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1. Buy boxes of orange juice, almost past their expiry date.
2. Put boxes on the hot office windowsill for a few weeks.
3. Cool down juice in fridge.
4. "Hey dear coworker, would you like a refreshing juice box on this hot spring day?"
5. Watch coworker retch and vomit, spitting blue-grayish juice over his desk, crying: "Why would you give me old moldy juice without checking the date?"
6. "Do you remember when you told me you didn't have time for unit tests? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, DAVE, THIS IS WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS WHEN YOU DEPLOY UNTESTED CODE.... NOW FINISH YOUR JUICE!"33 -
Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
My boss is technically restricted shall we say.
As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.
Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.
It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.
Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.
He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.
4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.
He insists.
I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.
He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.
I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.
He insists.
I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.
He then says he wants the air.
I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.
He insists.
That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.
WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.
Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection
To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.23 -
The original story:
"When I've got my very first android I was downloading any shit from Play Store. There was app called pattern security or something like that. The app was taking selfies everytime power button was pressed several times and then photo would sent to email. One day I left my old phone at home and at the office this is the photo i've received."
12 -
Best prank I did to a office must be that one I did when I was 7 years old:
> Sat at a schoolcomputer and explored stuff
> Found alot of network printers
> Found one called "city hall front desk"
> Created a word-document with the biggest font possible
> Wrote "Dick"
> 2000 pages of the word "dick"
> Print 2000 copies
> Did the same to a kindergarten and a "rival school"
> Never got caught because I used my teachers novell account ( the password was his name)
I miss novell15 -
6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.
4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.
7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.
7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.
7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.
7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.
7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.
7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood
7:41am - found it.
7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.
8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.
8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.
8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.
8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.
8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.
8:12am - got on devRant.4 -
Me: Sitting in beanbag chair in development office, using closed macbook as a plate for a large walnut-brie-honey-rucola sandwich, honey dripping all over the aluminium top.
New manager (well, he's pretty old, but newly hired): "I don't think you're allowed to eat near the computers"
Me: "And I don't think you're allowed in my dev cave".
*Put macbook to the side*
*push him out of the office*
*close sliding door*
*close blinds*
*sit in beanbag chair*
*eat sandwich*
*lick honey from macbook*
I'm sorry, coworkers. Two weeks of writing MySQL queries made me a bit feral.9 -
"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.
~Record scratch.mp3
~Freeze frame.mp4
"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"
~reverseRecordSound.wav
A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office.
"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely
"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."
"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.
We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting.
Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.
We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.
"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.
"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."
"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly.
He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.
"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.
"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.
"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."
"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.
"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.
"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."
"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed
"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here," he said, as he displays to me my old code.
"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.
"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code.
"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously.
"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."
"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said.
"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.
He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."
He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment
"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.
"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."
...
After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."
Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.
I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.16 -
My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server
I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.
It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.
One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.
Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.
Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.
Then, next week, it happened again.
My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.
(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).
Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.
I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."
My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.
Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.
Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.
My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.
This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...
So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.
So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.
The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.
One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.
The cleaning staff came in.
Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.
Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.
We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.
You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.9 -
Fuck open office spaces.
A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.
During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.
Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.
Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.
I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.
I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?
All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....18 -
One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.
Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".
That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.
And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.
So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.
Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.
So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.
So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.
Life is to short to work with something you hate.13 -
This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
After months and months of unrealistic deadlines, pulling late night shifts coupled with an insane commute and two very small children at home I had a total burnout. Turned up to work one morning, and stared at the Java code I had been writing for the past couple of days and it might as well have been written in Martian. The more I stared, and the more I tried to keep things together internally the less I was able to make sense of anything - just a random jumble of characters on screen that were as intelligible as the green scrolling lines from The Matrix.
My office manager saw that I was obviously in some distress and took me into a meeting room to have a quick chat - and there I was, a grown man of 35 bawling my eyes out like a two year old. Not the most edifying moment of my life.
However, the company couldn't have been more supportive afterwards; one of my colleagues drove the 100 miles to get me home in my car and took a train back up to the office; my GP signed me off work for six months and treated me for severe depression; the office instituted stricter working policies - not on the developers, but the sales/PM teams that were handing down ridiculous timescales simply so they could get a sale.
For my part, I've learnt to push back and say "NO!" - work is not your life, it's an important part of your life, but my no means everything. Don't feel beholden to a company to meet unrealistic targets that you haven't agreed to. Talk.3 -
I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.
While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.
I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.
So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.
She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"
During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.
It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"
I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.
I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.
Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.
It read something like:
hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?10 -
I usually don't work for indian clients. But when I do, they make sure I don't get paid.
Some highlights from my last project,
Client: Do you know ERPnext?
Me: No, but I am good at python.
Client: My boss wants me to find a guy who can create barcode generator for erpnext.
Me: I can use pyBarcode to do it.
This is exciting I thought. I get to learn a new framework. Start working on it. Not an hour passes by,
Client: hey can you remove this menu item?
Me: Which one?
Client: Also can you add the dashboard icons to left sidebar? Like Odoo? Do you know it? It is also python based.
Me: Then why don't you just use Odoo instead?
Client: My boss wants it. He doesn't understand computers. He is pissing mr off.
Me: Then how come he suggested erpnext?
Client: His friend told him.
*experience mindfuck*
For the next 3 days he has me working on these UI tweaks, never mentions barcode again.
But I finish the barcode stuff. Tripple check everything to make sure they work. Tell him to check so I can get paid. Guy asks his boss to check.
Boss > Client: It doesn't work
Me: What doesn't work?
Boss > Client: Everything!
Client: I actually tested everything and they work. My boss doesn't know how to use it. He is very old.
Makes me make more changes and finally when I ask for the work done so far,
Client: Boss didn't come to office today. I'll get you paid. Please try to understand my situation.
Me thinking, "mofo your boss didn't hire me,l. You did". But I keep calm and tell him I won't work until I get paid 50%.
3 days passed. No reply. Set his skype status to "Away" forever.
*spidey sense tells me I'm not getting paid, again*
U am beyond pissed and burnt out. I fucking wish there was a mafia I can request to collect my fucking money from them.20 -
Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)
My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.
Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.
PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)22 -
Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.
Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]
Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev
Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]
Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].
Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.
The fuse is lit.
Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*
Sizzle.
Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]
Bang.
Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]
Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."19 -
Root encounters HR at her new job.
So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.
Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)
But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.
The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.
I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.
But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.13 -
My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.
I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.
So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.
So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.
I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."
Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.
I quit by texting my boss.
He never replied.
I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.4 -
A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:
"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"
The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.
The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.
By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....
Backstory:
The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.
The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.
In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.
They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.
When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:
They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.
Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.
It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.
At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.
So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.
From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.
We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).
The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.
So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.
Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.
Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."
The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.
A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...
Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.
Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.
HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.
The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...4 -
After a couple years as a developer I've learned that all those banking sites and cool online stores and apps are held together with old chewed gum, duck tape and that guys who has been in the office 48h straight and whose wife thinks he's dead.2
-
If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.
I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.
I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.
SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."
Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"
SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"
Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.
SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."
We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"
SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."
Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."
He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.
So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.
You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.9 -
This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.
Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.
The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.
At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...
So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!
Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.
'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'
Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!
I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.
So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.
Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!
My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.5 -
You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.
A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.
After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.
I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.
They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.
So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.
From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )
So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )
Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .
Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.
After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.
He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.
They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.
I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.
I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.
They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.
If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.
Have a nice day.5 -
yesterday my boss called me to his office.
(him) - Please close the door
(me thinking) - My God, this is gonna be serious. He never closes his doors
(him) - It's a common practice here that we buy a new laptop for new colleges. What kind of laptop do you have?
(me relieved and excited) - Well it's 4 years old shit, 8 Gb of RAM, slow
(him) - Great we'll buy you this i7, big SSD, 32 Gb of RAM + new monitor, mouse and keyboard.
I was excited as fuck.
Until he sent me what he bought. It's much worse laptop than that I have 😑 Only thing that is better is it has 16 Gb of RAM.
I guess I'll just take that RAM off it and put it in my machine (if it is DDR3, God please may it be DDR3)4 -
So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.
So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"
The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.
How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.
At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.
And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.
"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."
Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."
"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.
"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back
*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.
At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^
You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.17 -
Absolutely hate the awful Machines we have to code on at the office, went through three laptops in the space of a year.
All of the them the exact model and specs probably purchased from some tech museum. They would hang and BSOD several times a day and made me look bad when my bit of code wasn't ready on time for a delivery.
Lol , even running spotify while running a couple of dev tools wasn't possible without causing the music to stutter.
After a year i managed to get my hands onto an old Dell desktop when a colleague left that had better specs that would sort of do the job. Wished i could reformat it but alas we aren't allowed to do anything remotely like that.
Finally got fed up of it all, since i bought myself a little treat, an Intel Skull canyon.
Awesome little piece of kit , pretty damn powerful and looks cool too.
Oh an on quiet afternoons I do get to game a little 🤗
The integrated iris pro gpu is surprisingly powerful, it can handle some of the older AAA titles although I haven't really put it through the test yet.
i leave it in the office
Secured with a kensingon lock and locked in my desk drawers
But I usually take it home over weekends
8 -
I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.
Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂4 -
Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.1 -
I am a tester by profession, But I love coding. Sadly my organisation doesn't allow people of my profile to install IDE/ Programming softwares... So I had to work with what I had... VBA, MS Office...
I started to work on few small Ideas, then I and a friend worked on a macro which automates a 5 year old manual process... It became a Hit ! It changed the whole process... My manager started to highlight it everywhere... Other manager started to come to us for helps....
So I learnt MS Excel Vba, then MS Access vba... started to become an expert...
Now the whole onshore and offshore management knows us by name....
This excitement made me explore other programming language band fell in love with Python and JavaScript...
Now I made a virtual bot for my manager....
That small project paved the whole way of my programming passion...4 -
Dead 💀 developer.
My first interview,
Back then was technical graduated local CompSchool. Call for a job newspaper, by phone ☎️ the Supervisor assign a date for interview.
In the office the developer guy was amaze because he will hire any from CompSchool he also was student and all stuff made was on the premised of he learned and worked on the company.
About half and hour talks, he write my name on a post-it and put on HR desk.
“Come back tomorrow morning .. tell me you got the job !”
Do so, entering the office next day, was a sad people talking.. the Developer is 💀 dead (drugged on a party).
So this guy “my name in the post-it” is our salvation for all the database, passwords, accounting, etc. and spell my name.
What tha... got the job, the money 💴, was 18 years old, with excessive income (dead guy salarie).
Worked 3 1/2 years for the company.
Thank you 💀 for the opportunity.9 -
The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...
I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.
Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!
I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.
RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.
Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.
We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.
Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!
I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.
I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!
But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.5 -
At my old job, me and a colleague were tasked with designing a new backup system. It had integrations for database systems, remote file storage and other goodies.
Once we were done, we ran our tests, and sure enough. The files and folder from A were in fact present at B and properly encrypted. So we deployed it.
The next day, after the backup routine had run over night, I got to work and noone was able to log in. They were all puzzled.
I accessed a root account to find the issue. Apparantly, we had made a mistake!
All files on A were present at B... But they were no longer present at A.
We had issued 'move' instead of 'copy' on all the backups. So all of peoples files and even the shared drives have had everything moved to remote storage :D
We spent 4 hours getting everything back in place, starting with the files of the people who were in the office that day.
Boss took it pretty well at least, but not my proudest moment.
*Stay tuned for the story of how I accidentally leaked our Amazon Web Services API key on stack overflow*
/facepalm5 -
If you need to learn/teach object orientation, these are my approaches (I hate that classic "car" example):
1) Keep in mind games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Civilization, Age of Empires (yes, I am old school). They are a good example of having classes to use, instantiating objects (creatures) and putting them to work together. As in a real system.
2) Think of your program as an office that has a job to do, or a factory that has something to deliver. Classes are the roles/jobs and objects are the workers/employees. They don't need to be complex, but their purpose must be really (really, really) well defined. Just like in a real office / factory.
3) Even better (or crazier), see your classes and objects as real beings, digital creatures in a abstract world, and yourself as a kind of god, who creates species (define classes) with wisdom. Give life when it is the time for them to come into the world (instantiate object) and kill them when they are done with their mission (dispose an object). Give them behavior, logic, conditions to work with, situations where they take action, and when they don't. Make them kinda "smart". Build them able to make decisions and take actions based on conditions. Give them life. Think on your program as an ecossystem. There must be balance, connection, species must be well defined and creatures must work together to achieve a common objective. Don't just throw code and pray for it to run. Plan it.
-----
When I talk about my classes like they are real beings, and programs as mini-worlds, some people say I am crazy, some others say that's passion.
It is both! @__@3 -
Holy shit i've found my father's old books back from the 80's for basic and comodore 64. He learnt from thoose and used to code a lot of games and office softwares on that old beast. 😮
1 -
A person just bought a 3000€ workstation and asked me to install cracked versions of Office, AutoCAD, full Adobe suite and Rhino with plugins. And he's going to use them at work to make money.
So, since I have to, I installed 2-3 years old versions of each, in English (he only knows Italian) and blocked all the connections so he can't receive any update/fix or use web related functionalities. I also disabled all autostarting components and contextual menu / OS integrations (although this can be seen as a plus).
When he's calling me asking to "fix" things, I will simply say "sorry, it's the only way for the crack to work, if you want everything you'd better pay for a license or else go open source".
Why can't people understand the value of the complex software they use? Just because it's not a material thing doesn't mean it's not a steal43 -
To the junior dev in my office:
I may be old, but my generation fought wars so you could have your precious emojis. I mean, they were browser wars, but many lives were lost and families destroyed.4 -
One Thursday noon,
operation manager: (looking at mobile)what the.....something is wrong i am getting bunch of emails about orders getting confirmed.
Colleague dev: (checks the main email where it gets all email sent/received) holy shit all of our clients getting confirmation email for orders which were already cancelled/incomplete.
Me: imediately contacting bluehost support, asking them to down the server so just that we can stopp it, 600+ emails were already sent and people keep getting it.
*calls head of IT* telling the situation because he's not in the office atm.
CEO: wtf is happening with my business, is it a hacker?
*so we have a intrusion somebody messed the site with a script or something*
All of us(dev) sits on the code finding the vulnerabilities , trying to track the issue that how somebody was able to do that.
*After an hour*
So we have gone through almost easch function written in the code which could possibly cause that but unable to find anything which could break it.
Head asking op when did you started getting it actually?
Op: right after 12 pm.
*an other hour passes*
Head: (checking the logs) so right after the last commit, site got updated too?. And....and.....wtf what da hell who wrote this shit in last commit?
* this fuckin query is missing damn where clause* 🤬
Me: me 😰
*long pause, everyone looking at me and i couldn't look at anyone*
The shame and me that how can i do that.
Head: so its you not any intrudor 😡
Further investigating, what the holy mother of #_/&;=568 why cronjob doesn't check how old the order is. Why why why.
(So basically this happened, because of that query all cancelled/incomplete orders got updated damage done already, helping it the cronjob running on all of them sending clients email and with that function some other values got updated too, inshort the whole db is fucked up.)
and now they know who did it as well.
*Head after some time cooling down, asked me the solution for the mess i create*
Me: i took backup just couple of days before i can restore that with a script and can do manual stuff for the recent 2 days. ( operation manager was already calling people and apologising from our side )
Head: okay do it now.
Me: *in panic* wrote a script to restore the records ( checking what i wrote 100000000 times now ), ran...tested...all working...restored the data.
after that wrote an apology email, because of me staff had to work alot and it becomes so hectic just because of me.
* at the end of the day CEO, head, staff accepted apology and asked me to be careful next time, so it actually teached me a lesson and i always always try to be more careful now especially with quries. People are really good here so that's how it goes* 🙂2 -
Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.
Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.
You know.
"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.
In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?
I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?
The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.
What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.
Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.
But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.
Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.
Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!
Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?
Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?9 -
At an office job I worked at (2018), one day we were told to drop everything we were doing for the day and gather around, because there was a lady (about 70 years old) who had stopped by to give us "Life Advice".
The lady started her speech with this statement:
"In 1974, I lived in a mansion with 7 servants at my service and 4 cars".
I'm not making this up.
Then she rambled on for 15 mins about how she faced difficulties in her life, starting from studying in a boarding school in Switzerland, then coming back to India to work at the Taj Hotel (Mumbai) under a team of world-renowned chefs who were mean to her, at her internship which paid her about $2500 USD a month in 1985.
