I love listening to music and reading on the train every morning. On my way to the station, I get a text, "DUDE. ***** committed suicide."

He was a good friends of ours from high school. I remember once he got a few of us to go caving on homecoming since none of us had dates. He'd never finish a candy bar; would give half of everything away. He once drove out to California to try to start over; lasted three days and came home, but through a girl he met he was in Hawaii for a year.

He lived a lot of life, and he had a heart of gold.

I didn't get out my ebook on my phone. I didn't even put my headphones in.

I had lost another close friend from University while I was overseas. I remember being in the city art gallery when I got the news. I walked right out to the harbor, fell to my knees and cried. I always thought one day I'd be home and could shoot the shit with my old roommate. Now he was gone, and the only thing I had from him was a text from 10 days before saying, "I haven't been doing too well, but thanks for asking."

I'm back in another software engineering job, on the train to an 8-to-5, shakin it for the money. I couldn't read on the commute. I just looked out that window as the train car descended into the subway, and thought to myself, "What am I even doing anyway?"

I'm in my mid-30s; too young to be losing people like this.

I'm sorry man. I wish we had caught up sooner. I wish you weren't gone, but I know you're at peace.

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

So my programmer boyfriend chose his career over me.

We made plans together that he will teach me how to do be better at coding and that he will leave his company because it sucks. However, they joined some hackathon and won.

Now, they are going overseas and our plans? Nothing. He chose his company, success, money and fame over me.

We’re engaged btw. Sorry for being so dramatic. Any advise?

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

Minimum wage employers and restaurants asking "and why should we hire you?".

You have 40 vacancies in your area for just your company alone.
You're paying $13.25 an hour when only a year ago you were paying $9.75.

Why should we hire you?

F*ck you, pay me, that's why.

You're not f*cking NASA
You're a God damn chain restaurant with a 40% turnover rate, who's employees probably shoot up in the bathroom on the rare occasion they even get a break.

I looked at the guy with all the annoyance I could muster, stared him down for a good five seconds and said. "You pay a few dollars over minimum. You're job is not important enough to even ask that question. Have a nice day." And got up and left.

Dude followed me and stuttered " hold up. I was just..."

But I was already out the door.

You were just what mark? Asking a dumbfuck question as if you had any leverage at all?

Your competitor *across the street* is offering 50 cents *more* per hour, and has guaranteed breaks.

What, did you forget 2008 and how you treated millions of people as disposable? The little part where you and most american industries demanded passion, without pay raises? Promotions without benefits? The jobs that if you worked hard, rather than a promotion or a pay raise, your reward was more work and less hours to finish?

You assholes thought we forgot about that? How you shipped millions of jobs overseas, blamed it on "automation" (chinese and indian slave labor), and then pointed the finger at millions of impoverished people as "lazy" in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and told them "you just got to work harder and smarter!" Or "just get a small loan and create the next google!" from the comfort of your yachts? I'm looking at you bane corp.

No, now the shoes on the other foot motherf*ckers. Hows it feel needing all *us* commoners? "Why should we hire you?"

No, why should *I* WORK FOR YOU?
Cuz I saw THREE dirty tables coming in. A line of people that could be being served. A line that could have been optimized with the proper table count and some simple changes. A menu that doesnt even incentivize your biggest sellers and a dozen other things your store is doing wrong.

Think mark, think!

This is one of those braindead questions employers paying sub $18 an hour ask, because they suffered so much brain drain from years of payola profits from too-big-to-fail wallstreet bailouts, that they forgot they are not king midas, unless they are the king midas of shit, because increasingly everything corporate America touches turns into shit.

And while were on the subject, stopping bringing in outside management to stores. It destroys team cohesion, staff morale, pisses off people *on site* who *actually know* the team, the stores daily activities and processes, and who are better fit for that role. You bring in disinterested outside management, and it's one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen: these smarmy selfcongratulating f*cks who know nothing about the particular store, have no connection to the staff, go on firing sprees or alienation-sprees to hire in friends, fuck up the schedules because again they know nothing about the employees, and then move on after a few years to greener pastures, leaving a barren radioactive wasteland of chain smokers and burnt out staff in their wake.

Dear corporate America, your free ride on the public's good will is over. It's over.

Now you're in the bitch seat. Come sit at my desk and explain to me, EXPLAIN TO ME, why I should sweat and labor to save your shitty company hemorrhaging money like a bleeding crack-addicted hobo dying with a sucking chest wound from a chicago skidrow friday-night drive-by?

You dont deserve it. Your management and company culture is worse than incompetent. It's full of smiley guys expounding about their passion for customer service while giving each other sloppy BJs in broom closets, a veritable cornucopia of cult-like corporate dick suckers *and* dickheads, proclaiming, no...PROFESSING (hence "professional") their undying allegiance and dedication to their corporate family with the intensity of cujo, foaming at the mouth, or Mitt Romney preparing for a photoshoot, plastic smiles and feigned laughs.

