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Search - "project managers"
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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.43 -
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: Takeover8 -
Its that time of the morning again where I get nothing done and moan about the past ... thats right its practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
Today I'd like to tell you the story of "i". Interesting about "I" is that he was actually a colleague of yesterdays nominee "G" (and was present at the "java interface" video call, and agreed with G!): https://devrant.com/rants/1152317/...
"I" was the spearhead of a project to end all projects in that company. It was suppose to be a cross-platform thing but ended up only working for iOS. It was actually quite similar to this: https://jasonette.com/ (so similar i'm convinced G / I were part of this but I can't find their github ID's in it).
To briefly explain the above + what they built ... this is the worst piece of shit you can imagine ... and thats a pretty strong statement looking back at the rest of this series so far!
"I" thought this would solve all of our problems of having to build similar-ish apps for multiple customers by letting us re-use more code / UI across apps. His main solution, was every developers favourite part of writing code. I mean how often do you sit back and say:
"God damn I wish more of this development revolved around passing strings back and forth. Screw autocomplete, enums and typed classes / variables, I want more code / variables inside strings in this library!"
Yes thats right, the main part of this bullshittery was putting your entire app, into JSON, into a string and downloading it over http ... what could possibly go wrong!
Some of my issues were:
- Everything was a string, meaning we had no autocomplete. Every type and property had to be remembered and spelled perfectly.
- Everything was a string so we had no way to cmd + click / ctrl + click something to see somethings definition.
- Everything was a string so any business logic methods had to be remembered, all possible overloaded versions, no hints at param types no nothing.
- There was no specific tooling for any of this, it was literally open up xcode, create a json file and start writing strings.
- We couldn't use any of the native UI builders ... cause strings!
- We couldn't use any of the native UI layout constructs and we had to use these god awful custom layout managers, with a weird CSS feel to them.
What angered me a lot was their insistence that "You can download a new app over http and it will update instantly" ... except you can't because you can't download new business logic only UI. So its a new app, but must do 100% exactly the same thing as before.
His other achievements include:
- Deciding he didn't like apple's viewController and navigationBar classes and built his own, which was great when iOS 7 was released (changed the UI to allow drawing under the status bar) and we had no access to any of apples new code or methods, meaning everything had to be re-built from scratch.
- On my first week, my manager noticed he fucked up the login error handling on the app I was taking over. He noticed this as I was about to leave for the evening. I stayed so we could call him (he was in an earlier timezone). Rather than deal with his fucked up, he convinced the manager it would be a "great learning experience" for me to do it ... and stay in late ... while he goes home early.
- He once argued with me in front of the CEO, that his frankenstein cross-platform stuff was the right choice and that my way of using apples storyboards (and well thought out code) wasn't appropriate. So I challenged him to prove it, we got 2 clients who needed similar apps, we each did it our own way. He went 8 man weeks over, I came in 2 days under and his got slated in the app store for poor performance / issues. #result.
But rather than let it die he practically sucked off the CEO to let him improve the cross platform tooling instead.
... in that office you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a retard.
Having had to spend a lot more time working with him and more closely than most of the other nominees, at a minimum "I" is on the top of my list for needing a good punch in the face. Not for being an idiot (which he is), not for ruining so much (which he did), but for just being such an arrogant bastard about it all, despite constant failure.
Will "I" make it to most incompetent? Theres some pretty stiff competition so far
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!7 -
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 medal23 -
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".2 -
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?8 -
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...1
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"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."
"..."6 -
Get ready for one of the biggest AMAZON rants EVER.
I dislike this company so much I can feel it in my bones.
They have NO, absolutely NO idea how user experience works.
PROBLEM #1.
If you have Amazon Prime / Video (ANOTHER FUCKED UP PROBLEM THAT CONFUSES A LOT OF PEOPLE) and you want to watch a movie on your Xbox using the Amazon App, You have to buy the movie ON YOUR COMPUTER FIRST, YOU CAN’T BUY IT DIRECTLY FROM THE APP.
WHAT THE SHIT AMAZON?
So.. go to your laptop, buy the movie, go back to your other device (Xbox or whatever), click “My movie library” and then you can watch it.
OH AND THERE’S ALSO A “MY WATCHLIST”, WHERE YOUR NEW PURCHASED / RENTED MOVIE DOES NOT SHOW UP.
Yes.. there is a “MY WATCHLIST” and “My movie library” or some shit.
HOW, WHY, WHY FUCKING AMAZON, WHY.
PROBLEM #2.
“WE HAVE A ZILLION ALEXA SKILLS NOW !!!1!!!!!11111! EINZ!!!!!”
Yeah, WELL, NOT THAT HARD WHEN YOU HAVE “Alexa Evangelist” traveling to every DAMN tech convention and having them make USELESS FUCKING SKILLS THAT NOBODY WANTS USING BOILER PLATE CRAP THAT ANYBODY CAN USE.
Oh and Alexa is DUMB AS SHIT.