But the point she made was, in spite of all her difficulties, she never gave up and kept working.
When she was finally done, NOBODY clapped. She felt awkward as hell and we saw it on her face.
I still chuckle when I think about that incident.11 -
My 1 year old waddled her way to where I am sitting to my computer and gives me this. I start a new job this Monday and have been really nervous, I always get nervous when I start a new job. Guess who is going to be sitting with me at my office this monday? :)
7 -
So my in-laws got a new computer 😑
Yup you know where this is going. Ok so after I transferred all of their data set them all up etc.
They wanted to use "word" and could I set it up for free for them. I said no Microsoft office is not free you lost your license and disk and your old computer is trashed so the better choice would be Google services . So I explained the value of using Google drive, docs,sheets etc.. today and told them how much better it is everything would be on their Google drive so if I got hit by a bus they could get a new computer again and still have access to their data etc... So they said great and so I did.
Two weeks later... Can you set up word for us on our computer. Me annoyed at this point " sure no problem"
I made a shortcut on their desktop to Google docs. Them: oh boy this is great see John all you have to do is click on google docs to go to word! Thanks so much!
🤫🤓5 -
What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!
I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.
Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.
So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.
Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!
I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.
After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:
"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."
So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".
While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.
Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.5 -
Sometimes I wonder how compromised my parents online security would be without my intervention.
My mom logged into her gmail and there was an red bar on top informing about Google preventing an attempted login from an unknown device.
Like typical parents / old people, that red bar didn't caught her attention but I noticed it immediately. I took over and looked into it. It showed an IP address and a location that was quite odd.
I went ahead with the Account security review and I was shocked to find that she had set her work email address as the recovery email!!
I explained her that work email accounts cannot be trusted and IT department of the workplace can easily snoop emails and other info on that email address and should not be related to personal accounts.
After fixing that issue, me being a typical skeptic and curious guy, I decided to find more info about that IP address.
I looked up the IP address on a lookup website and it showed an ISP that was related to the corporate office of her workplace. I noticed the location Google reported also matched with the corporate office location of her work.
Prior to this event, few days ago, I had made her change her gmail account password to a more secure one. ( Her previous password was her name followed by birth date!! ). This must have sent a notification to the recovery mail address.
All these events are connected. It is very obvious that someone at corporate office goes through employees email addresses and maybe even abuse those information.
My initial skeptism of someone snooping throguh work email addresses was right.
You're welcome mom!9 -
When I worked as an IT student and was asked what we could do to ensure the destruction of data on old drives. I suggested lighting the office on fire while blindly firing guns into the inferno. To this day I don't know why they laughed.3
-
Since everyone is posting their system, I'll do it now, too:
- Type: Laptop
- Age: about 5 years
- Weight: 2-3 kg (too much)
- Modifications: Paper below problematic keys; Samsung Evo 850 250GB SSD
- Usecase: School-Laptop with every Office-Suite I could find.
- Pros: Wrecks my PC with the boottime (Gnome > KDE); Looks really sick; Really lightweight Arch installed; Quiet when not under load
- Cons: Really heavy; Battery old and unreliable; Bluetooth stops working after closing lid
13 -
I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.
I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).
She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).
So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.
Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.
She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).
So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.
Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.9 -
Old rant about an internship I had years ago. It still annoys me to this day, so I just had to share the story.
Basically I had no job or work experience in the field, which is a common issue in the city I live in - developer jobs are hard to come by with no experience here. The municipality tried to counter this issue by offering us (unemployed people with an interest in the field) a free 9-month course, linked with an internship program, with a "high chance" of a job after the internship period.
To lure companies to agree to this deal, the municipality offered a sum of money to companies who willing to take interns. The only requirement for the company was that they had to offer a full-time position to the interns after the internship, as long as there were no serious issues (ex. skipping work, calling in sick, doing a bad job etc.).
On paper, this deal probably makes sense.
I landed an internship fairly quickly at a well-known company in the city. The first internship period went great, and I got constant positive feedback. I even got to the point where I ran out of tasks since I worked faster than expected - which I was fairly proud of at the time.
The next internship period was a weird mix between school (the course), and being at the company. We would be at the school for the whole week, expect Wednesdays where we could do the internship at the company.
When I met at work on that first Wednesday, the company told me that it made no sense for me to meet up on those days, as I was only watching some tutorial videos during that time, while they were finding bigger tasks for me - which in turn required that they got some designs for a new project. They said that due to the requirements they got from the municipality (which I knew nothing about at the time), they couldn't ask me to work from home - and they said it would "demoralize" the other developers if I just sat there on Wednesdays to watch videos. Instead, they suggested that I called in sick on Wednesdays and just watched the videos at home - which is something I would register to the workplace, so I wouldn't get in trouble with the school. It sounded logical to me, so I did that for like 5-6 Wednesdays in a row. Looking back at this period, there's a lot of red flags - but I was super optimistic and simply didn't notice.
After this period, the final 2 months of the internship period (no school). This time I had proper tasks, and was still being praised endlessly - just like the first period.
On the last day of the internship, I got called to a meeting with my teamlead and CEO. Thinking I was to sign a full-time contract, I happily went to the meeting.. Only to be told that they had found someone with more experience.
I was fairly disappointed, and told them honestly that I would have preferred if they had told me this earlier, since I had been looking forward to this day. They apologized, but said that there was nothing they could do.
When I returned for the last school period (2 weeks), the teacher asked me to join him for a small meeting with some guy from the municipality. Both seemed fairly disappointed / angry, and told me what still makes me furious whenever I think about it.
Basically after my last internship period, the company had called the municipality, telling them that I had called in sick on those Wednesdays, and was "a lazy worker", and they would refuse to hire me because of that.
I of course told them my side of the story, which they wouldn't believe (unemployed person vs. well-known company).
Even when I landed a proper job a few months later, the office had called my old internship for a reference - and they told the same story, which nearly made them decline my application. This honestly makes me feel like it's something personal.
So basically:
Municipality: Had to pay the company as the deal / contract between them was kept.
Company: Got free money and work.
Me: Got nothing except a bad reputation - and some (fairly limited) experience..
Do I regret taking the course? .. No, it was a free course and I learned a lot - and I DID get some experience. But god, I wish I had applied at a different company.
Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.. But f*ck this company :)8 -
On an afternoon the day before delivery, we discovered a crashing bug. At around 2 AM, we had found the cause and fixed it. A short sleep at home, then back to office at 8 AM because the delivery was 200 devices containing that software, and they had to be updated manually because production had put in the old image.
We seized all available computers, even those from marketing who were... surprised. Half-way in the update, we calculated that we wouldn't have enough time until the freight service would show up.
So we asked the secretary that she should be a bit flirty to the parcel guy, invite him to a coffee and chat around to buy us more time. We closed the last parcel just when he figured that he had to continue with his tour.5 -
Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?
This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.
Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.
Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.
Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.
Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.
React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.
Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.10 -
Just found out that softmaker.de has a website were they publish one of their professional fonts every month.
I looked at it and then downloaded all previous months. 😂
I just ❤ the web archive!
---
Btw. does anyone has experience with the officesuite from softmaker.com on linux?
They provide an office-suite for linux as well which I appreciate but I'm not that hyped since I currently don't need it and the design is kinda old fashioned. (I once tested FreeOffice.)
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I hate when someone throws at me some task all of sudden with a tight deadline.
Wednesday was one of those days.
manager: we want to remove all the offices because of our tight budget this year (multimillionaire company, lol), everyone will use office 365;
me: ahn... ok, but everything was already tested? Some macros, routines, old documents can be a big problem, as far I know (I don't use M$ at home, servers are Linux, so I really don't know about that). I can do some tests, only will need some real documents to make sure everything will do fine;
manager: yeah, yeah, everything will be fine, the high management already decided, don't worry, just remove the offices in the company, ok?;
me: alright...
*me deploys the remotion script in every f*cking machine*
48 hours later...
manager: well... everyone is complaining about the office 365, random complains, can you attend all the calls and reinstall if you can't solve the problem?
WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!
[RAGES INTERNALLY]
5 -
First day of a week long vacation and this series of emails comes in (no I didn’t reply to any of these)
Random new QA: “Why does this 5 year old functionality behave this way?”
(10 minutes later)
QA: Okay I saw your out of office message but I really need to know why this behaves this way or else I’m opening a defect because I don’t believe it should behave this way.
Internal me: Heh that’s great kid but you didn’t make the requirements.
(Another 10 minutes pass)
QA: Defect opened, please resolve this before Wednesday.
Oh the joys of enterprise development, I guess if it’s a big enough deal they’ll actually forward it on to the people I put in my away message. I’d love to see that defect holding up the release when I get back on Monday.9 -
TLDR: Small family owned finance business woes as the “you-do-everything-now” network/sysadmin intern
Friday my boss, who is currently traveling in Vegas (hmmm), sends me an email asking me to punch a hole in our firewall so he can access our locally hosted Jira server that we use for time logging/task management.
Because of our lack of proper documentation I have to refer to my half completed network map and rely on some acrobatic cable tracing to discover that we use a SonicWall physical firewall. I then realize asking around that I don’t have access to the management interface because no one knows the password.
Using some lucky guesses and documentation I discover on a file share from four years ago, I piece together the username and password to log in only to discover that the enterprise support subscription is two years expired. The pretty and useful interface that I’m expecting has been deactivated and instead of a nice overview of firewall access rules the only thing I can access is an arcane table of network rules using abbreviated notation and five year old custom made objects representing our internal network.
An hour and a half later I have a solid understanding of SonicWallOS, its firewall rules, and our particular configuration and I’m able to direct external traffic from the right port to our internal server running Jira. I even configure a HIDS on the Jira server and throw up an iptables firewall quickly since the machine is now connected to the outside world.
After seeing how many access rules our firewall has, as a precaution I decide to run a quick nmap scan to see what our network looks like to an attacker.
The output doesn’t stop scrolling for a minute. Final count we have 38 ports wide open with a GOLDMINE of information from every web, DNS, and public server flooding my terminal. Our local domain controller has ports directly connected to the Internet. Several un-updated Windows Server 2008 machines with confidential business information have IIS 7.0 running connected directly to the internet (versions with confirmed remote code execution vulnerabilities). I’ve got my work cut out for me.
It looks like someone’s idea of allowing remote access to the office at some point was “port forward everything” instead of setting up a VPN. I learn the owners close personal friend did all their IT until 4 years ago, when the professional documentation stops. He retired and they’ve only invested in low cost students (like me!) to fill the gap. Some kid who port forwarded his home router for League at some point was like “let’s do that with production servers!”
At this point my boss emails me to see what I’ve done. I spit him back a link to use our Jira server. He sends me a reply “You haven’t logged any work in Jira, what have you been doing?”
Facepalm.4 -
I remember during my internship in a startup company, we were 3 interns and one senior and everyone had an iMac with two monitors at the beginning and a private office for each.
Later I was moved with the rest of interns to a small 1 square meter workstation and my iMac was replaced with an old Pentium 4 PC.
After that, they took my 2nd screen away.
At the end of my internship period, they said they can't afford any of the interns and they kicked us (indirectly!) away and kept the senior only.
That is my 3-month professional career in depth!5 -
They want me to be a speaker at this event , I wrote them this
Regarding this statement on the speaker form “Presentation rooms are set up theatre style with a lectern, lectern mic, screen, laptop with Windows XP Office
2007/Vista XP and a projector.” – is it just an old form?
I do have one question what does this mean exactly? Are you actually using windows xp? it’s not supported by Microsoft anymore, so it’s quite dangerous to have unless it’s not attached to the internet what so ever and never has been. Vista… is not much better. Windows 7 is 2008 you should at least be using that I would of thought? I mainly ask because if I am going to speak about technology and computers I can’t exactly say I’m an expert when I’m using tech as old as that. I mean I’m 20 I was 7 when xp came out, I know how to use it but it’s ancient, in computer terms It’s as old as Aztec times and I’d rather not be sacrificed to a sun god (seriously if anyone who knows tech at all sees me I’ll be embarrassed and taken the piss out of majorly).
Could I just use my laptop? If needs be?
Sorry to be a pain1 -
Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.
When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.
I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.
At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.
At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.
I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.
And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.6 -
Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:
People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.
The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).
Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.
Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.
Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.
I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.
I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.
I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).26 -
My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.
Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"
He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.
As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.
Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.
Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.
I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)
3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.
Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".
I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.
I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.
The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.
December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.
I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.
In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.
The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.
In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.
I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.
My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.
HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.
In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.
Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.
As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...
Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!
And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).8 -
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 -
DISCLAIMER: I swear to god this is true. This is a completely unfabricated anecdote.
Soon we are moving to a new office space, and my department have been delegated the responsibility of moving all of the computers from the old work space to the new one. I was a little confused at first, because I'm a software developer, not a removalist.
It gets better.
We just had a meeting the other day, and my manager had advised us that we were to be moving the machines on a Saturday. I confirmed whether we were being paid overtime, simply because I had never worked a Saturday before. My manager replied (this is paraphrased but ultimately accurate) - "It's unpaid. Because you get paid a salary, you're expected to do unpaid overtime here and there. We have christmas parties and nights out, all of which come out of the companies pocket. Not all companies do this, so it's only fair you give back".
I honestly couldn't believe it. I was being asked to spend basically the majority of my day off moving computers from one site to another, for free, purely because it's "expected". Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?
Long story short, I went home and started updating my resume.18 -
Boss: this is different from the old console I don't like it
Me: but this has been approved by product management and the team already made estimates and committed to the feature
Boss: Well this needs to change, our existing users will not like it
Me: This is far from agile to be honest, and the change came from user feedback analysis
Boss: You are not doing your work *swears and curses* this is against the team direction!
Me: then why was this committed on this sprint? All I did was facilitate the needs of the team to proceed development.
Boss: *runs out office and starts calling other bosses to boss around*
Runs in 5 minutes later, saying we are not allowed to destroy a feature with enhancements like this.
Me: *Infinite facepalm*7 -
So today I realized that Im not happy.
When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.
I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.
After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.
However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.
At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..
Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).
Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.
Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?4 -
Woo, rant time.
I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.
However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.
I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?
I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?
What would you guys do in this situation???19 -
I recently left a job after a few years of intense work and long hours. After leaving, I left a critical but fair Glassdoor review. Since then, I have received multiple emails from the CEO of my former employer asking me to remove the review and including (what I perceive to be) threats of the industry being “small” and mentioning my new manager by name.
I had seldom spoken to the CEO before these emails – a bit of small talk here and there in the office – and his notes to me contained details about personal and family struggles (as justification for poor leadership and mistreating employees?) that I thought verged on inappropriate. I had also delivered all of the feedback in my review throughout my tenure at the company – and, of course, had not received any interest from leadership in discussing my thoughts until I made them public.
What is the best way to respond here? As an attempt to diffuse the situation, I sent a kind email back acknowledging that working there was at times difficult, but also expressing my gratitude for all I learned and the opportunities I had. After that email, he again asked that I remove the review and made reference to the “small community” of the industry.
Should I remove the review? Is he really going to tell my new boss that I left a critical (but truthful) Glassdoor review? If he does, will my new boss even care, or will he see this as a weird and inappropriate overstep from my old employer?14 -
20+ years ago we got a contract to replace an old home grown system for managing rented equipment for a company with offices in two countries with a new standard system.
I was tasked with building a few addon modules to handle import and reporting that the standard system lacked.
Over the course of 8 months and multiple trips to their head office for on premises development along side their people that knew how it should work (there was a lot of waiting for info so it was not 8 months of actual work) we finally was ready to present the finished solution.
After about one hour of demonstration their boss questioned why we did not demonstrate the connection to their corporate group accounting system ...
“Corporate group accounting?”
After some confused discussion it turns out that in one of the first meetings the sales person had they had mentioned this accounting system and that all accounting info was to be exported there.
This requirement was never listed in the specifications we got and looking into it it turned out that the standard system did not support such exports at all.
In the end we had to throw it all away as it proved impossible to get that info out of the system (which was not of our design).
We barely avoided having to repay all fees as their people had approved the specification but standing there without a clue to what he was asking for was a very scary experience, thinking “how could we miss this?”2 -
Doing occasional first & second level support besides my actual job of coding can be fucking annoying and time consuming.
Just let me code in peace and listen to doom metal!
"Blabla our 17 years old plotter does not respond blabla fix it please"
"My computer is so slow, make it faster"
Go die in your filthy office chairs by being pierced through the stinking butthole you ignorant endoplasmatische retikula!1 -
Chrome, Firefox, and yes even you Opera, Falkon, Midori and Luakit. We need to talk, and all readers should grab a seat and prepare for some reality checks when their favorite web browsers are in this list.
