There once was a bright young engineer who was hired by a company to design their new light ship.
Like 50 seconds after getting inside the company, the engineer was approached by a douchebag in a business suite.
"Hey, can you make us a mock up of the ship's design in the next hour or so? Nothing fancy, it must be very simple! To not overcomplicate it! Just a simple mock up so we can all see what are we talking about in this project! Please do not overthink this!"
The engineer, young and naive, just folded some piece of paper and gave the douchebag a paper boat.
"Fantastic! That's all we need for the presentation for the investors!"
A couple hours later the suite was back screaming.
"YOUR FUCKING FARSE! YOUR SHITTY SHIP EMBARRASED US ALL! THE VERY MOMENT OUR CEO TRIED TO STEP ON IT IT SANK! YOU ARE FIRED AND WE WILL SUE YOU FOR INCOMPETENCE! I ASKED YOU SOMETHING SIMPLE AND YOU CAME UP WITH THIS OVER ENGINEERED PIECE OF CRAP, YOU SON OF A.. [many, maaany expletives suppressed for brevity sake]"

This is how I feel everytime someone asks for "a tiny change" or some "very simple solution".
If it was so simple that it could be done in such short notice, than why the fuck do it at all, instead of buying it? I heard people sell all sorts of things in the internet nowadays. Software fucking included.

Training the beast!
Hopefully I will submit my paper soon, and then I can share a video of the beast in action :)

So my localization algorithm actually runs onboard my YouBot :)
My paper was basically torn apart by my professor, so I had to write some new classes and redo the whole experimental section. And all the other sections too. I resubmitted it to him after revisions, and the second iteration was way better - I'm really close to final paper level :)
I told my professor and postdoc that I will appreciate more support and positive feedback, because so far our communication was only very dry criticism. For me it's really devastating, because feeling like I constantly disappoint people just kills me on the inside.
It seems like they took it to heart, they have been nicer to me in the last few days :)

Tech startups, an analogy:

After 18 years going from help desk teams to NOC teams, telecom engineering and all manner of startups in between I have concluded the following:

Imagine wanting to start an aerospace company because you know how to fold a paper airplane, but not how to actually design and engineer an actual craft that will pass basic air worthiness checks.

That’s 99% of “tech” companies.

Discuss. I’ll make drinks.

Dev: (Watches user print out screenshot of maintenance app to do list, walk across facility to printer. walk across facility to equipment and check things off on paper, then walk across facility back to their terminal and copy the findings over.)

Dev: We made the app responsive so they could do that on a mobile device. Why are they printing?

Manager: Printers are cheaper than getting more tablets.

Dev: …

Dev: Can we at least get a printer at each terminal so they don’t waste so much time walking across the facility?

Manager: That’s too many printers to maintain. It’s easier to just have one.

Dev: …

I just had to print out some bills for a colleague.
Nothing too bad you say?

Well.. She doesn't seem to care about security or privacy at all.
I opened the website of her email provider at my computer and moved away from the keyboard, so she could log in.
But instead she told me her email and password... In an office with some other colleagues... Multiple times and wrote it onto a piece of paper that the later left on my table.
After that I should look through her inbox to find the bills.
(Yup, I know a lot more about her now)
After finding and printing out her bills, she just thanked me and walked out of the office, because hey, why should I log out of her account?

It's nice that she trusts me... But that was a bit too much...

Post after a long long time...

Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.

Anyway, time for a story.

After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.

Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.

One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.

They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.

Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.

He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.

I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.

Day saved? Not yet.

Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.

My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.

I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.

Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.

And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.

I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.

I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.

I am hysterical right now.

In a new country and in isolation.
Laptop out of charge. Plug converter broke so cannot connect my laptop to power.
Ordered one. Need to wait one whole day for it to arrive.
Perfect gloomy weather to just reflect my mood.
Not even allowed to go out for a walk.
Wrote down some pseudo on paper so I don’t forget.
Only to realise there was a problem with it.
So I rewrote it correctly.
Now just waiting.

