I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

Let's get rid of the developer training: Pair Programming

Let's get rid of the software testers: Test First Programming

Let's get rid of the project managers: Agile

Let's get rid of the project planners: Scrum

Let's get rid of the system admins: DevOps

Let's get rid of the security guys: DevOpsSec

Let's get rid of the hardware budget: Bring Your Own Device

Let's get rid of the servers: Cloud Computing

Let's get rid of the other scruffy guys: Outsourcing

Let's get rid of the office space: Home Office

Let's get rid of the whole fucking company: Takeover

Frontend is as hard as backend

An appreciation post for every single frontend developer out here who can bear customer, project managers and designers nagging

You guys deserve a gold medal

When the PM gives you the project estimates...

Project manager: I thought you said you made sure it was live today! I'm going to have to explain that you're the main issue with why it isn't live to management!

Me: have you cleared your cache?.... (long silence)

I swear it's the new "have you tried turning it off and then on again".

devRant has over 30k users within 1 year. Congratulations @dfox @trogus and awesome work. I would also like to thank my boss, project managers, colleagues and clients. They are the biggest contributors in devRant. lolz...

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

"You will get a month to finish this project."

"I will be honest and give you are a realistic deadline. It will take about 2 months."

"But ${random} company told me they will take one month."

"As you can see from your previous project, they will say one month and will drag it to two-three months by making excuses"

"No, I don't think you are good enough for it. I will pass it to them."

"..."

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!

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

Painful Representative Often Jeopardizing Expected Completion Times, Making All New Assignments Greatly Escape Reality

Or

P.R.O.J.E.C.T. M.A.N.A.G.E.R. for short.

FUCKING PROJECT MANAGERS.

FOR THE LAST TIME, YOUR ALTERNATIVE IS UNUSABLE As explained the original proposal, and in comments THAT YOU FUCKING REPLIED TO AND AGREED WITH, the thing you want to use WILL NOT WORK. WHY ARE YOU SUGGESTING IT AGAIN?

FUCK YOU, YOU HAIRY-ARSED TWERP.

Also, dfox can we please have fucking anonymous rants!

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

PM : Have you finished the login issues?
Me, junior dev: No mister.
PM: Why not? You're going to delay the sprint.
Me: The other PM told me not to do it.

When you're the only dev in a project with two managers, life suddenly feels like you're back to 5 years old with your parents arguing all the time.

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...

One of my previous managers would constantly make promises our team couldn't keep. "You want it in a week? Sure, we can finish it in a week! You want it tomorrow? Sure, we can do that!"

It got so bad that our team basically had to stage an intervention. At one of our standups, we flat-out told him that even if the entire team dropped all of our other tasks to focus on the one big project, we still would not be able to meet the deadline he'd promised the client.

And that fucker actually said, "Well, if you want to come in on the weekend to work some overtime, I don't mind." as if he was offering to do us a favor by "allowing" us to work more.

No overtime pay because we had salaries.

So glad I don't work for him any more. Of course, my next manager wasn't great either, it just took longer for us to figure it out because she wasn't nearly as blatant about it.

Manager Logic: The project is behind, we have brought on additional managers to satisfy the client. 😲 The fuck is a manager going to do? "Meetings! We need more meetings to ensure the deadline is met."

Dear "managers,"

Stealing credit for something you have not done is real theft.

When I come up with an idea and a detailed outline of how to build and deliver it, you do not get to say "oh I also had this idea." You did not. How could you? It uses tech you don't even know exists.

When I then proceed to build the whole thing on my own without any of your inputs (then again, you have no idea of how it works, what would you bring to the table), you don't get to parade my project in front of the board not even mentioning my name.

You see, it's not the first time you pull that off, you have taken full credit for every thing.

it's not just my wee feelings getting hurt for lack of recognition: it has real world consequences.

You get the promotion, you get the salary raise and you now live in a flat with a balcony and a view, while my wife and I share a studio as my salary has not budged.

You're a cunting thief, I hope your mom dies.

Best,

X

So I worked on getting a server ready for about 30 hours last week to be ready for a deploy on Monday Night (last night). Not only did I work on it for 30 hours, we had two other architects and a senior engineer working on it too. We got everything done Friday and it was ready to go with a simple cutover on Monday night.

The only thing left to do was deploy a link change Monday night on the existing landing page. My part was the backend servers and application that had the complicated SSO system and the other part was just a link to get to the SSO. I asked the person responsible for deploying the landing page's link if he was ready about a dozen times. He kept saying he was deploying X (the code name for the project deploy) and that is all he was doing.

Now jump to that night. They have decided that a single landing page wasn't enough and they were going to deploy a full CMS. Well no one knew what the hell was going on and they didn't realize that the landing page was hosted externally on another host. After arguing for two hours they delayed the deployment for multiple days. 24 hours later they are still trying to figure out the CMS on a host.

30 hours and four senior engineer's time wasted to get everything done for the deadline all to be canceled because of on jackass's lack of planning. WTF

Project Managers be like "hey bruh, I just wanted to put a meeting half way through your crunch for a deadline to make sure we can meet that dead line"

That moment when your project managers think hiring 3 new developers will deliver their project 3x faster.

Dear designers/project managers,

I am a developer. That means you don't have to explain simple programming concepts to me that you half know and think you fully understand as if I have never seen code before.

Save your breath and stop being so condescending. You don't know half as much as you think.

Thanks, from one annoyed dev.

After a long thought I have decided to quit my job and work on my side project😎
Who else is tired of these shitty managers who don't understand anything!!

Some years back I was working in a project that essentially dealt with all things related to foreigners and foreign affairs in Switzerland. You could manage entry visas, work permits, citizenship, international warrants, Interpol requests, etc.

One of the test managers (from client side - i.e. the government) was once manually "testing" and mixed up the production and test instance, to both of which he was logged in at the time.
The test case then ended up setting up an entry ban against himself, as he used his own name for testing...

Next time he returned from vacation the border control at the airport were like "Uhm, Sir, we can't let you into the country. Please come with us." :D :D

(He managed to clear that up in end, I dare say, though, that he learned his lesson.)

TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.

I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.

FF to today:

- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"

And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.

Heard about that developer thats was involved in a car accident and went to hospital for brain surgey?

Doc said he need to remove half of the brain but he will survive. His developer friends was happy with the news that he will survive but sad loosing a great developer.

The surgey went as expected and now he is one of the best Project managers in the business.

Dev: This is the first version of this new app, we’re still experimenting with how it’s going to work but initial headway is looking promising. It cost very little to make, came together very quickly and is already resulting in productivity increases for users. We’re just doing a bit of code cleanup now and we’ll make a move on the next iteration.

Corporate IT: This project is being completely mishandled! In order to successfully build an app you have to determine every single requirement beforehand! It takes millions upon millions of dollars due to the complex system of governance and approval that needs to exist. Massive numbers of stakeholders need to be involved and coordinated to even make so much as a login screen! I bet your project doesn’t even have a documented list of core values.

Dev: Has you ever successfully built an app using that methodology?

Corporate IT: 😡 That’s a loaded question. I went to school to study project management and have over 25 years of experience in the field. If you had the training and experience I do you would know that tech projects are naturally very volatile and there’s nothing you can do about that!

Dev: …

Project manager: We have 13weeks for this project. We have promised the client.

Me: okay, why wasnt I consulted on that commitment?

