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Dev: Hey our current server is starting to chug a bit. Can I get approved for $1200 additional spend to double the speed?
Manager: *Sharp inhale*. We need this project to cost as little as possible, we really can’t justify spending any additional money for any reason right now.
*2 days later*
Manager: YOU ARE APPROVED FOR $100,000 TO IMMEDIATELY IMPLEMENT SOMETHING RELATED TO NFTs IN ANY OF OUR APPS. THE BUSINESS NEEDS TO EXPAND INTO THE METAVERSE ASAP IMMEDIATELY. I NEED AN ETA BY EOD AS TO WHEN THIS CAN BE ROLLED OUT.
Dev: …16 -
Manager: So great news, we will also be building a new app this year!!
Dev: We only have 2 devs and we already struggling to maintain/build our current portfolio of applications. I don’t think we have the resources to support another.
Manager: Nonsense, this is a very small project management app that was requested by the CEO himself!
Dev: …We already have MS project, why can’t they just use that?
Manager: The executive team isn’t interested in learning MS Project, it’s way too complicated. They want us to build an internal version of MS Project one feature at a time so they can pick it up over time instead of getting overwhelmed with learning MS Project all at once. It also needs to have loads of customizable automation features so leadership doesn’t ever have to get “in the weeds” having to work with it. It needs to basically run itself!
Dev: …What about this is small?
Manager: Well that is the requirement.
Dev: …18 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.10 -
I got assigned approximately 20 tasks, all are high priority.
Coworker got assigned 2 tasks, (“like fix button sizes and padding”, “localisation “)
He completed.
I got questioned: “are you sure you are a senior developer? Are you doing your work at all? If your coworker can finish low priority tasks in a day , why you as a senior can’t? “
Me :”if you have the ability to see , please tell me how many tasks I have that are in high priority.”
“Exactly, I need you to complete it now , I expect more from you as a senior. “
Me: “why not you tell me which tasks are higher priority? Because can’t be all are urgent. If everything is urgent , nothing is urgent.”
“Stop giving excuses, be a team player.”
Me :” how is it making excuses for asking urgencies of the tasks?”
“Hahaha you called yourself a senior. What a joke”
Me:”likewise, you called yourself a Project manager yet can’t manage. What a joke indeed.”20 -
Manager: We really need to save money with this project, so nobody call tech support for anything.
Me: There's this open-source solution that would work great.
Manager: Bad idea! There's no tech support number to call.
Me: ...4 -
The intern again. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!!
She's now done the Laravel course my manager bought her, so now she feels she's ready to tackle a real world project. Hahahaha.
Okay, I have a project set up: Replicate a simple existing website that only has a basic header, some picture thumbnails and a footer element using Laravel. I've already installed Statamic and everything she needs as dev dependencies and made a step-by-step README.md file for her to get the site running locally on her machine. I told her to replicate the home page HTML.
She didn't read the readme file after I've told her multiple times in the past to do so. She tries to run the Laravel application without running composer update and all the other commands I listed in the readme file, and doesn't read the fucking console errors she's getting. She cloned the project into another Laravel project and her files are a fucking mess.
I am sick and fucking tired of telling my manager that she is not suited for this industry, she's just costing the company money and wasting my fucking time. I have been unable to focus for the past month and a half because of her.
She can't even fucking Google the console errors she's getting, just hopping on MS Teams asking me to help without even trying to solve it on her own.
I want to cry. Fuck this company and its stupid CULTure.15 -
I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.
Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂5 -
Manager: Hey Dev I need to do QA on this PR.
Dev: That PR is not finished yet
Manager: Well do QA now anyway, that way when it is finished it can be merged in right away since QA has already been done on it. It’s a project management technique called “fast-tracking” and it improves efficiency.
Dev: …9 -
Manager: We will be building a new app. THIS TIME EVERYTHING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, ANYTHING LESS THAN TOP QUALITY WORK WILL BE REJECTED!!
*Not even 2 days into the new project*
Manager: Ok that’s good enough, we can fix it later. Can you go quicker on the next feature? Just sacrifice a bit of quality so we get these tickets closed as fast as possible. I said we can fix it later. Getting tickets closed asap is top priority.
Dev: …3 -
i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.
when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"
he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.
i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.
our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.
in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.
after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.
i never received an apology from anybody involved.5 -
We had to review a design document written by our partners, and have it approved by end of Dec.
While I was reading it, I noticed that we committed to a module I wasn't familiar with. I asked the other two lab mates, and they had a surprised Pikachu face.
So we called the boss to discuss this. And it dawned on him that we committed to a task that was assigned 20 months of work, but nobody started working on it. And considering Holidays and other commitments, we had like 3 months to do it from scratch and deliver.
My advisor panicked, and his first response was to assign this task to me.
I politely declined, and after digging in my email box, found that he actually assigned the task to someone else. So I showed it to him.
Thinking I would save him after he treated me badly for nearly 2 years was hilarious. For a better manager, I would have definitely agreed to assist. But as it is now? I'll be eating cookies while I'm watching the project burn.13 -
Appretnly for 5 devs + 1QA we need now :
A project manager
A scrum master
A VP of engeneering
Another person I don't remember title.
yep 2023 will be "productive"9 -
Every day I feel like Dr. Leonard McCoy.
"I'm an automation expert, not a ..."
* DBA
* ElasticSearch administrator
* Kafka Architect
* Email marketing specialist
* SEO Analyst
* Front end developer
* Doctor
* Project manager
* Accountant8 -
New spin on the Manager / Dev format!
Recuiter: WE NEED AN ABSOLUTE NODE EXPERT, NODE NODE NODE, WE LOVE NODE! WHAT IS YOUR NODE EXPERIENCE?!?!
