I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

OMG, more changes requested by a client for their website. Co-worker is wondering why they're doing these requests and is asking my boss if the design confirmation process has been skipped.

I'm a junior developer, and this is my only experience so far. I don't know shit how to deal with these stuff. I just wanna focus on development right now. Have a proper team to guide me. Be in an environment where I can get strong technical learning. I don't know how to deal with all these politics yet.

I wanna walk out but I can't. I can't be selfish to my wife and let her be the only source of income, seeing as she even has it worse and wants to get out of her workplace too. I've done it before, can't let it happen again.

Sorry for the drama. I gotta vent out.

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.

Last year I changed jobs from a large multi-national to a small local agency (which happens to be run by friends of mine).

One of the reasons for doing this was that my work involved more office politics than *actual* software development, and had just plain stopped being fun.

Now, I am having fun again! An example?

For one of our clients we have to connect to (a lot) of third-party APIs. Often even SOAP APIs!

Now I hear you protest "But that is no fun at all! SOAP APIS SUCK!" Which is true, more often than not. 😔

BUT! My friend started an internal API-SNAFU Trello board. Every time you get bitten in the ass by some ill conceived fuck-up of an API, you get to add your complaint to the board.

Beside giving as something to reciprocally rant about, the board also serves a serious function: depending on the amount of fuck-ups an API has been known to make, the price for working with that API will go up.

Who said it doesn't pay to complain? 😀

I work in a consulting firm.

I started right after graduation. I entered with candy glasses. Thinking is all well and ready to climb the ladder.

I entered as a junior developer.

On my first project, i am constantly belittled by my team lead. To the extent i suffer from ptsd.

On my second project, i am the only dev. I am amaze i manage to handle all the development job by myself for a year. Still i get nasty comments from my boss. Despite i am able to deliver on time.

On my third project. i left due to office politics.

Currently i am in my fourth project. The code is complete mess. The development environment is crappy. It doesn't reflect change right away.

My passion has dried up.

I'm seriously giving thoughts, should i switch career path.

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!

April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!

July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....

August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...

September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'

somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..

I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.

Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.

Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.

Can I?

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.

I hate web development
I mean why it has to be everywhere and so important.
I joined college my friend calls 4 days before my quantum physics test. Asks if I wanted to do internship. My reply sure.
( Level of knowledge at that time no idea what API is, what react is but it's just making webpages ) made a nice homepage within 4 hours of YouTube 2 tutorials and 2 developing that. Friend appreciated his manager also liked.
But failed to deliver the complete e-commerce website's frontend.

Comes next, hackathon nothing related to Android specific( I like coding for Android) need webdev in one way or other. One senior asks if want to go together sees my GitHub and rejects politely by my skills ( I would have too).
Went on with my 2 more friends with thought of making an all Android app guys team, next week team breaks. I then got offer from a friend to join with them in web development I agreed now prepare for web development.
Team was rejected internal politics of organizers ( would take no all fresher's team).

Dropped learning webd.
Now started flutter and it feels good and comfortable but stability isn't permanent.

Now seeing GSoC
Sigh...Most requirements are for web , hacktober fest also had things related to web maybe I don't recall. Still thinking about it sigh...

Got selected for college app development team. The head had to be one with excellent webd skills.

Now college provides funding for projects and ideas, prototype requires making prototype. Most easiest thing to work on
.
.
.
.
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web development.

!rant

What did you do in life before you got into computers/development?

I was mostly a nolife gamer who could play video games 12 hours a day. I was also obsessed with History.

Loved also Philosophy, Politics, Theology, Geography, Biology, Arts and Literature.

All that I have been ranting about this year are first world problems. Not only because politics is the only taboo on devrant, but also because I have been making too much compromise again.

It seems that most of the money is paid in projects for industrial companies, marketing, and useless products. So I ended up doing only some work for impact projects and ecological startups, taking time to learn new technology, and otherwise waste my potential to make a change by doing web development for well paying companies.

Still better than the years before, when I was an employee. Corporate culture sucks, at least it seems so at most companies in Germany and probably also America and even more so in other countries?! As a freelancer, at least I have the choice not to agree to any offer. And I did say no to many offers this year.

But still ...

New year resolution: prioritize customers with a purpose to make the world a better place. Make less compromise. Stop complaining about bullshit tech and just get things done instead.