Project Manager: yeah.... we have to do it

Me: okay, if we have 2 dedicated backend and one full time frontend - ONLY on this project.

Project manager: (with the face of lies) yes yes sure we can do that.

6 weeks later, after continuous interruptions. Frontend is behind because he was only on the project to an amount of 2 weeks of the 6 weeks.

Project manager: Are we still on time?

Me: *looks around for prank cameras* no the f#*k we not

Project manager: can we put in weekends?

Me: its 2019 bro, that ain't happening

*But because I am a nice guy, and dont like taking Ls, we will have it ready. Just not gonna tell the project manager, he deserves a few sleepless nights *

It's getting close to that time of year when we are all encouraged to think of others and spread joy around the world. I've decided to go against my usual snarky/anti-social nature, and do something to help others this year.

I'm announcing the practiseSafeHex charitable fund, to give back and help others.

This fund will invest in cutting edge medical research to detect the genetic abnormality in humans that results in project managers not being able to comprehend the simplest of concepts.

Together we can find the reason why the concept "more meetings = less work" is uncomprehendible.

Together we can discover why we can't use an automated bot to generate reports, instead of spending hours in excel spreadsheets.

And together we will find a reason why the answer to the question "can we please just try it?" is always "No".

We do this not for ourselves for short term gains, we do this for the greater good. Together we can find the cause and build a test to filter these people out. So that never again will stressed out developers have to deal with these petty ridiculous issues.

Together, we will solve this!

Thanks,
practiseSafeHex, CEO and managing director of the practiseSafeHex charitable fund for the betterment of developer sanity

Do managers not fucking understand that Jira is meant to eliminate all this stupid "What's the status with X?", and "Is Y done yet?" chatter. Our communication channels should be on business logic and other global updates about the company, not about fucking workflow status updates because you have nothing else to do with your day but ping me every 5 minutes.

LOOK AT THE REVIEW COLUMN ON JIRA. I MEAN ITS LITERALLY CALLED REVIEW. SO REVIEW IT AND DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.

I swear the devs consistently have a better overview on timelines and project status than management does - which is sad, because this is literally the definition of management!!!

One thing that pisses every dev off I know!

Project Managers who think making any changes takes 30 seconds.

"No Susan, changing the site isn't as simple as changing your f**king Facebook status!!"

PM had a bad habit of breaking me out of my zone so I had a talk about what that means.

I explained the idea behind how interruptions can cost productivity. He seemed to get it, or so thought. Said he'd message me as to not break the zone. Good good!

He messages me with a question, then walks over to ask if the message broke my zone.

🤔

What if the long term goal of @trogus and @dfox is to create a developer army, hell bent on the destruction of project managers and clients everywhere (except the cool ones).

I mean I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Just wanted to... You know.... Raise some attention.

Programming is a lot like playing video games. It challenges you to beat quests/tasks and hunt enemy bugs while providing boss levels in the form of large projects with tight deadlines and project managers who like to move the goal posts.

I tend to respect project managers who came from production (ie. who can code, design, or produce something tangible), vs. "professional" managers who have no idea how the work is actually done.

Sadly I didn't encounter many.

I raise my middle finger:

- to the past developers of this 4 year old piece of garbage project that we are maintaining, who thought that using StringBuffers to construct html documents as a Http response as a good idea

- to the bosses and managers, who keeps on giving unreasonable deadlines yet passes accountability to others.

I gave you all a Linus Torvalds style fuck you!!

That is it, I decided to resign

Fuck post-it notes.

Oh look, another product manager found his inner child and plastered a wall with a colored arts and crafts project.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm abso-fucking-lutely in favor of connecting with your deep childish nature -- but then at least enter the meeting room like a boss, armed with some creative ideas, really get to work with some fingerpaint, modelling clay, glitter, molly, acid blotters and grape juice for the whole party.

Not only was that project poorly thought out. Not only does the assortment of colored squares contribute nothing to the clarification of ideas. The issue is also that by Monday morning, the meeting room will look like a strip club after an escalated party, floor littered with 60 little neon pink and green slips reeking of desperation, cheap glue and failure.

Now your whole project is on the floor.

OH DIGITAL WHITEBOARD YOU SAY. NOW WE HAVE 10 MANAGERS FIGHTING DIGITALLY OVER VIRTUAL POST-ITS, ON A CLOUD SERVICE COSTING $500/MONTH.

Product managers, just go fuck yourself, I don't care about your kindergarten bullshit processes.

Call me when you manage to pull a workable idea out of your ass, and just draw an SVG diagram with Inkscape, or write your brainfarts into a nicely organized Markdown file.

My manager is so cool at work that he doesn't care if I sleep during office hours or even skip working for a couple of days as long as I meet the deadlines. All he cares about is getting the work done and keeping his team happy.
I abso-frigging-lutely respect him very much and like him as a person.
Unlike my friends' managers in other departments, he wouldn't assign me more work if I finished a project before the deadline.
I wish all the managers in all the companies realise work-life balance is important and act like him.

I feel like castrating our PM right now.
"Hey, here are a few changes I promised the client will be done by tomorrow. "
**Sends a 1000+ page document **
It's on a fucking weekend moron!!!

This big multi-million consulting company hired me as freelance. They did it in a hurry, because "the project already started, it is a very important client (a bank) and we need your expertise by YESTERDAY".

In the first THREE WEEKS I had meetings with their own project managers, their client's project managers, techies, sales people. No one was able to tell me what do I have to do, but:

1 - they asked me for very detailed estimates plus a release plan
2 - f**k your estimates, we need this BY JANUARY 16th

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.

I just lost faith in the entire management team of the company I'm working for.

Context: A mid sized company with
- a software engineering departmant consisting of several teams working on a variety of products and projects.
- a project management department with a bunch of project managers that mostly don't know shit about software development or technical details of the products created by engineering.

Project management is unhappy about the fact that software engineering practically never sticks to the plan regarding cost, time and function that was made at the very beginning of the project. Oh really? Since when does waterfall project management work well? As such they worked out a great idea how to improve the situation: They're going to implement *Shopfloor Management*!

Ever heared about Shopfloor Management? Probably not, because it is meant for improving repetitive workflows like assembly line work. In a nutshell it works by collecting key figures, detecting deviation in these numbers and performing targeted optimization of identified problem areas. Of course, there is more to Shopfloor Management, but that refers largely to the way the process just described is to be carried out (using visualisation boards, treating the employee well, let them solve the actual problem instead of management, and so on...). In any case, this process is not useful for highly complex and hard-to-predict workflows like software development.

That's like trying to improve a book author's output by measuring lines of text per day and fixing deviations in observed numbers with a wrench.

Why the hell don't they simply implement something proven like Scrum? Probably because they're affraid of losing control, affraid of self managed employees, affraid of the day everybody realizes that certain management layers are useless overhead that don't help in generating value but only bloat.

Fun times ahead!

Hello everyone 👋

I see people blaming the developers when you see a crappy software product , saying that they have done a bad job.

But even it could be true also it could be the product managers who didn’t give enough time todo what needs to be done or project scope is too big for the persons knowledge.

I’ve worked in a company where deadlines were so tight I didn’t have enough time to proper UI and Testing. I used to be only developer who has someone experience and I had to train the interns as well. I am also to blame to joining such company but in desperate times takes desperate measures.

And now when i’m leaving the company and I have spend 2 years of my life for apps that I’m not proud of.