Dont forget to wipe your chin, asshole. It's not Ronald McDonald your blowing, but it's definitely not Gordon f*cking Ramsey either.

Would you like fries with that?

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

Most of things I'm about to say are experienced by almost 99% of developers in Africa including my country so I'm going to make it a more general rant.

As an African developer, life is both exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some of the challenges that make life difficult for developers in Africa include:

1). Slow Internet Speed: The internet in Africa can be extremely slow and unreliable, making it frustrating to work on projects that require large file downloads. This is a serious challenge for freelance developers who work from home.

2). Unstable Electricity: Frequent power outages due to inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment in energy production and distribution, and political instability makes it difficult for developers in Africa to work consistently. Most times I get frustrated because you can experience black out at anytime of the day which could last for hours to days automatically rendering you useless if you have no power backup generator at home.

3). Low Pay: While the opportunities for software developers in Africa are quite high, the salary is often disappointing. Many talented programmers end up seeking better opportunities overseas. In fact I quit my full-time job because of this reason.

4). Lack of Support for Tech Start-ups: There are few venture capital firms in Africa willing to invest in new ideas, which makes it difficult for tech start-ups to get off the ground. It's just sad, you can have an idea and just die with it.

So in summary, it's not a walk in the park to be a developer in Africa, but despite all of that I am glad to be a part of the African journey, having the opportunity to had work at a tech agency firm on various projects ranging from healthcare to finance, I find it rewarding to know that my work has contributed to a better future for my continent. 🤞

When your boss asks you and the senior dev, “how do we get the overseas contractors to stop writing lazy code and feel like they’re part of the team?” And you both respond with “we don’t, they won’t stop and don’t care. This is just a contract. Stop expecting them to love the project”. And then the boss agrees that he gets what he pays for.

...and then promptly says, “but HOW do we change their attitude about this?”

The senior told me he keeps a resignation letter in his drafts folder. He sometimes opens it and updates it with the latest gripes. He’s over 70 years old. The approach of DGAF is ever closer for him.

Damn, credit cards are so fucking secure these days that you hardly can BUY shit with them!
I need some special electronics that I only can get from a vendor in the US, which is overseas. Click click, buy, done. Well no, credit card refused. WTF? Click retry link. No, still refused. FUCK.
Called up the 24/7 hotline of my CC company. Oh yeah, that got blocked by the security system, somehow. We disable that for 20 minutes, just retry. Clicked retry link at the vendor. No failure mail. Hmmm, too good to be true?! Called up the electronics vendor. Yeah should work, stuff is in the warehouse stage. 40 minutes later: credit card declined. FUCK.
Called up the CC company again. Ok, disable blocker for one hour. Nice advice from them, tell the vendor it's only 45 minutes so that there's some buffer. Clicked retry link at the vendor and called them up to make sure that they retry before the time runs out.
LO AND BEHOLD, I could finally pay the shit!!

So I just told my manager that I want to resign my job.

I have decided to accept the offer from a German software company. First time working overseas, full of uncertainty.

I don't know I am excited or nervous now.

The guy that sits opposite me eats with his mouth open and makes "onming" noises.

Also when he needs to call people overseas he goes on to speaker, and sometimes eats lunch while on calls!

I forgot to mention he's incredibly loud, that with my headset (Siberia V2) I at some points max it out :/

Bad for my ears

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

Vodafone, 2019
This is simply ridiculous

"Welcome to The United Arab Emirates. Warning - you have activated your mobile device overseas. Significantly higher charges may apply. While you're here, it will cost up to $20.89/min + 40c connection fee to make calls, $5/min to receive calls, $3.50 to send a TXT and data is charged $51.20/MB. It's free to receive a TXT. (...)."

Not Shure if other carriers are better, but with roaming on this rant would have, probably cost like 10$ :D

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

So yesterday I went to the postal service to claim my package(stress ball). While I'm waiting for the package the employee there asked me:

EMPLOYEE: There's so many stress balls here why buy one overseas.
ME: It's a dev swag I got free.
E: Oh I see. *looked at me suspiciously*

a moment later...

E: Hey, why stress ball? Did someone on your family got stroke?
M: No, it's for me. *smiled*

The after I got the package, the man looks like he wants me to open the package in front of him. Which I didn't do because I'm late for my work.