I've tried literally all of them, in search for a lightweight (read: not ridiculously bloated) web browser. None of them fit the bill.
Yes Midori, you get a couple of bonus points for being the most lightweight. Luakit however.. as much as I like vim in my terminal, I do not want it in a graphical application. Not to mention that just like all the others you just use webkit2gtk, and therefore are just as bloated as all the others. Lightweight my ass! But programmable with Lua, woo! Not like Selenium, Chrome headless, ... does that for any browser. And that's it for the unique features as far as I'm concerned. One is slow, single-threaded and lightweight-ish (Midori) and another has vim keybindings in an application that shouldn't (Luakit).
Pretty much all of them use webkit2gtk as their engine, and pretty much all of them launch a separate process for each tab. People say this is more secure, but I have serious doubts about that. You're still running all these processes as the same user, and they all have full access to the X server they run under (this is also a criticism against user separation on a single X session in general). The only thing it protects against is a website crashing the browser, where only that tab and its process would go down. Which.. you know.. should a webpage even be able to do that?
But what annoys me the most is the sheer amount of memory that all of these take. With all due respect all of you browsers, I am not quite prepared to give 8 fucking gigabytes - half the memory in this whole box! - just for a dozen or so tabs. I shouldn't have to move my web browser to another lesser used 16GB box, just to prevent this one from going into fucking swap from a dozen tabs. And before someone has a go at the add-ons, there's 4 installed and that's it. None of them are even close to this complete and utter memory clusterfuck. It's the process separation. Each process consumes half a GB of memory, and there's around a dozen of them in a usual browsing session. THAT is the real problem. And I want to get rid of it.
Browsers are at their pinnacle of fucked up in my opinion, literally to the point where I'm seriously considering elinks. Being a sysadmin, I already live my daily life in terminals anyway. As such I also do have resources. But because of that I also associate every process with its cost to run it, in terms of resources required. Web browsers are easily at the top of the list.
I want to put 8GB into perspective. You can store nearly 2 entire DVD movies in that memory. However media players used to play them (such as SMPlayer) obviously don't do that. They use 60-80MB on average to play the whole movie. They also require far less processing power than YouTube in a web browser does, even when you download that exact same video with youtube-dl (either streamed within the media player or externally). That is what an application should be.
Let's talk a bit about these "complicated" websites as well. I hate to break it to you framework web devs, but you're a dime a dozen. The competition is high between web devs for that exact reason. And websites are not complicated. The document itself is plain old HTML, yes even if your framework converts to it in the background. That's the skeleton of your document, where I would draw a parallel with documents in office suites that are more or less written in XML. CSS.. oh yes, markup. Embolden that shit, yes please! And JavaScript.. oh yes, that pile of shit that's been designed in half a day, and has a framework called fucking isEven (which does exactly what it says on the tin, modulo 2 be damned). Fancy some macros in your text editor? Yes, same shit, different pile.
Imagine your text editor being as bloated as a web browser. Imagine it being prone to crashing tabs like a web browser. Imagine it being so ridiculously slow to get anything done in your productivity suite. But it's just the usual with web browsers, isn't it? Maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea after all... Oh and give me another update where I have to restart the browser when I commit the heinous act of opening another tab, just because you had to update your fucking CA certs again. Yes please!23 -
I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.
It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"
I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".
- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.
And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.
About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.15 -
Boss: [tells me to do a thing]
Me: [does a thing]
Boss: [mad because I didn't do the thing his way]
Me: [physically numb from putting up with this shit for 3y now]
I've been checked out at work for awhile now, but today was some next level BS. I had to throw together an application demo in 3hr, couldn't take lunch today because I needed to sign for a package, sold an 3y old laptop on Ebay (and got chewed out because he thinks it's worth more than that).
The only reason I still show up to this shit-show of an office, is I don't want to leave my only other coworker with our boss.. That, and my interview isn't until monday....2 -
Story Time.
TL;DR - Because of Corporate PTSD, I replace the word "everyone/folks/guys" with "Team" when I'm addressing my colleagues, whether it be an e-mail or verbally (F2F/Zoom/GMeet).
In 2019, An office job I worked at, a new Vice President joined the company (the same one who told me he saw me in his dream).
We were required, on a daily basis, to form a circle and one-by-one everyone would out-loud say their yesterday's and current day's tasks updates.
So before the VP joined, everyone was free to initiate their turn however they wanted. Phrases like "Hey Everyone", "Good morning all" or "Hi All" was all around acceptable.
But the moment he started joining the stand-ups, he felt the need to change this phrase to a standard "Good morning Team". No other variations of this. Only and ONLY these three words.
Why you ask? Because saying Good morning is good manners and using the word "Team" strengthens the bond between co-workers and increases collaboration and creativity.
Some colleagues were bound to forget this and they did, which resulted in the VP blasting at everyone for doing so. He would show genuine rage over this, almost as if the company would go out of business because of us, not complying to do so.
Now imagine, you get up at 8 AM, get ready, commute, and get ready to speak for the standup and you get yelled at in front of everyone, FIRST THING before you start working.
Needless to say, it would kill everyone's spirit for getting their day started but nobody could speak up against him because obviously, he was the VP of the company then.
And oh yes, our CEO fired him 5 months after that because he (the VP) got slammed with a pedophilia-related lawsuit, by the parents of a 5-year old.6 -
Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.
So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.
So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.
First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.
Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).
This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.
So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).
And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).
They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.5 -
Story time!
I worked at a company that was the HQ for a sizable organization for a while, until it was eventually bought out by another company, and then yet another company who was located in the valley.
We were kinda a forgotten office not being the HQ, like most places like that are.
No customers EVER visited our building, few if any people knew we existed even, even our own company. I visited HQ in the valley on a number of occasions and was stalked by the video monitoring system for hours before I was stopped by security and the cops called because nobody believed there as an office outside the valley when I explained why my badge looked different .... (San Jose cops were very nice about it and really pissed at the security team.) But that's another story...
One day people who were never at our office decided (after many meetings without talking to anyone at the office) ... they decided the beige walls at our office didn't match the company colors.
So they took all the generic wall coverings down and painted all the walls an almost imperceptible different color.
So now we had an office with all white(ish) walls and nothing on them. Due to the configuration of the building there were these huge monolithic white walls that looked pretty dumb.
This lasted quite a while so as a joke I printed up and framed (found an old frame, as a former HQ we had lots of stuff lying around) a sign that said:
"This space intentionally left blank."
When the "mediocre hotel room quality art" and posters were scheduled to go up the folks putting the art up skipped that wall thinking the sign was official.
Even the somewhat corporate drone directors, and one VP at our office thought it was so funny, they didn't say a word about it. Word has it back at HQ they assumed it "must be fire code or something" and told the folks hanging the crappy art to skip that wall.
It lasted on that wall for a decade until we moved out of that building. On the last day, everything was moved, but that sign remained. No idea if it is still there or not...1 -
So, we have massive desks in office and there is no much space for them to fit +2 newcomers. Occasionally, my old youtube recommendation "Tetris Original Theme" started playing out loud. :)
10 -
Any thoughts on whether my alternative keyboard layout will lower my risk for wrist pain? I map each key to an Amazon dash button on each edge of a large bookshelf in my office. It's lots of exercise, and I'm almost back up to my old typing speed.1
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Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.
Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.
Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.
Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.
The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.
We never saw him again.4 -
I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.
They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.
I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.
The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?
After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.8 -
I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.
Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.
Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.
This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.
But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.
So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.
I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.
I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.21 -
Home office!
-Everyday PC
-Laptop for the convenient mobility.
-Old Mac Mini for iOS builds.
Here is where I pretend to do work.
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Sort of a meeting, sort of an informal interview, I've dialled in from the home office and my audio setup includes a standalone mic and some noise cancelling headphones. It's going really really well when all of a sudden I see something in the preview window of my webcam feed.
Behind me, looking very concerned and confused is my 73 year old Nanna who'd decided to pop in and see me as she was passing by.
It's common for me to keep the front door locked, but my Nanna has an emergency key and knows I don't always hear a knock at the door, so let herself in.
So she's now in the house, calling out to me and she can hear me talking, so follows the sound of my voice thinking maybe I'm on the phone. Walks right into the office, where the door is behind me, eventually puts two and two together to work out that I can't hear her and finally sees herself on my monitor. She panics and goes to hide in the corner of my office, almost underneath my workbench because she's old and doesn't know where she would or wouldn't be visible from.
The rest of the meeting went really well, but overran by at least half an hour. Meanwhile I can see my poor Nanna hiding away in my peripheral vision.3 -
Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer
Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....
Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while
But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...
The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm
He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.
I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.
Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.
My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"
I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)
He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)
Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.
Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.
I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.
Am really Fed up with it all7 -
Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.
After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.
While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.
I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.
I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.
I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.
There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.3 -
The story of how I got my dream job.
I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.
--A few weeks pass--
It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!
I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)
The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.
--D-day--
I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!
Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.
We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.
I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.
--Two days later--
I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.
--A few months later--
I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.
I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).3 -
So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.
My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.
You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.
Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.
I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.
I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.
The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊7 -
Time to time I do some Hard- and Software repairs for neighbors and get some little money for it.
My neighbor let's call this one "Bob".
Bob has a new printer and a old one which is over 15 years old.
First: Holy shit 15 years old printer works still. WTF? Is this thing Hulk or what?
He ask me why he can't print a 128 site Doc with pictures in it from the old printer. It always stop at around 50 pages.
I tell him that it has only 32 MB Ram/Flash and can't print more. Before the Doc's were much smaller and could print that, but today you got files with more than 10 MB and on a printer it need's atleast 128 MB Ram to process and print it.
Guess what? One week later he asks me the same questions.
Why don't you print it on your new shiny expensive printer and why do you need still that OFFICE WAR VETERAN OF PRINTER to print it???
Seriously just use the new and better one!! Bob please give that old one a burial. He deservs it!5 -
TL;DR: OMFG! Push the button already!
I've been away on paternity leave for quite some time now. Today is my first day at work since the end of July.
Just a couple of days after my paternity leave started, I was contacted by one of the managers because a tracking and analytics service I had made some months earlier had halted.
Now, I did warn them that the project was fragile and was running of an old box in my office. So they shouldn't be surprized if it came to a halt every now and then.
Well, so being on my paternity leave and all I didn't want to spend time fixing it. I had a child to look after. So I told the manager that the box probably just had shut down. I think there was a power outage the day before, so I probably thought it was the cause. So he probably just had to turn it back on. I also told him the admin u/p in case he needed to restart some services.
Today, the CEO enters my office telling me to get that thing fixed. Because that manager apparently couldn't find the power button.4 -
There was this senior designer many years ago that used to come in late everyday, do fuckall except piss everyone off and then spend the majority of her day on the phone organising her social life. We all hated her, and she knew it. This one day she came in and resigned. As we were all Mac, we quickly invented a nickname for her which was "Type 11" in the old Mac days this error was "Unexpectedly Quit". The sad thing was she was best mates with the owners wife. Everyone in the office was questioned about their meanness and nasty vibes. She didn't quit it was just to get back at us for hating her. 12 years on, I'm self employed and she does marketing in a manufacturing co. We get on really well and she gives me good work. Moral: I have no fucking idea what life is about.1
-
So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.
Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….
My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.
After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …
So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???
Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...
Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.
First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself16 -
Continued from previous post.
The man with hoodie walked down a dark alley. At distance, a house which looked haunted stood. As he entered the house he sighed a relief. Once inside, he descends to the basement where an old computer sat. He turned on the computer and smiled. The screen showed a prompt. With fews keystrokes, a series of scripts begin to execute. Finally at the bottom, a text blinked.
"Awaiting Connection........"
The CPU was recovered from rubble and brought to General's office as per his order. It was connected to a power source and it started to boot. A prompt showed up. A man in suit, suggested perhaps it expected a login. The General sat on his chair smoking a cigar thinking on what action must be taken next.
While men in suit discussed about the CPU, someone plugged in a LAN cable. The General who was lost in thought, saw this from corner of his. A moment passed. General sprang from his chair, hurling his cigar to the floor. As men in suits, looked at the General's display of athletic behavior they sensed the tension. Everyone turned to the CPU now connected to LAN now.
Far way, the screen on hooded man computer showed. "Connected".
A series of scripts started to execute.
Cold wind was all that could be heard out side the General's office building and the house, where hooded man sat in the dark.1 -
So it's done. I signed my new contract with my new company after I left my old job. Better contract level, better pay, better benefits (at my old office they didn't even give me a pc. I had to use mine..)..
But the sad/funny story is that my old boss do not talk to me anymore because he can't understand why I'm leaving..sooo mature!
I really don't care because actually he do not deserve anything from me, he's (and forever will be) an arrogant prig without humility.
The only regret is leaving the co-workers I bound with..but I'm sure we'll be in touch.
Yep.. maybe this is definitely a rant/story!
Wish me good luck for this new adventure!2 -
For about 3x years now, we have had 3x generic work email addresses that are used as microsoft accounts for office 2016 licenses.
(The company is dragging its heels on getting office 365 so MS like to make our lives hell.)
Suddenly we can’t get office updates... and when we sign in to see why, it says that because we are apparently only 3 years old we need our parents permission to use the account or we’ll lose access by September.
Never were we forced to enter a DOB when setting the accounts up!!! So it used the account setup date instead.
It turns out that we can’t change our DOB ourselves, as we are a ‘child’ and need a parents permission.
Fine.
I access my personal account and follow the instructions to add the 3x email addresses as my children so i can change the DOB.
‘Ha ha’ i hear microsoft saying, ‘it doesn’t work that way!!’
No, In order for the parent to verify their child’s identity, they are charged 0.50c per child!
Wtf!!
Doesn’t cost a lot but come on Microsoft!!
It’s that, or submit ID, which obviously wont work for a generic support@ email address like we have.
So annoying and we don’t know what to do.
Wonder how much MS are making out of this...2 -
Oh boy, finally something to rant about.
I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.
First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.
Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.
Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.
When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.
In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.
The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?6 -
New office saga continues
We had 2 days on induction and these guys hired a 19 year old intern for the HR department.
Yes, the worst possible combination.
In last two days she made our life hell. Insufferable human being.
How can a person be so annoying?!
It was so tempting to roast her, but then I had to control my instincts so as to not get a warning during my first two days.
Not saying that everyone is bad and there surely exist great people, but wide majority of Gen Z makes me go nuts and that is all what is wrong with corporate world, old wine and fresh blood overlapping.
We are headed towards self destruction, buckle up your seat belts.8 -
We have this lovely little old lady who works in QA and whenever she finds a bug she goes across the office to the developers desk and taps them on the shoulder and spends like 15 minutes explaining and showing the bug...
This is infuriating as you lose all concentration on what you are working on and wastes so much time... But I can't bring myself to tell her to stop just can't find kind enough words. She's a lovely person and means well but it seems her world runs a lot slower than everyone else's.1 -
I think that two criterias are important:
- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind
1) Some simple anti examples:
- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-
2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.
E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.
Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.
When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.
It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo
Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.
Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.
My worst enemies....
Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(
Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.
I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.
Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?
XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????4 -
Not at all dev related but I don’t have a social life so I share with you guys:)
I’ve been fat for all my life. You might say it’s my own fault blah blah but I quit sugar over 10 years ago, I don’t snack and eat 1-2 meals a day, not much more than others do.
The first time I was in good shape was when I was 16. I was growing, I started boxing and I was happy-ish with my body for the first time. I got down from 110kgs to ~87kgs, which is a good weight for me, I have heavy bones and wide shoulders I guess.
I insured my shoulder and couldn’t do boxing anymore but my weight was still pretty much stable. After working in the office for a few months I started gaining weight again, I think mainly due to the stress and lack of sleep.
In 2017 for the first time I hit a new high with 120kgs. I quit my terrible, stressful 24/7 job and relocated and got down to ~115 which I maintained for quite a while (still going to the gym and stuff).
And then the lockdown started..
I went up to >120 in no time.
(Sounds really bad but as mentioned, I’m heavy anyway so I’m not THAT obese, just fat.
Seeing my weight was really scary to me so I started a keto diet again, which I did before but with limited success.
Warning: Controversial topic coming up..
I took it a bit further and tried 0-carb (carnivore diet) instead of low carb and I lost 6kg within a month. Then the next plateau at 114, then at 112 etc.