Dev: Well I've had exposure to it since it was nearly new, all the way back in 2012, and since my professional career started about 7 years ago I've used it fairly often on a per-project basis.
Recruiter: WELL HAVE YOU BEEN USING IT DAILY FOR THE PAST 5 YEARS!?!
Dev: Well no, as I said I've used it for specific projects... anyway, there are these things called weekends...
Recruiter: WELL WE ONLY WANT NODE ZOMBIES SO SORRY.
Dev: Thanks for reaching out and wasting my time.
Recruiter: ...
Dev: ...
God recruiters are like robots, don't they understand senior-level engineers are language agnostic?6 -
I'm in internship, why the fuck am I the one explaining them how to use git, Android studio????? Why am I the project manager?????? I'm supposed to learn from you not the opposite. Fuck this monkey.15
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i'm feeling so sick right now.
PM invited team for today to present his "vision": "<name of our component>: what it is and what it is not".
but it didn't make sense and showed that he hadn't understood the problem at all. the whole architecture made no sense given the problems that shall be solved. his architecture diagrams missed some essential parts that were actually the giant weak points of his concept. his pseudocode, that should exemplify interactions between components, didn't address the complexity of required interactions at all. it's like he expects some magic to happen and has no fucking clue about the requirements (but acts like it), even though he is the manager of this software project.
and when devs ask really interesting questions that fundamentally question his concept, discussions lead to nowhere and questions are not answered. at some point he literally said "there is no such thing as <name of our component>, i still have to find this out"
really!? after one and a half year, since you sold the idea for this component to upper management, and after half a year of development, you still can't tell what it is what we actually want to build? are you fucking serious?!
at some point in discussion he said that these questions need to be answered but that "there's no time left", and he ended the meeting. although there was still half an hour of meeting time left.
i'm so fucking sick of this, i hate everything right now. i can't listen to this bullshit any longer. in discussions, he contradicts himself all the time, it is so fucking surreal i'm starting to feel like i'm insane.
it makes me really sad and tired. i don't want to care about this shit any longer.14 -
Web Devs - How many projects do you typically work on at once? I am currently developing 24 websites at once, most of them custom (homepage). I just feel like that is absurd and my company is absolutely insane. Not to mention I'm the front line for client communication as well, pretty much the project manager AND developer. We're a huge company too, not a start up. Just feel like not having project managers for web dev industry is unprecedented except for freelance. 😡👎🏼18
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Manager: Hey software engineer, how's the project going?
Software Engineer: Good, just debugging my code.
Manager: Debugging? What kind of bug are you trying to fix?
Software Engineer: The ones that make my computer turn into a lava lamp.
Manager: Ha ha, very funny. But seriously, how can I help?
Software Engineer: Well, I need a bigger monitor. My current one doesn't have enough real estate to display all the errors.
Manager: How about a second monitor?
Software Engineer: No, I need a bigger universe.
Manager: I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, keep coding. We have a deadline to meet.
Software Engineer: No problem, I have all the time in the world. I just need to find a way to slow down time.
Manager: I wish I had your optimism. Just let me know if you need anything else.
Software Engineer: How about a unicorn? I heard they're good at coding.
Manager: I'll see what I can do, but in the meantime, stick to using a keyboard.3 -
Project manager sends mass email out for the 5th time about how things are needed ASAP. We're already overloaded. Sprint planning was thrown out the window a month ago. But the email is in comic sans.2
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The push back phrase my manager uses when I try to discuss a requirement which I think is incorrect:
"It was discussed and agreed upon at the beginning b/n PM and engineering"
To hell with that, if 10 people arrive at a stupid decision, its still a stupid decision
I just sit back until the project progresses much further and wait for another senior dev whom they can't ignore to bring up the same issue.
It is supremely frustrating 😤2 -
I manage a team of engineers.
Toxic Culture Post #2:
Manager: Everybody on your team needs their own swimlane in Jira. Each person's work should be their own lane. When I have a ticket for <Project A> I want to make sure that <Bob> always gets it, all tickets for <Project B> must go to <James>. You'll need to figure out which team member will handle <New Project C> and create their personal swim lane.
Me: That's not really how SCRUM works. Actually, that's not how teamwork works. You're creating silos and we all need to learn how to do these tasks. We're a cross-functional team, and each team member brings their own unique talents to the whole process.
Manager: So you'll create the swimlanes?
Me: No
Manager (to Bob): You'll be devoted to <Project A> from now own. It's the only work I expect you to do. All work for that project will be yours.
Likewise, my manager also reached out to each team member and assigned them specific tasks, furthering the silos.6 -
Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.
First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.
Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.
Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.
Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.
Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.
What a shitty start to a career as a developer.
Anybody having a similar experience?
5 -
meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)
of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...11 -
Client project manager calls me up one day
PM: hey can you make some precise estimates on some items for a project you’re not working on? It should be easy. It’s very similar to the project you ARE working on and it’s only a handful of user stories, mostly front end stuff. We´ll need this to be done by tomorrow night.
Me: um, I guess if it’s just a few simple items. ok
PM: great! I’ll let you know when you get access to the backlog.
Me: sounds good
Link to project is sent to me. Backlog contains over 20 user stories, most of which are backend related. And it doesn’t have much to do with my current project.
I contact PM: this isn’t exactly what you announced when I had you on the phone. If you want precise estimates with a minimum of design, this could take up to a week. I could however proceed to some ballpark estimates (poker planning) for starters if you need this quickly for your roadmap.
PM: no I need PRECISE estimates down to the hour for each item.
Me: ok then, it’ll take up to a week.
PM: 🤬🤬🤬. You told me it could be done in a day. I’m coming to realize your word can’t really be trusted.
Me: 🤦🏻♂️14 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
I've just finished my last day at work... I'm switching from being a 100% PM (almost 3 years) to being a 100% backend machine!