Maybe it's a first time here that someone sent a stress ball from US. Goodness. Hahahaha

ps. the man looks at me like I did something illegal which is a bit awkward. Hahahaha

Sales guy calls up from overseas and complains website we got developed from another vendor is not working.
Being just the middle man who project managed the website development with the offshore vendor, I had no clue what was wrong as the site was working fine and "worksforme" was not going to be acceptable answer for the costumer demo.
Being an embedded drivers guy, had no idea to debug this, except one:
Me: Which browser are you using?
Him: I.E
Me: try any browser other than I.E
Him: it works. Thanks
Boo yeah

My mother lives and works overseas, and she'd complain about her IT department all the time.
Wish I could get work permit to work there, but I'd have to serve in 'their' military for 2 years...

Yeah, totally makes sense. Nope.

Random.

When you haven't seen your family for a very long time (coz you're overseas) and they ask for recent pictures of you (I don't like taking pictures)...so now I gotta take pics and selfies for them folks 🙄🙅🙍

WTF freelancer, just won a design contest and it’s so fucking hard to withdraw the money to my bank account.

“There is some invalid bank details in your withdraw request, please confirm with your bank”

I never withdraw money before so i have to wait 15 days for my first withdrawal for each withdrawal methods.

The first method (express withdrawal with no fees) was failed because the bank details issue, talk with the cs and they told me to confirm to my bank, confirmed and tried again (only 1 or 2 days waiting time) but still failed, been trying this 3 times.

Trying the second method a.k.a wire transfer, i have confirmed the bank about what details are required to receive money from overseas first so i can prevent some stupid errors.

Wait another 15 days and ...

STILL FAILED WITH SAME PROBLEM

FUCK

This is the first time i regret when i won something.

ＦＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵ

Got my first laptop while I was overseas.

It was a windows hp laptop with Vista.

It was an absolute piece of shit.

Decided to find the people responsible of it.

Got to what a software engineer was.

Boss told me to look in the library to see if i find some books on the subject. Got a Java and C++ book.

Shit was hard af cuz I had no clue what I was doing, but I liked it. Decided to look more into an application wise platform of study rather than doing basic CLI shit. Got into web development with Java. Got a hold of more JS. Liked JS more cuz shit was easy, found about server side JS with classic ASP, did VBScript as well.

Eventually found Python, fell in love but hated the whitespace ussage for block level code etc. Found Ruby, to this day the most beautiful language according to me. Read about why's poignant intro to Ruby.

Dug it, but wanted some other things. Found out about the study of data structures ans algorithms, then harvard's free cs50 course, then mit courseware, rice's python class. Took all of them. CS50 introduced php, liked it, sounded like a drug, was easy to use, for whatever fucking reaskn my ass decided to use version 4 even though 5 was already out. Learned to appreciate advancements in programming language even more

Hipster phase, while studying php got more into JS and web design with more css concepts, wanted my shit to be pretty. Somehow landed with Common Lisp. Mind fucking blown.

Continued with php. Got into uni, math made sense through programming, ok so I am stupid, but not that stupid, python is the best calculator ever.

bring it bitches.

Graduated.

Still don't know what I am doing.

My company took over a project that was previously sent overseas . (PHP, laravel 5.1) so I was pointed a lead developer in this project, when I emailed the "senior developer " from the previous company about version control and code documentation. He assured me there was nothing to worry about . ... I found 450 line methods without comments and as version control I found zip files with dates as the name ... fML this is gonna be a long summer

When your call connects to overseas technical support...

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

I don't want to sound ethnocentric but is anyone else annoyed by having to correct the spelling of variable, class, table name, and other code after it was built overseas? I'm in a third round of combing consecutively deeper into the code to ferret out these misspellings so they don't go into production. Is it too much to ask that the freelancer who says he speaks and writes native English not then turn that work over to a subcontractor who clearly does not?

My employer forgot that I've been overseas for 6 months. Just, forgot.

Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.

Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.

I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.

A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.

I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.

On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg

The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.

I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.

But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?

On Tuesday my client states she will get me one more piece of info I need to launch the site.

On Wednesday, nothing.

On Thursday, nothing.

On Friday she berates me that the site is overdue and demands it be launched before Saturday so she can send the announcement email.

I remind her that I was waiting for the information.

She responds, testily, that the info wasn't mission critical after all and to just insert something as a placeholder. Oh, and that there had been a religious holiday and so nobody would have been available to respond to the information request anyways. Like I'm just supposed to know all that without anyone telling me.

I'm now trying to get the attention of our overseas developer, who is the only person who can pull this off, but he's likely clocked out for the weekend.

I'm so mad right now I'm about ready to burn the whole site to the ground, cut my losses, and just walk away. But that would damage my reputation.

My first dev job is my current job, but I'm leaving it tomorrow to go on on an internship overseas, then return my focus to completing my Computer Science bachelor's degree and getting into a Master's program.

