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."

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.

A company that I can only describe as North Korea. The team if full of fresh graduates who started their career there, worships the manager, and have never seen the outside world. Every company has politics and minor annoyances but this one stands out as absolutely ridiculous.

Here, frequent emotional abuse and humiliation is common and is right. New hires are taught that the only way to be a good leader is to verbally abuse their subordinates to the point of crying. The cream of the crop in this company would be considered complete morons in other companies. The skill of typing in the right keywords to the search engine and copy/pasting code makes them MVPs.

In this company, even system admins don't know how to "grep". Developers just click buttons in an IBM suite, write some Python script to compute something, and call themselves developers. They are so proud of themselves and believe they can take over the world because they are highly competent.

Professional hires are not valued and considered threats because they question and stand up to the supreme leader. Team leads, managers, and senior managers obsess about an employee's Twitter activity and gossip about what time they came in the office and left.

So much time is spent on estimations that wouldn't matter anyway because they will be adjusted to fit the actual hours to make the company look good. Everything is pointless and loud power trips are encouraged. The measure of competency is not based on technical prowess and effective communication, it's about how loud and verbally abusive you can be.

Tribe members suck each other's souls and bully who they consider as outsiders to feel better about themselves. Very few professional hires and even fresh graduates reach the six month mark before submitting their immediate resignation letters or just disappearing completely.

The smartest ones leave while the dumb ones stay. What option do they have? This is the only place where they can feel smart. This leads to a high concentration of naive juniors with huge egos running around like the next Torvalds. Overtime is admired when more often than not, it's unnecessary and shows inefficiency rather than hardwork.

Here, cunt whore leads and managers can arrange a meeting to have an audience for their useless power trips. A random ass bitch can turn a 15 minute scrum into two hours and suggest all 50+ developers to write MOMs without getting laughed out, otherwise the scent of her vagina meat will explode to everyone's faces.

Here, juniors are entitled and complain about their salaries despite having no technical skills. Intellectuals are passive aggresively picked on with the assumption that they think they're too smart.

Whoever questions the supreme leader and their current delusions are demonized. This includes a very intelligent and reasonable manager who quit because he was not provided anyone to manager because the supreme leader refuses to share power. The only to survive is to caress the supreme leader's ego while doing damage from the inside.

Everyone else have an epic slave mentality. No one says no to the client and everyone comes to work whenever they are told to. When you instruct them not to accomodate any more requests, they look at you like you lost your sanity. The only way to reform anything or anyone is to get the supreme leader on your side.

All that manipulation games were fun while they lasted. But team members crying to you and hugging you on their last days because you were the only one who stood up to them takes a toll on your mental health.

Story from back then,

D: “We need mac sir”

M: “Is it neccessary?”

D: “well, the project requires us to build stuff for iOS, so...”

M: “let me ask IT Support”

S: “our company’s policy are to use windows machines for all our development needs, windows is better in the long run for developing various software for the current market, it’s future proof and have better performance than macs, macs are only usable to build smaller variety of software, so can you guys use windows laptop instead?”

M: “what he said”

D: “what??!”

M/S: “what?”

*eventually we got macs but jointly bought by the company and the client,

Office politics rant:

I work with lazy ass whose only purpose is to flirt with each other and pass time to go home. Selfish and narcissist people.

Nobody bats an eye on them. My shithead manager doesn't say a word to them because there's a dick amongst them who licks his ass on behalf of all others.

Anyway, I am not much concerned about them as long as they don't bother me or interfere in my work.

Today I came to know that a friend (also a senior team member who hardly works) resigned. Along with him, another co-worker quit. Another one to quit soon.

My manager puts all their workload on me. Well, no problem. I go to office to work and I am okay with this.

Shit hit the fan when 80% of the team is idle and I am overloaded unnecessarily. Why? Because I work. Work responsibly and consider myself accountable for the work I do. I delivere quality with efficiency.

All of the remaining members (except for that ass licker) are my juniors and draw double my salary.

I am trying hard to find another project within organisation. But no success. I tried to get a senior director of other department to help me but every effort wasted.

I am emotionally fucked. My start-up is going nowhere. My other side projects are stuck. I have literally wasted last 10 months and haven't learned a thing. My family is least interested in me. I am incurring financial loss in my stock market investment and missed some great opportunities to invest.

Well I am fine. Not anxious, depressed, hurt, angry or sad. Because I know no matter how bad a person is, there's at least one good thing in them.

I believe there are still people out there who go out of their way to help others.

I see hope and believe that one day everything will turn out well much better than expected.

I believe there is still good in this world and everyone (no matter how good or bad they are) deserve happiness.

At the end of the day, I found this picture on internet which made me feel peaceful which I would like to share it with everyone. 😊

Shine on 💎

Have you ever been a victim of office politics?

What's your story? Here's mine:

I am being singled out because I am the only team member of different caste/religion as compared to others in my team.

Hence, I am being abused mentally and overloaded with work while others enjoy gala time.

I cannot raise my voice because I am the junior most in my team and cannot break the hierarchy to talk to VP about this issue.

However, I am considering doing it soon once the lay off air settles down a bit.

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.

Incoming office rant alert!

Some people just want to destroy humanity. Their sole purpose is to create as much negative destruction as possible.

So this bastard, working with me in my previous project seeked me for help. He wanted a better project and work. Because the previous manager troubled him a little which his weak cunt could not bear. But just for the records, our previous manager was fucking amazing. A great mentor. This loose cunt found issues with such a person.

Anyway, out of goodwill, I talk to my current manager and get him moved. All good.

Bugger starts playing mind games in new team with me, my friends, other team members and manager. The ass licker we all know (refer earlier rants).

