In pair programming session with intern. She deletes something she shouldn't have.

Me: No, wait, don't delete that, undo.
Intern: ...
Intern: What is undo? How do I do that?
Me: ...
Me: *cringes internally*
Me: Uhm.
Me: Go to Edit > Undo, or press Ctrl+Z

I think I understand what is wrong, this poor individual has extremely rudimentary computer literacy skills worse than my 77-year old stepdad's and someone in management decided to give her a Junior Software Engineering position (actually paid internship) which is doing more harm than good.

Newly hired developer who calls himself ”senior” on linkedin has not contributed for 6 months. At least. I have been very helpful on many pair programming sessions. Directing him. Being extremely precise how things works and are working together. Small and big picture. He calls me and ask questions and I answer. Explain. Again and again. But it does not stick.

Nothing.

Extremely precise tasks. Written specifically for him.

Nothing.

He has like 10 commits in one year. It’s the worst I’ve seen in a developer role.

The other day in a zoom meeting he failed to declare a variable correctly. He copy/pasted a line instead and renamed the variable.

I saw this early. But I need not to work with him for a long time. It is now very clear that he will never contribute but in fact decrease the velocity of the team.

One year is a long time.

He is stupid. He can’t learn. Did he not tell the truth about himself when management hired him?

It so sad they hired him.

Another case of "devs too stupid to poop" TM.

We had a funny discussion today.

Topic came up that a project using Lucene was incredibly slow.

Then came the yadda yadda of Java bad, Java sucks, Java bla Java blub in the gossip mill.

Both things irritated me, last thing was just the usual "I want to use new stuff cause I wanna be a cool jackass" trouble.

So. Today meeting. We did quick analysis by pair programming.

If I tell you that a whole team managed to review an PR, give it green light...

Despite the PR using the thread safe Lucene IndexWriter in a non-parallel fashion for large bulk inserts?

The whole problem screamed parallelization.

Yeah. If you ignore that scream and implement it in a sequential fashion, it is slow.

Congrats Jimmy, your retard level is off the charts.

!rant

Thank you, senior developer!

Thanks for offering to help me when I said haven’t slept at all tonight.

Thanks for having a pair programming session with me when I said I would have trouble finishing todays tasks that the customer was expecting.

Thanks for being understanding and explaining, instead of just staying quiet and do everything yourself, when I couldn’t understand even simple solutions with my sluggish brain.

Thanks for making sure I understood what tasks needed to be done and how to do them before you resumed to your own.

Thanks for caring, and telling me I did good work even though I wasn’t my sharpest today!

I miss when my job was just about coding, I could spend entire workdays writing C# or TypeScript while listening rock or metal with few meetings in between, being very passionate in programming and computers sometimes I found was I doing so engaging which I spent more than my 8 hours workday on company's code base trying to improve it and my older coworkers were very happy with my code.

Then a "promotion" happened, I went to work directly with a client, a huge enterprise which is working on renovating his internal software and here the fun stopped. Long useless meetings are a regular occurrence, there are absurdly long procedures to do everything (for example since CI/CD is leaky we have to do dozens of workaround to get a microservice deployed) and having very little written documentation this gives an huge advantage to people which actually enjoy to spend their entire workdays on a MS Teams call over "lone programmers" like me which actually feel significant fatigue in doing that (alone sometimes I was able to log 12+ hours of programming daily between work and personal projects while after 3 hours of PP I feel drained) since the information passes in meetings/pair programming and I dread both.

I feel which my passion is still there, I still enjoy coding, tinkering with Linux and BSD, broadening my knowledge with technical books and having passionate conversation about tech but I dread my job, sometimes I try to look at it under a more optimistic eyes but most of the times I just end disappointed.

My dev lead is a uniquely poor leader with an impressive ability to produce a large amount inflexible, temporarily functional code.

As we're in another pair programming session where I try to keep him from destroying over all type safety and architectural decisions to meet a self imposed demo deadline, he keeps trying to access properties of his state.

This state object is incorrectly typed with an anonymous type with incorrect properties.

Despite repeating calmly stating that the object is incorrectly typed, and that's why there are red underlines when he tries to access a property he knows is in there, he insists that that's not correct.

Finally, he knowingly says that he's figured it out and that he's been doing this for many years.

What was the solution you might ask? (state as any).myProperty;

Truly breathtaking mastery.

How to disconnect from work after working hours? Im working for the last 4 months as a mid level dev in this company. I mean Im able to problem-solve and do my work but sometimes I get so addicted to problem solving that I get worried and become obsessed, hyperfixated (especialy if Im stuck on something for lets say a couple weeks). It goes to the point where I work from home 12-14 hours a day just to figure out some bug in the flow.

Thing is, our codebase is large and when doing every new refactor/feature some surprises happen. I dont have a decent mentor who could teach me one on one or even do pair programming with. All i have is just some colleagues who can point me to right direction or do a code review from time to time. Thats it.