Before this job, I was an office assistant at a small company that sold cosmetics products and fragrances. I had just returned to college after a 1.5 year hiatus and was tired of that job. I wanted to get into the field, even though my experience was limited to freelance web design and a few personal programming projects of which I no longer had any proof, and I still didn't have a degree, but I wasn't confident that someone would contact me. Yet I decided to update my resume and upload it to Indeed.com. I was already getting interviewed at a call center when this local tech startup called, and 2 weeks later, I had the job. We were 3 employees and I was, not only the first woman in the team, but also the first person to ever get hired by the directors without a college degree. Today​, I still hold those two titles and the team is 3 times bigger.

It was a very bumpy ride, and tomorrow I move on to other adventures, but I'll always be grateful for the opportunity, all the lessons, and the best team mates I could ever have. Without their wisdom and guidance, I wouldn't have half the blessings I have today. I will miss them dearly, but I know we'll stay friends.

Here's to better things and to a college degree! <3

1 - Stop working from home and start my own office
2 - Get more clients as a consultant/software house
4 - Launch SASS products overseas to get more 5x income
5 - 6 travel at least 3 times to other states

Building a production-ready app from scratch during a two-week visit to the overseas client. Built it in one only to hear "you make things look too easy". The app never saw the light of day.

I got send to Shanghai with only 2 days of notice, because the Chinese team fuckup a project that's not even mine, and the deadline is coming soon.
Though, I enjoyed the local food

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

I'm done fighting with my professor over my thesis project. They want me to go slower in building my project and we only have 7 weeks to deployment. Well screw you how in the hell do you expect me to prototype, build, bug fix and deploy all this and go SLOWER. YOU AREN'T AIMING TO BE A CAREER DEVELOPER ARE YOU?

I feel really sick this morning. Between the anxiety of graduating soon and my debt...

I just want live for myself. Not the sake of a school or some corporate entity. When this is over I want to work overseas in Europe. Do something for myself for once.

For the love of GOD, if you're an architect or someone in the position where you can make drastic changes to the overarching design of a software system, if you're so keen on enforcing something "cool" just because you've read about it in a blog post/seen it on a youtube video, READ ABOUT IT THOROUGHLY, as in, pick up a fucking book or do actual research. An architect overseas just informed us that a whole legacy PHP application (a fucking monolith with a dysfunctional database, yes, I think someone demented designed it) should be rewritten to a microservice architecture (without a messaging broker, just plain API interaction through HTTP) AND WE'RE KEEPING THE DATABASE WHICH BEGS TO BE PUT DOWN FOR GOOD. So now we're gonna have a clusterfuck of tons of PHP microservices (Q_Q) which interact through plain HTTP APIs (swagger's gonna be put to a test) and all have a single broken database in the center. Talk about a microlithic design. Jesus Christ.

All i want to do is write code. Give me time, space, and stop bothering me so often and I can fix the shitty outsourced code. I can do it, really. I can write a ton of resdesign docs and improve so much shit. But I can't do ANY OF IT BECAUSE THESE FUCKS ARE ALWAYS PAWNING OFF WORK ONTO ME AND REFUSING TO LET ME GET MY HANDS DIRTY.

Stop asking me to email people. Stop asking me to update documentation that isn't for my features. Stop bothering me. Stop. Fucking. Bothering. Me. All. The. Goddamn. Damn.

Stop it stop it stop it fucking stop. I don't care about the PM's dumbfuck braindead statements and always wanting to pick a fight with me. I don't care that x environment is down. I don't care that your shitty overseas programmers can't tell their own ass from their head. I do care that I have the skills to fix it if you would give me the fucking time and space.

Instead of having me do all the mundane tasks that your shitty ape programmers could do overseas, let me have some fucking room to breath and I can fix this shitty fuck of a project and Maybe I can save it before it collapses on itself you dumb fucks

Holy shit im pissy today

3 weeks ago my job got cut while I'm overseas ☹️ only a few days after my grandmother died - talk about when it rains it pours 🌧 but so grateful for the last chance to say goodbye to granny.

Now I'm enjoying the unexpected, extended vacation and gearing up for job hunting... the market is brutal tho. Good luck out there everyone!

So i started an (8 month) internship in January. Team of 4 (2 senior/mid level devs + boss) plus 6 or so other people in our other office overseas. Everything was going really well IMHO. Boss's feedback for halfway through the internship was good too.

First 4/5 months were great: loved the team, got feedback and help when i needed it, wasn't stuck doing support too much, etc.

This all changed when both the devs moved to our other office. My boss works from home a lot and has frequent meetings, so i hardly see him. I have a 1 hour window first thing in the morning if i need help from the devs overseas. After that im on my own.

If i get stuck, even on something very small that a more senior dev could explain in 2 minutes, I'm stuck either unable to work or figuring it out (wasting hours of time) for the rest of the day.

On top of this, since I'm the only one around in our office, im stuck on support every week which takes hours of my time usually. Last week support ate up most of my week, which put me way behind schedule on my other work. (That was an unusually busy week of support.)