God, how I hated that job...8 -
Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..
During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.
I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.
So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit
- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.
Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).
Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.
I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅4 -
Most useless feature:
Once we had to create a Learning Manager System to a small university. One of the (useful) features was a "file system" to people upload, organize and share documents (like a Google Drive prototype). This was the "student portfolio".
However, we had to create a page to act as a "cover" to it, that should allow the student to change the background, add exactly 2 images, and up to 9 "post-its". The image shows the notebook of our client while he was thanking us praising it as the greatest innovation of the decade.
The post-its was kinda nice, but what's the point of those images??
Anyway... On the same meeting of that picture the client asked us to include a "canvas" on that same page, so people could draw whatever they want. The words used was "just like [MS] Paint".
We postponed it, hoping he would forget about it, but on the end of the project he was still asking about it.
I found a lib that did the job and integrated with the project, but I also included a long comment for the next devs saying that I'm sorry they would have to support such thing 😅
The client loved but we never knew anyone that really used that Paint
3 -
*me and my manager, during my appraisal meeting
me: *talks about work done in previous project, and the current one under him
manager: but your JIRA throughput is very less.
me: the tickets which I pick are more research oriented and almost always take more time than the other config- fix type ones, and due to me being shifted from another team, there has been an increasing learning curve, I realize that, but...
manager: look at Jack, his throughput has been consistently high.
*me, after realizing my appraisal has obviously gotten affected and this discussion will lead nowhere
me: I would like to have a chat with HR before I sign the form with the percentage increment you are offering.
*me, with hr the next day
hr: your manager tells me that your throughput has been less than satisfactory.
me: *goes on to explain about the type of tickets I have been working on, along with other enhancements done to make people's lives easier
hr: but the throughput...
me: where the f**k do I sign?2 -
A little over a year into my job at my current company back in January, I have a yearly meeting with my manager to discuss the progress I’ve made and to talk about what’s next. This is the meeting where we are supposed to discuss a potential pay raise but it’s the last topic of a predefined agenda.
So we spend a couple hours talking about how work has been for me. I started there as a junior developer with very little experience in the field but was quickly able to jump into a project with a fairly large codebase to help out the only other developer working on the project. Before long they’re so happy with me that they actually put me in charge of the application, which means my responsibilities evolve toward a whole lot more communication with the client and everything else that comes along with being in charge, including a lot of stress. I also salvaged another application initially developed by another company but that was so bugged it should’ve just been sent to the pits and rewritten from scratch. I was also asked to develop a couple POCs that were satisfactorily delivered.
Anyway, after almost two hours of going over my accomplishments and getting praises from my manager, we finally get to the part where we’re supposed to discuss a pay raise. He immediately cuts me off by saying the subject is not on the table due to the current crisis and our company struggling to make ends meet. I tell him I understand how hard it must be for them but also explain that I know for a fact other companies in the field are still making financial efforts to reward employees they’re happy with. He responds by saying that he’s aware of that, but he also “knows” that those same companies are laying off people that don’t deserve to be laid off despite the fact that they’re receiving government aid to stay afloat.
In the weeks following that meeting, I find out our company is doing the exact same thing my manager was condemning (laying off good people, taking massive advantage of government aid) and all the while not giving anybody a raise.
In any case, I really felt like that meeting was huge waste of time. What’s the point of going over everything I’ve done, congratulating me for my great work and even promising to give me even more responsibility if you don’t want to reward me for any of it? Do you honestly think I’m working hard so I can get a pat on the back or brownie points from you? I’ve got a family to take care of and I am trying to make their lives a little better each day by putting in hard work. But if hard work and climbing the latter of responsibility does not help me achieve that, what’s the point??1 -
Stress made me fall into old habits of instead of saying stop and letting my team now that I was falling apart (not realising it myself even) I just kept saying "Yes, I fix that." to every single request that was made in the project.
The closer we got to the deadline, the more I hyperfocused and ignored the signs. I just kept working. The last two days I didn't even sleep.
Of course the launch botched. I finally broke down and both my mind and my body have given up, since yesterday I'm in a mental feedback loop causing continuous anxiety attacks and migraines. I literally CAN'T do anything but trying to not go back into fight- or flight mode and remember to breathe.
I FINALLY made my project manager aware (something I should have done days ago) that I am incapacitated and now I am waiting for medication (Oxazepam) to be picked up at the pharmacy by my husband.
I almost literally worked myself into the ground.
I've been here before. Never again.
This is what happens if you don't listen to your mind and body and put up a white flag in time.11 -
I've been a bit "removed" from .NET lately and I've been slowly forgetting about it. It's like I grieved a loss, and now I was moving on, for lack of a better analogy. I was just beginning to get used to my new environment of Node JS and PHP. And, recently, I was put on track to complete a full project using Node JS.
And then suddenly a new company reached out to me, interested in my skills, and asked for me to build a simple .NET web app to showcase my abilities.
I got started, and holy crap I forgot how nice it was to be coding in this environment. Everything I had forgotten about switched on for me, like riding a bike. I was done with the app in a matter of hours. It was probably the most productive I've been with a coding assignment in forever. I was beaming with pride at the fact that I could code so fluently despite some time away. Everything here just made sense to me.
After I submitted it to the company for review I sat back and thought, damn, do I have to go back to Node/Express JS? I barely have any experience with it 😂. The only reason I know anything is because I watched a 20 minute quick tutorial on how to build an API. That's it.
I really want my current company to give me projects that are in my preferred language and they aren't and that's killing me right now. I can learn, that's not a problem, but my effectiveness as an employee is completely shot by not allowing me to build in code that I know and understand. I was fuckin hired for my specific coding experience, why not take advantage of what I know?
