Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

German gov contractor interview.
1 interview went fine, test project went fine, then they told me all looks good and they'll fly me in so I can meet HR in person.

Flew up to Germany and there are solution architects and project managers in the room questioning me about C++ although it was about a java position.

Then told me that I'm no fit for them as their java devs need to be rock solid in C++ to make communication between departments easier. What the...

Stupid fucking project managers, just posting some slurry in Slack:

"User can't get into app!" _sends useless screenshot_

Yeah? And? I have no context on what time this was, what device, where, how, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

You want me to just telepathically jump to their location on earth, sniff the electromagnetic spectrum waves to sleuth out what exact requests they made and when to figure out what the problem is?

Just shut up. Shut up

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

Walk around the office in his underwear, because he forgot he left his trousers in the bathroom

Run a red light outside the office due to not wearing his required glasses. When questioned by co-workers, replied "I don't follow those facist rules"

Asking if we work less will we get paid more, because the project will take longer to do (while in a startup with no funding trying to secure some)

Tell a senior dev to stop testing in his spare time, as we won't be able to release on time if he keeps finding critical security bugs

Telling me "your timezone is not my concern", when asking for help with new tooling so we don't have to be online at the same time

Blaming my team for requesting too much help, leading to his team missing deadlines, in a meeting with very senior managers. When the reason we were requesting help was the handover doc we were given was filled with lies about features being finished and "ready to ship" and lacking any unit tests

Being accused of bullying and harassment to the CEO, because someone asked "did you follow up with X about the partnership they emailed us about". The person who was responsible, forgot 4 times, and saw it as an "attack" to mention it in team meetings

Telling an entire office/building mid November they've secured funding for at least the next year, then announcing in January after the Christmas break that its cheaper to move to India, so they are closing the office in 30 days

I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.

Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.

I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.

No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.

The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."

Fuck Everyone.

Time to find a new contract.

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

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. 😡👎🏼

Dear project managers.

Go fuck yourselves, stop hindering me in my ability to do my job. My job is to get the job done, I know exactly what exists where. If I request something, fucking get me it you useless cunts.

You're wasting time and resources with your lack of technical knowledge and making life difficult for the rest of us.

Sincerely, Frustrated Developers everywhere.

I recently started working on a 3 months old project, that was outsourced to two Indians genius. One of them left just before I arrived.

I had the chance to discover those guys were not using any version control system, just exchanging a zip file. I don’t even talk about the codebase, never seen such a mess …

Even better the project managers, were not using any IT program to follow the project advancement, but just Excel!!!

After a few days I realised that the remaining dev was not committing anything, the guy was always lying, (so many people died around him + some emergencies)

So, the guy got fired, but don’t worry management found new genius to save the project 🙂

Can someone tell me if outsourcing is really working?

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?

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 pendejos

Giving the stink-eye to the stakeholder who scheduled an important meeting when I’m out on PTO 😒😑😠 And my calendar had the day blocked off for weeks. Stakeholder probably doesn’t want me there because I’ll just tell them their “solutions” aren’t actually solutions.

Can someone explain to me why non-technical people even work in tech companies ??

I really don't want to sound like an asshole, but can you, for example, imagine that someone who doesn't even know what brick is would work on a construction site ?

Or can you imagine working in bike repair shop not knowing neither how to ride a bike nor how's bike is built ?

Sure, every company (especially large ones) needs bookkeepers/HRs/accountants etc. that don't need to know the inner workings of business.

Those people don't bother me, and they are necessary to keep the circus going.

I'm talking about all those middle management individuals.

All those "Project Managers" , "Business Analysts", "Directors' , "Principal Program Managers " etc etc ..

Such thing thing would be unthinkable in every other industry but somehow, in tech, anyone can work as long as they can throw a sufficient number of acronyms around.

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.

Fuck corporate managers who set goals without consulting the team as to what they can commit to!! "These are the goals that you need to commit to and you need to get them done in three months!" ... New team. Members come and go (even I replaced one). Low cohesion. Many dependencies. Unclear goals. A PO who's certified in many different ways, but has no damn idea what to do. Sure, let's get this shit thing done in 3 months.. aaaand we're late 6 months. Nice job. Stupid fuckers. I'm so glad I'm just consulting on this project and not a member of this chaos organization.

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

How did we normalize Project Managers (non-technical scumbags who literally just make excel sheets and track work items) yelling at Developers (they literally get everything done).

Imagine having PMs yelling at surgeons for not removing a tumor fast enough or something.

DevRant hiring managers - do projects actually matter? Have you really hired someone because of a cool project?

Oh my... I'm so exhausted and tired of everything. First I got really sick for two weeks and couldn't work. I also collapsed on the floor one night and hurt myself. Well what happens yesterday? You guessed it - I fell down the stairs and hurt exactly the same spots as two weeks ago... (no I was not drunk).

And then I have to work on a holiday today (yes, still with that same fucking shitty shopware project) because I have to attend an appointment in a different country on Thursday (I need Thursday off, but I don't have any vacation left).

So here I'm sitting almost crying in pain because of this FUCKING project, everything hurts, I still can't think straight and shopware is denying my refresh tokens. FUCK THIS JOB. Seriously. Fuck it. I have had the chance to look into a lot of companies and do different things, but this is the worst.

Nobody fucking cared about the project for nearly 8 months, and now that I'm close to leaving the company they begin to act like "oh well it must be done by then". ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! I told them a million times I need help and that I won't be able to finish it in time. That's what happens when nobody plans a project, but accepts it anyways because "it brings in money".

Seriously?! This project has been a waste of money and my energy and nerves. We're already 100% over the budget and will never ever see one cent coming from this shitty project. WHY FOR FUCKS SAKE IS IT THAT THOSE PEOPLE JUST DONT SEE IT WHEN A PROJECT IS GOING DOWN THE FUCKING DRAIN?!

In the same meeting
Well be moving on to open source technologies. You are devs and are expected to learn this on your own. Preferably on your own time
Minutes later.
Well be holding an agile workshop and also outside consultants to help the managers.
I left a few months later for multiple reasons.
I did stay for the first month and helped set up the angular project and structure. But i had to train a person who never worked with angular or anything frontend. It wasnt her fault. She was a developer and expected to learn on her own even tho she worked just backend before.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

I truly believe that a back end needs to know about front end as much as a front end needs to know about back end.
And a more serious belief is that project managers / owners need to know about both. Thank you.

One of the things I find annoying about today's development is having to use package managers.

Here I am, trying to just simply install a package. Oops! The version of x you are running is not compatible with y. *fixes it and runs it again* Oops! The version of y you are running has dropped support for z.

How about! You just! Let me! Code! And stop! Making me waste time! On project scaffolding! For each! And every! Framework! Library! Or whatever!

*pulls my hair out*
lol