Feeling incredibly frustrated right now, just wanted to get this off my chest.

!rant
We've got a small army of foreign contractors working with us both in the office and overseas. Syntax has become the thing that stands out to me the most. We can all speak the same language, but our partners don't quite have the syntax down, resulting in some rather amusing email exchanges. I can't fault them, if the shoe was on the other foot, I guarantee I'd be butchering any other language's conversational syntax. Overall, the experience has been a bit of an eye opener for me.

This one happened to me two years ago:

Off on holiday overseas, just arrived and decide to check my Emails. Easy peasy..."Hey, we noticed you're logging in from a different country. We sent a security code to your backup account."

Welp, fine, login to my backup account: "Hey, we..." Can anybody guess the problem here? Yep, my primary account was the backup account for my backup. Lovely circular dependency.

Microsofts solution: Play the guessing game, where you name us Emails, Contacts and Folders to prove it's yours and we might unlock your account... or not (managed to get it back on the 2nd try)

Thank you Microsoft for ensuring my workfree, email-free holiday.

Needed money for my company, not enough clients to support business on SaaS alone. Took on a 5k / month job building a platform that competes with my SaaS (more niche, less generic). Also sign up new client who that company's owner is part owner onto my current SaaS. Win / Win?

I do a lot of custom work to my platform to fulfill their needs, which is why I ran out of time for the 5k / mo project. I did these customization for free. Losing money to keep client, but also improving my system.

Work gets busy, I need to drop the 5k project. Client is upset I am working more on his other company (he is not majority owner). I return 1 month of funds to the owner and say I cannot continue.

Owner threatens to make other company that he is part owner stop working with my software if I do not complete project. Blacklisting...great. I agree to work with an overseas developer to do it and PM it for 3 months at least. Making nearly nothing from it (now 1k / month for PM), working nights to deal with India, losing sleep...

Other company suddenly folds due to conflict of egos with that SAME owner. Users drop from 16 to 1. I drop the project, no more strong arming me. Everything is a loss, all effort and money lost for nothing. Bad bet..however...

Owner becomes 100% owner of the other company, and of the software company. I transition him to PM his own project, he still uses my software because It doesn't, nor will it, ever do what the one he is building does. Also, partners from previous company break off and use my software again. New Client. #profit.

But holy hell was it stressful in the interim. People's business tactics are disgusting. Stay calm, play it neutral. Win. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to succeed...at least for a little bit.

I was so scared that how he screwed his partners he would screw me over as well if I built one of the modules I have planned for my System, but haven't done yet.

If I did it for him first and then built my own (totally diff codebase) I really didn't want to run into any legal issues considering the schematics he has now are mine, but I didn't finish that part of the system for him. He is obivously highly competitive. Even though he wanted me to, and still does, want me to run his company for him.

Who knows, maybe in the future. To be CTO / COO of two SaaS CRM's in the same space may make sense. But I will never sell my software to him or partner with him. Too much drama. Avoid the drama. Be careful out there fellas.

If you are a creator, people will take advantage of you in every way imaginable. Read the fine print, read the people, document everything. Don't put yourself at risk.

Family support (2 phases)

When I was younger my mom bought me a 486 from the cow spotted company.

I didn't do much development as being kinda isolated in computer land didn't really make that easy to understand / do, but I messed with everything else.

At that time (somewhere near the invention of the wheel) just exposure to computers really gave a huge leg up on getting into tech.

Moving on until MUCH later in life I was working in tech, often with developers, but not in development. That company was acquired by an overseas company, the head of the new company appeared on the white house lawn and Trump said this would be great for America jobs ... so of course they laid a huge number of people off just before the acquisition.

I was kinda done with that corner of the industry, no matter how good you are / who you work for it was an area that just sort of decays in in importance. I'd go visit the developers and they'd share their excess free lunches they got each day.

Then I'd go back to my corner of the offices and read an email about how the quarterly crappy ass pizza party (that maybe cost a couple hundred busks) was called off due to "cost cutting".

By this time I've got a family and kids, and I decide to take a chance at starting a new career and they were kind enough to go along with my "sleep, care for family, school, care for family, code, sleep" lifestyle for a number of months.

And it worked out.

!rant

I'm in big dilemma for a few days. About what to do to my HP stream. It was bought from overseas so it has licensed windows 10. It only has got 32GB for storage. And I only have like 1GB 2GB free space. I am using it for presentation, urgent quick code debug, watching movies and browsing internet.

So the dilemma is should I abandon the license windows 10 and install a lightweight Linux distro or not? 🤔

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Wow I'm jobless now due to inflations now no companies here in Malaysia wants to hire me.

I looked at linkedin realised I am not the only one who is facing this issue.