Just rant. Please feel free to give ur thoughts

Some people might agree

Soo much fun working for a cunt as a boss:

B: We getting soo close now, the plane is coming in to land.
Me: Yes, but the engine is busy falling off
B: Well, if we miss the deadline, its only us to blame.

NO YOU INSIGNIFICANT LITTLE CUNT, ITS YOU, ONLY YOU, 100% ENTIRELY YOU YOU SHIT FACED DUCK DICK.

Context:

We are on version 8 of our deadline, which was initially March, our next and final extension ends next Friday, we are this fucked ebcause all he fucking does is make bad descisions and pointless changes, we been telling hims once October to stop making changes if we ever want ot make the deadline.

Directly after he vommited that poes out of his mount he goes on to detail the massive change to the data structure that only needs to be changed as he refused ot listen to the developer when they told him not to do it that way 3 months ago.

How is it even possible that someone this moronic and incompitent can actualyl exist on planet earth. He is not even a flat earther.

Broken app is broken again. This app is broken so often and so hard, I'm struggling to give a damn.

These fuckers need to take their shitty project, code and managers especially, and launch them into Mars

They blame us and everyone else for their shit and I'm done with it. I need to sleep and not have these fools call me at all fucking hours.

I am being asked to support Internet Explorer 8 on this project I am wrapping up. The front-end has been developed using AngularJS 2.

Dear project managers,

Learn to use the fucking ticketing system. And by "use" I don't mean emailing IT asking them to open a ticket for you.

#GrowUpPinheads

Job Interview for a CTO role for a premium employer, a big law firm.

All is going well, I am telling them about my years of experience doing complex software integrations in business environments. Talking CRM/ERP, project management and development with external service providers. I tell them I want a salary of 100k and they nod in silence.

Then out of the blue one of the three stakeholders/managers leans over for a final question:
"Soo, we have this really big IT problem and if you would happen to know a solution to it, you would really prove your worth: I have these 10k+ E-Mails in my Outlook folder which doubles as an archive and Outlook keeps getting slower all the time. What can we do?"

Being asked (or more accurately made!) to travel Mon-Fri (i.e. staying away from home) for at least 2 months to a customer's site to work on a completely insane project that had no design, formal requirements, preparation or support. It was just a "friendly side project" 2 friendly managers concocted.

After some research, the project wasn't actually technically possible, but the customer wanted it so I had to try to find a solution.

The complication for me was that my wife was almost 8 months pregnant with our first kid and I made it clear I really wanted to be at home. Was left to feel I had little choice but to go. Project runs over but damnit I'm taking my 3 weeks parental leave entitlement.

Day before I'm due to go back to work, I get an email saying "You'll be travelling tomorrow for the next few weeks". At that point, I replied with the most angry work email I've ever sent and threatened that if that was the case I wouldn't be back. Plans were changed.

I ended up leaving within a couple of months anyway.

"Don't worry about pagination, we can just send the whole database to the front-end" ~ My Boss, being serious AF.

Worst of all, he has worked in system development for 20 years, he is not meant to be this stupid.

*me currently working with .NET and Angular2*
Manager: you have to switch projects, you will work now with Node.js and React only
me: I don't want that.
Manager: okay then.

*two weeks later*
Manager: I'm sorry, you have to switch projects.
me: ...

And here I am onboarding to a new project, trying to understand how React and Node.js work.

P.S. help me get my avatar.

When you're deep into coding and every 15 mins a project manager taps you on the shoulder to see how it's going.

It's so frustrating when you're trying to power through a development but get constantly interrupted by phone calls, coworkers, project managers, meetings, emails and IM.

Just let me work!!

The headset rule. If put on, project managers, the pope and everyone should stay away the developers. If put on one ear, it is allowed to disturb if it's important. Headset off, party time.

Managers when a developer misses something on a project: “we need to go red fucking alert and schedule several meetings on why this developer inadequacy can never happen again and make sure to record this and make sure the stupid ass devs read all the requirements and use this mistake to offload more of our work onto the dev team”

Managers when they or any other team member misses something on a project: “oh we just made a slight woopsie, just a tiny little miss on our part, a lil fucky wucky, no need to worry”

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. 😡👎🏼

*receives email about project*

*turns around*

PM: "Hey I just sent you an email about a project"

No. Fucking. Shit.

Worst Project: Project Managers that don't trust their team.

Our PM before didn't want the developers included in the client meetup because she said the developers wouldn't understand anything in the meeting.

A month after the proposed deadline after, I free up my time (I'm handling different projects), and I decide to speak with the client to see where thing went south.

Apparently, what our PM promised/understood is far off from what the client wanted.

The project was a simple "show the drivers where they need to go next" mobile app while she promised a "Traveling Salesman Problem"-esque solution.

Many years ago when I changed to my second job, I had to do a lot more JavaScript work and upon Googling for a solution, that's when I came across jQuery. The idea of only having to write a few lines instead of multiple lines just to do a simple task was pretty exciting.

Plus looking through the docs and reading up about animations, I thought that was pretty cool and started playing around with it. Eventually I came to a project where I needed an interactive form and so I used jQuery to handle a lot of the UI work. My managers and the client were pretty excited about seeing how stuff can appear/disappear.

Inappropriate experience at work: One of our project managers got arrested one day for fraud. Apparently an employee had been in the middle of an online purchase and walked away from their desk. He happened to see the unmasked entry of the CC info (this was before websites cared about masking sensitive form inputs). I guess the temptation was too great…and he was too stupid to realize he’d get caught…and he jotted it all down. He made thousands of dollars in purchases which, naturally, eventually led back to him.

The same guy, before he got arrested, had made a joke when someone in an office team email said “Feel free to have some cake in the break room.” He replied “No need to do anything to me for the cake.” His first name was “Free”.

Project managers are people that think 9 women can make a baby in 1 month

One of my project managers wanted a feature where the user can save over files without having to delete all information of the previous file and that they could go through previous versions. So I told him, "Okay, what you want is a versioning system." Then he proceeded to say no and describe the exact same thing as a versioning system. I wanted to yell at him that that's exactly what he wanted but kept my mouth shut because there is no point in continuing the conversation.

Karma Story

2 motherfuckers that were absolute shit as managers applied for a position for the web tech manager at my institution. I was the one that Xed both their applications.

Now, I didn't do it out of pettiness, I did it because both of these assholes lied about their positions, responsibilities and knowledge.
One of them washed his hands on a project stating that he had no knowledge of web development, but stated on his resume that he was working as a web dev at the time(in node and asp.net) as well as angular frontends <--- fking bullshit

The other stated that he has been coding all his life. Yeah shitbag, that is why you were selling phones at a company and when i mentioned to you that i studied comp sci you said that it sounds interesting but you had no idea what development is or how computers even work.

There were many. Might say fuck it and just take the position for myself. Shit got funny af and it is amazing how being a shit person and a liar will get back to you and bite you in the ass.

Fuck them

Hands down biggest coding distraction has got to be Project Managers.

I've been teaching my brother basic front-end development stuff. He's good. Seeing this, I decided to put him into a real project. So I got one, a simple front-end project. But the project managers are assholes and requesting stupid things. Thus, my brother didn't complete it before deadline. I don't know what to do now. I can't help my brother because I don't have enough time. I am very furious as I want to leave the project and fuck the manager over. What should I do?