I asked her "Play the song Starboy by the Weeknd" and she said: "I CAN'T FIND THAT SONG"
Then you go "Play me Starboy" and she goes: "HERE IS A SAMPLE OF STARBOY BY THE WEEKND"
Same with other songs: "YOU DONT HAVE IT IN YOUR PRIME MUSIC LIBRARY".
She doesn't even TRY to go to your fucking Spotify account, you have say: "Play Starboy by The Weeknd on Spotify" AND THEN she still has the FUCKING NERVES to say : "I Can't find that song on Spotify".
BUT YOU JUST FOUND IT ON YOUR OWN DAMN CRAPPY PRIME MUSIC.
"Hey Alexa, how many days till the end of the year?"
GUESS WHAT ,SHE CAN'T TELL YOU. (maybe now but not 2 months ago)
PROBLEM #3.
AUDIBLE.COM and AUDIBLE.CO.UK have DIFFERENT FUCKING DATABASES, THUS, YOU CAN END UP HAVING 2 ACCOUNTS AND HAVING 2 LIBRARIES, and.. THERE IS NO WAY TO FUSE THEM INTO 1 account.
OH MY GOD, HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?
I FUCKING HATE that, how can ANYBODY think that is a GOOD IDEA?
PROBLEM #4.
Their website is a TOTAL FUCKING mess, really, who the FUCK designs that piece of SHIT.
Look up a movie, let’s say “SCHOOL OF ROCK”
First result?
“School Of Rock” - “Amazon Video”
So you can click on this and watch the movie.
Then click the second result.
“School of Rock Blu RAY” and next to the price-tag “PRIME”
You click on it, you can buy it, but HEY, LOOK, WHAT DOES IT SAY?
“Unlimited Streaming with Amazon Prime
Start your 30-day free trial to stream thousands of movies & TV shows included with Prime. Start your free trial”
WHAT, WHAT!!!! CAN I WATCH THIS WITH AMAZON PRIME? OR DO I NEED THE AMAZON VIDEO? I DON’T GET IT.
Put me in a room with all those FUCKWIT project managers and their fucked up company culture and I’ll rip them a new one, I can go on for DAYS about the SHIT they are doing.16 -
The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.
*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"
Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.5 -
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.5 -
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!10 -
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.6 -
Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.
Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.
I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.
Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.
Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.
I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.
The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.
For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.
At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.
Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.
He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.
Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.
I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.
So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.
4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.
The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.
I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.
That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.
My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.
Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.
That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.
I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.
The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.
I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.
I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.
For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.
Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.
Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.
Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.
Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.
Freedom is a wonderful feeling.13 -
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,
X9 -
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."2
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You know what? I'm gonna rant about it because it's 2AM, I can't sleep from anger, and the pain from the workout wasn't enough to keep my head straight. I don't care if you read this. I just need to let it out.
You're a fucking dick. You have the biggest ego I've ever seen and what you did today had me holding back tears from rage and trying hard not to punch you in the neck. I don't see why that sort of shit is necessary when working with somebody.
Your team "borrowed" me. That wasn't my project, the client requested me to be there. Your first reaction when you thought the task was just a small change is "I don't think you can do it." It turns out, it was bigger than that, so why don't you volunteer doing it now? It turns out, you only worked on small tasks.
It's your project, you've been there for years. I was instructed to ask you how to set it up because you're supposed to know where things are. It's not like I'm asking you anything that can be resolved through logic or Google. All my questions are project-specific - which repository, how are you testing this, how can I set this up for this version you're using and the clusterfuck of microservices dumped into one place with 12 YAML files, etc. If you had a README file, I'll gladly read it. To be fair, you do but it's fucking empty.
I tried to set it up directly in cloud shell (Linux). I get errors about packages that aren't there, I resolve them one by one. Then finally, I'm stuck on the SDK. Your project uses an old version (when the new one has been around for 10 years) and you're setting a bunch of parameters from different configuration files that isn't part of the standard deploy so I ask you about it and your response is:
"What shell? The one on the internet? SDK? You don't need an SDK! I hate to bust your ego but you don't need an SDK. I don't know why you're doing that. If you just ran it on your local machine, it would work without additional setup."
Wow. Amazing response to a question. As if I did some hacky stuff and your assumption is I'm making things more complicated. It's almost like you didn't overreact. So I stayed calm and said, "Okay, I'll install your IDE on Windows and run it there." A few minutes later, same SDK error. Oh, I thought this is supposed to work locally without doing anything? It turns out, you made a lot of hacky dacky setup on your workstation and you forgot about it but hey, I have the huge ego. What do I know? My head is so heavy, I can barely see.
Realizing how wrong you were with your previous reaction, you attempted to initiate smalltalk. "So you use Linux in your previous project? Amazing." Fuck you, man. Fuck you and your dog smile. I'll keep it professional but I'll be asking the developers in the client side moving forward. You wasted so much time of my life and irritated the veins in my temples.
Finally, you say "Install the SDK" and in an attempt to shake your memory, I say "So you need an SDK" but of course, you have to look smart and say "Of course you need it, that's the SDK!"