Most company in Malaysia declared bankruptcy. Massive retentions.

Looking remote jobs from overseas, got ghosted.

Hey @devrant want to hire me to reprogramme devrant for 3500USD? Hihihihi😈😈😈🤡

New year. Trying to find a overseas job.

I’ve been trying to find a job in my field for the last four months and nothing. Today I got a lead on a trade job with a construction and renovation company. I have zero experience with anything they do and their rep offered paid training with improved earnings with increased skill over time. I can start next week if I take it. Less pay than I’m used to but more than zero which is what I’m making now.

Another friend who is a handyman is offering me more per hour and training as well. Just handing him tools and shit until I learn enough to be useful.

Now I’m wondering, why have I been wasting time on a dead-end programming industry that ultimately outsources everything overseas for less than minimum wage?

Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"

"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"

"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"

"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."

"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."

"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."

"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."

"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."

"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"

Look, extra remote team member. If I hired you with the express requirement that you work and/or live in sync with my time zone, and you claim to live and work in my time zone for a few weeks but you're lying to me and you were actually just on vacation here and have moved back overseas, you SUCK. And now we're firmly entrenched with the project and it's near impossible to fire you at this point if I don't want to deal with a whole new developer and learning curve!!!

Fuck this shit!!!
So I've also ordered that 1$ Pro Pack Unixstickers.
They came today morning and when I opened it there was only 2 FUCKING STICKERS!!!!!!! Fuck it! Never going to order again. I've totally lost the faith ordering something from overseas.

- VueJS
- Develop a cross platform app
- Try get job overseas, pref in Switzerland
- be self employed using my dev powers
- make my bike connected to internet. Dev a real-time dashboard. Try to add consciousness to bike.

Long story short I joined this company as a junior after 1.5 years of a break from development. Before that I worked for almost 3 years in the required stack. We agreed that if I do well after 3 months probation period I can ask for a raise.

It turned out that Im doing better than half of my team so 1 week before probation was about to end, I put in my raise request. Got nothing but strong feedback, even managed to burn myself out a couple times.

Now since the request 11 weeks passed. Our HQ which has the final say about the raise is overseas. Im getting excuses about summer: allegedly because of summer some people in the appproval chain have vacations so this process is taking a long time. This is the excuse they are giving to me.

Right now Im getting really pissed off and resentful because this drag is becoming unnacceptable. Also being in a new scrum team filled with total juniors complicates everything a lot. Im not having the best time here. But at the same time I dont have any savings actually am in debts and currenty barely am able to survive paycheck to paycheck to I cant just quit on the spot.

Had I known that they will drag this out that much, I would have applied to other places and presented them a counter offer. Or at least bluffed from the start in order to speed the raise proccess up.

Should I give ultimatum to my manager?

Im hesitant to do that because up until now we had a decent relationship and he seems like a nice guy so I dont want to rock the boat.

Or should I bluff about having a counter offer, so he would speed things up? But what happens if he asks me to forward him evidence of my received offer?

When I was 7, my dad bought me a pc. (in 2007). It had some sort of pentium processor and 2 gb ram. I had that pc until I turned 18. We changed the power supply some ports and mouse / keyboard but that's it. I learned all the programming basics, design even animation on that pc. It would take days to render a simple 2D animation. When I finally got the chance to go to a university and move overseas, I bought my own pc. As a full fee paying student, I still couldn't afford the latest and the greatest tech. I somehow bought a core i7, and with 8 gb ram, no bells and whistles. And now I'm almost 21. So when my friends recommend me killer games, I'm sorry fam, call me maybe 10 years later.

Do you often have meetings with overseas colleagues? Do you notice cultural differences? Do you read up on what kind of business etiquette or anything similar they have there? Or do you just dive right into IT stuff?

As a dev living overseas I video chat with my family every Wednesday after dinner--a ritual to keep the family bond strong.

A ritual I dread.

While my cousin who works in hospitality always brings up interesting stories from her work, I have little to say about mine.

Sometimes my mom complains me being secretive of what I do. Everytime she says it I cry a little inside.

How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?

I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..

70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.

My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.

I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…

My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.

Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.

I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.

As I settled into my armchair with a steaming cup of tea, I thought back to the time I almost lost my heart—and a small fortune—to a smooth-talking scam artist. It all began innocently enough when I joined a dating site after my children encouraged me to put myself out there again. That’s when I met David. With his charming smile and heartfelt messages, he made me feel seen and cherished. We talked for hours about everything—from our favorite books to our dreams of traveling the world. I felt like a teenager again, butterflies in my stomach as we planned our future together.