I should say something to my manager but I know they will just tell me no because they want it to be built in Javascript as it's the preferred language of the Gods.
Joking aside, I don't think they will go for it because it is another language that they would have to manage and maintain if I ever leave.
Oh well 🤷8 -
Today I told to my Project Manager that after one year of taking care ( explaining thousands of lines of codes) to an external team ( another company) to migrate our application from a monolith to microservices + react, that the React UI they build looks like shit.
He replied "at least it works".
Now I must find the courage to tell him that it doesn't work correctly because instead of a simple *migration* the external team rewrote some algorithms used in a bank application and now the data are wrong.
advices ?1 -
What does PFA MOM stand for?
We're an international company, we all use English while working. That's all fine and good.
But there's one project manager that throws in really obscure acronyms that even I, a native English speaker, struggle with.
It's "please find attached minutes of meeting". Is it really that hard to type?16 -
I’m working at an architecture firm these days, so I don’t have many “dev” stories to tell. However, I’d like to share this anecdote to reassure (or demoralize) you all that the kind of nonsense we’ve all dealt with as software developers isn’t limited to the software industry.
I’ve been working on a project to build townhomes and apartments on vacant lots in an urban environment.
Space is limited, so the client assured us early on that they would be centralizing all the mechanical equipment (water heaters, air conditioners, etc.) in the basement of each building. We finally got all the apartments laid out and presented them to the client last week. During that meeting, we get a casual “oh, by the way, we need a 3-foot by 3-foot mechanical closet in each apartment.” Did the project manager push back? Of course not. Have our deadlines been adjusted as a result of changing requirements? Don’t be silly! Starting tomorrow morning, the team gets to feverishly search for an extra 9 square feet in each of a couple dozen different apartment layouts that are already “cozy” in time to meet our next deliverable.
Clients suck.
Changing requirements suck.
Pushover PMs suck.
In every industry.2 -
Some people get ego boost when they get positions like team lead or manager for software development team. In a nutshell you don't know shit about programming how the fuck you became tech lead? You fucked up the entire project that you managed and now shifting blame on someone else. Well fuck you!9
-
Fuck product managers.
Just the other day I was discussing our progress so far and this product manager shows us the timeline and his vision for the project.
Ngl, I haven’t seen such an ambitious fuck for so long. He doesn’t know how to do anything other than fucking spreadsheets. The only problem with his plan is that we don’t even have the team, just 2 pity devs carrying it.
I still don’t get it, why the fuck would a company with 2 devs need a product manager?1 -
Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...
So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together
So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.
Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?
After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.
Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.
The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.
Lockdown started.
There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.
A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.
Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!
It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.
The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.
Suddenly my manager is fired.
Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.
The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.
Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.
...
...
Fuck
"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.
...
It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.
I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.
But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.
It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.
So yeah, sorry for the rambling.5 -
Devils Advocate moment: A proper PM can assist greatly on projects.
Don't get me wrong, you have all for the most part been faced with the incompetence of glorified quasi manager positions. But a proper PM can be a gift really.
I absolutely despise generalizations, I do get that percentages matter, but shitting on professions when the realm of possibilities have yet to be touched to the full extend of capabilities seems like child's play really.
remember, y'all think you are all God's gift to the world through coding experience, but a solid network engineer might have as much gripes about developers as y'all do about managers, project managers, sys admins etc, and the same shit can be applied vice versa.
Software engineering is magic, in the sense of the tv show "The Magicians" where you can make an incantation and suddenly your penis/tiddys explode: inexact science.
Be a tad bit open minded, learn enough about their shit to tell them that they are fucktards, and run from the ones that know but don't fix shit.
Peace pendejos2 -
How can I make my manager understand that performance should not be measured by how many tickets we have resolved?
If the ticket is an easy one then sure 1-2 days is enough, but for some complicated shit or dealing with models that I have never touched before, I am gonna need several days just to understand the requirement.
For some fucked up reason, our story point is in hours, instead of days. So when we say 24 hours, then it's only 3 days.
Another fucked up reason is that my colleagues doesn't seem to mind. I am the most vocal one objecting when got assigned too many tickets. They just joke around and seem to accept it.
FYI, I am just 6 months in and bouncing between 3 projects.
Am I just too lazy or slow?
In my previous company, the devs seemed to be pretty chill, and the project manager only complained when an issue has been dragging on for weeks.5 -
I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.
So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.
As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.
On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose
I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.
The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.
The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.
Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.
I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.
Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.
What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?23 -
I applied as a full-stack dev at a private company, they offered me the Project Manager role instead, I took the offer and after 1yr they gave me a choice to choose between staying as a Project Manager or switching to being a Software Engineer/System Analyst. I took the SoftEng position because project management isn’t my career choice for now.
Now people saying I not knowingly chose to be demoted. Is it a bad choice?10 -
When my manager says you can do this whole project in 14 days its very easy,
meanwhile project and me
2 -
After reading some rants abut stupid project managers I remembered this situation that happened to me a decade ago.
One of the tasks was to move some html component to different place on the page. The whole page was a mix trs and tds and to achieve that I had to rewrite the whole page structure. I estimated around half a day to complete that task. It was my first job and I was not great back then, but still it was reasonable amount for this task.
Now lets introduce my PM : the guy was a complete tool. He was a former hardware store manager ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and had no idea what we were doing.
He started ranting how on earth such simple task can takes so much time. I started explaining myself, but he wasn't listening. Instead he started sharing his screen, he made a screenshot of the page, pasted it to the ms paint, cut the component, and moved it to desired place. Then he said : It took me like 10 sec to complete the task and I have no experience, maybe I will replace you?
I was speechless. I had no words and I just kept silence.
Then he said he would reassign this task to X, because he is competent.
