I’d heard rumblings from my friends in other parts of the organization that there were going to be layoffs coming, so I’d warned my little engineering team. One of my team was vacationing abroad.

When he came back, one of my teammates told him it was all over and we were going to get fired.

He told me that he’d been told that and I said that it probably wouldn’t affect us and that I wouldn’t worry about it (I was under the impression that the layoffs would only really hit customer-facing roles).

The member of my team who just got back from vacation, the one who I reassured, was the only member of my team who was part of the group laid off.

Goddamn it.

I just joined a new organization and saw a single file with 9433 lines of code. Advance RIP to me.

!rant, TL;DR at the bottom

Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]

And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]

and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]

His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]

Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"

Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.

TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.

A few Challenges at my job:
- a CEO with zero tech skills and zero memory.
- a sysadmin with literal brain damage and epilepsy (but he's great, we just have had to learn how to deal with it)
- another (volunteer) sysadmin who we call @God on Slack and who usually only shows up in extreme crises.
- the budget of a tiny organization, the web traffic of a huge site.
- incoherent business logic subject to the whims of volunteers and the loudest users
- a main revenue stream that contradicts our main mission.

it's fun! woot.

In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)

The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.

Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).

Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:

- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.

Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?

You know when you work with an incompetent team or organization? No one
knows what they are doing and there is no competent leadership to set high standards and
people are making their own bullshit up? Yeah? That's my current workplace.

Question: is it a red flag if I'm "not supposed to" blog about tips and tricks I've found at work (not even code level, just organization and general design patterns)? Reason given to me: "we need to be careful about due diligence and intellectual property for our investors to be satisfied". Am I working with idiots?

My weakest skill is simply organization. I can produce great work in a decent timeframe, just maybe not for the project or task I should be working on, assuming I don't get distracted by that email I was supposed to follow up on yesterday.

Fuck corporate managers who set goals without consulting the team as to what they can commit to!! "These are the goals that you need to commit to and you need to get them done in three months!" ... New team. Members come and go (even I replaced one). Low cohesion. Many dependencies. Unclear goals. A PO who's certified in many different ways, but has no damn idea what to do. Sure, let's get this shit thing done in 3 months.. aaaand we're late 6 months. Nice job. Stupid fuckers. I'm so glad I'm just consulting on this project and not a member of this chaos organization.

!RANT
Web Devs - I need your opinions.

To make a long story short, when my fiancé and I first moved in together I changed cities. One day at the grocery store we ran in to one of his old buddies, whom I had never met. His buddy works as a counselor at a non profit organization for mental illness. His friend asked me some questions to get to know me and found out I was a web developer. He instantly got exited and told us they needed a new website for their non profit, and asked me what I charged. Being shy, put on the spot, newer to the industry (uncomfortable talking $ due to inexperience) and seeing the guy was paralyzed I felt I HAD to say yes. I also said I would consider donating the site to them, as I knew my other web dev friends had done that for other non profits.

They were easy to work with and the build went smooth. We chose Wordpress so that they could go in and update the site on their own. I was under the assumption that I would create the site for them, but that they would take care of changes on their own, that I wouldn't be "supporting it". I even trained the friend 2-3xs on how to use Wordpress and make changes, but they ALWAYS have changes every month, including slides and content creation. Being a noob at the time, I KNOW it's my fault for not being more clear on the I'll build it but not make changes thing, and I've tried to kind of get them to see that I'm too busy, politely.

We'll, 3+ years later I've now found success in a different career path that takes up ALL of my free time after my 9-5 corporate web dev position, and am no longer interested nor able to do freelance work, including supporting existing sites. Since we don't have a contract in place, and they've never given me a cent, i was thinking of giving them a notice at the end of this month saying as of 2018 I will no longer be able to take care of their website, and that they'll have to find someone else by that time? I feel bad because it's a non profit and they don't have a lot of money. I'm afraid they won't find someone else nor be able to afford it. The situation is a little more sticky since this is my fiancés friend and I don't want them to feel like I'm leaving them high and dry, cuz I know they're very thankful for the site. I just wish they understood that I never promised to do changes for them every month. Even if they offered me money, I just don't have the time. I'm 100% fine if they want to keep the site and my code, although they really could use a redesign anyways cuz my code back then was terrible. What are your thoughts on this? Is 5 months fair? Am I doing the right thing?