Went more strict and removed seasoning and stuff and started eating more nutritious meat, liver, heart, tongue etc and my weight started dripping again.
Yesterday for the first time in ~a decade I got down to 105kg.
My end goal is 90, so I made it half way through.
Just really happy to have achieved this. The 1 good thing about lockdown I guess, I had so much time to be on my own.
Before you say eating no greens is bad, keep in mind that most not old people die because of obesity, not because of a lack of fiber.
It’s a big achievement for me and I hope that I can get to 90kg in another 3 months..
Story over8 -
My coleague's story
- before leaving after long day at the office final look at support cases (after official support hours)
- sev1 ticket logged an hour ago, noone called us (although should have; after support hours)
- angry manager calls and demands to get in touch with the client immediately (we're already after support hours, FTS should pick the case, not us)
- we reach out. Customer has business-impacting case
- after initial info gathering: some cert got expired, they got a new one and placed it in the app's directory. The app still does not work
- the first question we ask: "are you sure you have placed it in the right directory?"
- "yes, we are sure. No problems there" - answers a voice with indian accent
- noone finds the root cause for hours.
- It's already 1am
- someone from client's specialists comes up with an idea: "are we sure the cert is in the right place? Let's try to move it to the same directory the old one was in the first place"
- .................................................
- production is working again
- "Why didn't anyone from support suggest this?!?!"
- .................................................
- 2am. Case solved, manager is informed everything's allright now.
- In the morning we get yelled at by the manager bcz we supposedly missed a sev1 ticket and were incompetent during the conf. call
This reminds me why I stay away from support. And why I started hating people. And why I do not work with indians (our ways are too different for me to stay sane and not to kill anyone).3 -
Start raising tickets/bugs like you were going to the doctors and things would get fixed a lot faster.
X page doesn't work.
Great information there what about the page isn't working?
Doesn't answer the question and gets pissy when you have to ask them again.
If this was a doctor's appointment all you would've done is walked into my office and yelled it hurts over and over.
Then proceeded to shit on my floor as you're leaving because I didn't diagnose the problem fast enough.
What were you trying to do when the system took a crap?
What did the red text say?
Can you take a screenshot? because the old saying a picture paints a thousand words holds some truth.
If you can go to the doctor and give them a full run down of when you got sick and what symptoms you got in the same order they happened why do you struggle to do the same when reporting a bug.4 -
I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.
I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.
But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?
I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).
Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.
I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.
Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.
Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)1 -
[Warning! - Sob story ahead, you've been warned]
Dear devRant,
today someone who interviewed me in the last days, said they want to hire me.
Good news, right?
Professionally speaking yes, but... i don't know.
I always been a freelance: never had much work, but i was always free of doing whatever i liked and whenever (no fixed working hours).
I have a room in an office with 2 other people. People i love to hate (it's complicated).
But now i'm thinking about this new work they are offering me: no more freelance, no office, no flexibility. All with a 6 months contract.
What really scares me is that i will lose what i have... even the 2 co-workers that i hate/love: i have never been able to make friends, they are the thing that comes closer to friends in my life.
I'm feeling a void in front of me:
being an adult (35 years old...) and choose a work that pays, but loose... essentially what i am, what i have hardly build...
OR decline the job, and going on "Peter-Pan-style", living at my pace: free but constantly hoping of something good to happen to me
I don't know, really don't know... so many feeling are overwhelming me now.
And tomorrow i have to make a decision5 -
Stories from Gary #000
Short background info:
So I'm working as a game dev for 3 years now and by now I can say that I've seen some shit. Mostly because of one of our game designers, let's call him Gary.
So Gary, from here on called GDG (Game Designer Gary), is a regular game designer (GD). His job is to come up with new game ideas, commission the assets, make sure that translations are done, etc. - simply put, he has to get a lot of shit together before we can start working on a new game.
Would be no problem at all if GDG wasn't lazy as shit and would work for once in his life. No dev really wants to work with him anymore, since he's known for calling a game or any issue "ready for development" even if half the assets or specs are still missing.
Let's move on to a particular situation that happened a couple of months ago.
I had an issue assigned to me, which was about implementing the translations for a new game. As I read the issue and checked if everything I needed was given, I noticed that the most important part was in fact missing - the keywords for the translations.
-.-
So, I called GDG and asked where I could find the keywords, to which he responded "Oh, I'm working on them right now... and by the way I got a weird bug with the translation program. Can you come check it out?". Sigh. I went over to his office, rambling about how I should be able to help him with a program I rarely use and which was written ages ago.
As soon as GDG saw me coming roundbthe corner, he started explaining how the keywords aren't ready yet, since the program to create translations and their keywords won't let him name a translation.
"I can create new translations, but I can't assign a keyword to them."
"Okay, show me what you did", I told him, eager to leave.
He started to type the keyword, which turned out to be huge ass long and immediately I noticed a little counter, like "x/50", directly beneath the text field started to count up with every new character GDG typed. See where I'm going with this? HE WASNT ABLE TO RENAME A TRANSLATION BECAUSE HE WAS TOO LAZY TO FUCKING READ AND CONCENTRATE FOR ONCE. Sorry for that, but even thinking about it gets me angry again.
To some this might sound like nothing, but it really got to me at this point. Maybe it will become more understandable as I post more GDG stories.
tl;dr: A 40 something year old man, who's been working in his job for over 10 years wasn't able to use a program which he daily uses and asks me for help, only to find out he's a complete dipshit.4 -
My old boss used to deploy sometimes at the last second. I was about to walk out of the office (friday at around 5:30pm) when he said "Oh wait i wanted to deploy this website you've created" Before i could argue he deployed the website and ofcourse it broke in production..
This caused me to stay for another hour and a half in order to fix it...2 -
Last office building I worked at, the company across the hall recycled old PCs for businesses. They had two reserved parking spots in the building parking lot right up front. The signs read "Employee of the Month"
Every day when I came in the owner's $80k luxury car was parked in the middle of both spots. -
left the office early today to see my 2 years old son before he goes to bed.
it's 11pm and I'm working from home, gonna wake up around 5:30am to commute to work.
I really need to move closer to work3 -
Opened an old document using Office, tried hours to move around the document but couldn't.
Then realised, I was pressing 'h', 'j', 'k' and 'l'.
😒😒2 -
Extract from a quite old recruiter email (excluding the formalities):
Position: junior dev
Workplace: office for first year, can be changed to remote after (salary will be 50% lower if you go remote though) *suspicion levels starts raising*
Payment: 1€ per line of code (empty lines/comments excluded) or page of documentation *alarms start ringing*
Additional info: on high alert for 4 weeks every 6 weeks *wtf is going on*, salary bonus is 10€ per week *I stopped reading here and moved the email directly to the spam folder*6 -
Longest I've worked without rest + why?
Over 24 hours. Why?
In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).
Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.
One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.
January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"
At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)
One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...
VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow." -
I have just lost all respect and desire to work for Google...
Google is accelerating partial reopening of offices and **putting limits on future of remote work**
Both hypocritical or draconian? Sounds like it's being run by an old man now...
Wonder if employees will revolt... Jump ship to the other FANG companies... Guess I'll win either way unless they all goto Facebook...
https://cnbc.com/2021/03/...12 -
When I began my sandwich course in a big French company, I was dreaming about cutting edge stack, rocket computer and stuff...
I was disappointed when I came to my office with an old Windows 7 computer, coding via LANDesk to an old server with Windows Server 2008 on it, with Eclipse ... INDIGO...
I have to use Java 1.7 ...
Tomcat 7.
PRTG for monitoring...
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ...
One screen...
Coding on a codebase where, indubitably, MVC pattern was just a weird thing in books.
No UT.
Lasagna code.
Well it really disappointed me.
Luckily, the Information Service was very open minded and gave me a laptop with Fedora, 3 screens, updated the servers, and let me update the stack, with Java 10, Angular for the front, they are okay for using Docker.
So ... even if it seems to be fucked up, there’s still hope !!3 -
Looking around where I work, I'm reminded of when I was young and ambitious, like all the other kids around me at the time, with a dislike for all the older dudes and dudettes in upper management. With the exception of three other guys around my age, everyone, including the CEO, was in high school, middle school, elementary school, or not even born yet when I started my career. Just like them, I was plucky and chatty and (trying to be) funny and social. I didn't know how fast I would go from that set to the old fat guy that they look askance at and wonder how I'm still around with my weird ways and "boomerish", socially retarded behavior. What's really galling is that I'm solidly Gen X, like some of them, but I guess I talk more like a Boomer because my parents were older when I was born and I was kinda raised in that mindset. I'm the office schlub now. A man out of my time. And I've never been in any kind of upper management, even. I am Kevin Malone.
3 -
IKEA small Filur container might be the best IKEA product ever produced. Why?
- it's ridiculously compact for its volume
- it fits the standard grocery bag just perfectly allowing you to reuse old grocery bags as trash bags
- when closed, it creates almost airtight seal without using any gaskets
- it's absolutely overbuilt and ridiculously strong
Why is it so strong? You see, the wall thickness along doesn't matter, but the wall thickness to volume ratio does. If you decide to build a house with the same wall thickness out of same material, it would collapse under it's own weight.
But the wall thickness to volume ratio of this very container allows it to be possibly the strongest IKEA product ever. As a matter of fact, the walls could be three times thinner also rendering the container perfectly usable. Also, this kind of plastic bends but doesn't break. Also, the lid alone has 38 FUCKING stiffening ribs.
Also I like the color and the office vibe the whole thing radiates.
Totally get your hands on one. You won't regret it.
12 -
The most obnoxious company process I've encountered so far is the nonexistent one.
This is what happened at my first professional job. PM and CTO quit after about a year, yet the top honchos were insistent of salvaging what was left of their "enterprise" software suite and putting us through a death march to try and continue development.
No plan, despite having a JIRA board filled with month-old backlog stories. No direction, because the CEO was now head of the project and wasn't in the office about 50% of the time, and our lead dev wasn't willing to take the reigns.
I wouldn't have minded trying a bunch of different things and having them fail. At least then we'd be doing something, you know? But instead we sat around, trying to squeeze any kind of goal from the higher ups, until I finally had enough and found a much better job.
It wasn't enough to convince me to give up software development. But boy, did it sure come close. -
Oh, boy, prepare for the shit to fly at your face at light speed. Here it comes!
Been working for 6 weeks at this new company now. But at a department that has nothing to do with the job in my contract. Went to the boss and asked how long I have to do this the first week and he said "It will be 4-8 weeks. After this (department A) you'll be placed in department B". I was like "Ok".
6 weeks pass by and there's no sound from him. Went to his office and complained that something slowly needs to happen (changewise). He agreed and I went back to work.
Few hours pass by and my coworker gets a call from him that I will be working at department C from now on with no more information (such as end date) given. My coworker told me that and I asked if he didn't tell my coworker about the end date or any change of plans regarding department B. My coworker didn't know anything.
After the work ended I went to the boss again to ask him why there was this sudden change that he could have told me before in today's meeting or if this sudden change will interfere with our old plan. Instead he passive aggressively told me that he already told me that I will be placed at department B in 2 weeks.
No shit, Sherlock. I already fucking knew that you told me that. I just wanted to know if this sudden change changed our old agreement.
This company is so fucking unorganized. Jesus!4 -
Last day in the office. I started remembering good old memories. Felt nostalgic and doubted my new job as they were not giving rise as per my expectation.
Then, my manager comes up with his divine improvement in the good working site (not for me but for other dev).
I felt sorry for my fellow mates and started praising my new job.1 -
I remember at a company that I was working as a Drupal developer, I had finished building a website (both designed and developed it) using Drupal 7. I was very satisfied with the result and the way the company was operating, I had to show it to the project manager and he would say if it was OK to show it to the boss and then I would contact the client to say that we are finished.
When I showed it to the PM, he provided some changes from his personal "I know everything" book and after I made them, we both went to the boss' office. Keep in mind that I had built the website following the clients notes and preferences (custom sliders, certain color swatches etc.) and I was on point.
So, after we entered the office, we sat and I was pumped to hear good news. But, not a minute passed since the page loaded and the boss was clearly unhappy with the result, and more specifically with the changes that the PM provided (not even my fault). When he finished talking, I tried to explain that I followed exactly what the client said and executed accordingly, without the changes that the PM had put on the table. Suddenly, the boss' face was angered and turning red(ish). He started shouting at me and saying that I was not experienced enough to know what I am saying (I was 21 years old at the time), and that they had the experience to criticize if the website was ready or not and if the client would like it, pointing out that I wasn't capable of knowing what the client needed.
I was bursting in my chest, I felt a fire burning with anger and righteousness, but I turned my face down and apologized. It SUCKED! It felt SO bad. I took the notes that he said (which changed 90% of the website's design) and after that I called the client.
I felt some kind of vengeance when the client started shouting at the PM, when he saw the website. He yelled and said that, the design that the boss chose, was not remotely close to what the client had requested.
Next day after I finished the website with the design I had provided, the boss was looking at me like a (proud) wet cat, saying 'well done' but not another word, while entering his office.
Well, at least the client was happy at the end! That's all that matters, right?4 -
It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.
New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.
Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.
Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.
Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).
In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.
Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.
Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.
Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.
Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.
tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.
I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end... -
I got a median-pay front-end job through a contractor (after a contract from hell...but yeah I didn't learn...) and I'm getting zero assignments after a month and nobody seems to know what my role is.
I'm one month in, and every week I have to email my boss to remind her to sign my paycheck, which is stressful because I'm charging for my time because my assignments are like "Research this" or "look at this Wordpress theme or brand guide". The team never communicates but once a week, and I'm beginning to believe that I'm not a good fit for the team because they are impossible to get a hold of and the sysadmin won't give me access to anything even when I CC my boss. (I don't want to grief this guy...) Despite this, I've been told privately by higher-ups on a few occasions that they plan to hire me full time by November...
My SO thinks that the reason people are so dodgy toward me is because they literally do nothing and I'm breaking the flow of that by asking for things. I'm used to agency output, which can be toxic and where everything is 'due yesterday', and I'm watching this team work on assignments ten times slower than normal. ("You want to change a phone number on a website footer? You'll get it next week...maybe." I can't step on toes because I don't have access...) I'm perfectly fine with having to wear several hats at a low-stress job, but I can't even get my first assignment and I'm still being asked who I am in weekly meetings, or asked things like, "Would you even be willing to relocate here?" (I actually live DOWN THE STREET FROM THE OFFICE!! WHY DO I HAVE TO BE REMOTE? Why am I being asked this question?) It feels like my boss impulse hired me, with zero input from the team, and had no real reason to hire me in the first place...
It could also be another issue: Yeah, my experience is in PHP/JS/React, "but here have a seven year old .NET project and a company laptop with zero documentation and make this form import data to a database we know nothing about." Lead dev won't even talk to me.
I feel like a joke.2 -
Don't feed the pigeons.
A cautionary tale.
When you feed the pigeons they keep coming back. They don't stop pestering you for help, and they don't ever listen to you.
I gave my father-in-law my old laptop, and installed the latest version of Office 2016 because I'm a nice guy.
Now, every week at family dinner there's something he needs me to help him with.
Mind you, his previous computer had Windows XP and the one I gave him had Windows 7. So it was quite the texh upgrade for him.
Except one of his octagenarian siblings wrote a family recipe book, and wrote it in Word Processor. (because Old People!) Well fuck of course it has pictures, clip art, special formatting, vertical and horizontal lines. It worked fine on XP because Word Processor was supported by XP.
The following is me explaining to him over the phone why his recipe book wouldn't load into Word. I was in his house picking up 2000 rounds of ammo for my and my wife's pistols (target practice) while he was out and about.
FIL: "It's the link on the desktop. It comes up in Word on the old computer but when I tried to put it on the new computer it wouldn't work. I used a thumb drive."
Me: "Okay well I tried to..."
FIL: "I don't know why it would work in Word on one computer and not the next."
Me: "Okay, well I clicked on the link to the file on your old desktop and it opened in Word Processor, not Word."
FIL: "No it opens in Word on the old computer, but it won't open on the new one."
Me: "It opens in Word Processor on the old computer, it won't open in Word on..."
FIL: "Which computer are you sitting at? The old one is on the left." (as if I wouldn't recognize the computer I had for three years and just gave him a month ago!)
Me: "The old one."
FIL: "Okay so it should open in Word on the old computer."
Me: "It won't. It will open in..."