Things start slowly breaking and everybody thinks that manager is an asshole (well, he is a bit not that bad as much as this guy). This fucker slowly brainwashes everybody making them think he is a victim of office politics (which didn't exist in first place) and gains sympathy from everybody.

Now he started behaving like a manager and kicking everybody's ass by his cheap mind games and politics by making everybody against each other.

I helped him and he set up everybody against me. Made my manager hate me for no reason.

There is no morale or team spirit left anymore. And with 70% of the team being laid off overnight, the motherfucker is happiest because he gets the money and position he desire at others' loss.

Time to quit this project. Just a month or two more and I shall be free.

But I wouldn't resist to punch this motherfucker in his face breaking all his teeth.

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.

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!!

When your boss shouts "good job" so loud that your whole team bitches about you

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

I have to get this off my chest, because I don't know what else to do yet.

I became an engineer because I wanted to give people more freedom, namely by giving them control over their jobs and lives. This is why it breaks my heart to think I might no longer be fit for a traditional career in software.

I have been doing well financially, but I am emotionally spent from several burnouts. My resume shows that I stopped staying at jobs for more than a year, and I feel that's going to catch up with me soon.

So, I can't say that I'm not at fault here. I believe I am partially responsible for the circumstances I tolerate, even if I did not directly cause them.

I'm... just tired.

- Tired of doing more than my job and not being at the title that describes what I am currently doing.
- Tired of my physical health degrading from sedentary work.
- Tired of my mental health degrading from office politics.
- Tired of reactionary, nonsensical management decrees like "No comments in code because your code should be self-documenting"
- Tired of a huge workload on my plate because my teammates won't volunteer to help.
- Tired of people playing ping-pong in the office at 2pm.
- Tired of boards of directors who put their profit over good contributions to society.
- Tired of people not showing up for work at all.
- Tired of chasing people down because no one understands actual requirements, let alone who stakeholders are.
- Tired of sending something to production on 2+ month long release cycles where everything breaks at the end.
- Tired of being told to support tons of devices and every browser back to some version of IE without being issued the hardware, and without being given enough QA bandwidth.
- Tired of interviewing candidates who can't code only to see them get hired anyway because a coding bootcamp trained them to write apps fast.
- Tired of crunch times where people work nights and weekends to deal with the consequences of bad decisions but not refactor the code to prevent the next fire.
- Tired of masturbatory all-hands meetings where C-levels act like they care about you while taking all the credit and asset growth you earned for them.
- Tired of the same "Welcome to <CURRENT_EMPLOYER>!" joke that some dipshit answers when asked about a strange implementation.
- Tired of watching security vulns get released as "calculated risks", despite my protests.
- Tired of being told to learn new frameworks or libraries because they are popular enough to affect recruiting, not because they actually aid your education.
- Tired of having no time for my family, friends, or even the people I'm apparently helping in my job!
- Tired of promises that everything will get better.

I've decided to take a last stand and try to work for myself. I'm scared, because I don't know what I am going to make that people would want. Despite being in software for 13 years, I don't know what I am doing because companies offer so much infrastructure to isolate away marketing and sales concerns.

But I think my incompetence in marketing/sales is probably why I should go for it. I don't care if I never become rich or famous with a startup. I will fuck up, but it's good because then things will be my fault. If it's my fault, I can change it.

I don't know if blazing my own trail is the only way to feel alive again, but I know that I can't keep expecting my employer to give me a sense of purpose.

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....

Sometimes dealing with office politics is tougher than coding challenges!!

> 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.

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.

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 window

Some people are a little too sensitive about harmless practical jokes. 😒

End of wednesday,

Suddenly I cannot login to gitlab,

My colleague checked that somehow my user was nowhere to be found,

It seems that “housekeeping” may have deleted my account by mistake (I have been using it since I was working on a project in different division a long time ago)

Now getting me another login credential is a pain because of all the bureaucracy, it’s definitely gonna take a while,

Gonna use the spare time to play around I guess...

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.

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 :|

How to handle fucking management assholes playing politics in office. Always there to take credit of the job they haven't done.
Really pissed off !!!

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.

Talking about politics and soccer in the office should be forbidden... Missing remote work so much.

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.

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.

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... :)

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!

Been trying to figure out what makes me happy - professionally. Nothing makes me more happy than writing a challenging piece of code.

But I now hate doing that at my job because of all the office politics involved and the only challenge I ever face at work is when I am told to add some conditions in modules that are written by others and ofcourse they can add that condition in 5 minutes and it takes me an hours to first understand the functionality of the module and then add my condition. Not to mention, I then get judged on it.

I am just not happy at this job anymore and sometimes I feel like I will start hating coding just because of this job. So I gave them my resignation and left. But they want me back and offered that I take a month off and think about it. I know when I go back it will the same shit all over again.

I don't have any other job offer at the moment and it will be fine for me to go back but hmm I am just not happy in that place anymore and I am so confused.

Can anyone relate to this? What do you guys do to feed that inner developer the challenges that hmm idk make you feel alive? If you know what I mean.

Anything that can motivate me :(

Your office Politics was so intense that you had to read books like '48 laws of Power' to survive :|

Those that can, do; those that can't, manage.

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.

An old acquaintance of mine from university gets in touch with me about a graduate job in their company. They have terrible reviews regarding bad office politics etc but he says he really likes it and has a lot of room for growth via courses. Salary increases each year for 2 years and 'most' people get a promotion during that.

Should I be skeptical?

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.

Worked on a project, where the goal is to fit whatever can be shipped based on the days estimated and funds allocated for the product to be completed. End story is that the user/customer have a product that nobody knows and wants how to use.

Approached leadership team and told them to right the ship, but due to numerous bureaucracies and levels of approvals required, project was shelved and a new project (again with allocated fund and deadline) is being cooked.

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.

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. ;-(

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.

So many politics, yet so little comprehension.