When it started working, it turns out, you can only run the unit tests and you suggested I develop all of these with just unit tests. 30 minutes before the shift ends, you admit that you never got it to work. Wow, what a waste of time. Ego, huh?
Let's recap:
Your boss, the client, your fellow developers interviewed me and I passed all of them (technical exams, live coding, theoretical bullshit, etc.) including the exam YOU created. My first week in the office, you didn't talk to me even when the manager asked you to. The first time you talked to me, all you did was brag about how you taught everyone in the project, how you're the only senior there, talked trash about the managers, said everyone else is too lazy to learn by themselves, and threw it to my face that I wouldn't have gotten the job if you interviewed me. I've been there for like what? One week? I don't even have access to any of your shit. I wasn't even in the same project as you are.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt, maybe that's just how you talk, maybe I can learn something from you. I get it, man. The people around you are "lazy" and "stupid" and you taught all of them. Your ego must have inflated from all those people completely dependent on you so you assumed that everyone else is the same.
I've taught people myself but I've never treated anyone like that. I don't walk around the halls like they owe me their lives. I don't blow up on them and then humiliate myself because it turns out I'm terribly wrong.
I don't know what to make of this. It's either you're underestimating me or you've seen my previous projects and assumed I have a huge ego that needs to be broken down. I asked nicely but wow, what the fuck kind of reaction is that? I guess you busted your own ego.
Damn, fuck you. Three months of this shit and I lost my patience.11 -
Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.
Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.
Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.
Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large
Web team responds to the email..
"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "
Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).
Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.
"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."
After a dept. managers meeting this morning:
MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."2 -
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. WTF2 -
That moment when your project managers think hiring 3 new developers will deliver their project 3x faster.8
-
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"4
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I am about to fire this client.
I can't take any more of this abject fucking stupidity.
I can't take any more sentence fragment responses to detailed questions and thorough responses.
I can't take any more expectations that I deliver consistent metadata and hundreds of pages of documentation, yet no one else has to do the same
I can't take any more rules only applying to/hamstringing me and my team
I can't take any more fucking gross incompetence and grossly undereducated shitfucks that get to send ridiculous bills and have 0 accountability while playing developer
I can't take any more obviously nepotistic and racist hiring that walks back every step of progress we've made in the last 50 years
I can't take not being able to call a spade a spade and being the villain when there's obvious graft occuring at every level
I can't take these old fucks padding their retirements while rendering everyone else contractors and cutting off opportunity for future generations
I can't take how absurdly, blisteringly stupid the business people are, or the fact that one average project managers with a recent PMI cert somehow bills what I do
I'm 100% going to drop dime on these fucks to every regulatory body they are beholden to, their investors, their corporate owners and USCIS, since I've already doxxed the shit out of all of my coworkers that don't remotely qualify for the positions they occupy.5 -
2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.
Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.
My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/
As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.
"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.
First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.
Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.
Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."
"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"
I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.
Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.
Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.
PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.2 -
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.4 -
From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece
INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-
- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.
13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00
- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.
You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.
You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.10 -
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!!7 -
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.)8 -
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.12 -
A lot of Project managers are idiots.
Here is what happened: I am a backend developer and was asked to replace some images on some website (not even sure this is supposed to be a backend task). So i did, changes went through review and then they were live.
A few hours later they come to me saying i made a mistake because the image has wrong color tone in one of the browsers (internally facepalming myself)... I didn't design the images nor made any changes to them... I just fucking uploaded the files that were sent to me... That's fucking it.
They blamed me for a design issue and how I should've noticed this issue blah blah blah... And i had to spend an entire fucking hour to explain to them step by step what i did, how i did it and why the color tone was wrong even though i am not a designer and my main tool is VISUAL FUCKING STUDIO AND NOT PHOTOSHOP.
The shit part is that the images were sent to us by the client, so really, it is their fucking fault not mine.
Oh, and they tried to guilt me by saying the client won't pay for this since the images are wrong.
Lost an hour to this bullshit.6 -
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 *7 -
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 sanity10 -
Typically my low motivation stems from some form of management dickhead-itis, too much red tape or restrictive processes (current place took 3.5 months + 2 forms to order a webcam our client had paid for as part of the project ... it was €45).
How I deal with it? I try to give a go changing it, talking with managers, explaining the issues, suggesting alternatives. Such as removing your head from your ass, when done, it can have a wonderful impact to the team.
When that fails (not if) ... I quit. Which I actually just have. Got a job offer last week, although I really wasn't a fan of how things were going on this team, I was working on some cool projects and wasn't sure what was right for me, career-wise.
Then I had a argument with a new manager as he doesn't remember agreeing to allow the developers to estimate their own tasks. He was annoyed I told him we can't do X in 2 weeks, we previously asked for 2 months.
That was enough to knock me over the edge, so I handed in my notice, took the job with much more management style responsibility and hoping for a fresh start.1 -
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.4 -
Was asked to help a team of interns in a remote country, finish an app. Not only were they terrible at literally every aspect of development, but were arrogant and argued their "new" ways were right.
Spent weeks on the project being nice, trying to help them, sending them links to standards and documents, pointing out unit tests shouldn't be failing, everyone needs to have the same versions of the tools etc. You know, basic shit.