FIL: "I was thinking maybe it had something to do with a screen that popped up when I logged in to the new computer. Something about antivirus software?"
Me: "It will open in Word Processor on your old computer, but it isn't formatted..."
FIL: "Yeah, it's a '.-w-p-s' file so it should work in Word."
Me: "Word Processor is a different program from Word. This opens in Word Processor."
(long silence)
FIL: "So which one do I have?"
Me: "You have Word Processor on the old computer."
FIL: "So how do I get Word Processor on the new computer?"
Me: "You don't. It is defunct software, it was discontinued ten years ago. You can try to get a converter online, but there's no guarantee it'll work."
FIL: "Alright, I'll be home in a few minutes. I'll take a look then."
This was at 10pm last night, and I'd been out all day since 7:30am. He still didn't believe me that the book was written in Word Processor until I showed him the different startup screen for Word Processor, where it says "Word Processor" plain as day.
I fed the pigeon. And it looks like there's more of this to come.
3 -
I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.
So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.
I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.
Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.
This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?
And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...
I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?
I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.
And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?
This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.
There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.
I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.
Man, I don't want to go to work today.6 -
I started noticing something about startups here. They all think they r innovative and full of fresh ideas, but they all just copy bigger companies. My old coworker started a small web dev company and they are using php with react, the company ladder is the fucking same as anywhere else.
I noticed these as i was collecting ideas for a company (if i write that word again pls shoot me). So far we are thinking
0) no, or minimal local storage, we would have a github subscription, jira cloud, vps
1) no strict hierarchy, ultimately the ceos would make the decisions but in every meeting we would include even the interns
2) the stack would not be set in stone, java spark and vuejs are good starting points but frameworks exist to serve a purpose
3) like 2-3 days office time per week, if someone wants to work from a café, why not2 -
My new home office.
I haven't posted on DevRant in a while so thought I would share my new home office set up.
My old set up was great. Dual screen standing desk, fast desktop and great monitors.
Since having a new baby a few months back, the home office is now a nursery. My only option is to sit at the kitchen table or stand in the kitchen (I prefer standing).
So here it is, my new office. Laptop on a kids toy box, fit snugly between chopping boards and tomatoes.
And hey, I don't actually mind at all, I love my family.
Just remember that when life gives you tomatoes 🍅 ...
5 -
My programming desk created from stuff lying in office.
Under pizza boxes is old not working coffe machine
2 -
When my old boss from previous company called me to take on a project that their current developers didn't able to finish. I return to my old office like a saviour of the day 😝5
-
Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.
I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".
A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"
The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.
When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"
Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕1 -
One day at the office at whoever built Laravel
Dev: sir, most of devs use php, we can use good old php expressi...
Boss: no, dump all of them, we'll create our own functions that do same job
Dev: ok... So our devs will use mysql, we can use sql quer...
Boss: dump them all too, again, we will make our own functions that dont look anything like that
Dev: we can also use standard...
Boss: NO STANDARDS! Creare every single php method or sql query in another method that does the same job... -
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 :| -
Holy fucking shit are email clients bullshit.
I don't know what happened there but if you thought the chrome-firefox-ie-egde gaps back in the days were sick - let me tell you.. email clients are made by the devil himself. All of them. All of them? Yup. Because he made some of them being owned by apple, working beatuiful and no weird stuff.
But on the same end he made some of them owned by microsoft and their office Studios. They use the word engine to render html emails. Read this again. Read it without starting to cry in agony.
But thats not enough. Let's make some of them use an ie-engine and the mac os variants going to use some webkit based renderer. This way there will be no valid ruleset to make it look good on all of them, isn't this great??
Now this might be hell already. But lets pour more salt into these wide opened wounds.
Let there be Germany and United Internet, owning trash like Web.de and GMX, whose android clients going to work completely different across Android and app-versions!
Once you've mastered these, let me introduce you to gmail. Lets take only the body node of your email and do some fuck up with it, so you have to display a non-responsive variant on mobile.
Now you might be thinking "but there are web-based clients, they'll do good ain't they?" Long story short: fuck you.
Not enough.
Let's go back to ms.
Hey dude lets make it possible to scale up your whole system. So old people can read shit better. And now the funny part: let's make it so that the word rendering engine, rendering emails goes completely mayhem on your mail, so it looks like a completely different thing! (:
If you ever receive a newsletter in your inbox and that shit looks like it's planned to look like.. appreciate that shit. Sacrifice a virgin as thanksgiving for it.
TL;DR:
E-Mail needs to die. I'm doing this for over 2 years now and this shit needs to stop asap.4 -
!tech
recently i have been realising that i am utterly lonely. their isn't a group of people in life (apart from my parents) who aren't either paid to be with me (i.e office colleagues) or i am paying to be with them (i.e gym) and its very sad.
i don't have any siblings. the relatives are on sour terms, so no one visit. my parents are mostly loveless and the whole family is just focusing on sustaining than living or enjoying. i recently had some arguments with my friends and now they too are not on talking terms. .
I am a 25 year old, short , somewhat chubby guy in the most boring and safe field with no interesting interests except an average guy stuff ( cars, stocks, tech, career, sports... things that guys usually discuss).
I have been told on face that my vibe isn't interesting and i can honestly accept that . i myself wouldn't want to be with someone like me. if you are girl, then i will probably be talking to you for 30 seconds of joke-cum-fun-cum-serious-cum-caring stuff( i usually have 1-2 lines of witty stuff prepared) before going all silent and boring you the fuck out.
the next convo will be followed by an even dumber sentence but i will try to end it with a geeky joke or reference and a small laugh prompting you to also smile or fake laugh. and if you did that, then i will be desperate to keep you laughing, but my sentences will keep on getting more dumber and boring until you leave and categorise me as the most boring idiot/ "nice guy" you met. ( and meanwhile i am at the mental stage where i love you as the most precious thing of my world and imagining kids and life with you)
I can't care for anyone. I have seen too much parent fights, empty walls, money issues to understand how to care for anyone . my life is focused and sad.
shall i go on giving chocolates to everyyone in office to be popular? shall i ask a random gorl on the stret for her phone number? shall i start strolling in the park and try to talk to people? honestly, if i were a girl and someone does this to me, i would be shit scared and creeped out than falling for that guy.
then how the fuck i land myself into someone who wants to be with me? do i even want someone to be with me? or is loneliness the only thing i want?
i feel pretty okay for the most part of the day in this loneliness, except at some weird times like when am eating a platefu9 of chinese alone in some shop, or at night when i lock the door of a 9x9 large room and realise that i am the only one here.
i was once excited to grow up and do grown-up stuff like drive a car, take a solo tour, goto vaccination in every few days, be adventurous . but that has changed . i did all these things when i had people in my life. i somewhat felt motivated to do those, seeing that there were people who wanted to be with me during/after these things and care about me. now it just feels pointless.9 -
TLDR: I need advice on reasonable salary expectations for sysadmin work in the rural United States.
I need some community advice. I’m the sysadmin at a small (35 employee) credit card processing company. I began as an intern and have now become their full time sysadmin/networking specialist. Since I was hired in January I have:
-migrated their 2007 Exchange server to Office 365
-Upgraded their ailing Windows server 2003 based architecture to 2012R2
-Licensed their unlicensed VMware ESXi servers (which they had already paid for license keys for!!!) and then upgraded them to 6.5 while preventing downtime on hosted VMs using tricky transfers and deployments (without vMotion!)
-Deployed a vCenter server to manage said ESXi servers easier
-Fixed a three month gap in their backups by implementing Veeam, and verifying its functionality
-Migrated a ‘no downtime’ fileserver to a new hypervisor host, implemented a ‘hot standby’ server as a backup kept up to date by the minute with DFS replication.
-Replaced failing hard drives in a RAID array underlying their one ‘business critical’ fileserver, which had no backups for 3 months at that time
-Reorganized Active Directory and Group Policy deployment from a nightmare spiderweb of OUs and duplicate policies
-Documented the entire old network and now the new one as I’ve been upgrading this
-Audited the developers AWS instances and removed redundant machines, optimized load balancing on front end Nginx servers, joined developer run Fedora workstations to the AD domain and implemented centralized syslog monitoring on them.
-Performed network scans and rewrote firewall exceptions to tighten security
There’s more, but you get the idea. I’ve now been tasked with taking point on an upcoming PCI audit which will be my first.
I’m being paid $16/hr US, with marginal health benefits. This is roughly $32,000 a year, before taxes.
I have two years previous work experience managing a third party Apple repair facility (SimplyMac) and every Apple certification for warranty repair and software troubleshooting. I have a two year degree in general sciences, with about 4 years of college credit (Two years of a physics education and two years of computer science after I switched focus) I’m actively pursuing a CCNA and MCSA server 2016 with exams paid for and scheduled.
I’m going into a salary negotiation in two months. What is a reasonable salary to request, from your perspective, for someone in my position?
Thanks in advance!6 -
I really love my mother but.
A couple of weeks ago she asked me for advice regarding a laptop. She wanted something cheap for office and stuff.
Since I know her I exactly knows she needs extreme fast boot and responsiveness. She'll go all hulk rage if the laptop doesn't boot in less than 30 seconds.
Told her to get something with ssd since storage is no issue and 4gb ram with an decent older I5. Took a whole day going through stores in my area and online to find good deals. Send her everything I found. Really good laptop for under 500€ I would've killed for.
Fast forward. She bought some 300€ shit laptop because it had 1tb memory. She didn't ask for advice just bought the cheapest that would read decently description wise.
Now she is raging all day and bitching about it being so slow and I should fix it for her since I'm an it guy etc.
Looking at the specs I nearly started to vomit. She seriously bought a laptop worse than she already had. Old i3 2gb ram 5200rpm HDD.
I told her she should return it because it is shit. But no. She insists that since it's newer it is better and I am only a lazy fuck who doesn't want to be bothered to do her a favor.
Offered the best thing I could think of. Told her I'd install Linux on it for her and teach her how to use it.
Explained it would run more smoothly since she refused to take that shit laptop back. But no. Of course she insists on using windows 10....
FUUUUUUUCK. I love my mother but seriously I'm about to explode.5 -
I need to convert lots and lots of lengthy hard-coded entities into backend objects, as I'm tired of pushing new commits every time something superficial needs to change.
Also, I need to figure out continuous integration. The guy who was going to help with that just left the company, and I was using his eventual forthcoming help as an excuse not to take responsibility for learning about it myself.
I need to learn golang and start converting some code to it, to see if the performance compares to the perl that's currently in place. Perl is brilliant, but aside from me, only old people know it, at my office. That definitely creates a longterm supportability issue.2 -
Back in the old days, ie. before facebook, I used to save all my funny email attachments to a folder. I got talking to one of the support guys. Seemed a nice fella. So, I network shared my folder and told him to how to connect. I did suggest that he probably shouldn't share it with everyone else in support as some of the material was a tad risqué.
I realised he hadn't taken notice of this advice when I walked in the office and all the support PC CD drives were randomly opening and closing and the PCs playing farting noises. (Anyone remember that?)
I had to go round all the PCs and kill the process.
I then returned to my own machine and disconnected the shared drive. -
Hey! This is a followup to my last story.
TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.
First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.
Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.
One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.
The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.
I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.
Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.
Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...
Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.
One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.
I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...2 -
I have a really old Toshiba NB200-10P notebook with Intel Atom CPU and 2 gigs of RAM and 32 bit architecture... It was made for Windows XP, and now it barely runs Windows 7... So I'd like to give new life to this old piece of hardware with Linux (for basic tasks like Office, and maybe coding with Notepad++)...
I really like Manjaro, but after they ditched 32 bit support, the Manjaro-32 community project seems a bit unstable...
So, could you devs please recommend some reliable - and somewhat good-and-simple-looking - Linux distros?
20 -
Postman Rant
wow just wow ! just got turned my home internet off by the cable company. And they are right to do !
I apparently didn't sent them their money. But why didn't I ?
Im the typo guy who likes a bill in any type and then pay it. Sorry for beein old fashioned there. Now this lack of human intelligence aka. my postman didn't brought me them. Instead I always receive others Bills and shit( ok sometimes he drops it right ). Does he think the people
in this house live in a fuckin hippie community or some
shit where we all are one system. WTF ????
But my revenge will come you giant shitpile, except from reporting you to your office.
You FUCKED with my internet connection. That's personal2 -
Bought myself a standing desk (one that rests on top of an existing desk), a new chair with good lumbar support and a few other office bits and pieces before the end of the tax year in the UK. I didn't think I'd be able to put them through my Ltd Co next year because of IR35 changes, but they have been delayed now.
The only thing I don't have yet at home is dual monitors. Otherwise the setup feels great. 30 Mins sitting followed by 30 Mins standing is doing wonders for my old back
3 -
Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.
The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.
Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.
That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.
The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.
The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files
If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.
Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.1 -
Last week I had to make a presentation with two others before finishing school, to test our "competence while working with other people".
My old MS Office license expired, so I thought I could make a presentation with HTML.
Me and the two others met so we could discuss what each of us did for the presentation so far.
"Dude why are you opening your browser and not PowerPoint"
"You'll see"
I showed them the presentation and then the file behind it so we could edit the content.
"Dude wtf is this"
They ended up just sitting at their phones and I did all the work, one week later we had to present "our" work to the teachers.
"So, who worked exactly on what?" the teachers asked, and while the two others were struggling to tell them what they did, I gave the teachers a small glimpse at the file.
I ended getting the best grade and saving my graduation, while one of the others has to go to school again. :D3 -
So some people will be happy, but LibreOffice 6 will introduce a MS Office 2007-like ribbon thing.
It's optional for people who prefer the old version, but it may bring more people into LO. That's cool.
source: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/...1 -
In response to https://www.devrant.io/rants/334693
Resume is updated. Had an old HR co-worker friend reach out. Had a tour of the office. Introduced to the hiring manager. Scheduling a coffee with my potential boss. I really want this!3 -
So, idk if I told you guys yet but I'm a web dev intern.
Recently the company I work at doubled in size and so this was the result...
Here's what my weekend looked like:
Friday:
0830: Math exam at school
1005: Get on the public transportation
1100: Arrived at internship
1130: Get started on setting up 8 new PC's
/*realize I have to do them one by one, clean window installation, office, updates, and some random software. Internet connection sucks, so one PC at a time it is.*/
2130: bus ride home.
Saturday:
0900: Get on public transportation to work
1000: Arrive and start finishing up PC's
1600: Start moving old pc's to new room and install new pc's
2130: Get on bus ride home
Sunday:
0830: Get call from second job asking me to do some stuff.
1100: be done with second job
1400: Get on public transport to work
1500: start cleaning up old pc's for reuse
2130: Go home
And today we finished installing everything.
I've spend 17 hours of my weekend at internship. Guess who's taking Wednesday and Friday off? -
We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?
Well... It's not all white and black...
As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...
Let me take an example:
Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.
Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.
So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.
A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.
So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.
Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?
Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?
---
Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.6 -
Fun fact. I work for a 20-year old company that does software which mostly does print outputs. 95% of our clients actually use it specifically and exclusively to print their invoice runs. There are over 25 printers in this office, 5 of which are within chair-rolling distance of my desk.
I don't know how to use or fix any of them. I must be a *really bad* developer. >.<3 -
Debugging WebRTC is pure hell.
For starters, it's JavaScript, so you know this isn't gonna end well. Second, it's still in kinda beta phase for some browsers so you gotta add polyfills. Let's talk compatibility now. During normal days, yeah, I could ask for a couple of computers in the office, each using a different browser. But, covid. One browser mishbehaves and doesn't wanna share the camera with the other browser, so I can't really test a connection with the only 1 computer I have. I can't take my partner's computer all day to debug.
Solution: ask the marketing department or even the execs to video chat with you to test it on a staging server. So I push my changes to the server, wait for them to build, call my lab rat, check all the bugs, clean the code, push the changes back up. No fancy breakpoints. I'm doing the old style like my great uncle did. Oh wait no, he was pretty intelligent, but my lab rat isn't. They probably don't know what a console is. So no baby I'm not only talking about console logging the problems, I'm talking `alert` the heck out of the bugs - okay no, I'll just display the objects in the middle of the screen. The screen is my console.1 -
So I've been hired as a senior software developer with all the tags included (mentoring, innovating, pushing forward changes) for a company that is trying to move away from waterfall development (yup, it's 2019 and this exists) to a more iterative workflow.
I was initially hired and sent out to do some "field work" abroad for 3 months and then worked "remotely" from the local office with our field partners.