Client gets an error message. Proceeds to write the error message on a piece of paper, scans the paper in as PDF and attaches the document to an email to tech support.

Client: Too many of our business processes take place on excel and paper! We need to modernize our business processes. Build an app that can do the main things we do with excel and paper in app form.

Dev (4 months later): Here it is

Client: Ok some of our users want to still use excel and paper so build the ability to print the app and export/import to excel so they can continue working the way they always have alongside our new app.

Dev: …

!rant
... so... maybe not that much of a thing, but i think it is:

a gal (27 years old) i started teaching programming two weeks ago, who had literally no previous experience with programming, algoritmization nor c#...
... just now, after 3 lessons of 6 hours altogether, and after yesterday when i explained to her what arrays are and reminded her what loops do...

... invented bubble sort. on her own. no googling. on paper. no "trial and error code typing and running".

i'm actually pretty proud of her :)

... putting the algo concept into actual code will still be a bit of a struggle, but yeah, hell, can't help thinking that she's actually pretty smart :)

(p. s. fist lesson was i drew uml of a fibonacci algo and forced her to understand what it does, second lesson was i explained the minimum required c# syntax for her to be able to implement it and forced her to write it (with as little help as i could), third lesson was the concept of array and "okay, now here's array of numbers, make a function that will sort them")

looking forward to what will happen when i explain recursion and nudge her towards quicksort O:-)

My job title on paper:
"Application developer"
How I'm introduced to interview candidates:
"Senior software engineer"

Does anyone else see a problem here? 🤔

Some idiots ripped off our work and code that was open sourced and wrote a paper on it and got it published from some cheap publisher. Even for me to some benefit of doubt or consider that probably they worked on advancing our research….they didn’t even give us any credits!

Heights of shamelessness!

FYI, we already had an IEEE paper published!

I don’t mind if you guys have any suggestions on how I can get back at them. I don’t think a rant is going to calm me down for what they have done.

"not sure if we can meet those salary requirements, but I'll get back to you"

JK they just send me the code challenge, no idea of what salary to expect. scratch that one off the list.

meanwhile in another prospect i have had not just multiple interviews, but then add on two additional 'prep' and 'post' interviews for each of the ORIGINAL interviews i have to do with the recruiting company REEEEEEEEEEEEE

honestly it's not a good reflection of what is really valued at these companies - paper pushing over getting to work... ok

WEVE ALREADY TALKED FOR HOURS JUST MAKE A DESICION: GIVE ME AND OFFER, OR DON'T AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

This is just straight up a joke. Head of data science has had us implementing something based on a paper.

I raised some "concerns" about it a while ago. Found out today they'd not even read the paper. We're pretty sure what we've been asked to work on doesn't solve the problem it's meant to solve...

New name for the paper: The New Yor(login or subscribe to read the full name of the news website)

For the Project Management exam, my university requires us to install a program on our PERSONAL laptops that is meant to take over the control over the entire system during the exam, monitor any “suspicious activities”. The software is closed-source (it’s called Schoolyear Exams), does god-knows-what in the background, takes the control over the entire system and can be summoned through any Chromium web browser.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that you want to make sure nobody is cheating - but at this point, I’d rather write it with pen and paper. Or just provide us with computers for the time of exam.

I decided to whip out my old laptop instead, installed a Windows 10 on a separate SSD, and installed that software on it.

Also it’s very amusing that this software is also mandatory for the Linux exam… But the program can’t run on Linux (it’s Windows and Mac only and doesn’t even support M1 chips).

EDIT: typos

Hiring a third party to help us with something...
Third party: yeah okay, we know what we need. Can we get access to your git repo
Me: sure, I'll make sure you'll get it
(To the admins): hey can you get them access to our git server?
Admins: did they sign the personal data processing contract?
Me: oh they won't work with any personal data. It's a dev server and they only need access to the source code. And the usual contracts and NDAs are already done
Admins: well we still need the other one.

... Sure. Why not. Just delays the start of the process for... Like a week and a half until that useless bit of paper has passed through all the necessary departments. Not like time's an issue. Right?