Things got quite heated a few weeks in when they started completely ignoring me. Shit was breaking all over the place and crashing, as I thought we were going to build it one way, and they went and built it another.
Was practically begging the team architect and my manager for help dealing with them. Only reply I got was the usual "were aware of the problem and looking into it" bullshit.
Eventually after the app was done, a mutual agreement was reached that the 2 teams would split (I maintain they were kicked out). All the local devs were happy, managers had mentioned how difficult they were and it would be great for us to finally work on our own.
So I thought everything was fine ... until my end of year performance review came along.
Seems I'm quite poor at "working with others" and I "don't try hard enough with others", it was clear I was struggling with the remote team and "made no effort".
WELL FUCK RIGHT OFF
Not being cocky, but I've never had anything like that in a performance review for the past 7 years. I'm a hard worker, and never have trouble making friends with colleagues. Everyone in the country complained about these remote fuckers, even the manager, who I begged for help. And the end result is I need to work harder.
I came in early, stayed late to fit their timezone, took extra tasks, did research for them, wrote docs. And I was told to work harder.
Only reason I didn't quit, was my internal transfer request was approved lol. New team is looking at projects orders of magnitude more impressive, never been happier.3 -
Remember that company that first brought me to devRant last 2018? The one I ranted about almost every day like it's the only reason I exist? They lost their client, it's the only project they have, and it's a pretty big one based in the US. Now they're in big trouble and the enemies they made from being a big bundle of cunts launched their own start-up.
A few days ago, a previous colleague texted me asking if we have available positions in the company I'm currently working for. He said "the client suddenly vanished". I asked, "What do you mean? They just vanished? Aren't there other projects?" Of course, he didn't answer and instead asked where I'm working now.
The last time I talked to him in person, he was saying that they will be sent abroad for that project and that the company has new projects lined up. I rolled my eyes internally but just said, "Okay". That was when I visited the office for the last time to get my clearance which I didn't get and didn't bother getting anymore otherwise I'll be in jail for arson because god damn it, those motherfuckers really make my blood boil. During that time, more than half of their employees were gone but they were so brainwashed, they still believed it had a future.
The first thing I did was open LinkedIn and add the two developers still in that hellhole. I trained some people there and those two had the least ego and had the best performance - resourceful and not as lifeless as a fucking placenta coming out of their mothers' vaginas. Now that I think about it, placentas have more nutrients and use than the vacuum-headed cunts left in that company.
In less than five minutes, they accepted, that's how you know the situation really is dire in there. I'm friends with one of the project managers (who hate the PM from the other company) so I offered to refer them and they went with it. The situation is interesting because PM1 (friend) before she became a project manager actually planned to move to the hellhole company with me, this was years before we knew it was hell where she was insulted by PM2 (PM of the hellhole) and some bitch cunts were very rude to her during the interview. Now those same cunts can't find a job and the roles were reversed. If they dare to apply for PM1's company, I'm gonna need all the popcorn in the world.
Why can't they find a job? A combination of two traits - incompetence and arrogance. Actually, it's more than that. They bully almost every employee that joins the company. Their motto is "We don't need experienced hires" and they treat the experienced ones like shit so 90% of the employees are junior developers egos bigger than Mandingo's cock. It matters more that you can drink and gossip with them than you can do your job. People working overtime all the time are praised instead of looked into because they're inefficient. People who leave on time are judged. People's social media profiles are stalked and gossiped about. Even the company owner and manager participates in personal attacks towards their own employees and humiliating somebody (inviting audiences) while they make someone cry is their sick display of authority and fun.
System admins don't know how to fucking chmod or even grep. I had several months where my job was to sit there and answer questions 'cause I can't do a fucking thing without being distracted. Then word would spread that I'm doing nothing. One time, I was working on a critical issue and this guy asked if I could help him. I said I can't right now. He said he will tell the client that he can't finish the task because I'm not very helpful. I said, "Go ahead, the only thing that would reflect is your lack of skill." Shit like that and frequent attacks had me drinking coke and vodka in the office. Eventually, I got depressed and the HR didn't leave me alone. They kept pressuring me to present a medical certificate on when I can come back. My psychiatrist refused because "depression doesn't work like that". I found out after I submitted my resignation that they planned to give me an ultimatum that if I can't provide a certificate within 30 days, they will fire me. Oh well, thank you.
It was fucking North Korea, I said it before and I'll say it now. They have no clue what's really outside their own bubble. They stayed in that shit hole thinking they're a bunch of Steve Jobs or that they own the world because their peers (who are retarded themselves) praise them. I looked forward to this day and it finally happened. They are forced to go outside and now they can all see what they're really worth - nothing.
Good luck finding a job, you fuckers. This year's gonna be great. Ah, the sweet smell of other people's misery in the evening. :)8 -
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!!"6 -
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.10 -
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.1 -
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!8 -
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.4
-
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.