During all this time it seemed that my ideas go through smoothly, there was a lot of chatter about how things are moving forward, how new projects, innovations and new methodologies are implemented.
And yet, after my "remote" work has finished and I have to do things locally more, all of the skeletons fell out. It's just talk, nothing seems to be changing at all and yet any attempts to talk with the brass is like hitting a brick wall.
Not only that, I've been handed a 12 year old project with no possibility to refactor, no technical documentation, very few comments and in a terrible style.
The atmosphere in the company is odd as hell. People are either not very initiative, nor they seem to really care about all of the "changes" that "should be happening".
It almost feels that I've arrived in a company that still lives in 2007 more or less.
Should I quit, or perhaps it's a little "too soon" (have spent 7 months in the place already)? What I don't want is to get in the same train again (work for a company for 8 - 12 months, feel burned out because of the divergence between actual things done and "plans" and then change the job).5 -
Recruiter called me to present me a job in fintech.
Arguing about how work standards are important and that task oriented work culture is great.
....
Recruiter (can’t find any argument): All people work in office. It’s financial institution they need to protect privacy.
Me: AWS on last summit presented show case of whole bank from EU in their cloud infrastructure.
....
And we argued for at least 10 minutes where me was talking about losing time and task oriented workplace with specified goals and listening about how brilliant people are there and how much they believe in opensource.
I started believing they want me to go to work to indoctrinate me and make me corporate pig.
Hell no I am to old for that.10 -
TLDR;
Couple of years ago when I was leading small team that was aiming to deliver new application for company I worked in we were fighting for bonus during weekend. I told my coworkers that I am at work this weekend and try to meet this impossible deadline and get bonus for it cause I need this money. I don’t expect them to come since I can’t provide them nothing more then free time during work week.
Well they appeared at work.
One of directors tested application on Friday and sent email to ceo that it’s not working pointing around 20 bugs in long message so we won’t get bonus.
We closed around 50-100 bugs during weekend and I responded to email on Monday ( deadline day ) that all of those bugs he mentioned are not present on test environment version and he must tested some very old version.
Ceo called me and we clicked trough first 5 from list in his office and everything worked. I told him that deadline is Today but he refused to give us bonus to not discredit his director but proposed double bonus for squashing couple of minor remaining bugs in next two weeks.
We got this bonus and had a great laugh about it.
I also herd that this director called his qa to tell them it’s impossible of what we did.
Well those were funny times. I was young, earning shitty money and had nothing to lose. -
I work remotely for a team that works together in an office, and this morning on the conference call a team member said
"one thing i think we need to do with this is stay on task, because while these things that have been added are cool we don't need to be doing anything not outlined in the MVC requirements"
Okay first of all -- this is a completely foreign technology to this team. It's not like I diddled around adding fancy animations and no function. The problem working in a new technology with an old mindset is assuming that it's going to move linearly from step 1 to step 2. And that drives me fucking insane.
- Progress in paid contracted work is done by staying on task.
- Progress in research isn't done linearly. You have to try shit -- and figure out what doesn't work.
I feel bad because I'll chime in and shoot down ideas with a fucking guided missile because I know the answer and I've done the fucking research -- I'm not a dick about it, but replying with a simple "no that's not possible, because of this or that", the call becomes silent for 30 seconds because I've shattered their understanding of the technology because nobody has taken the time to understand anything about how this thing works!!
So until they either listen to me, ask me, or learn the smallest amount to get on my fucking level, I'll keep progressing -- because whether the old world idealists like it or not -- that's my job.
Progress.
</ rant>14 -
When I was in School we had one Computer room where the PC's were the school used to 'teach stuff about pcs' (mostly office and some Maya). These where connected to another via the network and reset to a predefined state Everytime they were rebooted.
Since we were somehow able to get into the room during breaks between the lessons we obviously abused the room and played Minecraft in there but since the machines reset each reboot there was not much progress. Also there was no Java installed, so we needed to install that as well (that can take ages on old, school machines.).
Since the machines were connected via the school network I found out how to reboot or shutdown the other machines remotely. That was really funny for me and a friend who quickly found that Minecraft is too boring. We were just constantly rebooting the PC's the others were just launching Minecraft on and thus resetting the whole Java and Minecraft installation.
Got a lot of angry curses but nothing serious happened afterwards. Was the first I felt really badass on the computer tho.1 -
!rant from a support guy
I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know
My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.
So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!
Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.
* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.
After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)
And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!4 -
Some background to get us started...
Just took over the position as IT Specialist for our local county commission back in December after the previous employee left.
Before leaving she deleted all of her emails for the past 9 years.
Included in her emails were the details for certain program licensing the county had purchased not the least of which was 200 Office 2010 professional keys.
Getting into the office this morning my boss says "Hey got a problem for you, we've exceeded the license count for Microsoft office, and the vendor we purchased from is no longer in business."
My first response was Ok, lets go with open, or libre office. Problem solved. (I'm piece by piece upgrading our infrastructure to a more dependable OS you know, Linux.) I knew the open office suggestion wasn't going to fly so I promptly got on the phone with our friends @ Microsoft.
They were as helpful as you can expect when provided with only our MAK # and sent me back to try digging around for details 9 years old with our purchasing department. Who happens to be too damn busy to concern themselves with what the IT department needs this morning.
That will be remembered the next time the internet "Quits" working as they so often like to claim when then cant get an item to add to a cart in amazon.
Sure people just because your chosen shit browser (Edge) doesnt like to play well with js all the time the internet must be broken... -
So I'm pretty sure that when I went all in to Apple's Siri shitfest and turned on "Hey, Siri" that I had to accept some kind of privacy notice or some shit. Essentially, being an iPhone user and turning on that service, I've agreed to allow them to listen to me.
But what about the guy who sits next to me? Are his rights to privacy being infringed because my phone can also hear him? If so, who is the one infringing? Me or Apple?
Apple is just an example, but imagine if someone has an Echo in an office or a Google Home. Or what if you're unknowingly standing next to someone with a Google or Apple device that's always listening?
I know my old Android phone had picked up people at the grocery store before. I never turned on "Ok Google" but I used the speech to text of the keyboard a few times. When people showed how you could go see what Google had "heard", I was surprised to find how many OTHER people it picked up.
Anyway, just some thinking. -
Ugh... some people...
Just left the office early because of the toxic climate. That one infamous collegue is basically unable to communicate without being a narcissistic 5-year-old and was arguing whether we should write a test (I was going to write the test) that would need a single additional branch in the build system.
(The test was for a parser and it should test whether it can handle absolute paths. A simple regression test with a file and an expected output. Because absolute paths are different for every platform and user, the files to be parsed would have to be generated with appropriate paths before the tests were run. Well that would require one single python script and a single line in the script that runs the script and DONE)
Well that guy was unable to focus on his own work and started an argument about whether that test was necessary.
Even though I still think it is necessary, it might have been a reasonable argument if he would have acted more agreeable. But he was saying the feature was useless anyways "everyone will use relative paths only anyways" and "because noone here cares a ratass about maintaining the tests it will all fall on me again" ..
Wtf was this guys problem, I (CAPS) was going to write the stupid test and since when do we not write tests in order to better maintain our product? I get that he worries that the test environment will get more messy, but thats better than having the product code go messy or unfunctional! And c'mon guys, how are absolute paths a redundant feature... -
Old boss: Can you tell me why we need to purchase Mac?
Me: Because we are all using Mac in HK and UK offices and we can share the company license
Old boss: Why can't we just purchase the software license in Windows?
Me: Because it is expensive, and the total cost will be much more than purchasing the Mac alone
Old boss: I still don't understand why we need to purchase Mac.
Me: Ok. (Walked away with approval form. Finally got the approval from UK office)
My old boss was the only person that using Windows!!3 -
I guess my story is not really cool, but okay, I lost my job as a Digital designer (Yeah, I actually have a bachelor's degree in graphic design, I'm an impostor)
I lost it because I saved enough money to travel to Japan and I wanted to stay at least a month so the company didn't like it. after coming back I got a job as a content editor, I just copied old content from an old website to a new one, basic html and css, not even responsive design, then I got really into it, and bootstrap came along, the company opened a new department "Front End" so I got in, I learnt responsive design and Jquery, really loved it, I went back to Japan for a month and a half, keeping my job, I liked it, but I quit.
I now work as a remote front end and I feel stuck, I'm very comfortable as remote, don't wanna go back to an office, but it seems I'll have to, can't find any opportunities to improve remotely, and I feel like I'm missing what the "cool kids" are doing.4 -
Not exactly a story since I was too young to remember, but my parents told me that I was really enjoyed playing with the games my father made for the good old commodore 64 we had.
He basically had two 5" floppy holders full of his own games and programs he used to make. Unfortunately we only have the disks now. :(
The first memory of me using the computer though, is when my father bought a computer for his office (was win 95 with the "you are now safe to switch off your computer" message) and I was sneaking in to play with paint because it was so cool back then. -
Our project manager is a past-retirement-age consultant who prefers to communicate the old-fashioned way, which is to physically pop in to my office asking questions about stuff that isn't even urgent and could easily be dealt with in jira or by e-mail FFS. Way to go disrupting a dev, break my flow and deprive me of my joy of working! He even says it himself: "May I disturb?" My answer is "No, but now that you already did, spit it out!" He's a nice and funny guy, I give him that. But I don't like this particular behaviour of his. I've complained to him directly and also to my boss, but to no avail. This is where devRant comes in, to let the steam out. Anyway, if I have it my way, we will definitely *not* be hiring the same consultant for our next project.2
-
I don't like coding in the dark anymore. I think I've been doing it for about 2 years but I, just now, realized it.
I never even noticed when I started doing it. I just remember that--when the sun sets and I'm still working--I think to myself "ugh, it's too dark in here".
It just seems crazy to me because I used to love the dark. Not in the broody, ooh I'm a hacker kind of way.. just that I worked better in the dark.
I used to choose afternoon or evening shifts whenever given the choice because my brain works better when it's dark out (if that even makes sense). I used to work inside conference rooms with the lights out or dimmed.
But now, I just caught myself thinking I needed a brighter light in my home office.
Huh. I think I'm getting old.3 -
So... about how I fell in love with coding
I was 12 years old when I went to mom’s work because I had nothing else to do. There was an iMac. At that time I used to have a PC at home with a Windows OS. When I approached MacOS at my mom’s office I had no idea what to do. Right before my mom had told me that I shouldn’t delete anything, all the documents are really important on there. So guess what I Did? In order to download Counter Strike 1.6 game I decided to install Windows OS on the iMac which deleted everything that was on the computer! Absolutely everything! So.. my mom told me to fix this after, and then I started to do some research and somehow learned python and javascript in next two months. Thanks to my mom!1 -
Couple of years ago, I made a nice app that i was proud of, and a friend's father was interested so i visited him on his office to demo the app. Everything went nice up untill his damn printer decided to stop working and the very old man asked me for help "politely" . I made the classical mistake and tried to help but i could'nt fix it . the client old man later said he would contact me soon but that never happened. I thought he didn't like the app but i asked my friend anyway. You know the rest , he liked the app but was worried because i was very young and lack skills!!
he's questioned my skills for not being able to fix the printer. -_-3 -
Flash back to when The old mouses had the trackballs in them, pulled the mouse apart and pulled the trackball out 🙃
Coming back to recent times, myself and a work mate printed off small troll faces and stuck them to the bottom of the laser mouses around the office huehue1 -
So, was testing a classic Mac an old friend sent over and realized an interesting convergence had occurred in my office.
In the attached shot you can see the following:
Center: A Macintosh LC III - effectively the last of the 68k Mac line
Right: A PowerMac G5 - one of the old cheese graters, and the last major release of the PowerPC line
Left, under the monitor: A 2020 Mac Mini - effectively the end of the Intel Mac line
The LC III gives a startup chime, but I wasn't able to get a video signal out of it using the Apple-to-VGA adapter I was using. Otherwise I'd be posting a shot with all 3 up and running.
2 -
Been working in market research for the past year and a half while doing a part time masters in business.
I officially quit in a week and will be a full time student and reviving my dormant programming skills.
Gone are the days of colleagues asking why their pirated Microsoft office crashes on then 8 year old laptop. No longer will I be subjected to attending client meetings where my sole purpose is to ensure the projector is working as I am "good with that sorta thing".
Friday evening, I am free!!1 -
Transferred a lot of important files in between PC with a 32 GB thumbdrive. One time, when I needed it the most, it couldn't read. It had the original up-to-date information on everything. Backup files were old and found in either emails, in another PC somewhere else and on an ex-colleagues laptop that, due to poor office management, lost track of where that laptop is.
-
Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.
We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.
I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.
My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.
I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left. -
Dad's office when I was 7 years old. Saw his employees use MS Office. Saw an unused computer.
Monkey see, monkey do. -
It seems like there is a whole another grade of fear — Basilisk grade. It’s impossible to experience it and walk away without serious consequences.
Imagine: I’m barely 20. It’s my first real, official, high-paying job. I’m already a team lead. A big Russian non-govt company with a blue logo. Huge new office in Moscow.
My “childhood” is officially over — I’m not playing around anymore. I’m an adult in every sense of the word.
Several weeks go by. Maybe even a month. Just a regular day at the office. I’m waiting for the coffee machine to heat up, and suddenly, it hits me. I’m here, at the office. Moscow, a city of 10 million people, is beautiful in the summer, yet I can’t just leave the office and go for a walk whenever I want to. When the day is over, it’s already evening, and I barely have time for myself. There are other people around me, with way higher positions, but their schedule is just the same as mine: nine-to-six. My adult life just started. I have forty years of this ahead of me. No matter the company, no matter the position: unless I’m the CEO, I’m doomed to get to work in the morning and go back home in the evening. And then I retire, old and not that beautiful anymore. And then that’s it.
I was never the same after that day. People are plotting my betrayal behind my back. They all act as one. Just out of my frame of view, their heads are turned to me, and they all look at me with the same devilish grin. There are no people — it’s all one huge shoggoth that lives under the office floor, and my colleagues are its ugly tentacles wrapped in human skin. I start missing deadlines. I become paranoid. Next thing I know, I’m at the psychiatrist’s office, being prescribed aripiprazol — a strong antipsychotic that is designed to literally make you slower. Anxiety worsens. I develop restless legs syndrome. I lose my ability to sleep. My intelligence is slipping away. I’m fired.
I have the return to Saint-Petersburg, cariprazine prescription that felt like lobotomy with extra steps, losing my ability to read, delirious manic episodes ahead of me.
It is only now that I kinda-sorta tuned my medication scheme in by going through countless psychiatrists of all sorts. But I sure as hell work at a place where I can do whatever I want if I meet deadlines.3 -
So this is a story all about how:
I went from my brother being asked to clone the disk of old laptop to a new one. My m.2 ssd being held in with duct tape because of it and me having to run a tar command that took over 5 hours to complete.
So my bro got asked by a friends mom to help her with "PC Problems". In short the old laptop was barely useable and they ordered a new one on the reccomendations of my brother. Turns out the laptop he recomended shoud have had a 1tb hdd in it. Instead it had a 256gb m.2. Note: The old disk was 500GB.
So cloning wasnt possible. He then told me, that they also bought a regular sata ssd which was supposed to go in instead of the non present hdd. So I <-Want to emphasize on this! went to work.
Ordered a ssd in the right form factor.
Made a disk image of the old HDD.
Had to drill out the screw holding in my m.2 ssd as it was stuck.
Its now held in with a piece of kepton tape.
Wrote old disk's image on new disk.
It doesnt boot in new laptop.
Spend an evening trying to rebuild boot partitions.
Fuck it, lets install windows 10 (instead of 7) and copy all the shit over manually!
Lets buy office for 30$ on g2a as it would be a pain in the ass to explain the that its normally a subscription.
Previous rant happend.
Brought them the laptop yesterday telling them I did all the work.
I collect the ssd they ordered explaing i ordered the correct one and would take tis one for me.
Still had the 500GB img file of the disk and wanted to compress it in order to put some data back in place.
The tar command took over 5 hours to complete! I havent checked on it yet as I went to sleep. -
I'm really trying my best to improve but the work I'm doing (both the code and the business theme) is so god damn boring that I feel like I'm torturing myself just trying to keep up. How am I supposed to learn and build myself when everything is so dull and gray? I can't even talk semi-passionately about the work I do, its all just picking up user stories with lengthy business specs on them updating old code or writing up some new code to fit some business / API standard I know nothing about. Occasionally I'll review other code from a developer doing the same thing and sift through trying to find some way to improve a project I don't care about. Hold down the nausea that comes from fighting off the mental fatigue as I struggle to find the words to explain how a component I made works in terms I don't understand too people that know and care much more than I do...
