Unless that side is your company vs another company in which case-- you are 100% on the company side and everyone else is stupid and incompetent.4 -
Starting to develop a feature that may eventually render a department in our company redundant. Wish me luck8
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My boss has gone for a long vacation from last week and will be back in Feb. And office feels soooo awesome and fun. No office politics, no senseless meetings. Just pure work in peace.
I wish he doesn't come back only....3 -
I can’t believe we’re stuck in a meeting for a couple hours now because a piece of CSS code caused the UI to bug out only but ever so slightly and it’s being treated as such a big deal.
Gimmie a break man, nobody even noticed16 -
It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.
Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.
Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.
I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)
I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.
After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.3 -
Last year I changed jobs from a large multi-national to a small local agency (which happens to be run by friends of mine).
One of the reasons for doing this was that my work involved more office politics than *actual* software development, and had just plain stopped being fun.
Now, I am having fun again! An example?
For one of our clients we have to connect to (a lot) of third-party APIs. Often even SOAP APIs!
Now I hear you protest "But that is no fun at all! SOAP APIS SUCK!" Which is true, more often than not. 😔
BUT! My friend started an internal API-SNAFU Trello board. Every time you get bitten in the ass by some ill conceived fuck-up of an API, you get to add your complaint to the board.
Beside giving as something to reciprocally rant about, the board also serves a serious function: depending on the amount of fuck-ups an API has been known to make, the price for working with that API will go up.
Who said it doesn't pay to complain? 😀1 -
This is a story about the shitty client who managed to ruin everyone's day, consistently....
So this client, its our biggest revenue source (about 33% of total) and our boss is total wuss when talking to them because of that... Each meeting he has with them he ends up bending over nd just takes it all...
So after each meeting with those shit heads, it's always the same...
It's our fault for going over budget (them changing their mind like 10 times during a project over key issues has of course nothing to do with it, because hey, we're a flexible company and all we do is modular and extendable right?)
Its our fault for not meeting the deadline, because of course our boss keeps accepting last minute projects like there we're otherwise sitting on our thumbs
And than their fucking contact person... Biggest ass ever, always involving us in his own office politics... I'd throw him through the window3 -
This might seem like a dumb rant to have but I just started a new job, and I asked my boss about the Work From Home policy and basically, there is no work from home, at all. I'm bummed out because I got into a really good WFH rhythm at my last job and now I have to go into the office every day, even though I am stationed in a different city than the main company office anyway. I'm already remote! Why do I have to pay to come into work remotely anyway!? Argh.15
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I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.
Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.
Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.
One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.
I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.
Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?8 -
There are two types of people: Doers, and Talkers.
It really annoys me when talkers (who do nothing) ask me to stop doing things because it makes their lack of productivity look bad.
So sorry sweetheart, if you want to look better, just start doing work yourself and then you don't have to worry about my work making you look bad.4 -
I work in a consulting firm.
I started right after graduation. I entered with candy glasses. Thinking is all well and ready to climb the ladder.
I entered as a junior developer.
On my first project, i am constantly belittled by my team lead. To the extent i suffer from ptsd.
On my second project, i am the only dev. I am amaze i manage to handle all the development job by myself for a year. Still i get nasty comments from my boss. Despite i am able to deliver on time.
On my third project. i left due to office politics.
Currently i am in my fourth project. The code is complete mess. The development environment is crappy. It doesn't reflect change right away.
My passion has dried up.
I'm seriously giving thoughts, should i switch career path.13 -
Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.
While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).
In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.
As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.
I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.
The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.
I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.
The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.
Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.
I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.
Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.
So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited! -
We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.
Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.
Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:
Day 1:
We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?
Day 2:
We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.
Day 3:
We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.
Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.
Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)
I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.
Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.
Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.
Day 5:
End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.
Day 6:
Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
Day 7 (Today):
Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.
What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.
Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.
You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.
When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.
Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.8 -
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 :| -
There's always one asshole in the workplace that wants to make everyones life so much harder with shitty stupid reasons.3
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When leaving for the day on my last day in the company.
I thought what I learned here? nothing technical except how to survive the politics, backstabber, betrayal, blame game and getting used.
I wish it could be added as skills in CV.2 -
So I had a manager who just up and quit with barely any warning. We were shocked! Turns out the guy had been shielding us from all kinds of crazy office politics that we were totally unprepared to deal with after he departed... We managed in the end, but it was not fun.1
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So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.
After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).
Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.
Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.
Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).
I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.3 -
TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.
A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.
One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.
Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.
So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.
It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.
Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.
A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.
Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.
The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.
Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.
They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.
If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.3 -
The company where i am working at currently is kinda weird. The company is run by a gujrati guy and he has placed almost all his cousins in high positions...and on top of that the CTO (whos the bro of the owner) micromanages people and also fires them on a whim...i am kinda worried that if i am not able to do a particular task, i would be fired too...He has asked me to do unit testing of some complicated functions on mocha/chai and i have never done all this before. I am not understanding what to do and there are no senior devs in the office who knows about these things...7
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Passive aggressive coworkers that have problems with each others work but instead of working out problems together they just complain about each other to me and try to drag me into it. What makes people think I want to play office politic games with them? I'm just there to code!1
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Best way to deal with office politics?
As background: we have our own implementation of some C++ data structures, including an "Array" class (basically the same as std::vector).
A few years ago, the senior guys on my team refused to add new features to it for (seemingly) no good reason.
So senior guys from another team added the features anyways, in THEIR repo.
My team couldn't stop them, but refused to allow the new features in OUR repo, so now our Array is split between two repos for no good reason 😢.