🤔3 -
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!!!5 -
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 -
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.5 -
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.3 -
Recap: https://www.devrant.io/rants/878300
I was out Thursday at the Hospital. I'm what the doctors would call "Ill as fuck"
So, Friday I’m back in the office to the usual: "How was that appointment?"
I know people mean well when they ask this. So, I do the polite thing and tell them it went as well as it could.
Realistically it does't matter how well it went... They haven't cured Crohn's because I showed up to the appointment. They know I'm fucked already.
But, push it down, add it to the future aneurism.
I had to go through the usual resignation meetings with managers:
"We"re fucked now you're going"
"yep"
"we need to get a handle on how fucked"
"already done that for you, here"s a trello board, very fucked."
"we need to put a plan together to drop all the junior devs in the shit with the work you’ve been doing"
"You need about 4 devs, please refer to the previous trello board for your plan"
Meanwhile, me and Morpheus are in constant communication because all of this is like a Shakespearean comedy.
So, I overhear a conversation between a Junior Dev and the Solution Architect.
[SA] took over the project because he knows better than two tried and tested senior devs -_- (fuckwit).
JD: "It took me one and a half days to build it out"
SA: "Yeah, it must have taken me twice as long... It must be a problem with the project, you should just be able to check it out and run it."
JD: "I know, it has to be wrong"
All of this is about Morpheus' work of art, of an Ionic 3 hybrid app.
I fumed quietly at my desk because I've been ordered by the Stazi to be hands off.
Since Morpheus and me were pulled from the project [JD] and [JD2] were dropped into it to get it over the line.
It"s unfortunate and I was clear and honest with my advice to them: I personally would not take over the project because I"d be way out of my depth... Oh, and the App works, so uh, there's no work to do.
They have been constantly at our desks. Asking fuckdiculous questions about how to perform basic tasks. So they can get Morpheus" frigging masterpiece to the user.
It"s like watching that touch up of jesus that got borked by an amateur. Shit I have google, it's like watching this happen: http://ti.me/NnNSAb
[JD] came to me Friday evening.
"I can’t get this to build to iOS or install on [Test Analyst]'s phone."
Me: "No worries brother, where are you stuck right now?"
[JD] describes the first steps with clear indication he hasn't googled his problem.
Life lesson: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy
Que an hour of me showing [JD] how to build an Ion3 project for iOS. Fuck it, your man's in a bind and he"s asked politely for help. I can show him quicker than he can read 3 sets of docos.
I took him through 'ionic cordova build ios', the archive and release processes in XCode 9, then the apk bundling process for droid. Finally we have an MAM so the upload process for that too.
All the while cleaning up his AppIDs, Profiles, deployment attempts.
Damn they were a mess.
I did this with a smile on my face, not because I could say "I told you so"... But. because when any developer asks you how to do something. If you know how to do it, you should always be happy to learn them some new tricks!
Dude's alright, he's been dropped in the shit. Now I know how badly so I'll help him learn things that are useful to his role, but aren't project specific.
As a plausi-senior dev (I'll tell you about that later); it's my job to make sure my team have what they need to go home smiling!
I’m not a hateful fucker, the guy asked me an honest question so I am happy to give him the honest answer.
I took him through it a few times and explained a few best practices. Most were how to do his AppID and ProvProfile set up. Good lad, took it all on board.
However! In his frustration, he pointed the finger at Morpheus' "David" (ref: Michelangelo).
He miraculously morphed into a shiny colourful parrot and fed me SA's line:
"you should just be able to build from a clean clone"
My response was calm and clear:
"You can, it took me 20 minutes on Thursday evening. I was bored and curios, so I wanted to validate Morpheus' work. Here it is on my iOS device and my Android device. It would have taken me 5 if my laptop wasn’t so horrifically out of date."
I validated Morpheus' work so I have evidence, I trust that brilliant bastard.
I just need to be able to prove it's good.
[JD] took this on board.
Maybe listening to two tried and trusted senior devs is better than listening to a headstrong Solution Architect.
When JD left for the weekend I was working a late one (https://www.devrant.io/rants/874765).
His sign off was beautiful.
"I think I can happily admit defeat on this one, it can wait until Monday."
To which I replied: "no worries brother, if you need a hand give me a shout."
Rule 1: Don't be a cunt.
Rule 2: If someone needs help and you can give it: Give it!
Rule 3: Don't interrupt James' cigarette time.
Rule 4: goto Rule 3.rant day 3 jct resigns crohns resignation solution architect wk71 invisible illness fuckwit illness junior developer4 -
Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -
Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.
Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x
Manager - please join our meeting.
I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.
Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?
Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going
Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - ) New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.
Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.
We are all like yeah probably. 2hrs pass 3hrs pass Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.
Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back.7 -
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 16th5 -
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 thoughts2 -
The NYC Lesbians Who Tech Summit starts today and I think I am in heaven. Hundreds of queer women and allies from software developers to executives in one space nerding out and empowering each other- ahhh!