DO NOT be afraid to argue with people. It doesnt matter who they are. Senior engineers, tech leads, delivery managers, if you know something is wrong make it heard. I made a point of telling my Project Manager that the current project is the worst ive ever seen. The technology is awful and we all hate the development. They need to know this stuff. And if they come to you with a deadline that you dont think you can make, say it then and there. Then they cant come back and say why isnt this done. Basically dont just do as youre told. If we needed that we would get robots to do our job. We need people who think and have opinions and make those opinions heard at the appropriate level.

Managers when a project is going off the rails:

*crickets*

Managers when something is successfully on track:

THIS NEEDS A ROADMAP, WHERE IS THE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE, WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS, I DIDN’T APPROVE THIS ACTIVITY.

When project managers copy and paste clients' vague requests word for word with no further explanation

I was working on a team with people with various employment statuses. Contractors, employees of the client, and me as a regular full time employee of the company that “owned” the contract. My HR manager gave us a presentation about our reporting structure. I had at least seven managers for different reasons across various projects.

I got a new position so needed to resign but I had no idea which managers were the ones I should notify. I looked at the org chart that the HR lady showed. I sent my resignation to five managers that would be affected by my leaving. Unknown to me my project manager was actually a contracting manager hired by the client. He let his employer, the client, know that the lead dev quit.
Apparently it destabilized the contract for my employer. If I hadn’t just issued resignation they would have fired me for telling a customer about a significant internal staffing change. They didn’t fire me because the optics would have been worse for them.

“Like herding cats.” I’ve heard this out of the mouths of PMs and other management types. No shit that’s what it’s like because cats aren’t herd animals. It’s what happens when you put some of the smartest people in your company at the bottom of a hierarchy, and then have some doofus manage us that reads inspirational leadership blogposts all day.

We will undermine the shit out of your shit, and you won’t even know it’s happening.

We will make every single reprimand of yours into a joke while you’re not in the building. “Hey Joe, I’m pretty sure what you’re doing right now is spreading negativity. Don’t you know it’s contagious?”

We will game every single metric you try to use on us. We will game every single one of your leadership agendas.

When I think of these things, I laugh in my heart like Skeletor.

Shit Project Managers say.. to my coworker when I'm not there :
"Hey do you think she's working hard enough ?..I don't know, she has only made 2 commits in the past week so.. "

Fortunately my coworker defended me and told me after but yeah.. As if you could measure efforts and work in development by counting lines of code, fuck-tard.

I'm so sick of dumb project managers, they want "updates" but then they reply with "I didn't understand any of that but it sounds like it's going well"

I literally have a PM who does it all the time, at this point I could talk to him in another language, and he'd just say "Great, sounds like its going well" then proceed to ask for updated a couple hours later *hardfacdpalm*

SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK IS SCRUM, WHY DO MANAGERS KEEP USING IT, WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO MICROMANAGE AND MEET ARBITRARY DEADLINES THAT ARE TANGENTIAL TO THE MAIN PROJECT???!!!?!

Dear Project Managers,

If you schedule a status update meeting for the end of the week, it is NOT okay for you to stop by my desk every day and ask if the project is on track. You will get your update during the update meeting you scheduled.

KthanxBye

I am actually a bit angry that there is no fucking thing to rant about at my new work - no dumb clients, no dumb project managers (I am doing project management with the boss and the company is somewhat startupish) and the project is interesting as well.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.

One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).

After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".

Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.

Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding.

My company’s upper leadership is sooo focused on the NUMBER of defects that are open on our project and only the number. We give each defect a priority of P0, P1, or P2. You would think this would help prioritize and strategize our plan to fix them. But nope. Every week we have some arbitrary “goal” to hit. A number purely made up by clueless leadership as to what makes a “quality” product.

On Friday’s, managers start harassing devs to merge their fixes and for QA to close out defects. So effectively rushing to hit that arbitrary number or else we’ll have to work Saturday.

Meanwhile they want more test automation coverage to reduce the incoming defect rate. But when the fuck do we have time to develop said tests when all you want is the defect closed to bring down your precious little number?!

They’d rather us close 25 P2 defects to bring the number down rather than 10 P0 or P1 defects. These leaders are so incompetent it kills me! Without any back story, they’re ultimately the reason we’re in this position in the first place! Argghhh!

I'm of Indian descent and I just stepped into a meeting where some American project managers couldn't understand tech support 's accent. it wasn't them though, because I couldn't understand the guy's thick Indian accent either.

My project mananger let it slip during the sprint review that the upper managers are making plans to do lay offs / cut the fat.

What an ideal moment to hand in my resignation.

I just joined devrants and starting my rant here with a dig at the Project Managers I have worked with.

My ex-boss who had 35 years of experience in IT Industry, didn't know one single fucking coding language, obviously had no clue about source control or anything even remotely related to computers, and had been project manager of a project having over 1 million lines of totally undocumented code split into 389 files with no apparent structuring. All variables were either alphabets or names of programmers who developed them.
Code was in Python 2 and had bugs/line ratio ~= 5.
He asked to write a 'wrapper' class and somehow run it in Java and fix all bugs automatically. (insert Shia LaBeouf's magic GIF here)

When I said it doesn't make sense, he said you should put in hard work and do it, and not give excuses.
Time given to do this - 1 hour :-P

Good thing I quit that shit place and that pathetic moron. Love my new job and life! :D

Seriously managers should trust their developers and allow some degree of freedom. It helps a lot.

During the majority of my career, I've been the stereotypical pissed off guy with earphones in mashing away at his keyboard.

During lunch hours, I absolutely love listening to other pissed off devs. Their tales of buggy Microsoft products, oblivious project managers, dangerously unqualified directors, and severely disabled bosses are often the only thing that put a smile on my face in a workday, and here in Tokyo a workday is often your whole day. I don't feel there's anything wrong with it - the targets of their abuse often really are leeching tons of money while contributing little to nothing, so I feel like they deserve the abuse.

However, I don't like it when devs trash-talk other devs. I sympathize with those guys, even if they wrote bad code. I know writing good code is really, really hard, and I know that they were trying to do it under extremely difficult circumstances (in an office). If they're junior I sympathize even more because they're often better than I was when I had the same amount of experience.

So in conclusion, don't hate your fellow dev. Don't let hatred control you and poison your well-being. Direct your hatred where it belongs, at project managers.

Had a blast from the past the other day. Testing an issue with an AngularJS app in IE11 on a project managers Surface.

Nothing works. Just a blank screen. I open the JavaScript console to hundreds, maybe thousands of errors. They all seem eerily familiar, but I can't place them. It's like something from a past life.

Then I see one that brings the issue into sharp focus.

"{{variable_name}} is a reserved word"

No it isn't, I think. That hasn't been a reserved word in JavaScript since...

Me: "Is your browser in Compatibility Mode?"

PM: "Yeah, it's for one of our legacy programs"

Me: "You need to turn that off to test this app. It thinks you're using IE6, so it's having a 2 decade old shit-fit. I haven't seen those errors since I was a teenager making crap on Geocities"

I never thought an error message could make me feel so old 😩

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.

There you are, fiddling with next.js webpack settings, because your isomorphic JS-in-CSS-in-JS SSR fallback from react-native-web to react-dom throws a runtime error on your SSR prerendering server during isomorphic asynchronous data prefetching from Kubernetes backend-for-frontend edge-server with GraphQL.

You have all that tech to display a landing page with an email form, just to send spam emails with ten tracking links and five tracking beacons per email.

Your product can be replaced by an Excel document made in two days.