When you're reading a NLP paper that cites Aristotle, you know some serious shit is gonna go down.

Something tells me those fucks at the coop won't pay me on time. Last time I called I got this woman telling me how I can'T ImprOviSe FreElAnce ProJecT, and that I had to go back to belgium so she could explain to me how to register my contract.

I said I was in a different country. She didn't care. Apparently those stupid c*** still live in the 2nd millenium when everything had to be done using paper.

I worked in 5 different country so far. It was always painless, administratively speaking. Here I'm broke, I'm supposed to make more money in a week than my parents in a month but I'm about to go live in the wood. Joke of a country.

I think I am going to start doing lets play series for minecraft and post online. I spend a lot of time playing modpacks with my kids and I should just start recording and add audio commentary later. I can compress the video and do speedups for boring parts and cut other segments. If I create a spreadsheet for the modpack and do it by numbers then I can burn through the modpack fast. I like watching lets play series to figure out modpacks. Especially direwolf. However, these lets play episodes are a good 30 to 45 minutes long. I want to play, not watch someone else play. I hate the ones where they don't know how to do the modpack and they don't cut the video. Direwolf does a great job editing his videos. His video is FULL of good content.

If I can get the videos short enough it will keep the attention span of the mass plebes that cannot find their way out of a paper bag. This is definitely catering to the lowest denominator. I can turn my hobby into something useful. I want to try and compress the 30 minute video into 5 to 10 minutes. It will be a minecraft junky playthrough. Maybe add some time lapse stuff too.

I think I should do the playthrough first, reset server and do again with video capture. I want to incorporate comedy into the videos too. Gaming should be fun. I wonder how much space a 30 minutes video will take?

A pratice paper for web development. How does this have anything to do with HTML5? I could have sworn the answer was A.

I got to see my paper for information system today and I got half the marks from total.
The teacher wanted me to write the latest technology properly from fucking 10 year old book.,🤐😠😡

Dont you just love spending like 2 hours playing around with a library and doing some math, on real pen and paper, only to find out the library had a function for what you need already there and available

:)

Had a fine day, but all of a sudden existential dread kicked in.

Then I noticed a bug right next to me, got a sheet of paper and let it out. Thanks for lifting my spirits

I have fucking HATED Windows 10 from day one. Now I'm hearing there are new vacillations of this genius programming train wreck that I think is designed to force monetize Microsoft's business model.
After a short while I managed to get to a point where I can maintain W 7. In fact, I'm using my old computer right now. Because I could not get this rant to load onto Devrant website. If you are reading this we know that it is because 10 sucks consistently.
I save my files onto a backup hard drive so I can find 'paper file' type solution for whatever random crap might block me at the keyboard. In fact, I still use paper and file cabinets so "technology" doesn't bring me to a screeching halt every time something like "no record of that account" or "wrong password".
Why the hell does my PASSWORD work from W7 but not from W10?! And it's getting WORSE by the day! I'm about to take a fucking hammer to my new fucking computer. And to that guy who smarmy says something to the effect of 'don't be such a pussy... just fix it and you will be happy.' Well. Fuck you too!
Now. That being said. Anybody have a suggestion on what to try next? And don't say something like, 'take your computer to Micro Center or Geek Squad'. I've done those guys twice each. And for a small phenomenal fee they have each time made things slightly worse plus lost parts of my saved data each time.
Oh. And "reset to previous" doesn't work either.
Suggestions?
Probably better at this point to attempt to solve my own problems wrong for free at this point. Maybe I'll learn to program in Linux or some such thing.
Forrest
for suggestions please contact me at
res0naza@yahoo

"Most electronics work better while turned *on*. The rest are made by HP"

Fucking printer will not only *not* print my stuff but will also make hellish noises, print the same "hello world!" page six times in a row, jam paper in the seventh and spit expensive ink on its own mechanism while there is not even paper in it.
Fucking outdated cellulose-based bureaucracy. Govt' websites are far from perfect but yet are closer to it than presenting fucking tree-meat slabs unecessary covered in colourful liquid gold.