Also, it has some of the best talk titles I've ever skimmed in a tech conference pamphlet. A sample:
"The Gift of Being a Lesbian Who Techs: Igniting Your Power to Lead"
"Space, Science & Religion: Why This Muslim Space Nerd Wants to Travel to Mars"
"How Tech is Revolutionizing the Billion Dollar Cannabis Industry, and Why Women are
Dominating"
"Ruthlessly Running in the Direction of Your Fears"
"No Gods, No Managers: How Anarchist Ideals Can Help Make Your Office & Open Source Project Better"
I love our community❤️ So amazing that it has come far enough for something like this to exist.14 -
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.1 -
(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)
Dear Current Workplace,
Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.
Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".
Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.
Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.
Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.
Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.
Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.
Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.
Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.
Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.
Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.
Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.
Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.
Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.
Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.
Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.
Fuck you for your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.
Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".
Fuck your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?
Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.
Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.6 -
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.6 -
I am being asked to support Internet Explorer 8 on this project I am wrapping up. The front-end has been developed using AngularJS 2.23
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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.
#GrowUpPinheads1 -
I work as a software developer for a small and specialized company on a very popular, albeit niche, piece of system software.
This software has been around for a while, and in that while it has ages. If there is one thing you could say to have aged gracefully--well, this thing ain't it. The codebase itself is what anyone would expect of a large-ish C++/C product started in the mid 2000s: documented poorly (and where it is documented, documented *wrong*), full of obscure bugs, full of idiosyncratic design choices that caused the obscure bugs in the first place, and a code style--or rather a general approach to software engineering--taken straight fom the 80s.
It is also fair to say that the product has been developed by marketing. What started out as a company-internal project to help others get work done was perceived as valuable for others, quickly rushed out to market, and "developed" by listening to whichever customer screamed loudest at that point in time. ("Developed", in the "duct tape and WD40" style of development similar to an early 90s web page: the result has no class, no style and everything users find "interesting" to interact with is a java applet.)
About six months ago the powers that be finally acknowledged that a codebase that has not seen a single line of refactoring since its inception over ten years ago is not a solid foundation for further business. What was once an openly hostile attitude towards refactoring and general improvement of the codebase itself rather than the set of user-visible functions slowly morphed into a secretly hostile attitude. Upper-level management continued to denigrate developers seeking to improve the system citing their own experience ten years ago as reason why things must still be done exactly as they have did. Parts of this upper-level management were soon complimented on their work and it was suggested they take the next step in their carreer.
Which they did, with two toes of one foot. The other eight remained in internal discussions and, more importantly, inside the head and arse of the new managers. Which promptly turned just as secretly hostile and blocked all attempts at improvement. Instead it is highlighted that the developers are clearly not smart enough to do their jobs.
Meanwhile the entire project is falling behind deadlines. We've failed to deliver on three accounts already and are now nine months behind on another plan that was set for 15 months nine months ago. (Yes. We have officially started working on this thing, but no work has been done. More to the point, work has been *started*, but is stalled or rejected continuously because "that's not what we would have done five years ago" or "you can't change that, whoever wrote it must have thought about this a lot.")
And now upper-level management has begun reverting changes that same upper-level management has requested and signed off on. Without communication. So that developers don't start work on things they have not signed off on (because they don't read the plans or give any feedback). Because developers are not qualified for their jobs and must be closely monitored to ensure they don't break stuff. Which was already broken. Because the product has been bitrotting since birth.
Fuck my life.3 -
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?"6 -
"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.6 -
*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.2 -
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.2 -
*receives email about project*
*turns around*
PM: "Hey I just sent you an email about a project"
No. Fucking. Shit.3 -
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 them8 -
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.2 -
Web Devs - How many projects do you typically work on at once? I am currently developing 24 websites at once, most of them custom (homepage). I just feel like that is absurd and my company is absolutely insane. Not to mention I'm the front line for client communication as well, pretty much the project manager AND developer. We're a huge company too, not a start up. Just feel like not having project managers for web dev industry is unprecedented except for freelance. 😡👎🏼18
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When you're deep into coding and every 15 mins a project manager taps you on the shoulder to see how it's going.2
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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.3
-
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.4
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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!!3 -
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.6 -
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?2
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So, monday I posted a rant saying that monday was a terrible day and that I was probably going to be fired/quitting soon.
Wednesday, I'm told that the project I had been working on for about a week was changed 2 days ago and to stop working on it.
Yesterday, I signed in and asked if there was any work for me (I work remotely) and nobody really responded so I just found something to work on. (This whole time, I'm thinking oh fuck, about to get fired) Then, about an hour before I was to sign out, I get a message saying that I'll be working on a new project starting today.
this morning, I signed in and had a meeting to get info on my new project. After the meeting, I check my bank account to see if I had enough money to order something and notice I had a bonus from the company. MFW.. So I asked one of my managers if there was a mistake and if it was supposed to go to someone else, and they said no. Of course, I said thank you and left it, but I STILL have no idea what it was for. https://youtube.com/watch/...2 -
> Worst work culture you've experienced?
It's a tie between my first to employers.
First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".
And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.
And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.
Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.
The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.
Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!
You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.3 -
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.6 -
If you're not into sad ones then better skip this.