I'm exhausted, I'm burnt out. This isn't me, and every day I wake up and tell myself that my salary makes me happy because it gives me the ability to do the things I enjoy and live on my own and provide for loved ones, and then struggle to swallow the lump in my throat as I drive in the cold to a giant corporate office with a thousand other Me's doing the same shit but better and improving.
I honestly love what my company offers me as compensation, I'll likely not find any better. But once I have some experience under my belt and some debt paid off I have GOT to find a jobs somewhere that doesn't drain the will to live out of me2 -
Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.
** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...
Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *
Me: Hello Ma
G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)
Me: It's really nice to he...
G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.
Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...
G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.
Me: Excuse me Ma, but...
G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!
** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**
CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?
Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.
Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**
G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**
CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*
Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!
But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.
While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.
CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?
Me: *Explained the situation to CC*
CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.
Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!
Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.
GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)
Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello
GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?
Me: ... 😲
CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...
G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?
CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.
Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **
G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.
Me: All good ma'am
CC: ** Hangs up **1 -
SOOO last monday I got a new MS Office and Outlook in my office. It's ugly as fuck and not as functionable as the old one we got here, and I cannot install Thunderbird or so...
But at least NIGHT THEME WUUUU
-
Here's a few:
What could be improved about devRant?
Best dev insults?
Your dev machine setup (from office space, hardware, to OS stack etc)?
Dream setup of the above?
Or we could go back to previous topics and do them again, since there are new members on devRant and new stories from old members. I particularly want to do wk30 (Best prank) again -
So today my company was removing most workspaces with USB 2 connections, DP cables and magsafe 2 power cables. This means that my MBP mid 2014 can't connect to the keyboard and monitors anymore. It already struggled with 4K, so my 2K options were already limited, but now the last few spots are mostly gone. In short: I'm being forced to upgrade.
But tell you what: I don't want to. It feels like a waste to recycle my laptop (even if it's company paid and owned) while it's perfectly acceptably fine. And mind that I will get the latest and greatest i9 for free. Yes, that overheating, throttling failure of hardware design piece of shit. 2 coworkers already own the beast and confirm that it gets really hot really quickly. One of them even has daily crashes (the laptop just turns off) and random reboots. A total waste of money. And my future time. As if it's not enough work to migrate to a new laptop (even with Time Machine).
So, fellow ranters, what do I do? I hope I can leverage the second best MBP (CPU-wise) from this situation, unless there already is a bunch of i9s in the office ready to be used. I really, really don't want one. And I think my current computer is great for what it is, even if it's old. It's a really pro machine for my needs (I'm very efficient, except for Android Studio).
I even consider asking for a Linux machine, but then a whole new world opens to me that may be a step too big (since I barely have hands-down experience).
Enlighten me with your ideas, muggles!5 -
rant && !rant
so my company just relocated to another part of the city.
it took about 2-3 months of searching for a space till the management found a suitable place. then about one more month for settling on the details (price, when we move, etc). then another month of just waiting for the space to be ready ...
the actual move took 1 day ... just one day ...
so the new place
- is better placed (for me at least)
- has lots of nice pubs / restaurants around for lunch or just relaxing after work
- has great views from every office
- lots of extra space for everyone
- ok people (so far) working at the other companies in the same space
- everyone seems so much more relaxed and easygoing and happy at the new place
But:
- the ac is still not working (32 degrees Celsius outside, and our office is facing the sun almost all day)
- for the first days we were lacking blinds at the windows
- office was full of little stinky bugs and they still keep showing up when we open up the windows
So, overall pretty great ... so (rant part??) WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO MOVE HERE ??? (both before it was decided to move, about 4 years at the old place, and after)
also, relating to the topic of the week ... nothing code related was learned, much was gained, and a life lesson was obtained: if you don't like something, just change it as soon as you can -
!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.
However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.
I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.
I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.
I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.
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I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs
Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.
Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!
People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.
And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!
I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?
And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!
The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.
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This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.
But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.
2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone
3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .
i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money4 -
My office uses decade old refurbished optiplexs. One of them even runs win7 32bit (ALL the rest or 64 bit) last night I stayed late to finalize some setup for moving the shared folder from a network shared external drive plugged into one person's computer. Over to a system that'll act as a NAS as well as run some simple automation (nightly backups mostly)
While doing that I remembered one person complaining their computer not always booting right. So I turned it on. Made sure it worked didn't notice any obvious issues. Turned it off. Unplugged it. Opened it up. didn't see any obvious issues so I closed it back up. Tried to turn it back on and it refused. Then I smelled burning electronics. Quickly turned it off unplugged and opened.
I think something shorted and the hard drive finally failed or something. I don't know what exactly it could've been but I threw a fit and left for the day
I'm currently in my way in early to swap that computer out and do some more investigating. Wish me luck talking to my boss less than a month in and something breaks while I'm in the office alone8 -
I worked at my previous job about 8 years (hired out of school) and wasn't actively looking for a new one; I had a lot of freedom and liked my boss and colleagues, but the pay was mediocre and I was under a lot of pressure because I was the sole architect, engineer, and programmer for a good number of important applications.
Anyway, my brother-in-law told me that his employer was looking for a developer and that previous candidates fell through, and that the pay was a lot more and they're good about raises (which was like pulling teeth at my then-current job) so I applied and went for an interview.
They basically gave me an offer on the spot and wanted me to start in 2 weeks. I told them that it would be hard since I'd basically be cutting my boss's Achilles by leaving so soon and suddenly (just hiring someone would take at least a month, not counting getting applicants), but they were adamant, as the position had been vacant for a few months at that point. I got them to agree to 3 weeks and pulled the trigger, but offered to help out in my old position for a few months cause we had a big project in progress I was leading.
So the new job is great: it's a much younger office and I'm having more fun and there's a lot less pressure. Meanwhile, at the old job, the project I was leading got scrapped and the asked me to do other odds and ends until, after screwing something up I basically told them I'm done. They got a new guy quickly due to a lucky turn of events, but he couldn't pick up where I left off on a lot of projects: they're going to rewrite one because of it. My one colleague still likes to point out that I left without them having knowledge of my code (besides that I always said I'd answer questions, plus it's been 6 months now and my code is all on a TFS instance they all have access to).
I still feel a bit guilty even though I have no reason to. -
Hey. Can you add excel97 vba capabilities to new office 365 ? I have a 20years old xls file with very complicated macros that i need to run.
And btw, how come a software looses capabilities over time.9 -
Cleaning up my desk at the office today. As I'm sure is the case with most of us, I have a draw that's full of old technical crap that's not currently in use (mice, charging cables, USB hubs, routers, access points, cameras, old phones and iPads, you get the idea).
Found out that not only do I have an extra Mini-DVI to HDMI dongle; I apparently have 3 of them. That's more than I've got available Mini-DVI ports to begin with.2 -
I had this boss once who called himself a sitting bull sometimes. He was about 60, an absolute dictator, strong right wing and building an aura of fear around him. He had this emberassing macho attitude which was especially delicate since he was a protective of the female ceo. He talked to everyone, colleagues, customers, partners like they where enemys and was extemely aggressive towards everyone. Meetings where extremly emberassing because he insulted everyone (except us devs), talked much bs an didn't let anyone else speak - including customers.
He was also paranoid af. Once he talked the ceo into firing a team lead he disliked. Before the guy got to know this, he called me, and wanted me to sneak in his office, copy everything from his computer in case he would destroy everything when I realized he's fired. As if everything relevant wasn't on GitHub anyway and is if the poor guy would be uprofessional as sitting bull.
The sitting bull lead the department like a ponzi scheme: He required constantly new projects with funding for some years to maintain the old ones and their piles of tech debt. Dev team grew and grew but every insider knew the bubble will explode at one point. One of the last projects was a partner project with another institution. Naturally he didn't want us to do anything for this project but use our man power to rescue older ones. One pm guy was employed fifty percent as ours and fifty at the partner. So while months passt by and we delivered absolute nothing but lame excuses, his other employer started to ask questions. At one point I told him, and told his other employer afterwards, that the sitting bull never intended to anything for the project. When the sitting bull learned the pm. Guy told them the truth he called him a traitor and fired him instantly.
I left shortly after and the bubble imploded eventually. The sitting bull retired after an heart attack. From over twenty dev positions a single one remains and his main job to shit down one broken service after another...3 -
-Be Friday morning
-Be me sleeping, I have my vacation.
-Got SMS from secretary that her office (MS office 2013 pro) not working Word, Excel, Outlook.
-Ignored, still sleeping
-After hour received call from her. Answered say I will be after half a hour.
Got shower, breakfast and went there.
-an old error appeared again. Can't open any of programs, same error, can't remember error codes. But it's update or something breaks it, tried reinstalling, but it will shows up again. Quicker fix is repair.
-turned off updates cuz I don't want to deal with this everyday.
Anyway. Fuck Microsoft monkeys for not testing their shit before releasing1 -
En route to free software. installing Linux on an old pc at office. i think the drivers are still proprietary tho
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Hey guys,
I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.
Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.
Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.
However there are some cons:
My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.
Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.
Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?
They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.
All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"
What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.
On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.
Any thoughts?6 -
So. My new machine at work has decided that running visual studio is too hard and our build script has decided that building vcxproj files is too hard. And our one sysadmin for our team of 100+ is the only one allowed to fix it.
Luckily I have an old box that *only* takes 45 minutes to run our build, a hangover, apparently I am going through early manopause because it is hot as fuck in this office, and today is the day that everyone wants to loudly ask every question ever.
I guess what I am saying is I blame everyone else for my bad decisions and project them into my you-me instead of focusing on my me-me. Also I really don't want to talk to the S.A. He is difficult. -
So you are telling me I have to stay indoors from 21:00 onward because of Corona virus? And get a 95 euro fine when I don't? While I'm working 8 hours a day in a small office with 3 old fucks that refused to do ANY protection for their employees?
I'm glad you old fucks are dropping like flies. 2 million of you are dead already. Hurry up and die faster!!!7 -
i come from a very closely knit family and i kinda like it. i am in close proximity to my parents, they are growing old so i do a lot of home chores. meanwhile a lot relatives and dad's business friends live nearby , and the whole area around my home feels like a place of known people. my free time goes with 5-6 friends , who again live nearby, or with gym buddies. this is a nice life, which could further expand with a wife and my kids in future .
at the same time, i have seen the "work" life. my office is in a different state, 90% of people there are people like me who would be renting a home nearby and living alone/with strangers. their main "family"(well pseudo-family) will be their coworkers, and that's also not a bad thing.
in the workplace the reasons to be happy will be a lot (as parties or celebrations will occur on multiple birthdays/ company growths and other achievements) , and so will be the reasons to feel sad ( company failure, teammates leaving, missing family)
at the end of the day , when you are living an office life, you are a corporate rat running for the cheese you are never gonna (or , if you are a glass half full person, let's say that you are a "dedicated work professional giving your 100% to the company")
but here comes the dilemma : with AIs like chat gpt coming around and redefining nthe expectations from a software engineer, you will no longer be expected to be resourceful but rather how much of a corporate rat you can be. ( https://twitter.com/bajicdusko/...)
so 1) is it the only way forward for an upcoming engineer's lifestyle? to be like a soldier for their company , while their family and friends await for their long return? 2) if yes, what is the positi8 aspsct we can take away from this?
PS : what a stupid profession those AI/ML guys work in. they put out their minds together to make a sword which is gonna cut the heads of s/w engineers, their own breed. not lawyers, not doctors, not even the fucking peons, but their own freaking brothers5 -
I feel like a fucking god now!
We run a webshop and we are in contract with the national post office. Every time there is an update to their program I fear ahead of time what will be fucked up again.
After today's update we weren't able to open any shippment list we just saw a mile long error message. After the customer care couldn't figure out the problem, and the suggested solution might take up to 2days, and it is basically only a new customer file, i fired up my good old sqlite viewer friend, to chek if I am lucky...
Guess what! That shit is using unsecured sqlite dbs, so i've had no problem examining and even rewriting the values. So checking the logs and scraping the DB I've found the problem.
Apparently some asshole thought that deleting a service but keeping all of its references in other tables scattered around is a good fucking idea. And take it customer care, the new customer file won't fix shit, because it was in the global DB. I swear i am getting more familiar with that piece of garbage then the ones who made it.
On top of that the customer care told us, that if we couldn't manage to send the shippment list with the program we are not elligible for our contractual prices.
It is not enough that I had to fix their fucking shit program, they also "would like to charge us" because their pogram isn't working. What a fucking great service. (At least the lady on the telephone was friendly)1 -
!rant
Who here uses mechanical keyboards at work?
I have an old razor at home with Cherry MX Blue switches, very noisy so definitly not suited when around co-workers.
Any recomendations on silent boards suitable for office life? I've looked at the Logitech g413 with romer-g switches but I am unsure if these are pleasant to work with.
I am also considering POK3R, Ducky One or WASD with Cherry MX Brown switches specifically for office. Would like to hear experiences from fellow devs who prefer mechanical keyboards and use them around co-workers.2 -
Back when I was a freshman in high school a friend of mine put an emulator on the shared drive, so we could play NES games while in the computer lab. Didn't know better/didn't care. One day I get pulled out of class and walked into the computer guys office. In there is also the principal of the school and the Chief of police.
The computer guy tells me there was an issue last week that caused the school server to crash and it caused damage. I asked what happened and the he said one of the emulators we were playing had a script that crashed the server and caused damage. I asked how much damage and they informed me it was over 3 thousand dollars. At this point I'm very skeptical that the damage was worth about the cost of a new workstation (the old one sitting on his desk, buried in boxes), and afterwards none of the faculty knew of any kind of an outage. I asked for him to show me what broke and what had to be done to fix/replace the damaged equipment but all I got was a simple, "I'm sorry. I can't show you that at this time."
They threatened legal action for a felony of damaging a school property. Myself and the other tech savvy kids talked about it over the next couple of days wondering what would happen. They threatened expulsion for myself and a couple of other kids, but ultimately just got a talking to about keeping personal information safe.
What I got out of it was if they think I'm good with computers I must be doing something right. Now I'm in IT. This is where it went wrong. -
I work in a small team. As the senior dev I tens to focus on important tasks that shape the core of the product but some times I can’t divide my self when there are multiple tasks at hand, so I pass some tasks to the an other mid level dev.
So the task was to create an automation in order to CD (continuously deliver) an order from WHMCS of the (git versioned) product to customers UAT, PROD envs.
To get a background this is an old guy with “constricted” experience in PHP/jQuery/Joomla/Wordpress.
So when we were breaking up the tasks he told me he would like to implement this so i gave him the task as i was busy with core features.
I was like what could go wrong? I know he doesn’t know much about CI/CD but he can read right? He will google right? He will search for CI/CD solutions that do this out of the box right? He will design on paper or what ever and do small POCs right? He will design the flow first before starting the implementation right? RIGHT?
So fast forward to today I had a call with him this morning about some DB staff. And he wanted to show me his progress…
His solution is:
(parentheses is my brain)
1. Customer completes WHMCS order (perfect)
2. Web Hook 🪝 action (YES)
3. cpanel gets source and “automatic!” Init, all using pure PHP code ignoring the usage of the current framework (ok… something is missing)
4. cpanel web hooks(?) WHMCS to send email to customer with the envs initial setup page(?)
5. Customer opens link and adds setup info (ok fuck, fuck, fuck)
(Ok stay cool composed, lets ask some questions maybe he thought it all in a cool way I can’t get my mind around)
Me: So how are you gonna get the correct version from the repo to the env and init the correct schema?
Dev: I haven’t thought about it yet.
Me: Are we gonna save each version to a file system then your code is going to fetch them?
Dev: I haven’t really thought about it we will see. But look on customer init user setup I implemented a password strength validation and it also checks if the password is the same.
So after this Pokémon encounter I politely closed teams. Stood up drank some (a lot) coffee ☕️. Put out the washed laundry while reflecting on life’s good things, while listening to classical music 🎼 .
Then I sat on my office chair drank some more coffee, put some linking park starting with in that order:
“Numb” then “What I’ve Done” and ended with “In the end, it does really fucking matter” -
Honestly my worst career choice was due to the fact that I was severely dissatisfied with my life at the time, so I answered a recruiting email from LinkedIn.