It was developed in two years by a team of ten developers crunching every day under twelve project managers that can be replaced with a parrot trained to say “Any updates?”

Your evaluation is $5M+. You have 10,000 dependency security warnings, 1000 likes on Product Hunt, 500 comments on Hacker News, and a popular Twitter account.

Your future looks bright. You finish your coffee, crack your knuckles and carry on writing unit tests.

That thing we all tried - explaining to project managers what the difference is between back and frontend,

Today i got 23 backend bugs assigned to me as a frontend 💩

Clients and Project managers do Believe​ in magic.

I am glad to see all the pent up anger toward project managers. I quietly rage against them daily. I have even made up acronyms like "LIS" for "like I said", "DBR" for "Drive by requests" and "OSR" for "one sentence requirements". I write them on my white board and the don't know what it means.

.project-managers { display: none; }

Clown manager put three juniors (and ”senior” dev on work visa) on new project.

They will never finish it.

It’s too hard for them with some legacy dynamically created complex database queries which will spook the hell out of them!

But managers like, ”it’s going to be good” and ”making good progress”.

Fuck no! Putting juniors together? With little support? It such a waste. They spent weeks just to get even the slightest progress.

No best practise. No tests. Just hacking away.

It’s a failure of the management! We fail our juniors and they will quit as soon as they get the chance and they feel like they have some wind under their wings.

”It’s going to be good”

Pff. Clowns leading this company.

Not all project managers are bad. 3% are decent.

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

Do you think Project Managers should know what source control is and have a basic understanding of its concepts?

Do you think this will help them do a better job?

Waterfall Project Stages:
Requirements, Analysis, Design, Coding, Testing, Operations

When you promote project managers to program managers and tell them to switch to Agile, you get the Agilefall project stages:
Best guess, Timeline, User stories, Execution, Blame the devs when the project plan trends late.

I want to beat them with a copy of the PMBOK wrapped in lead.

I am working on a project that integrated with Microsoft Dynamics. The D365 team changes the data and API too often. I keep munging the data over and over so that it fits view models.

Yesterday I had a technical discussion with someone that the company installed to coordinate building technical solutions that get shared between projects. This is a problem across all of our Dynamics projects and is a technical one than needs coordinated approach.

The management heard that I am “doing repeated work because the data isn’t stable.” So they decided that it must be a problem with the project manager. The executive decides to use it as a reason to fire him. Which shows me that I can’t talk to even a technical person without risk of project chaos.

After the conversation but before the firing I get an offer letter from another company. I plan on taking it to get away from this crazy company. The project is going to lose their key web developer and also the project manager.

This executive seems to love firing project managers. My other project is on its third PM. My trust for the upper management is basically gone. I can’t even discuss the technical hurdles with a technical person without someone getting fired. I’m so ready to be out of this zoo.

The only downside of leaving is that I won’t have as many stories to tell on devRant.

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

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?

Work from Home was not the cup of tea for most of us before Covid-19. 😱

Some really love working in the comfort of their home like your oh-so-lovely HR and some are scratching their heads like your beloved Project Managers.😂

The Designer is loving his space. 😍

Tester is enjoying some good naps in between the working hours. 😴

and... What do you think programmers would be doing? 🧐

Well.. well.. well.. Programmers don't really feel any change. Coding then and Coding now. 😎

How's your Work From Home Going?

>pentester
Raised an issue with a web application for out client that was weak TLS protocols/cipher suites in use on the sever hosting their application.

Then I was asked to confirm that reissuing the certificate was the correct remidial action for fixing this...

Man, it's scary to think non-technical project managers are in charge of fixing this stuff...

Project Managers who stand next to you whilst you are attempting to patch a critical issue

Did you mean “project managers”?

Bad managers, rude clients and annoying colleagues...

A lot of the stories here I read have at least any of the words listed above. My advice to most of you guys is: LEAVE.

And do it NOW.

The thing is, most of the stuff you're complaining about won't change. And you will be stuck there longer than you want to be and/or notice, trust me i've been there.

Especially the rude client part is where I've had lots of experience in, you have to search for a company which will abstract that layer for you. If you're on here most likely you're a developer and not everybody is a team lead. So why the F in hell are you even in conversations about budget and/or are you doing the most of the talking in the retrospective? If your project manager is ANY good he is doing that all for you.
There is so much to choose from (my experience in western countries) so please dont be stuck in a dead end job. Or start freelancing or whatever..

Project managers who distribute a task instruction like "add button on page x" into 20 ticket comments (each minimum 1000 chars), 1 pdf from the client, 2 unrelated tl;dr confluence pages, 3 lengthy bullshit management emails (at least 5 people in cc) and end up sending chat messages every hour...

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?

How many project managers does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they'll just schedule a meeting to discuss the lighting strategy.

Like someone else already mentioned here, remember that interview goes both ways: youre there to gauge wether workplace suits you or no. Always ask to meet teamleads/project leads or potential colleagues before accepting the job and try talking with them.

I applied to 3 jobs and in all of them managers did put a brave face and told me lots of bs just to get me accept the job. Managers live in their own world, sometimes they dont even know what you will be working on.

Once I accepted a job and got stuck with a perfectionist teamlead for 8 months which could have been avoided given I had the chance to catch the bad vibes during the interview.

Another time I accepted a job and had to work with a backend guy for one year and his accent was so thick+stuttering that I had trouble in understanding anything he says. Every conversation felt like trivia contest. I wish I had knew that stuff before accepting the job

I HATE PROJECT MANAGERS

They are so busy with their “schedule making” they skim over details and then blame us developers

Why am I sad, depressed, demotivated, you ask?
Because I was asked to create-react-app with nodemailer, it worked well on heroku, YAYYY MEE, "

"NOTHING GOES WRONG IN DEPLOYMENT FUCK YEAH"

Little did I know that was a "demo" for the business people, My superior / manager/boss wants me to deploy on 1and1 service provider,

> Okay 1 and 1 service provider does provide Nodej, so it shouldn't be hard.
> Turns out it is a Windows hosting server IIS 10 without URL Rewrite.
> *INTERNAL SCREAMING*
I went up to him to talk about this issue and requested to let me talk to 1 and 1, and get this sorted

> But bro, if we cannot fix it, I think they also cannot fix, probably.

*INTERNAL SCREAMING AT PEAK*

I just want URL Rewrite installed on IIS10 so that I can move on to the next project.
A little background for this project
> No support from him during development.

> I personally used HD Images, because why not?

> Website seems slow because of HD Images, and now he complains about it.

You fucking (managers) want a website to be scalable and fast and yet you choose to focus on B U S I N E S S instead of support the real guy.

I'm fucking sick and tired, it took me 24 hours figure out the issue because there is nothing on 1 and 1 support/ forum/help center.

Another 24 hours to try and fix, yet no luck.

I'm gonna finally point the domain name to heroku. Fuck, I'm so fucking done

All sysadmins, PLEASE! For the love of God just block port 21 in any direction from anywhere, going anywhere.. FTP needs to die.. The f**king protocol predates tcp/ip for God's sake! We need to stop project managers using it, it's a nightmare!!

Why do business and systems analyst even project managers try to give estimates for how long development should and will take? I hate how people who don't code and do any real work try totell me how long it would take me.

!rant, probably, even though kind of yes, but not overt

i just realized something: software doesn't take lot of effort and time to change because it would be difficult to make a change.

it takes lot of effort and time to change because making the change is easy, but inspecting and debugging what other things the change affects takes most of the time and effort.

it would be nice if project managers were able to wrap their head around this.

tl;dr i can make the change right now in 5 minutes, but it's going to take me an hour to check if me changing that didn't break something else.