X spend more then 4 hours and I heard no apologies.6 -
I think the sleep deprived me is finally cracking under the weight of incompetent assholes.
We just launched a major project in some weird cocktail of Agile slapped with MVP and release to the wild in a waterfall, but it was premature, premature in the sense QA hasn't even finished their side of things, but because some fuck with with "manager" in their title decided they have burnt through the budget with incompetence and scrapped an entire element of the project and outsourced just so they could make a shittier version that doesn't even fucking work.
How hard do you want to fail before you will start listening to the people that now have to work around the fucking clock to clean up this horse shit of a mess.
I'm literally arguing over field mapping with multiple 3rd parties, when the fucking requirements state WTF this is suppose to look like. All because they didn't validate or test their own shit.
Why is EVERY FUCKING cock head in this industry a waste of space and cash! Is it really to much to ask for 1 fucking project to fucking go live that actually fucking works where I don't need to work 2 weeks straight (including weekends) after going live just to be sure that what shit does hit the fan isn't going to create a SEV 1 issue...
Sorry, I'm pissed at the incompetence of others I need to deal with on a daily basis. It's not like this field is insanely hard. A little attention to detail and self validation, verification goes a long way. But clearly that's a rarity.
Once this shit is stable and actually works, I'll be pulling out the mop to clean up half this shit just so it actually works.
Oof, I'm getting to old for this bullshit.4 -
Okay today I wrote a very ugly api.. No f***king json mapper will handle that response in java. The values are dynamic... Good luck to anyone who will integrate into it... And good luck to anyone who will look at my code
Project manager please always give realistic deadlines2 -
Just when I had almost fallen in love with this new job which I started 8 months ago, this happens.
My “manager” had conversation with me. He was complaining that my work is of poor quality (objectively speaking, it is not). I don’t even directly work with this manager anymore. He “leads” this big project and he really wanted me to get involved in it but I struggled because it’s a big codebase and I was a new joiner. Months later, a new project was started and I worked on the backend for it. And I really liked that project more as I literally wrote it from scratch. And even the “mangers” for that project was a bit chilled out.
Now, the first “manager” kept trying to involve me in the first project but new requirements kept popping up in the second project and I was happy to work there. Somewhere down the this, this irked the first “manager”. Also, the company is known to be very cheap with salaries (a good work culture though) and they are paying me more than others since I switched from another company to work there. So they are probably expecting more output for the salary they are paying me. That seems to be the main problem here.
Obviously this first “manager” has never worked a development job before, let alone reviewing my code or something. So I was confused after this conversation. He’s asking me if I noticed these issues in my work and how I can do better and I bluntly replied no, I don’t see any issues in my work. He said he’ll speak to me again on Friday (2 days from now) and expects me to give an answer about how I can improve and stuff. He seems to be power-tripping do so I’ll probably be firm about my position. Will probably mention the money part as well.
It sucks that I left a corporation because of work culture issues and joined this smaller company. And I see the same corporate disconnect cropping up here.3 -
!Dev related but still freelance.
So.. I do 3D stuff, scenes, animation and so on. The e-sport pub manager I know told me about this guy that wanted to start a local organizations around FIFA, hold tournaments at the pub and so on. He had some finance, contacts and needed a 3D scene of a stadium to highlight top placers as 3D Fifa cards.
Gotcha, so I hooked him up with said stuff, he was happy, manager was happy, first tournament went well. Now to the shit show:
He wrote to me a couple of days later asking if I'm up for more jobs, which k respectfully declined because l was on a bigger project that took about 2months to complete. Since that day, he spammed both me and the pub manager with request and wishes on wanting to do more.. and I mean SPAM!
Like the dude can't take a no, sorry. He tried to call on phone and messenger, messeged me several times / week and asked the manager of he heard from me.
Both the manager and I were perplexed of his attitude and after asking several times to stop and we both had other things for now (events / projects).. he.. he didn't stop. So.. blocked and that's that, right? Fuck now.. other clients of mine asked me if I knew of him because he tried to contact them to get to me.. like WTF?! How hard is it to take a no and move on?! Jesus.. client of hell in a nutshell3 -
There are a couple:
A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)
A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!
A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss
Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P -
Project manager has cancelled every meeting for the last 3 months. Starts today’s meeting with “I don’t know what we are going to meet about. Does anyone have anything?” While the Product Backlog just sits there, begging to be reviewed.4
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Today is the release of one of the projects I’ve been working on. It was a chaotic project, where I’ve had to contact many people just to get pieces of information necessary to complete the project. Anyway, today the manager ask what the URL of the web app is to give it to the client except I already warned him prior that since we don’t have the domain name for the web app it wouldn’t go past the authentication. But guess what happened? Yep that’s right it’s my fault yet again.
I keep warning my manager about potential issues with the projects I’m working on but they fall on deaf ears, and when the actual problem happens it’s all my fault because I didn’t check it earlier, I didn’t make a mail, I shouldn’t use Teams to tell him about it, I should monitor more closely, etc, despite having no time allocated whatsoever.
In short I work 7 hours a day but should have 9 to even get close to what I need to do, and I’m blamed with problems that I warn about3 -
I’ve somehow ended up in a situation where I have a big project to work on - alone, since I’m the only dev in the whole company with any expertise whatsoever in that area… which is exhausting enough by itself, since I have nowhere to turn to when I struggle with it, no one to rubber duck with and share the workload with, no one to review my code. On top of that, I’ve somehow become thee go to dev resource when it comes to this integration, that client’s custom shit and so on. I’ve been doing this big damn project since late August, and I keep getting pulled off it for weeks at a time. I think I haven’t had more than a day or two in a row to concentrate on it for at least 3 months… and my manager keeps asking me when it’ll be done. What I’d give for a few more devs to share the workload with…2
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Documentation for all our projects within a few hours is really impossible, thank you project manager.3
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I propose renaming the title "project manager" into "plim". Why? Well, there is an old soviet nursery rhyme:
I came up with a new word
A funny word called Plim
And I repeat it over:
Plim, Plim, Plim!