The job sounded great on paper, the office was great, the interviewees were amazing, BUT at the end of the day it was so much less of a challenge than my current job that I was sick of it after 3 MONTHS (for reference, people who had worked there for 4 years and were seniors were asking me for help all the time at that point...on basic java problems...yeah..).
So my only advice when you get the itch to respond to a recruiter is definitely weight your options. Ask yourself "Am I really unhappy with my job, or is it something else?" because it can really save you a world of pain later on.
I got a different job thereafter, but it was sure embarrassing to run into my old boss at a party and he was like "how's the new gig" and I had already left...2 -
So it me again and loviing my life at this tech startup..... i feel like I'm actually achieving something thogh at a slow pace
I know i can give out more to this startup.....but there is this 1 manager in our technical department......FUCK the old man thinks he knows everything and so damn arrogant.... at one time he made a fucking simple error which was fucking obvius but the man you cant tell him anything
if anything goes wrong or if anything isnt working the FUCKING old man is quick to throw the blame on people which i feel isnt supposed to be a mind set of some1 in the technical department..... I get it yes sometimes it will be the person making errors but even when you do it right and its not coming out as its supposed to be the damn OLD FUCKING MAN says you are doing it wrong.....then he steps in and bang....it fels and he'll be like "WHAT? HOW WHATS GOING ON...."
and me silently will be like MAKE IT WORK FUCKING OLD GENIUS
I cant even bring in new ideas and systems into the company......hell be like WE ALREADY HAVE SYSTEMS IN PLACE.... guess what..... no fucking system is being used -
When I was 7, I got my hands on an Amstrad CPC-464. This was my first exposure to code, copying examples out of the handbook. Shortly after that my school got their first IT suite, with thirty machines running Windows 98. I remember lunchtimes spent playing ZipZaps, a game that shamelessly capitalised on the first Fast and Furious films. I learned how to create macros in Office, and after getting a machine at home with Windows 3.1 I also learned some basic DOS. When I was 12 we got our first XP machine, which I spent hours on with MSN messenger and mucking around with scripts. That machine eventually succumbed to my brother repeatedly powering it on/off, something I still kind of hold against my mother to this day.
After going into care, I bought an old XP laptop from a friend, a machine that I used extensively. I mined my first bitcoin on that machine, bitcoin that could have made me a rich man today if I had only taken backups seriously.
My next machine came with Vista, which was upgraded to 7 shortly afterwards. This is when I got a bit more seriously into code, contributing to a game written in C++ (Armagetron Advanced, if you're interested). I also learned a great deal about automation using this machine, and when I got my second desktop machine at 18 (which at the time was still extremely out of date), I built my first working web server with IIS. I've been through four desktops since then, one of which just about survived a house fire.
Now I run a company of my own, doing development work at a lower cost for social enterprises, and developing a SaaS platform that will eventually make me a living all on its own. This year I hope to finally stop having to worry about debt, income, where I'm getting my next meal from and when I can finally be self sufficient, almost seven years since the care system spit me out after conveniently forgetting to tell me I could have stayed there until after Uni.
I am proud, though, of coming so far with no college or university degree. I'm by no means an expert, but I'd call myself proficient enough in a couple of languages to be capable of making a career of it. -
Outlook irritates the heck out of me with its distracting notification bar that's recently begun popping up almost every time I start the god damn shitty application. What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this annoying crap. Our support technicians are unable to solve it, so I wrote feedback to Microsoft. I don't think they are ever going to answer, though. They haven't even responded to another problem with Outlook that I reported nine months ago! Microsoft are reallly inconsistent, to say the least. Some of their products, like Visual Studio, VS Code and Microsoft Flight Simulator, are excellent! But, more mainstream software, like MS Office and Outlook, suck. Windows (I'm using Windows 10) is so so. It works alright if you know your ways with the registry editor. The same goes for the support. If you're lucky, you can get hold of a real, flesh-and-blood person who patiently guides you through the cumbersome process of, for example purchasing and installing Minecraft (believe me, it isn't easy, took almost an hour for the support person to solve. Creds to him). Sometimes, like when activating an old Windows license, you get to talk to a bot and that, surprisingly, works very well too. However, if you report any bug or feedback to Microsoft through an application's help section, you 'll never hear from them. They just ignore it.
2 -
Windows ffs stop shoving your fucking updates into my ass. It was prompting me to restart computer for 6 fucking hours and it never gave a fucking option to postpone the update beyond one fucking hour. So I literally kept postponing it every fucking hour and went for a shower. By the time I returned it was updating it. I had more than 25 tabs opened on incognito window of chrome and atleast 8 Microsoft office files open and editing atleast 4 of them. It fucking ruined my work flow and I don't even remember the locations of the files I was referring. Who is going to open all those tabs and files. Ffs what is wrong with you WINDOWS. I AM SO PISSED OFF AT WINDOWS AND MY UNI THAT DOESN'T FUCKING ACCEPT ASSIGNMENTS IF THEY ARE NOT IN DOCX, PPT AND OTHER MICROSHIT'S CRAPPY PRODUCTS. I AM NOT IN A MOOD TO DO THE ASSIGNMENT NOW. FUCK WINDOWS. I SWER BY THE Old GODS AND THE NEW THAT I WILL CONTRIBUTE TO WINE IN THE NEXT 5 TO 6 MONTHS SO THAT I DON'T HAVE TO USE WINDOWS AGAIN.3
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I would recommend to check:
+ The technologies used if it suit to you
+ Make a trial to get into the env.
+ What they provide as advantage (food, flexible time, home-office, etc...)
+ How old is the company (avoid fresh startup and the I have an amazing app idea)
+ The renown of the company on kununu
+ Why not ask some customers how they experience to work with the company -
!rant
My friend is using his brothers office laptop for his personal use. Apparently his brothers IT department gave him a new laptop but forgot to collect the old laptop.
I feel this is unethical. What do I do such that the laptop is returned to company without my name coming out? I initially wanted to delete user account but laptop has an administrator account. Any ideas?8 -
Short : I'm in a situation where I fucking hate to go to office everyday because the business team thinks I'm their bitch
Long : Exactly one year ago I joined this small company, few months ago all the senior devs started working on revamping the old shitty ERP they have into new one.They put me in charge of taking care the support for a project we work before.Now fucking asshole from the BA team sit on my shoulder every day and forcing me to do anything he thinks he want.Right now I'm doing a data migration from massive excel files from client. It's in a shitty format I asked help from senior devs they said it's impossible to import this shit.But my asshole team lead also support that BA fucker.
I can't sleep everyday normally because of stress.My notice period (relieving period) is 3 months.I just feel like every end of day I wanna kill all those motherfuckers11 -
today is my 1 year here at work
got a new desktop last week
then yesterday bought some UPS for it then back at the office my 1year old partner (laptop) decided to die on me1 -
I have 4 pencils 1 black pen a sharpie marker an 14 year old book on web dev because its the only one my school library had an really shitty school iPad which is my only computer that i somehow managed to teach myself multiple programming language's with an developed my love for code using nothing but an online IDE and whatever i could find online i also have two marines recruiting pan-flits and a business card for the local Air Force
recruiting office an old worn out deck of cards an the antenna from an old baofeng uv-5r ham radio that i had modified which my mom decided to throw away because "it looked like trash" a few months ago even tho it still worked perfectly ...............
Pretty boring desk3 -
Me vs my job at mnc laggards
part 7/n
height of fucking bureaucracy. i feel like being in a government office.
i started my first day with these assclappers on 29th. after somehow managing the 3 crappy days of mental torture, i enjoyed a decent weekend and today i am back to the hellhole office, only to find my laptop BECOMING A KITCHEN TABLE! am unable to access any software, read any mail, attend any meetings!!!
What could be the cause? oh the good old incompetence!
So they have this shitty SAP portal that needs to be logged in everyday from the office VPN to mark an atendence. if an attendence is not marked for 3 days, it disables access the id to access all the fuckin systems, even the ones you are supposed to use to fuckin communicate with!
And guess who was not able to access the shitty SAP portal and had written 4 emails on friday to different HR bitches? UMM, MEEE!!!
I guess I need to take up this new shitty habit of keeping every email/phone number/id/fucking blood sample of every person i meet, because the fucking system can log out anyone at any fucking time!!!
The above crap combined with the fact that they work from a we-fuckin-work where you can't get a decent isloated phone booth for more than 30 mins, i am soon going to burst, and burst bad
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previous crap :
https://devrant.com/rants/6553736/... -
So, firstly allow me to start with I'm not one to use my phone, so the idea that I'm not allowed to doesn't actually bother me, but the threatening tone really does drive me insane. The corporate office environment here is quickly getting old. Am I wrong to be annoyed by this?
[To IT Department Group]
Remember these emails?
PUT YOUR PHONES AWAY. Next one I see I will confiscate until the end of the day.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
[Head of IT footer]
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Forwarded email.
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[To IT Department Group]
I see mobiles starting to creep out onto desks and people with heads down texting/looking at their phones.
Please stop.
What I said previously still stands.
Put them away, or I will.
[Head of IT footer]12 -
part 5/n
me vs my job at mnc laggards
Do these laggards even know how virtual meetings work?
meeting 1: an induction meeting from 10am-1pm . one day ago, the supposed manager of me called to say that he will be in office after 10.30, so i should come after that. so ofcourse i missed the call from 10-11.30 as i was commuting. one would expect the meeting to be recorded but nope :/ .Also, the 1 hour session that i somewhat attended consisted of an old guy telling how he has been doing these inductions for last 10 years in this company and how company takes its code of conduct with utmost sincerity (wtf?? tell me the employee benefits you dinosaurs 🤬)
meeting 2 : a meeting describing the softwares, from 2.30-3.30 . no fucking person is leading the meeting and 10+ people are just sitting their with their mics off!!!
also sidenote: microsoft teams and outlook can go suck its own dick if it has one. one of the shittiest piece of shit i have ever worked with. People find them so complex that they instead have unofficial whatsapp groups for official communication.
And guess what : YOU CAN'T FUCKING CREATE THEIR ACCOUNTS IN ANYTHING BUT LAPTOP!!
And when whatsapp comes into the fucking work life, you can expect an RIP to the P of my life 😭😭
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previous rants:
https://devrant.com/rants/6543145/...2 -
just msgd an old song on my prev company watsapp grp, and my old manager replied, "are u still not out of ur last nyt hangover?"...lol..it feels so heavenly to see him rant on me and now i can reply him back too..!!!
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I love linux because i dont have to forced to do frickin update like windows did.
Because i have an experience after update linux mint i cant even start the main GUI program. After boot only show blank console. It seem linux update broke the compatibility between my graphics card.
At least now i dont have to update because thats an option. The output of update is not different than windows.there is a chance you broke your OS.
But the struggle is when i need to install new app in linux. Sometimes need more than hour to find out why it doesnt work from the first time.
Any help here?
So this start from the office. In the office i usually use low spec laptop that work slowly. Then i found this IDE called rapidclipse. Its very promising with GUI builder and can build cross platform mobile app using only java built on top vaadin framework.
When i use it on low spec laptop hackintosh at office it work well although it take more time than other kind of eclipse and i dont need to install any kind of app again, just download-install-create new project-run on tomcat-work well.
Then i go to home to try this new tool , IMO my low spec PC still have more power to run something than old hackintosh. Because usually i use android studio with no problem. In the old hackintosh it went too long to build gradle only.
Then i install rapidclipse, then run desktop shortcut. Then it said i need to install correct java to use correct JavaFX.
After search on SO they said i must install jdk from oracle.
Ok so i got openjdk in my linux.wtf what is the different idk but dont have time to find out.
I install jdk from oracle.
Than finally can open the rapidclipse.
Wow , this gonna be fun.
Then create new project. Just a new project.
So im waiting. I see the progress at 10%. But still no increment on that.
I switch to other app for several minutes.
Then when switched back th app still at 10% and now is at no responding state. So i force close.
After that open rapidclipse again.
The previous new project can be opened. Yay, i think.
But so many error there. Omg.
So i create new project again.
But, but, i just repeated the first error then close again then try it again for several time. But still same output.
After an hour, i give up.
But still, why , just why it work like this. No error or whatsoever.
Back later i have a problem like this on different app.
Idkwhy.1 -
!dev
So, few people who know what shitstorm I've been through, considering that I've cut off all social media except Reddit and devRant.
I am one of those hotheads who will rebel against anything which is even slightly wrong or unacceptable so after my twitter incident, I've been thinking to change my behavior and attitude, which has caused me and my best friend problems and I let him down and embarrassed and I think he also gave up on me but more to that later (or maybe I've covered it up in my last rant). The point is I want to improve myself, grow myself and for the sake of that I've quit free-lancing, and took a mildly great opportunity in a meteor js based company, I like their office, I join within 2 months (2 months till my support period ends), also I've become quite a twitter addict so I had to shut down my old account.
But I have an idea to learn about the corporate environment and raise voice against them, which in my eyes is an action that should be needed.
Somewhere down the line, I wanted to achieve my dream i.e. to get my doctorate degree, I was so obsessed about it. But frankly speaking, I've given up on that too.
So. yeah, cheers to a new life
var life = new Life(); -
Began working on an old project at work today. It has been about 6 months since I last touched it and 10 months since I began working here. No one that works here knew how to get the project running on anything other than one specific computer in the office...i work remotely. So instead of remoting in I finally figured out how to run it on my computer!
*crash*
Turns out it only runs on vista.... -
How difficult is it to decide for your own future?
It's a month that I'm in total panic 'cause of a difficult choice I have to make about my job.
I really need some external opinions and points of view from other developers, maybe more experienced than me (I'm a medium-junior JS developer).
The situation is as follows:
1) I work as a Frontend Web Developer for a wonderful enterprise-like company with 100+ employees, where the individual rights are fully respected, there are no whatsoever pressures and there is a peaceful paradise-like atmosphere most of the days. I also love my teammates, which is something rare because I often dislike other humans.
2) I received a proposal from a Fintech startup, which required me a long time to complete a complex programming test they gave me. They look all very young, modern, fast and passioned about their job. But they are only living with bank's investments and are not producing any money at the moment. Also, I don't know if Fintech will be a successful field in the future.
3) I received another proposal, from a Healthtec startup this time, which has a lovely mission in the medical field, has received millions of investments, it's gaining some KK net each month but has a team of only 2 developers (3 with me if I accept). I know one of the developers and I remember he had issues of not getting paid months ago.
What's the problem with the first company? I totally dislike the product we are building, the development stack (fully Microsoft-based), the company's view (they still sell and think about software like in the 90's) and how the repository is managed. Everyday there are huge problems that end up blocking the frontend work and the final product is super ugly and works only if you know all the quirks behind it.
It's an old-fashioned desktop app with inside Chromium which should execute some components like graphs, tables, forms and shit like this. Every component is configurable through a property editor which is an utter giant mess of collapsed menus. I also suspect that the company's main business model is based on the difficulty to use this software (because they sell licenses and courses to use it).
There are no modern UX/UI concepts applied at all, nor they seem to care about it.
Each time I propose something there is a huge chain of approval-waiting that end up in a stale mate.
Also, it's useless to show my frustration about all these issues because I count very little in a so populated office.
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TLDR: I need to choice if staying in a Enterprise Microsoft-based and old-fashioned company, but in which the atmosphere is paradisiac or accept the risk to work for a Fintech or a Healthtec startup.
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What would you do if you were in my situation? What's for you the most stable field in the future?
Many thanks for the attention!6 -
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Déjà vu? Have we discussed this before? I think the old horse we beat is still laying on the floor.
I really really wanted this to be funnier that it is. It is not. This feels like the moment in Office Space when they tell the old guy that his invention is the worst idea anyone has ever had.1 -
Update on my "remote internship" (see my post history):
Asked my co-workers (overseas) for help yesterday evening. They completely ignored my slack messages in our teams channel, not even an acknowledgement of my message. It was only after i followed up this morning that they said "sorry don't really know" (this is right before they all go home).
Then, when i get into the office, two teams push broken code to master so I'm left dealing with that until almost lunch. After lunch, I try to work on my other task, but realise i dont remember anything since it's been two weeks since i worked on it. (I got pulled off for "high priority" stuff that apparently my team can't take 5 min to help me with.)
Finally get back in the zone on my old task, remembered id been stuck on that and needed to talk to the rest of team (Who are sleeping at this point).
Not sure what to do for the rest of the day.
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