Why is that when a project deadline has only 2 weeks left, Project Managers starts the project then. Why not start the project when we have 3 or 4 months left for the deadline?

Our Project Manager has this lame attitude that she will start with the sitemap, wire-frame and designing of a website when we have only 2 weeks to the deadline.

What the fuck is going on in here?

I feel really bad for the guy I'm currently working with. I have until roughly the end of August to upskill him in every aspect of 3 different iOS apps because once I move to a new project he will be the entire maintenance team for those apps. Feel like he is getting shafted so badly. The whole process has been poorly managed. The managers don't care how well I train him as long as it doesn't take too many man-days. And they are expecting that they can still pull me back in to help if he gets stuck even after I've moved. Starting to feel like I'm being taken for granted. Can't wait to get off this horrible project.

you know what i !love?

-project managers that can't manage something as simple as pivotal tracker

-project managers that schedule repeated stakeholder demo sessions when none of my stakeholers show up (ever)

-project managers that hold repeated grooming sessions that no one gives a fuck about because they can't manage what the fuck is going on the current iteration and therfore cannot forecast a proper next iteration

-project managers that complain about what doesn't get done in a current iteration because they don't don't pay attention to high priority stories that are added by developers in the current iteration even though they have (OWN) pivotal tracker

-project managers who have no clue about the business but want to turn grooming sessions into some sort of requirements gathering meeting only so they can appear halfway competent in the stupid little pivotal tracker notes

-cats that can't decide whether they want to go outside or stay inside

i'll take cats. at least their cuddly. sometimes. fuckers.

PM's? Like private messages? No idea, still haven't figured it out. There's still idiots from technical chats sliding in, often with a question that belongs in the very same chat they came from. My Telegram name has now literally "(No PM!)" in it, and a bio that says in all caps "DON'T FUCKING PM ME", yet there are STILL people that don't get it. September never ended, did it?

... Oh. Project managers.

Anyone out there like agile but find that project managers make it horrible. It is kind of like when you are having an interesting conversation then a bore comes around and overtakes the cool conversation.

It's easy to see what a person in my company do just by looking at their clothing. Money-guys with blue shirts and shiny shoes, tech guys with washed out jeans and a t-shirt with print. Then there's the bosses of tech guys, a hybrid with washed out jeans, sneakers and a poorly fit blazer for meetings. And then we have the designers, with their neatly trimmed beards, wearing a scarf all year round. And at last, project managers.. kinda like the money-guys but with sneakers for better mobility, and their right arm locked in a "holding cup of coffee" posture as they move from desk to desk like vultures overlooking others work.

And they say there is no dress code

So you have an organization that flirts with scrum and wants to be agile. You have non-crossfunctional teams who don't know what agile is. You have product owner who doesn't want to do backlog, but instead acts like project manager and asks for statuses and assigns tasks to peple. He wants the teams to find out what needs to be done and fill the backlog themselves - and then raport to him. You have business owers who noone knows who they are. You have project managers, who don't fit the whole scrum hierarchy. These project managers insist calling scrum masters "team leaders". Also these project managers think scrum is silly and don't want anything to do with it. And then you have higher program management that think this whole scum thing is better than sliced bread and everything is going just dandy!

Oh yeah, also highest organization management thinks that we are on the right track. We just need be more agile but less agile and work more efficiently whitout really saying, what the hell are we supposed to do.

Basically every day is like going to the zoo. Without the fun part.

Oh, well. Work on bad projects with bad clients/managers, for the sake of the money, it's a life sucker. At first I thought it was not a big deal. I was collaborating to someone's elses business and doing the best work I could.

I was tired, depressed, sleepless, having allergic rhitinis every two weeks, frustrated without any opportunity to grow intellectually, fearing clients calls and emails, and... in denial.

Since last year, I decided to stop working on some kind of project and for some kind of people. As the remaining contracts and projects were being wrapped up, I started to feel relieved, despite of all anxienty of let go long term clients and see income lowering.

Then I started to use my free time and savings to futher my education, send cvs and work on side projects. It's not an easy transition. I'll still need to keep working on not-so-good projects to pay the bills, however, I've been selecting more.

Slowly I'm recovering my life, health and enthusiasm for cs again.
I'm learning to not give a fuck and it really helps.

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

Notification pops up at the bottom of the screen... it is an email from a Project Manager.

2 seconds later...

Project Manager via messaging app: "Hey, I've sent you an email"

fuck off bitch... I know that already, it is 20fucking19... notifications are reliable and they work. I don't need a human toast notification to tell me about the other notification that i just received.

WooHoo, lets miss this deadline, fuck yeah!!!

Has 20 tasks last week monday, had 50 Wednesday and 51 Friday, as of today we have finished 1.5 and deadline is in 6 day, and shit is STILL changing. Fuck YEAH!!!

fuck javascript
node.js module system sucks. Like its module system is trash, who will want to download some fucking 1GB worth of packages to create a new project.
People keep on just creating other package managers. Yarn is good enough because it caches your packages but still, i am just from deleting some 2.2Gb node modules from my computer and just whyy ?
An area where internet connection us shitty and expensive it is just not very well.
Fuck javascript is everywhere so i have to use it,

typescript just adds another layer to the heavy lifting. You write some typed code to 'reduce bugs' but you generate much more heavy code. I could write in 1kb js file but i end up getting some 3kb js because what - i used typescript-ügvjpiahdjb

fuck javascript

On Friday. Client and Project Managers arranged a meeting and wanted me to be there. Client said the meeting will be max 15 Minutes but it was around 2 hours. This client project was due the following week. I was happy because everything was done and excited that the client might be coming down to say how awesome the work was.

The table turned around. They came changed the designed and functionalities. The client said, it won't take long to do it, right? and my Project Manager said No! No! No! don't worry its very easy thing. It will take him around 1 day to do it, it's just all cosmetic changes.

It took me more than a week to get it done, test again, check on browsers. The client was pissed and they fired us. Guess who was blamed for it?

I see a lot of rants about Project Managers (PMs). As someone who might work as that in the future, what are the some do's and don'ts for that role?

I can't stand talking to clients on the phone!

One of my first freelancing clients used to talk to me for an hour at a time. I really wish I could have billed him by the hour, it took him twice as long to explain anything and then I'd have to get back in the mindset for what I was working on. The phone is just so disruptive.

I'm so much happier working for a company where the project manager deals with the client's and product managers.

We need to learn to say no to project managers.

So the company I work for is moving to a new building. The project managers, who we do everything we do to avoid, are going to be on the same floor as us. The contractors, who we pay a crap ton of money to fly them in from halfway across the globe so we can work closely with them, are going to be 6 floors away.

...who approved this bullshit?

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

Here's some screenshots of my c++ learning project, CursesWidgets! (Or ConsoleWidgets, it's officially just named "CW")

Just got layout managers done - pretty nice step forwards since now widgets don't need to render their children themselves; they can (and by default DO) delegate the work to a layout manager.

Here are the StackingLayoutManagers, which are the equivalent of WPF StackPanels or just the normal way HTML works. They have different orientations, however, and will soon have different alignments (Start, Middle, and End, which is the same thing as the typical Top, Middle, Bottom, Left, Center, Right, except SME can be used for either horizontal or vertical alignments)

Anyways, enough of my rambling. Here are some screenshots. If you made it this far you earned the knowledge that I plan to make a beastly terminal devRant client using this technology.