Parents wanted a good boy rather than a happy boy so they got one... I wanted to learn programming and make games. I was kinda good at school and kinda not good at socialising. Or not good at being wanted around since my stuff is shit and everybody else's good. Standard bullying applies. Still adults back then promised work hard, learn and it will be worth it. Follow your dreams said internet. So I did. Tried the university 4 or 5 years maybe, completed 2, no degree. Nobody said that socially anxious, depressed never-had-any-girlfriends with mood swings struggle getting through one-size-fits-all institutions. But I learned programming. Nobody really cared. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. All friends on depression forums. Tried learning driving then failed couple times and put this until I have money to throw at the bottomless pit of learning driving.
For the reasons that can be summarized as "my parents fucked up and my country fucked up too" I migrated. New country, migrant, warehouse jobs in the area with warehouse jobs for migrants. Worked a bit then went for a sort of uni level course or software development again, probably the easiest way to prove "I speak English too" on my CV. Barely made it, of course. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. All friends on anxiety online chat. I worked on one game but then ran out of time. It was time to look for employment. Made portfolio (from scraps of old projects), looked for half year (online), didn't find it.
Decided to move from low rent no jobs area to high rent with jobs area. Got factory job, worked maybe 6 days then quit mid day since my brain had a wave of extremely low mood mixed with "THIS IS NOT WHAT I LEARNED FOR". Btw 5 days of that work went to the scammer pretending to be a staffing agency. Workplace didn't respond and I didn't have an "official" address so didn't talk about it. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. Got one friend locally.
So that's 3 years ago.
Then by some miracle I got into my first software job. Some miracle constituted of going to local dev meetings and talking to a really generous man that happened to be looking for people. I did some ugly web development there, then the company found out they're not doing well and laid off half of devs including myself. Kept all the project managers for some reason, I guess you don't have to code projects if you can code existing clients. It was stressful but I found next employment within a month, which is where I am still. For next to minimum wage. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. Getting old, losing hair.
I found I have problems doing work. Had days and days during which I've written like 10 lines, maybe. Of easy stuff. Nightmare. Life is pain and it's all I can think of some days. I'm approaching 30. Still anxious, male-male street hostility present as always, burnt out. Can't afford own house, can only rent a room. At this point I've been like nowhere, had almost no relationships (online doesn't count), and almost done no fun stuff in life (discovered a hema club recently which is the last thing keeping my sanity). I think I've heard all advice there is, all about how privileged I am in this day and age, taking ownership, exercising, hard work, positivity (can suck my undesired d...), todo lists, sleep, omega-3, vitamin d, no shortcuts, more work. I feel like I've wasted 10-15 years. To be honest about the feeling I feel like the world has wasted my 10-15 years. I feel like absolute trash. There has been a lot of bad things and very little good ones. Recently it's been more nothingness. The best free time to be sit at home with your partner off work with plague outside: wasted. I've been off for almost as many months as worked past year. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. Hope lost: yes, most of. Weakness is a sin, world is made for fuckheads, terrorists win, no gods to hear your cries.
So I want to ask you guys and gals, should I pursue my gamedev dreams? I maybe have the base skills, but I struggle to use them because attention deficit or something that keeps my brain processing all the past misery rather than working. I don't think I have enough charm to be anywhere for pretty face. I think my personality isn't too great by now either. At least the public one. Still I want to do creative stuff, dark, crazy, ridiculous stuff. At least somewhat fun. But I feel like a burden. If I was a studio I wouldn't employ myself. Will I be able to do the job properly? Gamble. My energy is mostly spent and I can do only so much about it.
But maybe it's not what I should want, I don't know. I'm rather lost recently and don't think there's much goodness gradient to follow anymore.
Sorry for a messy post, I don't really know where to get stuff out of my head and in what order. I tried therapist, didn't work.42 -
When project managers copy and paste clients' vague requests word for word with no further explanation2
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“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.3 -
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.2
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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???!!!?!12
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Working for this startup as a remote dev for last 6 months.
This month they delayed my payment by saying that they are still waiting for crowdfunding payment to be processed.
After 3 days my teamlead who recruited me quitted with 2 more people saying that its 'personal issues'
1 week later (today) I received a letter of termination saying that my contract ceases its effect after 30 days and I will receive my payment after 45 days as all service providers.
I reminded those fuckers that in contract there is a clause saying that they are supposed to pay me within 24 hours of invoice receipt (because this is not my first time with startups). Then fuckers responded that I will get paid as soon as they receive the money.
Contacted CTO today and he told me the truth. Turns out that venture capital that supposedly raised funding of around 10 million usd last year actually didnt raise shit. In the end startup did not receive this funding because VC convinced investors that this project is shit and not worth investing.
VC's plan is to starve out the startup by giving it bridge payment injections. At some point they want to buy out the startup and resell it for profit.
And here I am fucked in the ass. But for some reason im not mad at that VC because shit happens. Im mad ar startup managers who kept us in the dark for 2 weeks and dropped us like shit :)
I am really tired of broke startups and their bullshittery.5 -
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!2 -
Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.6 -
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.5 -
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.4 -
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.7
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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.7 -
I just joined devrants and starting my rant here with a dig at the Project Managers I have worked with.4
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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 💩 -
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.