But soon, the conversation took a troubling turn. David claimed he was stuck overseas due to a sudden medical emergency and needed money to pay for treatment. My heart ached for him, and against my better judgment, I sent him several wire transfers, believing I was helping the love of my life. Weeks passed, and suddenly, the sweet messages turned into silence. It dawned on me that I had been scammed. Just as I was drowning in despair, I heard about a group called Specter Lynx. I reached out, sharing my story with them. They sprang into action, tracking down David’s digital trail and uncovering the web of deceit. With their help, I was able to recover a significant portion of my lost funds. Now, I not only have my money back, but I also have a newfound appreciation for caution—and the strength of community. I often share my story, reminding others that love online can be a double-edged sword, but with a little vigilance, you can find your way back.

I was a bit intimidated going into my first full time job since I was the youngest on the team. They put me on a small project to start with and it wasn't difficult at all.

After working with my colleague for a while, he came in one morning and asked what I'm doing here.

"I'm at work? I work here?", I replied in confusion.

Then he went on about that I shouldn't be working at this company. He thought I was smart enough to work overseas at an investment bank.

Thanks for the complement :)

Last job and current job I got mostly the same way. Current job was done slightly more effectively.

Here is what I did both times:
* Each day I checked all the job sites for developer jobs in the locations I was willing to travel to. I made bookmarks to various search pages so I could quickly see the results.
* I regularly searched for websites of any IT companies or large corporations that had offices in those locations. I bookmarked these and would check each day to see if they had job openings on their websites.
* Every job I applied for I made a folder with the date and job description.
* Inside the job folders I made a notes.txt file with the wording of the job and links to the ad. I googled the company and added notes like peoples names, etc. to these notes files.
* For every job I made minor alterations my resume to make sure it aligned with the job ad and copied it to the job folder
* I created another text document called cover_letter.txt which had a written letter describing all my experience that matched with the job ad
* Where possible I would call and speak with someone to get more detail about the job and updated the letter and resume accordingly
* Finally I would email or post the letter and resume

Using this method I was able to apply to several jobs every day and I was able to reuse and improve on the letters as the weeks went by. Also since I applied for a lot of jobs when someone replied I had the job ad available to look at.

For both last and current jobs I moved countries. The difference was between last and current was the previous time I moved first then started looking and for my current job I started looking before I moved. For the current job employers seemed to welcome my situation and I had several job interviews lined up for after my arrival. I felt it put me in a better light since I was essentially unavailable until my arrival date compared to before when I was unemployed and looking and getting desperate.

The job I have now I was interviewed while overseas on skype and then in-person the day after landing in the country. They quickly told me I would be hired. It seemed good so I canceled the other interviews. Sorry no exciting circumstances.

well, I'm free now. In case you need a freelance software developer with experience in Python, Go and React living overseas drop me a message :)

Being a night owl I feel most productive from 10PM til 2-3AM, but that can't be good for me... Overseas cliebts love it tho

Hello wonderful people out there, I need some career advice and would really appreciate your help in deciding. I am sure you have perspectives and opinions that may not even have crossed my mind.

I am a Full Stack Dev with 9 years of experience. I got two overseas opportunities, one in Bucharest, Romania and the other one in Mississauga, Canada.
Now according to my research:

+ives in Romania:
> Role is good
> Low cost of living
> Money is good and company also provides 2 bed accommodation
> Access to Europe
> Is approx 8 hours far away from my country of origin

-ives in Romania (just as per my internet research when compared to Canada)
> Healthcare is not the great
> Scores low on standard of life and quality index
> Not sure I can think of settling down there

+ives in Canada
> No Language barriers
> Ample amount of opportunities in the long run
> Can strongly think of settling down there
> Scores really high in standard of life and quality index
> Strong healthcare and education system

-ives in Canada
> Living expenses are fuckin high
> Money initially is not that great and won't be able to save enough for my future goals
> Is approx 28 Hours far from my country of origin

Which one would you choose and if you can please mention why?

I need some Dev wisdom for you wonderful devRanters!

I have the opportunity to intern at a large multinational company overseas. I can get flown there and have a place to stay so that's not the issue. These are:

#1 it's cutting edge block-chain tech (not that I'll get to do anything super important) that I have no idea how it works. written in a language I don't know.

#2 they're trying to make a certain application of block chain technology proprietary and that goes completely against everything I stand for.

3# I'm only a 2nd year student and don't think I can handle uni while trying to catch up on a new development prosses, maintain decent grades and work part time at a job a might lose, if I go.

So, do I go?

okay so basically my cousins are staying over and its so annoying?? like they think they own my house? and like i have two dogs so with dogs comes with all that shit and pee that needs to be cleaned and ofc they dont understand because their mom cleans it all for them. then when my grandma comes over which idk why they keep asking me and my bullshit ass brother to clean it. and my parents are overseas so me and my bro has to clean the house and stuff. and my bro literally does no shit man. he aint jokin

So the saga continues…

If you’ve read my previous posts welcome if not please read for some context.