Why some managers think that a non-tech guy can be the Scrum Master of a dev project?

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.

Most awkward video conference call?

Our department is in a 'virtual' book club, reading The Unicorn Project, and I asked..
Me: "So what similarities have you seen with the Phoenix project and projects we work on here?"
Dale: "Ha ha..sooo many. The biggest is the disconnect of managers with no clue of what goes on."
<Vice president of our department also in the book club>
VP: "Really? Dale, I'd like to know more about this."
<awkward silence with blank stares all around>
DBA: "Come on Dale...spill the beans. Got the VP right there."
Dale: "Um...nope...not going there...nope"
<Dale's screen goes black>
VP: "OK, so when Maxine asks ..."

I see a lot of rants on this platform complaining about their boss/management.

About how they don't understand how complicated the development can be of seemingly simple tasks or how they would prefer small estimations over realistic ones.

Is that really the standard in this field of work?
Am I just that lucky to find basically the ideal boss on my first try?

My boss really understands how difficult some tasks can be even if they don't initially seem like it. He listens to my ideas as if they are at least just as important as his own. He can almost think like a real developer and is prepared to give us all tools we could want to evolve.

It is a very small firm and I'm basically the only real developer on this project, but I would follow that man to the ends of the earth.

Can some people please clear my conscience and confirm there are still good managers in this field who really care about their project and their employees/colleagues?

I have no words to describe the last meeting.

One of the project managers was putting his feet on the desk, chewing his gum with an open mouth, and playing around with his phone.

The people in the room were so tense and looks defensive, which is normal if you have dirty shoes in your direction.
Luckily I'm remote but at least I know that won't like to move to his team at any cost.

Project managers never ask Chuck Norris for estimations…ever.

Project managers suck, they don't know anything about programming and development, at least they should know the basics, it's the worst and most stupid job, and the worst thing is that they make more money than a developer.

Why is it so funny to me that there’s a certification for project managers called PMP?

PM on the phone with a client: "Your email is down? Who hosts it? You know, it would be a company like MailChimp."

til: Jiraporn is a legit Thai name and not only what overly horny project managers do.

PM: How long do you think this will take...

Me: When does it need to be done?

PM: good question.... last Tuesday...

Me: ... -_-

Long time ago i ranted here, but i have to write this off my chest.

I'm , as some of you know, a "DevOps" guy, but mainly system infrastructure. I'm responsible for deploying a shitload of applications in regular intervals (2 weeks) manually through the pipeline. No CI/CD yet for the vast majority of applications (only 2 applications actually have CI/CD directly into production)

Today, was such a deployment day. We must ensure things like dns and load balancer configurations and tomcat setups and many many things that have to be "standard". And that last word (standard) is where it goes horribly wrong

Every webapp "should" have a decent health , info and status page according to an agreed format.. NOPE, some dev's just do their thing. When bringing the issue up to said dev the (surprisingly standard) answer is "it's always been like that, i'm not going to change". This is a problem for YEARS and nobody, especially "managers" don't take action whatsoever. This makes verification really troublesome.

But that is not the worst part, no no no.

the worst is THIS:

"git push -a origin master"

Oh yes, this is EVERYWHERE, up to the point that, when i said "enough" and protected the master branch of hieradata (puppet CfgMgmt, is a ENC) people lots their shits... Proper gitflow however is apparently something otherworldly.

After reading this back myself there is in fact a LOT more to tell but i already had enough. I'm gonna close down this rant and see what next week comes in.

There is a positive thing though. After next week, the new quarter starts, and i have the authority to change certain aspects... And then, heads WILL roll on the floor.

For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."

Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.

Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.

You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

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

You "following up" and "just checking in" doesn't actually make anything go faster...quite the opposite actually..

Wish my 3 project managers would realize when everything is a P1, nothing is.

Project Managers will ask six figures salaries to whip an entire team of developers because it's fundamental to add AI to a fucking toilet by the end of the week, then walk around like they understood everything about life. Given how that's what they do for a living and we're not currently gunning them down on sight, I can't say they're entirely wrong.

So recently I got a new job in a respected creative agency with a good salary. FYI, I am a junior web dev with merely 2 years of experience. Office and everything is great about the job except the job itself. The senior dev have left the agency before I came and now they expect me to build a fucking transnational crm web application all by myself. And the deadline is in 6 weeks which only 4 left now. I don't want to believe that how they fucking give a junior dev such a big web project to build. In the beginning I wanted to resign but then I decided to build it. I have some difficulties but I think I'll manage to finish it. Just wanted to share how fucked up my current situation is. Fuck the managers btw.

Sharing your password with your coleagues is like sharing your underwear or your GF with them. It's not right and unless you're into some weird fetish you won't really want them back...

I've been asked to help in my previous project and I'm fairly certain my credentials are expired/locked/forgotten there. Guess whose managers will be encouraging sharing current dev's on that project passwords...

Arghhhh.

So I'm working alongside a very big development house that specialises in vehicle finance. They are huge - 60 plus developers, only work in pairs, have a minimum fee of £2500 per day and work with all the largest car manufacturers.

However, today they decided to completely change their api sub domain and all api routes that handle finance quotes. No warning at.

Of course sites I'm working on that consume this consume the said api are broken too.

To make things worse, my client pYs this company circa £19000 per year to use their api. I also recently discovered that the client is paying for their so called managed service. Insanity.

I mean seriously. This company has 4 layers of project manager and 3 forms of a senior developer. According to companies house their turnover is in excess of £4 million per year.

However, they get the basics wrong and do not warn in advance of major changes to their core api service.

Off I go to deal with 10 of project manAgers and support people in the hope if speaking to someone who can actually help.

Yes, thank you motherfucker. Please change the fucking specification again one fucking day before the deadline.

These project managers and clients are like little children who can't decide whether they want a lego set or a video game for christmas except little children don't blame santa for their own stupidity.

Guess what? I'm not santa fucking claus and can't do miracles in one day. It's on you little project manager children if we miss this deadline.

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.

When your project manager pisses you off so much, you could punch a baby or drown a puppy....

Got a promotion and had a loose definition of what my new tasks were. I got overwhelmed with being the go-to for project and account managers, and 75% of our devs, on top of my own work I had to complete for clients.
Eventually I wrote up a 2 page document of things I had to deal with daily/weekly and how I don't have time to do my work, so why should I even bother to do it.
We got it resolved, my boss took some of the tasks off my plate (like training the new hires) and allows me to work from home whenever I need to finish up work.

When project managers are panicking and you know you are really so close from done, a few fixes and everything will fall into place. But manager is on your neck because "nothing is working" now you must take time to be their psychologist instead of working on what is actually making them panic 🙃 development is a rough space. One bug can stand in front of working products just like that

I really wanna say, please fuck off for a few hours. Thanks bye.

Job BS that made me consider quitting?

Huh. so timely.

With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.

At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />

On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh.

Non-coding Project Managers who take on projects without consulting their developers on the possibility/ impossibility of a project have a special place in hell.

This happened many years ago.

First, the background. I was working on a government project with a consulting firm. I would regularly sit on conference calls with several business analysts, project managers (yes, plural), and government employees where I was the only one with any technical knowledge of the platform we were working with. Of the other supposedly technical people, most of them were warm bodies hired by the consulting firm. They knew little to nothing. Most of them bullshitted their way into the jobs.