Aaagh...... 2022 this year has been shity for real..
So its now 1 year and I've been a fullstack developer for this mid tech company as the only developer

so I've been trying to get these guys to hire a second developer. and try to also upgrade equipment and these guys didnt even bother to attend to my requests and during my evaluation meeting on friday these guys where down my neck about why projects are taking time to complete i MEAN WTF!!!!! told them its bcoz Im a 1 man army and most of the times Im chocked with the "any other duty" thing and how tha fuck do they expect them projects to be done on time
I'm the only developer some times i get sick 2weeks and where i left off is were i continue from and thats 2 weeks work of progress down the drain
I'm so fucking pieced off ryt now I feel like droping this shity job and find a much better organization
they want me to build them a developer department and they dont even equip me with the necessary tools to do so WTF do they think they are doing they think they know better than me?
so let them build their fucking dev department without me
this has been a fucking stressful experiance
wrote them a later to hire a second developer
I dont fucking care how they are going to do it
contracting or an internal dev if they dont in the next 3 months I fucking leaving this shit

I'm quitting my current job. I don't like my lead, and he doesn't like me either. Our team consists of two people. Me as a Junior Developer, and a dude as my senior.

Our company used 3 different organization chat in Lark.
1 for global developer team, 1 for local developer team, and the other for the operational team.

Countdown 3 weeks before my resignation, I got removed from the global chat room. 1 week later suspended from the operational chat room. The interesting thing is that, my senior teammate who resigned the same date as me does not receive the same treatment.

I still have tasks to do and it is hard to work with teammates who are not in the same organization chat. I also need to work on my benefits which require chats with the operational team.

I already asked HR and they took their sweet time to respond. Approximately 2 weeks after I privately messaged them. How responsive 😧 Even then their answer was vague and I didn't get the what I questioned for.

I'm kinda annoyed by this. No communication, no announcement. This company is just straight up shitty.

Holly fucking crap
After my review meeting on friday last week this morning was called again by our technical manager, accounts manager and sales manager set e down

TechManager: Ok so after our meeting we deliberated with the rest of the management board
and we decided to add more responsibility to your plate
AcManager: yeah we feel that you can be of assistance to the organization
TechManager: Yeah our technical department is short stuffed and since you also do technical stuff we want you to also be taking charge of the department whilst I'm not in the office...
But we have some areas we are not happy and those areas will need to be improved on
any questions?

Me: No
(thinking: ok this is an opportunity for me to ask for a raise )

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

Meetings entire day. Management/PMs fucked things up and forgot an ENTIRE system. They just spend A YEAR for the requirements. A YEAR!!! Just unbelievable. Guess who has to shoot from the hip just fucking guessing things to fix it before everything should be in production? So sad. I just have to quit this incompetence. Just…incompetence. I know it is complex but to forget an entire eco-system of applications is just beyond idiotic. One whole year and God almighty know how many workshops and business travel expenses. I am fucking distancing myself from this organization. I have no hope. No hope.

Never trust organizations who claim to have adopted the agile mindset, saying they use SAFe or Scrum or w\e, unless the teams themselves say that they have full autonomy for the release process. Because the upper management is not agile. Especially in older organizations. Typically they are the ones who will have the final say if teams don't have autonomy.

As a consultant, I joined a team on an organization who says that they're using SAFe. "Scaled Agile Framework". There is absolutely nothing agile in that horrid process.

Agility only happens at the team level. That's where we seem to improve the ways of working. Levels above, nothing happens.

I've been on this team for a year and we haven't released ANYTHING to customers. So those "release trains" are sitting on their stations.

Upper management refuses to green light a product release to customers that doesn't contain everything they want in it. In their mind they have the "perfect product" in mind and it needs to be perfect before it can be delivered to anyone. Fighting them on that idea has proven pointless. They don't understand what an agile mindset it. At the moment we are providing zero value to customers.

The MVP release date has been pushed for over 6 months now because nobody can come to a conclusion as to what needs to be finished before the release. They can't accept that we'd just release it now and keep iterating it. Everyone from the team members to the organization leader to their grandmother has to green light a release. People argue about minor nuances. Semantics. Big manual regression tests are needed to make sure that everything works. When a minor bug appears, PO's lose their minds and start calling out developers to investigate and fix it, and to set up more gateway checks that these things don't happen.

Organizations don't adapt the agile mindset very easily. Frustration sets in. Waterfall is forever.

Does anyone have experience on just "taking" the team organizer slot? My current team meetings are just nuts. A lot of ummms and awkward silences no structure and each runs at least 100% longer than the allotted time. No preparations are made before the meetings. The oldest team member has only been with the company like 1,5 year. I crave more organization

My best and worst dev experience this year was getting a new job.

The bad parts: I’m inheriting a code base that was maintained by an outside agency, so there’s very little documentation. There’s a lot of systems maintenance and upgrades that have to be done because it was never done. I’m working at a larger organization, so tracking down who I need for info can be tricky. I’m the only person maintaining my code base.

Now the good parts: Better pay and benefits. My co workers, dev and non-dev, are always helpful. Since the dev team is small, we are very discerning when we pick up work for the websites. I have more independence to self-learn. I’m not at a blame culture. My role is permanently remote.

So far I think the good outweighs the bad.

Over the course of a few months I have concluded that the newly hired _experienced_ developer is… not so experienced. In fact, it is very unclear what he/she actually brings to the table at all.