48 hours.
We had 3 weeks of "manual data collection": pencil, paper and a dozen of people around all the offices of the company with the task to collect serial numbers of every piece of equipment used.
Then we had 3 weeks of data entry, a dozen of people copying all handwritten data to a custom made VB form.

And then there was me, the guy that was in charge of verifying, zipping and sending the data to the client. I spent 48h non stop to go through everything, finding, fixing or delete unusable data.
I had to delete at least 25% of the data because incomplete or completely unusable (serial numbers too short or too long, for example).
48h in the office.

The data was then delivered to the customer. 2 days after, when I finally woke up, everyone was in panic because:
- serial numbers were not matching
- addresses were wrong
- the number of delivered records was smaller than expected

What did I learn from this experience?
When your deadline is tomorrow, and you need 4 weeks to complete your work, ignore the deadline and inform everyone at any level that you are ignoring the deadline. And then resign and find a better job.

Ah, yes, pencils and paper are powerful tools, but rat poison too. You just need to use them in the right place. The only data collection that can be trusted when done with a pencil is the one involving checkboxes.

Deep learning is probably (????) the only research branch where every successful paper title needs to be a stupid acronym or meme

I work in a conversational AI startup and the new intern that joined yesterday didn't understand half the memes or acronyms (especially all the Simpsons related) because apparently he's "Gen Z" and all the paper title is "Millennial" humour

He's only 2 years younger than me. Am I literally at the millennial - GenZ border ? Or the intern is out of touch ?

i have a very casual and boring job. it's a b2b company and you can get an idea of how less work we get (or how fast i am) that it's day 1 of the sprint and i have almost finished all my tickets. my manager always praises me as someone fast whereas i see myself as pretty slow and this company even slower.

i feel like quitting, but the relax environment and stability of the company on paper makes me wonder of that would be a correct decision.
It's a deep tech company (not just meat e commerce or car rentals, a proper b2b analytics giant startup with good profitability) , our sdks are used by major startups and yet i find it boring.

I am an android dev who would love to stay at top of the game. my previous company used latest jetpack libraries, kotlin, modular architectures and stuff. everyday was a hectic chaos of life where there were deadlines, new requests coming in every few days and i was becoming the awesome fast android dev that i am now.

in this company there is no challenge for me.But the amount of free time has helped me grow beyond a single domain. i am currently hustling in 3 areas : my body( i started working out regularly, got my tummy under control), my technical skillset( started taking web dev classes) and my physical skillset (started taking driving and swimming lessons) . the amount of self growth time increases since company has a good leave and PTO policy

it all feels pretty good but the constant feeling of being left out from the android domain makes me think if i should give interviews. am i being stupid or what? my friends are all growing up with better salaries and packages. i am way better than some of them and equally capable as a few of them, so i sometimes feel being behind in finances too :/

Some updates:

> Going to get another paper published (hopefully) once my exams end
> Got a intern, not a lot of money, ₹2L≈$2.6k per month for 2.5 months
> Will get a Mac from company for the intern(probably not new, and most likely will be taken back soon after the internship)
> Planning on entrepreneurship after getting a degree

Ohh and the rant:
1. Fucking sent me a 2 page list of links as "pre reads for internship" during my exams -- and intern will start soon after exams
2. Have missed 3 paper submission deadlines till now, hopefully will run more experiments on time this time and finally get that paper submitted (on 15th May)

can we agree that T is a dumb variable name?

I mean I totally know what it means in that instance, but why do people keep writing math stuff like they'd skribble it on paper?

client: "can you build out a staging server for us? here's all the code, everything you need"
me: "awesome, looking good, i have almost everything i need, just give me the credentials for the server, and I'll get started installing all the infrastructure"
client: "ok, try these!"
me: "doesn't work"
client: "this one?"
me: "doesn't work..."
client: "how about this one?"
me: "STILL NOT WORKING!!!"

imagine you want someone to do stuff on your server and you don't even know the root SSH password.... smh

why is this always a problem, use fucking 1password or something its 40 bucks a year, secure, and you can organize alllll your passwords. don't be a fucking boomer and write them on a piece of paper, or worse, apparently like my client, never know it or have it in the first place.