It jumps around shouting
Plim, Plim, Plim
Nobody cares about it
Plim, Plim, Plim -
My favorite thing at my desk is my adult coloring book. I'm a developer/project manager hybrid so I have to deal directly with the clients AND build their sites. 🙄👎🏼 Coloring in this is very therapeutic; the sayings are hilariously vulgar.😆👌🏼
2 -
I'm an idealist. I'm an optimist.
So of course I get enormously stressed out and depressed when the world just keeps fucking me over.
I have been at my current job for 2.5+ years. Been on the same project for the past 2+. And I am now on my 4th manager (not including the guy who hired me and got fired before I started).
It's just been one thing after the other. So many problems on this project with only one other dev on it until recently. Management has been avoiding taking proper actions.
I have done as much as I can and it has been a burden on my health. Last year I got passed over for a pay raise because of a bad manager, who since left for greener pastures. This year I got a small pay raise (below inflation) and a surprise bonus of such minuscule proportions that it's fucking laughable. I am being grossly underpaid for the weight that I'm pulling.
We just had a reorg that actually is a huge step in the right direction, and my new manager seems to actually want to give the project some proper attention.
So I asked him for a talk about my title and salary, so we can set things right.
We have now had two talks in a little over a week, in which he has emphatically stated over and over again how he just doesn't have the information or the power to give me anything at all.
And the thing is. I don't want to find another job. Of course I could easily do so, and for a lot more money too. But the problem is, I'm an idealist. I actually believe that what I'm working on, and what I will be working on in the future, at this place, is really important.
I should just get the hell out, as many of my colleagues have. It's actually quite incredible how many people have left my team over the past 6 months.
But I'm an optimist. I cannot see how management can possibly continue on this path without realising the consequences and taking action.
So now I've scheduled a meeting with the CEO to give him my two cents. I've done it before, which may actually have played a part in putting the reorg in motion.
I have to believe I can appeal to reason.
Otherwise, what's the point of anything?
I know. I'm the fucking clown meme.
Peace out.2 -
Question for those that worked alone with a project manager, and were you covered multiple parts, frontend, backend, mobile and you basically have good friendship with the project owner/manager but the job got bored or wanted to switch jobs because you wanted to change environment.
What was the period you informed your employer/project manager in advance about your resignation and leaving? 2 weeks, a month? more? And was it enough time for the manager to find replacement? Did you leave in good terms?3 -
I was refactoring a 4000 lines JavaScript file, turning whatever I could into components. It was a pretty old project that I ended up being one of the few wizards to actually know how most of it works.
At one point, I noticed that login into a user account redirected us to the dev-test server, even when working on a local Docker container.
I never quite understood the issue, but ended up having the bug mysteriously disappear.
Until it came back two months later, then disappeared again.
At one point, all of the dev team on the project (four developers, me included, and one project manager) was investigating the issue, and we never figured out how or why this was happening.
Just Symfony routes shenanigans I guess.15 -
My best experience this year was to be the project manager of a software project and my worst experience was to work alone on this project.
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!rant
In the past 2 days I worked a lot, now I slept 12 hours straight. I don't have any tickets left, and the manager told me to have fun. I haven't felt such freedom in a while.
(The project will be late by a year in February, so until now I always had at least 2 urgent tickets related to topics that I've never heard of before.)1 -
Finally, I finally got my dream job, but three weeks after starting, I will say I am going into depression.
First, I have to learn a new language (the lang is less than 7 years old) on the job. The language is so different from the paradigm I am used to-from OOP to functional programming, it has very little confusing documentation and a small but growing community.
Though I have been able to show some work, goddamit, it's taking me blood and sand to adjust and be productive.
My onboarding tasks are fixing bugs and implementing a feature, and it has been like walking in a dark tunnel.
I have to face my problem alone as all the devs in the team have swapped.
I rarely sleep, and I recently started to have an existential crisis!
Also, I work part-time on another project, and my output is so poor due to the fact that I am trying to adjust to the new job. Just this evening, I got a call from the manager who was passively aggressive, complaining and asking me to rethink (a passive way of saying "you are fired, if you do not...").
I am feeling anxious. It is taking so much time daily to adjust to the new job.
Will the depression pass?10 -
I just started a new job where in my onboarding, I’m supposed to learn typescript and react. I am also supposed to gain some knowledge of databases. Since I am so new, I don’t really have any meetings. I see my manager maybe 2x a day. I’ve been using my time at work to learn these technologies.
I learn best by doing projects. I recently built a bot that scrapes media off of one site and posts it on another site. I was thinking I could create a react front end in typescript for the bit. I would also add a database to my project (the model for the front end) which contains the post history of the bot.
Would that be appropriate for work? I thought it would be good project to help me learn react. However, I am new to the “corporate” world and I feel like my manager won’t want me to waste company time on my side project.
The only other responsibilities I have are reviewing the source code and watching some onboarding videos6 -
This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.
Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.
With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.
All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.
I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.2 -
Recently, our COO left the company and we got a new one. He is, for some reason, a freelancer which I find very odd as a C-level employee.
Anyway, fast forward 3 months and we the scrum master (or project manager), 60% of our dev team, one tech guy responsible for installations and our intern IT support department all got fired.
Now they gave me the decision for a raise, extra training (that they pay) but I have to find/figure out or an e-bike. Does anyone have some advice?6 -
Well....this shit again
This morning or technical manager calls me in his office and says he needs to discus something
sits me down and started talking about a project he needs
A school management system says he presented some demos at the client yesterday but they didn't really like options at the table
Manager: So can you get us something really quick?