So I got into a call with my line manager today after the intro, without me even bringing it up he goes “so this snr position, we’re hiring this overseas…” - erm right so that’s been shot down, amazing call so far hopes of a promotion dashed with the first five minutes even though I’ve been noted as snr “material”.

Secondly onto the upgrade. I mention that I don’t see any of it listed in Aha! in 2022, so I ask why given that we all know it’s needed asap. My manager goes, “oh yeah that’s been pushed to 2023, we also looking to assemble a team together to do it” - first off why in the world was it pushed back so far and two I already got given the task to upgrade the system by my previous manager as he’ll know that it will get done right, and my new manager has said everything agreed before would stay.

So, why the hell are you looking to assemble a team when I was put in charge of the upgrade and two I was training people up while they helped work on it too.

This job. Honestly it’s turning into a nightmare.

To say I’m frustrated is an understatement.

I hate that I have to take my multi screen desktop apart to move. Worst part is I'm moving overseas and it'll take months before I see it again. Wish I could pack it in my carry on.

Overseas outsourcing has so many challenges and drawbacks. Companies now realizing this and now insourcing development and business processes for quality and real cost.

Just now I was talking to this young girl on her employment in the corporates. I asked her if she learned anything that allows her to deliver value to her organization. She said 'not much'. And she was actually learning the wrong things, and didn't get exposed to the proper tools to get the job done, and the fact that she wanted to take the offer to work overseas.

I was telling her that if she has the adequate skills and the drive to deliver, she can be anywhere she want, but not now, and then I offered her a part time or full time freelance position that she can really learn up a lot under my supervision and deliver with satisfaction. She's not budging.

It also made me thought of myself on why I'm always hesitant to get out of Malaysia and just start a new career along with my peers overseas. I honestly want to get out of here. Seriously. I could have just gone out there. Do you know how much that I envied people who went out and had a good life being employed elsewhere?

But I still haven't been satisfied with myself, of not being able to deliver the best that I can, the best of my work throughout the 7 years of my career, and I intend to stay and prove that I can produce something great and potentially have really good gains before I make my ultimate move. I still have work to do. Unfinished business.

There are several more things that I need to cover such as server deployment on AWS, doing DevOps for web backend apps, and more architecting work. It takes time to learn. That's why I want to delegate some Android work to that young fella, so that I can move on to the more hardcore stuff.

I'm a second year CS student from Spain, and I'm getting my first remote internship for 3 months with an US bussiness. It looks great and the project does as well. My mentor's experience is quite impressive. Anyway, I'm a bit concerned as long as it's a new bussiness and I don't know about the requirements to do this legally overseas/remote, and he hasn't been really clear about that (we're meeting tomorrow by Skype). I just want to be sure it's not a scam. Any advice? It will be apreciated so much.

Applied to nearly 50 vacancies in Australia for role of Software Engineer/Developer. Maybe about 10 of them replied and said:

1. due to current international restrictions we are unable to provide Visa sponsorship for overseas candidates
2. we have decided not to move forward with your application

Waiting for others to reject me too.

Been studying web dev for about 10 months everyday and night and wanted to know when people usually look for they’re first job? I live in Asia right now and would be willing to move back to California or anywhere in the world to get started. What would you guys do freelance, search for jobs overseas, go to Silicon Valley “I’m from the Bay Area” but have been overseas for the past 6 years. Let me know thanks devs

Working on API part of current project, we were prepared with the API specs. The application that we are writing is supposed to replace the old and expensive on-the-shelf application that they bought licenses from overseas vendor years ago. In short, we writes an application that provides same functionalities at cheaper price for our client.

After it is all done, the client mentioned some of the API calls return wrong/incorrect response.

Furios, went to check the specific API call and confirmed that there's nothing wrong with it - all according to specs.

It turned out that the client didn't check against the specs, but with their current application instead.

That application didn't meet the specs they provide 100% (not broken functionalities but rather it was full with bugs here and there) and apparently the client have gotten used to it.

Now, we are writing our application to provide the same buggy API responses.... because the client doesn't want to introduce change to their clients.

I am writing to provide an empty json array instead of actual data....wtf

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

Makes me happy to see people in thick glasses and whores in general that stole from my age group trapped in the lives they stole.
Oh there should now be a manager at the one place I work who used to work in the job or they can just send this person overseas

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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.

When the overseas coder decides to add an external jQuery resource when it's already included (and loaded) in Wordpress and proceeds to mix $ with jQuery calls online throughout the site....

Question for the crypto users here:

Is paying someone/getting paid via a crypto transaction better than getting paid through Wire/Bank transfer, where you're dealing with overseas payments?

Do you recommend people having a crypto wallet so they can get paid overseas easily?

Any salesforce opportunities for overseas?