That rabbit in my grandpa's left table drawer, in the home I grew at. I wanted to finally catch it, and kill it. I was bad with animals all along, especially this one. My grandpa died the year before I was born, and my grandma said we would've got along really well. So much to talk about, a scientist to an engineer. So, I travelled back, but my home somehow turned from a city stone-walled house into a half-soaked, decaying wooden one. I caught that rabbit though, but while I was holding it at its neck and twisting it, it somehow disappeared, distributed evenly as if I were twisting a crayon. I was trying to find it, but in that left drawer, among century-old pencils and that red liquid thermometer I played with as a kid, only a faded out, dusty duckling resided. I picked it up, and unlike the rabbit, it was paper, no, cigarette paper thin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to run away. It just turned from yellow to grey, feathers leaving my fingers covered in fine dust. I realized it will never die, dwelling and decaying there forever, happy.

I did my calculations, and I knew for a fact when and where the rabbit should've appeared. It was the middle drawer, not the left one. I opened it and looked in anticipation how something chewed through the bottom. I caught it, but it was no rabbit, it was an alive, rubber rat. The rubber was white turned grey, old, aged, dusty, probably Soviet. I poked the rat's eye with a pen rod, but the rat's body inflated a bit, leaving it invincible. It was mocking me.

Of the same white rubber, a ball appeared. I knew for a fact it was alive too, I felt the bones inside holding it. I found its lips, and was prying it open. The massive, dry mouth emerged, with a full set of human teeth, albeit wider and nastier ones. Huge eyes looked at me. It was alive, it was intelligent. It was my grandpa's personal financial assistant all along. It told me to leave the rat and the rabbit alone. He told me not to worry about the ducking, as it was in safe hands.

It made friends with my brother during the "blue age", when he was wearing thin, worn out rugs instead of clothes, tiny faded blue flowers on them, screaming and annoying my grandma he lived with in that room, not a single person other than the two in sight. The house was slowly submerging. The water was rising.

Rarely do I find well-organized code written by researchers. Well, it runs, so reproduction is possible, but when it comes to actually change something in the code, it's as messy as it can get.
And THEN, I look into the paper so that, hopefully, I can make sense of what is going on. Turns out, the documentation on the paper is also poor.
F*<k. My. Life.

Tomorrow is my last paper OS finally the exam is over 🥲

I never went to college, the main reason was financially so I self educated myself from home, and 1 year later I had a bigger salary than the average salary in my country.. so I diploma is just a paper to me.. in fact one of my friends who went to a well recognized college in my country came to me to do him a project, he ended up impressing the professor and getting highest marks. So no CS degree has 0 affect on your job today.

Just remembered about that one time when my former boss wanted to talk about the requests we received from a particular client and asked to have all the mail exchanges during the last 3 months or so.

I forwarded all those mails to him, to which he answered "nononono, I want them on paper for the meeting".

I shit you not, he had me print something like 30 pages of emails, signatures and all, no fucks given, just to toss them in the trash 30 minutes later.

I’m very complicated financially and I got a project where the client feels like a geek and influences the project a lot, plus we started a tremendous bureaucracy by mail that made me desperate, not to mention that the designer has these artistic ideas that work on paper but not on the web. Neither of us allowed opinions so I decided to say no before starting.

I have to submit a rebuttal in two days I am crying I have no support from PI. I didnot have enough sleep. Anyone has been there this is my first paper in this area of research

i don't really care.
plusses abd minuses, comments and reactions.
none of it affects my shitty life in aby way, sane as nothing else does.

everything is a Skyrim quest. paper flat cutout pretenses of people trying ajd failing to convince me this is a life, this is reality, i should care.

failing.
it's all just subpar pretense.

A small child and a remote job did their job - no time to write my term paper catastrophically. I decided to order a term paper on economics. There were a couple of options for online help services, but I can not decide. . But I am very afraid to order. What do you think?