They hired a new project manager (or program manager, I don't remember) to lead the project at a high level. Things were not going well, because the environments were unstable. Since it was high security government project, we couldn't do any work for several weeks because you cannot copy work from outside environments. Literally a criminal act.

The new lead PM proceeds to take charge and send demanding emails. The one that sent me over the edge was an email that indicated we were all not working hard enough and we had to provide our detailed plans for a project in 30 minutes. Yep, she had it in all caps and a large font at the bottom - a 30 minute deadline. It would have been a rough 24-48 hours to put that together. 30 minutes was an impossibility.

That was the last straw for me. I flipped my shit and ripped my boss a new one. To be totally honest, I regret doing that. It only made stuff worse. Within a month or two, I quit along with our best business analyst.

About a year later, I found out from another government employee of the agency that a scandal erupted within the organization. At least one director level person on that team (government employee) was fired for cause. If you know how governments tend to work, generally it requires serious ethical or criminal violation for an employee to be fired. The consulting firm I was working got most of their work canceled, and they had to lay off most of that team. I'm convinced, based upon other stuff I read about my former employer, that kickbacks were involved. They had no problem paying off government employees for fat contracts and/or cooking the books (another scandal).

However, after that experience, I hope I never work on a government project EVER AGAIN.

Any individual project that made me learn cool stuff...

Maybe the kernelcheck project? It's a shell script that I wrote 2 years ago (it's still on my GitHub but the code looks kinda horrible tbh), and it really made me respect the stability of package managers, and the effort that package maintainers must put into it. Even a single package (the kernel) that you have to maintain the integrity of the .config for (the configuration file that tells you what options to compile in, as a module, or not at all) while on every new minor release, the config changes ever so slightly.. at some point I figured that I'd really need to do those compilations manually, to be able to supervise (and if necessary adjust) it in real-time. The ability for distribution maintainers to do this for thousands of packages.. it boggles my mind. Respect!

Fuck inherited projects!

I was invited to work on a simple migration and integration project for a bank. Thinking it was simple and just a month long project, I accepted it.

... last August 2020.

Now, almost a year later, we have freakin gone nowhere with this project. The bank has had 5 project managers leave over the last 1.5 years that this project has been active.

And every fix I make brings in numerous other problems.

It’s so fucking insane.

No one knows who to blame.

I am currently in call with the bank with about 12 other people who are all watching me fix bugs that they find -.-

My spouse is my project manager which is ironic since I normally seethe with anger when around project managers. It works though.

Well, the project I've been working on is now being terminated.

As the lead dev, I found out by one of the managers sending a public message to the staffing team in one of the channels unrelated to development, which I don't normally check.

Apparently at no point in their "very long discussion" did they think they should let me know of this decision.

Tbh I'm not even suprised, I was barely ever told anything. The others aren't either.

No matter the hard work you want to do, how much time you want and really spend to complete something, always a scumbag project manager will set the dates so that you won't make it in f*ing time!! Really now, it is frustrating!!

Well, I moved to a new company and all seems vanilla. But you know. Now I have this lesson to remind myself.

Our PM just send a mail to our team, that after testing the latest extension we made to the project, he could not find a single issue or bug (usually there are some minor UI problems or some edge case bugs we did not think about or know existed)
and what a incredibly great job we did, and he also forwarded the mail to all our managers up the hierarchy right under the CEO.
The appreciation is a nice change to the self-hatred I feel while coding

is there any good boss or project managers in the world or all of them are just born assholes?

Have you ever felt like your company is just some shell company, making meaningless projects to feed someone's appetite of bossing people around so that it doesn't look bad in taxes because he's paying himself with the salary and we don't even know what's connected to what and noticing weird relationships like some workers are of the same family members, who are also project managers but your salary is okay enough to keep your mouth shut?

So I'm finally doing the job I was hired to do 2 years ago, with the promise of working 1.5 years ago, and scheduled to work 1 year ago as the project slips about a 1.25 years.

The project is on it's 3.5th year of a 3 year plan and based on the architecture of the project, the project architect started a degree in software architecture 4 years ago. In Latin. When his first language was Japanese and his second was Indian English while this was a US company. And his entire degree was in Lisp, PHP, and html, this project is in C#, and his professional background is in Fortran.

This is a man who is no longer on the project, not allowed to contribute or talk to us about the project, and what little documentation he left us is in Swahili translated from Korean via Google translate from the second year Korean language major exchange student from Russia who got really into meth and Telenovelas.

It is every version of MV* without the M and with every definition of * including some he made up and some that have only been proven to exist via machine learning algorithm written in SQL statements.

This project represents an implementation of the presentation tier of an n-tier application, yet attempts to reimplement the other n-1 tiers in html5 and the dreams of children.

The new lead is a former engineer that couldn't begin coding until he figured out how to map all of his variables to his former cars and girlfriends inclusively and learned his management skills from the big book of micro managers and that one time everyone else in the office was sick but the intern. Who now has a girlfriend whom he works 200 feet from so he isn't 100% thinking with his largest head. At least from observation.

Yet, I still can't bring myself to go be with the whales/become an accountant.

Estimating time before consulting the dev on the task he/she will be working on is like pouring the milk in before the cereal. CRINGE.

Hi. I would like a hamburger. Would you like cheese? No. I would like a hamburger with no cheese. Ok. Wait here 15 minutes and I'll give you a hamburger with cheese.

It's the same everywhere... image assets... project managers... node packages... almost every exchange I have - is with someone who isn't present and cannot deliver what they promise.

Huge thanks to the other people who follow through.

The meeting I will go in few minutes. Our app went in production 2 weeks ago, the managers invite us (devs) to have a drink with 'important' people I don't even know. We will celebrate the success of the project, after 6 months of pressure with everyone telling we will fail and that we are losers. Hypocrite meeting.

Having to explain to non technical project managers that: Just because you don't see anything that's changed on the front end doesn't mean that I haven't just spent 6 weeks so trying to future proof and anticipate every little thing that might change on the backend!

How the fuck does that retard Zuckerberg manage to spend this much money on his metaverse and hardly have anything to show for? What are the developers actually working on? I mean, if you had that many people working that long on something you'd expect at least a product that looked all right, even if no one wanted to use it?!

I bet you could put a team of 20 top shelf developers, designers, QA and project managers together and give them 2 years to build almost anything we see today. A facebook clone, a Twitter clone, some sort of virtual reality look-at-my-perfect-but-empty-life-click-to-like piece of social shit-verse.. What the hell are they spending their time on?!!

Recently replaced project lead sends repeated harassment emails about “blown timeline.” Current PL says don’t worry, tells former PL to back off. I bust my ass 12+ hr / weekends and finish. Former PL says he was just pushing so I wouldn’t have to work so hard. Fucking managers.

By completely ignoring any project managers and only caring about what the customer actually wants.

when the project manager asks you if you have an ETA on the project you're trying to finish because deadline is a few hours. You have never done the thing you're trying to complete before so you have no baseline for it and they know that.... nope but you'll be the 2nd person to know when it's done, maybe next time don't promise deadlines without consulting the devs?

On a three months project for a website, the "strategists" and project managers spent two months and a half discussing the "strategy". It left us (production team) two weeks to create the content, the design, and code everything.

Of course it ended being rushed and somehow shitty, but they still congratulte themselves because they "nailed" the "strategy".

</rant>