Two years later, here I am, hoping to clean this up. As far as anyone knows, there's no good reason to have it split up like this.
How do i convince my team that we should move the code to OUR repo where it belongs?7 -
Ford vs Ferrari shows everything wrong with upper management. They are a bunch egoistic pricks in suits who have nothing better to do than play office politics and take credit for the hard work of people under them.
One of the best movie I have ever seen. Made me wanna smell some oil and grease.1 -
We are a remote team of two android developers for this startup. I have 3 years of experience and my protege has 1 year of experience.
One month a new guy with 10 years experience joined our team and hes working onsite. He's supposed to be scrum master and be good ad dividing and delegating tasks, but what he's doing past two weeks is appaling to me.
Basically we got a request for a new feature. He skipped discovery and planning steps, went straight to implementation and one week later showed us his implementation.
Note that at that moment my remote team was not informed about anything. He started reinventing a library to capture a picture and video, while there are tons of other well developed libraries out there.
What makes things more difficult is that his english sucks.
I don't understand what he's doing but now it seems that either he's playing office politics and is trying to stay ahead by not informing us so we would be forced to follow his implementation. Or maybe he is totally oblivious and don't have any sprint management experience, so he's just trying his best by working hard and trying to prove his own worth.
Eitherway it sucks that he is not able to communicate specifications from HQ to us, because even I did a better work with planning our sprints by communicating remotely.
So now I started asking him questions and turns out the guy doesn't even understand specification. He already half implemented the feature and can't tell us why we need it and why we are not using what we already have in the app. So now he's back to square one: doing discovery. It's fcking ridiculous.1 -
as someone who never worked in an office, or in a team, new term for me:
cowboying
I can guess what it means, but..
please, share... and elaborate
is this a new term?
I don't get to hear much office gossip... :)3 -
I actually like where I currently work, sure it has problems and some office politics. The work is not always exciting but what makes it good is not having someone breathing down my neck about timesheets, noone cares if the hours you work are not exactly business hours and a bunch of other stuff.
What I really like though is having a boss who backs my judgement. If I refuse to commit to timelines or work without being given the information I need he'll support me. I've had too many yes men as bosses which always ends up with the devs coping all the blame when everything goes belly up. -
When your peers lack the technical depth to promote their ideas, you bet they're honing their social skills in those confidential 1-on-1s.
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Anyone from Service Based IT Companies.? How much it really sucks to convince everyone around you about the idea you want to implement, but it cannot because the client is not happy and if he is not happy the management is also not happy. Its like we are chained to the chairs and systems, not letting us look at the outside world, where elegant solutions exists for smiple problems.
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Okay so there are a lot of things that are left by us students as "this would be taught to us on job, why bother now?" So i have many questions regarding this:
- is it a safe mentality? I mean University is teaching me, say a,b,c and the job is supposed to be like writing full letters, than am i stupid to stick to just a,b,c and not learning how to write letters beforehand?
- what is even "taught" on job? This is especially directed towards people in Big firms. I mean i can always blame that small ugly startup who treated me badly and not gave me any resources, but why do i feel its going to be same at every other company?
I guess no one is gonna teach me for 6 months on how to write classes with java, or make a ml engineer out of me when i don't know jack shit about ml.... That's the task for college, right?
I feel that when these companies say they "teach", you they mean how to follow instructions regarding agile meetings, how to survive office politics and how to learn quickly and produce an output quickly. I don't think that if i don't know how MVI works, then they are gonna teach me that, would they?i guess not unless they already have someone knowledgeable in that topic
- what about the things that are not taught in our colleges and we wanna make a career in it? Like say Android. From what i have experienced , choosing a career in a subject that's not taught you in grad school immediately takes away some kind of shield from you, as you are expected to know everything beforehand. So again, the same questions bfrom above
i did learned something from job life tho, and that too twice. Once it was when i first encountered an app sample for mvvm and once when i found out a very specific case of how video player is being used in a manner that handled a lot of bugs.
Why i didn't knew those approaches when i was not in job? Well, the first was a theoretical model whose practical implementation was difficult to find online that time and the second was a thing that i myself gave a lot of hours, yet failed to understand. However when i was in the company , i was partnered with a senior dev who himself had once spent 30 days with the source code to find a similar solution.
So again , both of above things could have been done by me had i spent more time trying to learn those "professional tools" and/or dwelve deeper into the tech. And i did felt pretty guilty not knowing about those...5 -
Best dev experience...a colleague who was my team lead when I joined a company as a "from-scratch" PHP developer, and gave me a ton of tips, assistance, encouragement and praise along the way. And for the bits that were not so good (on my part), he gave me constructive criticism delivered in a friendly and helpful way rather than chew me out.
And when the boss(es) of the company talked shit behind my back in meetings I was not invited to, about things they had no clue about (my performance as a developer)) he defended me and set the record straight.
Later he was demoted from team lead for office politics reasons. But was doing the same job as before, for less pay. Never complained.
His job consisted of, all at once, being the company IT/server/printer guy, first line customer support over phone and remote desktop, .NET and PHP developer, course holder to teach our customers how to use our product, and mentor to me.
Good guy. I'd give him a ++ if I could. -
While you developers are where you are, battling office politics everyday, scrumming, agiling and solving some of the world's toughest problems, I, for the past few nights, have been sitting for hours in-front of my computer, slipping into hour-long day-dreams while trying to determine my favorite ice-block flavor.
All I can say, is, it's either the yellow, orange, green, raspberry, cola, or the fairy-floss one.
And now I'm out of ice-blocks. ;-(
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