I dont know why I take this so personally. For example I had to do a feature which I did in 1 week, then MR got approved by devs and QA. After that during regression they found like 3 blockers and I felt really bad and ashamed. While in reality our BA did not define feature properly, devs who reviewed it didnt even launch the code and poke around in the app, and our team's QA tested only the happy scenario. Basically this is failing/getting delayed because of a failure in like 6-7 people chain.

However for some reason Im taking this very personally, that I, as a dev failed. Maybe due to my ADHD or something but for the next days or weeks as long as I dont find solution I will isolate myself and tryhard until I get it right. Then have a few days of chill until I face another obstacle in another task again. And this keeps repeating and repeating.

My senior colleague tells me to chill and dont let work take such a toll on my emotional/physical/mental health. But its hard. He has 7 years of experience and has decent memory. I have 2-3 years of experience and have ADHD, we are not the same. I dont know how to become a guy who clocks out after 8 hours of work done everyday. Its like I feel that they might fire me or I will look bad if I dont put in enough effort. Not like I was ever fired for performance issues... Anyways I dont know how to start working to live, instead of living for work.

I hate who Im becoming. I dont work out anymore, started smoking a lot, dont exercise. I live this self induced anxiety driven workaholic lifestyle.

Engineering manager and I have a chat last Friday about some working performant code that needs to be refactored for future reusability. Not my favorite stuff but ok, let’s do it. We talk about things VERBALLY, one way of doing it, then another way. She’s in a rush to her next meeting and has to go. I feel very clear on what she wants and how it needs to happen.

After the call I do some thinking and I give her the estimate and brief her my plan. I tell her exactly the way it’s going to be done. She says do it and gives me her sign off.

I submit my MR today. And then she says why I didn’t do it another way. A more generalized way. And “the way we talked about.”

And I ask her if she can explain her way bc there is obviously some misunderstanding. And she proceeds to zero in on some functions I wrote and say how they are not generalized enough and how it’s basically the same as what we had before (but it’s actually a much different design). I patiently listen and at some point she abruptly says she’s out of time and needs to go to a meeting. I say I still don’t understand what she wants. Then she says that she will implement it bc I still don’t understand and she has no more time to explain. I feel pretty bad.

I suggest next time she can show me on zoom whiteboard, just anything visual and not auditory to make sure things are clear and we are on the same page.

She concludes that management has directed us to come to the office more so I need to come in so we can do in person white-boarding.

This whole thing feels unnecessary. We’ve never had this issue before. It seems like either some intentional plot to get me to come into the office more often or terrible communication skills and a lack of priority on my managers part. Like can you just white board your ideas for 5 minutes?!?! There are many tools to do this digitally!

The thing is I still don’t know where the communication gap is bc I still don’t know what she wants. Keep in mind all this fuss is over three cards of text on a webpage.

This is my first job in industry. How do managers normally communicate engineering ideas? And what are the best ways over zoom? And in person?

I noticed here there is not a culture of whiteboarding or pair programming.

It’s on the days like these I question what I’m doing here…

pair programming and debugging with your senior

referring to line number so we know specifically what we are referring to

line 69 comes up repeatedly in multiple files

what are the chances

I am very confused nowadays, exist a great number technologies but i don't decide what technology or language of programming i want specialize me.

I love it the hacking but i have very little experience in programming and have a basic knowdledge in networks and database.

I love it the assembly language but only can code a pair of syntax in this language and know very little about components, architecture and the rest.

I love it the data mining, big data, IA, machine learning but i don't control the statistic.

Of every topics i have a basic knowdlege.

Actually i try to discover my practicality. I am learning Perl and regular expressions.

How do you focus in remote meetings? I’ve been pretending for a year or two, and then figuring out what I have to do by reading the meeting summary or the jira tickets.

Or proposing pair programming and casually asking the other person what she wants to start with.

I think it is easier to focus when the meeting is in my language, otherwise it is like the videos I play on the background when I do other stuff. But even if I’m not using the phone or another screen I zone out…

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market

I'm currently showing my new junior the ropes in the workplace. We'll be using Gitpod for pair programming.

Me: "okay so I think Gitpod will use my configuration if we use the workspace I made... are you familiar with vim keybindings?"
Junior: "😢"

Damn, I hate Spring and most CoC frameworks. We’re using it from 2 years, I read most of the docs and it still gives issue for basic taks which takes hours to fix because I have to guess the exact convention which allows the program to process corner cases which aren’t explained in the docs. Yes, in the end the code is more elegant but it’s worth it when issues which could be solved in minutes by a trivial if/else statement takes hours (rigorously on pair programming™️ since being one of the few which actually read the docs I end up with lots of calls for help for Spring related issues by other teammates) and huge headaches to fix following the framework’s way?