Me: Well... what's the time line?
Manager: They needed this like yesterday!
Me: Aaaah....well i think i can have something by 2moro morning
Manager: Aaah! No!.... 2moro it's too late need something like fast
Me: Ok so will look for some online solutions and open source projects
Me:.....
Opens browser, opens github, download project, runs project
project isnt looking good enough
starts designing UI
Manager:
downloads a system
installes
runs
closes
reopens
meet with a "Buy to continue using system" message
calls me
Manager: this was just a demo now it needs payment what should we do
Me: I'll come up with something by 2moro1 -
Salesforce document template auto generation.
I only recently got promoted from junior, but on this project I am basically the go to person for work on our templates.
I pull a bunch of mangers and our client rep into a meeting to discuss the issues surrounding this and offer solutions.
One of the things I said was "If we changed this process to this, which would take about a week to develop / convert, we could reduce development time on adding new products from hours to minutes."
The client was intrigued but said I'd need more data about direct improvements customer side to get the green light.
My manager and supervisor said, in front of the client, "Nobody really gives a shit about developer time. They're never going to let us spend time to make your job easier or faster."
I know it's true but it still hurts 🤕🤕🤕4 -
I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks? -
This week, the only team members working is our Team Lead and Project Manager. While I respect what they do I can't help wondering what the heck they are being paid to work on while no one else is around.5
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Seriously, I got given a project that someone else was working on, it's beind and they're on long term sick. I did the project as discussed. My manager has decided he wants it done differently, wasting about a week of work. This is the same manager that complained about my rate of closing tickets. 2 weeks ago.
Malicious compliance time, I'm closing the current ticket and creating a new one for the new work. -
Hi all, how do you deal with imposter syndrome?
I just joined a new job 3 mths back and am struggling with feeling productive. I feel my manager thinks I might be incompetent as my project deliveries are getting delayed.
I was burnt out as last job and it hasn't been easy picking up domain knowledge in a new workplace esp with wfh.
Any advice on how to deal with such a situation ?3 -
Adobe, the company with virtually limitless budget, somehow created possibly the worst CMS to grace this earth (at least from the UX perspective). Meet Adobe Experience Manager, or AEM for short.
For starters, there's two executable jars: author and publis. Author is where you make all your pages, publish is the "final" preview. Except they're the same jar file. It's deciding which mode to run in based on the jar filename. The filename is also how you configure things like which port it's running on.
Publishing pages (sending them to the publish app) looks simple: select the page you want, press a button and it's ready to view. Except it's not. In order to publish a page and have it visible, you also need to publish the entire directory structure this site is in. So if you have the page in a directory "my-site/en/pages/home", you have to publish "my-site", then "en", then... The real kicker is that when you press "publish" on a page there's a checkbox that asks if you want to also publish everything that's linked to this page, that seemingly doesn't do anything
Ok, enough about publishing. Let's focus on the absolute monstrosity that is the "author" environment. When you first open it, you're greeted with a pretty layout with transitions and animations that's clearly meant for the editors. This is where you make folders and pages, and this is where you publish them. It's worth mentioning that these "folders" exist only in AEM, not on your disk. This part is actually ok, and if it wasn't for the shit publishing ux I'd say it's good.
But, that part only allows you to make pages with some predefined components. What if you wanted to make your own? Don't worry, you can. You just need a maven project that mixes Java, JavaScript, scss and XML in an unholy abomination of frontend and backend that _somehow_ gets compiled into Java classes that then get shoved into AEM and somehow work. Usually. Except for when they just break for no reason (5 people tried the same thing, and each got a completely different error, and it worked for the 6th person with no issues).
But that all was just the surface level stuff. You see, AEM is much more complicated than that. It's not _just_ a wisywyg HTML editor with some customizability sprinkled in. No, sir. It's practically an entire Unix-based operating system. You can open "crxde lite", or like I like to call it, the "os view" to see the entire unix-like directory tree. Just don't be surprised by how it looks. We're in admin/developer territory here, so better get used to the UI that'd make Windows Vista jealous.
The "os" comes with a bunch of apps. Aside from the designer view and crxde lite, there's a replication manager, GraphQL browser, user manager, asset manager and many more. Each app comes with its own UI style and even worse UX than the previous ones. Oh, by the way. I hope you have plenty of ram, cause all those apps are constantly loaded in memory.
Did I mention that the entire thing is written in Java? And I really mean the _entire_ thing. From what I can see, even the frontend JS is generated from Java classes.
So, TL;DR: it's shit. Stay the fuck away from it, and don't use it unless you absolutely have to. Or you're a masochist that wants to make a living out of it. If you know your way around AEM, you're practically guaranteed a well paying job2 -
I really dont think the project manager who passed out from IIM recently deserves to be paid so much than us devs. I don't know why but I feel it's not fair to pay someone 3 times that of my salary for just sending emails and having some meetings..3
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This is the first time I have a bad PM and it's much worse than having a pain in the ass colleague dev. A bad dev will mess his/work project and maybe slow down 1-2 other devs.
But a bad PM will doom the whole project, wasting lots of time of the devs working under him/her. Costing much more company's money.
PM:This task should be ready by next week.
Me : This task will require X weeks time for developing and delivery
PM: What?! That's too long, it's a simple one, should be done in a few days.
Me: **explaining the challenges, limitation, env set up, testing etc. Also because I am a junior so may take more time than experienced dev**
PM: **insist that this is important blah blah**
Me: Understand your points but X days is just too little, I don't want you to blame me for missing the deadline. Either we get a reasonable deadline or you can get more experienced dev to do it faster.