How this individual actually got hired is proof that middle management has no clue of what they are doing. And it is poison to the organization. Bad management (middle/semi-upper in this case) is such a waste. More so than the newly hired incompetent developer. I am beginning to think she/he actually lied during the interviews. And I am not alone in my suspicions.

I've really begun to resent working with an organization where everyone above the team has a complete industrial mindset. Everyone seems to look for someone to blame, covering their own asses, and that leads to gateways and checks to make sure the quality is good before showing anything to anyone. Typically the agile mindset accepts failure, learns from it and moves on, continuously improving. Blame should not be a part of it. Failure should be a lesson on how to improve. Damn some people are just dinosaurs.

Ideal dev job would be to work on pretty/girly fashion or cosmetics websites, have drama free and knowledgeable co-workers, decent salary, great organization, external training opportunities, cute modern office, dogs, cats and a cafe on site, a dope recharge room & no talking to clients ever.

Currently having very funny project lead, who gives on the spot estimates for 9 years old very pathetic quality code having Android app in security domain. Memory leaks, bad practices, typos, CVEs etc. you name it we have it in our source of the app.

Since 5-6 sprints of our project, almost 50% of user stories were incomplete due to under estimations.

Basically everyone in management were almost sleeping since last 7-8 years about code quality & now suddenly when new Dev & QA team is here they wanted us to fix everything ASAP.

Most humourous thing is product owner is aware about importance of unit test cases, but don't want to allocate user stories for that at the time of sprint planning as code is almost freezed according to him for current release.

Actually, since last release he had done the same thing for each sprint, around 18 months were passed still he hadn't spared single day for unit testing.

Recently app crash issue was found in version upgrade scenario as QAs were much tired by testing hundreds of basic trivial test cases manually & server side testing too, so they can't do actual needful testing & which is tougher to automate for Dev.

Recently when team's old Macbook Pros got expired higher management has allocated Intel Mac minis by saying that few people of organization are misusing Macbooks. So for just few people everyone has to suffer now as there is no flexibility in frequent changing between WFH & WFO. 1 out of those Mac minis faced overheating & in repair since 6 months.

Out of 4 Devs & 3 QAs, all 3 QAs & 2 Devs had left gradually.

I think it's time to say goodbye 😔

At my new organization , they love spaghetti code, they neither want me to refactor it, because it works. Special thanks to php.

I'm so sick and tired of the human dick head parade. Epic has us register for a fucking GitHub organization and people found a way to abuse the pull request and sending 300,000 close to 400,000 people notifications so now we're dealing with spam that's going out with random shit including someone ripping their ass hole open (picture...). Over 200 emails I swear to god. This is why castration should be legal.

Unsubscribed from one, someone creates a new useless PR.

Make an ASP .NET application for job interview take home assignment.

Try to use docker with it.

Runs fine through Visual studio (not code)

I declare is working and submit to organization but say it can run through docker-compose up.

I get reply that even the basic command doesn't work.

Turns out visual studio does some magic mapping or caching under the hood that I couldn't find in any config in the project and somehow gets it to work, but when running without Visual studio it doesn't have that magic context shit and thus running through terminal fails.

Obviously a lot is my fault for assuming what works through IDE would run through terminal without testing, but I will be angry with VS to make myself feel better >.>

When a product owner starts explaining why the team needs code reviews, instead of the team, that's when you know that the organization is fucked up and business people are the ones setting up checks and gateways for "quality assurance" .. Sure, you need code reviews when 90% of the developers don't even know what automated tests are. Hopeless morons!

I have joined a new company recently and I'm worried.
Really have worry because of my people skills and little doubt on the manager. I mean what do I know I just joined but still overthinking it.

There are people who speak confidently and I feel intimidated because in the casual conversations I don't feel like I can contribute at this point at least, it's been a week only. Other thing is as I do not know much about the work, I can't speak in the meetings. I know that I'm expecting a lot from myself here as I just joined but I have a history of being silent in the meetings and in my previous organisation I could deal with it as I got comfortable finally.
How can I be more interactive with people, given that some are cold?

About my manager, he is young. He definitely has a good IQ that's why he is a manager now.
The thing is, he talks a lot. Conversations are not 2 way, and he kept on saying things without even understanding that I'm overwhelmed. I have previously told him that I am overwhelmed, he listened, took 2 minutes and continued with his all work related talks.

I don't like the way he's stating his expectations from the time I didn't even join. He told me everything about the organization, on first day, he gave me a 2 months rough expectations of me. I don't agree with all the points he makes but it doesn't seem plausible for me to interrupt and say my thing. For example when he stated his expectations, I should have stopped him and politely tell that it's too soon we can discuss these things in upcoming weeks. But just because he continues rambling, I can't say it. It seems a small thing but I know it's not proper conversation and will create issues for me. As I have had similar kind of manager before, who used to ramble and didn't stop talking. But couldn't understand my problems etc.