**Knowing well that I have the most experience in this task and other devs are busy with their own tasks**
In the end I have to escalate this argument to more senior manager because both of us won't budge. Not only she agreed to extend the deadline she also assigned a senior dev to help me when I am stuck.
His other mistakes I noticed during my time working under him:
- not consulting senior dev for the approach to the task (thus we have to change the design twice).
- assigning tasks to people without sufficient background (a java dev is being assigned a python task, it's doable but it's going to be faster if we assign to someone with more python experience right?)
I understand that our company is short-staffed, but I begin to wonder if the stress the devs endure is because of that or because of his incompetence.
Next time, I am going to specifically ask not to work under him again.2 -
Today was my last day of PIP project, I didn't do the work obviously. Is there any way HR will point that out and lessen my salary the month, that's all I'm worried about. I have savings but still don't want to lose a lot of money as I have to return the sign on bonus.
I just want to get relieved as soon as possible as people here are asses and I don't want to get in any mess in my last days. Has anyone has bad experience on PIP? I know the last thing that can happen is relieving which is the only thing I want.
It's a weird scary day for me. I'm studying, applying for jobs and stressed too. I didn't try to save my current job due to toxicity but I want it to fucking end. I really want to fucking slap my manager, slap his manager too.1 -
So my non-tech manager has started doing all the estimates for us developers on features upon high management request to save time, because of course rushing all the estimates for the work to be done in the next 6 months is the best process in software engineering.
All the estimates are based on previous work. Sometimes it will be accurate, but most of the time it is absolutely not.
So I get a task estimated to 3 weeks but I planned for 5. Just fit it in 3 weeks.
I planned for 2 weeks but the original estimate is 5. Just fit it in 5.
What kind of crap is that lol? What is the point of us estimating work if management knows apparently better than us how to design systems?
You guys got any similarly shitty project management system?1 -
My project manager is killing me.
I don't mind answering questions or providing more details when needed, but if you're sending me messages every day asking for status updates when you can literally see the status of every task in the PMS I'm going to lose my mind.1 -
I literally create a template of flutter project with state manager (provider) . Other words, I hate setting up a new project in flutter every Fking time. So I created a Cli (written in dart) app that flutter create something something and delete the main.dart and download the templates from my source from GitHub. Like a few folders and files.
Yes...I am this lazy2 -
after moving back to my home country, buying an apartment and after my career started to head to nowhere because there is nothing to code for me in work, just manager stuff, I am returning to coding after work to get back into shape, practice more, learn new stuff (and the old stuff)
wanted to create a small webapp with laravel/vue, holy fucking shit how hard it is (for me) to setup your env
install composer -> command php not found
o.O im pretty sure i had php on this machine HOW THE FUCK WOULD I HAVE ALL THESE PROJECTS HERE THEN
install php8.1 -> no such package
-.-
upgraded to ubuntu 22.04, install php8.1, composer
create new laravel project -> 3 errors, missing laravel/pint, phpunit
* visible confusion * i told you to create a project, if you need it, why didn't you... oh, wait
composer install -> same
well, * looks left, looks right * --ignore-platform-reqs
but still getting the chills from a new project, now I go sleep and tomorrow I start my journey to get back to business, wish me luck -
This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
--------------------------
There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))
4 -
Guys, i am having a tough time in work. So, i am sharing the story and questions here-
Initially, i was doing well with new projects and other existing projects where implemented new features.
But recently, i am assigned to a old project created by clients and some senior developer worked on it .
Ps: I was also assigned to this project 8 months earlier but was reassigned to other projects.
Now, Our senior developer who worked on it resigned because of the messy project and a lot of pressure from boss.
my colleague also resigned because of this.
Due to this, all this pressure thrown upon me. I am working on it relentlessly but i am soo burned out that i am actually feeling sick and constantly having headache.
And main thing is that the project has so many errors which iam getting during testing and i have to fix all of the error.
And yes they have documentation but shitty unreadable documentation . My manager also rebuking me why i dont remember things said to me 8 months earlier. (That time i just joined the company)
I don't know what will happen to me if i cant tackle this project.
And what should i do in such cases as my mental health is deteriorating day by day.3 -
How many of you ever developed (Or partially) "Stockholm syndrome" with your boss / project manager?
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!rant, but satisfying.
Got pulled in to a demo for some work that I had been apart of previously, but not recently since I had rolled on to a client. The Manager in charge of the work had fought me being pulled on to said client, as he wanted me committed to this project (which I didn't want to be invovled with). I had rolled off the engagement earlier this week, which is why I suspect I was included in this demo. So we are going through the motions, they are asking questions, I'm sitting quietly watching. out of the blue, Manager dude decides he wants to ask me a difficult question, because I'm sure he assumes he will stump me. I respond with "Not sure I'm the best to answer that specific question, since I haven't worked on this in a minute". He confirms that he only wants me to answer. So I do. And boy was I glad his camera was on, because he went from "Got em" to "Fuck, he got me" in a matter of seconds, and I could barely keep from smiling. After my answer, I respond with "Anything else you'd like to know?" to which he mutters "No, thank you" and quickly moves on. Talk about a victory. I'll ride this high through next week, I think.1 -
Couple of new colleages started last year.
Working with the new Full stack dev: Your WP site is slow? Try this new shiny CMS and just start all over!
Working with the new designer:
Can you send me the assets? Can you send me the assets? Can you also send me asset A? Can you also send me asset B?
Working with the new project manager:
So is it correct that i’m planned in for five projects today?! -
What should you do if the project manager is not assigning you any new work after the backlog already has been cleaned up?
I currently work as a junior front-end dev. For the past few weeks, the 2 juniors (incl. me) are lacking tickets. For example, I got 2.5 days of work assigned during our 3-week sprint. We already followed some courses, read some books & created some designs for upcoming features (that have no "functional specifications" written down).3
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