KthanxBye1 -
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. -
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*6 -
I think I want to quit.
I know it’s a bit of an inconvenient time with there being corona around but everything was okay up till January. I’m a junior even though I shouldn’t be. Since my manager told me and my team leader senior in my review “maybe you two should switch jobs” things have been going downhill. I think the team lead had it out for me and didn’t put me on a new project, I’ve been left with doing stupid basic shit like updating text on websites in a cms and doing fuck all and then there’s also another guy that was basically harassing me trying to put me in my place any time I was doing better than him and literally both of them been like that ... and now that I’m working from home it’s even worse. I don’t have any kind of assurance that everything okay and actually I think I’m being framed as welll since I found keyloggers on my work laptop and deleted cleaned shit up the past two weeks and changed my WiFi security as there were like 5 unknown devices on our network so yeah .. I’ve been framed and they made it out like I put a powershell script on one of the servers and it crashed a Porsche website for 8 h and all kinds of bullshit - this was yday. On Tuesday they logged me out of everything like changed the password for work vpn and kicked me out of slack and Microsoft teams for over 2 hours till the end of shift and two managers weren’t answering their phone and then next day my manager called and apologised that saying that he “accidentally” did that to me along with 15 people they let go from the company....
I’m seriously thinking of quitting being removed from team group for a moment , not being on a project and people literally trying to put me down after I know I’m genuinely smarter than them and if I had over 10 years experience like those on my team (I have 1) I’d be far higher up and better
They can genuinely just go fuck themseves !!!! And here I was going to work over weekend on something! No fucking way I just wanna quit or give in my notice but because of corona I’m divided8 -
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 😩 -
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.2 -
agency lesson 10motherfucking1 . Never take your project managers demands and run with them. Ask 10s, 100s of questions if needed. Layout every little aspect of the project and every little demand and every little asset needed.
They will fuck you in your ass and turn every eye on you when the client gets angry. They will fucking ruin you for the sake of their job.
Cover your ass in every way possible. Do not let your asshole manager define how shit is going down because (say it with me) THOSE WHO CAN DO! THOSE WHO CANT MANAGE!1 -
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.2
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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?9 -
TL;DR: OMFG! Push the button already!
I've been away on paternity leave for quite some time now. Today is my first day at work since the end of July.
Just a couple of days after my paternity leave started, I was contacted by one of the managers because a tracking and analytics service I had made some months earlier had halted.
Now, I did warn them that the project was fragile and was running of an old box in my office. So they shouldn't be surprized if it came to a halt every now and then.
Well, so being on my paternity leave and all I didn't want to spend time fixing it. I had a child to look after. So I told the manager that the box probably just had shut down. I think there was a power outage the day before, so I probably thought it was the cause. So he probably just had to turn it back on. I also told him the admin u/p in case he needed to restart some services.
Today, the CEO enters my office telling me to get that thing fixed. Because that manager apparently couldn't find the power button.4 -
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?6 -
Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
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.8
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I’ve been at this job 4 months and I feel like I’ve been here long enough to make an accurate opinion of it. From day one I have not felt welcomed. There is no communication within the team.. none of my questions are ever answered.. and when I do ask questions I get snarky answers. I don’t expect my hand to be held, but as someone who is new, I’d like you to give me guidance. Especially since the code is mostly legacy and no one else on the team seems to know anything about anything.
Oh and there are not daily stand ups, project managers, or direction in the tickets themselves.
I guess I should have expected this on the first day when I asked for a SIP or documentation on how to get my environment setup I was practically laughed out of the office and then had the nerve to ask me why it took me the entire day to get 5 environments up and running.. not giving me the custom mappings or the global UDFs.
Today was my last straw.. when I asked a question in three different forms of communication on multiple different channels and was never given an answer.. and then was asked why I did something the way I did instead of doing it the way they wanted me to.
I think the saddest thing is that I felt tricked into this. I was told this position was going to be one way but ended up being something else. I was excited to share my knowledge and best practices to the team. Instead, I’m an outcast and get only be negativity and excuses when I politely bring up suggestions.
I no longer have the will to code here.5 -
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.3 -
What managers fail to realize is us developers and designers work close. We talk about things, we bicker, we find related problems that we have in our workplace. We band together and we form efforts. They are few and we are many. A project managers job is to be a servant to who they manage. If you cannot be straight forward and well respected At the same tome then it is not the job for you.3
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>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...4 -
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.2 -
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. -
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.2 -
I hate this project. Please end it now. I always wake up stressed whenever I work with you. Just let me go back to my team and never borrow me again. I'm tired of being passed the ball shortly before deadline.
Yeah, yeah, everyone knows who keeps missing these requirements and surprising the devs. By this point, you are already notorious for this. I just hate the unnecessary pressure and receiving constant follow-ups when I usually deliver things fast.
You're stressing out your developers. You don't care about anyone's health. This field is stressful enough, having managers like you doesn't help anyone. You don't do your job properly then when someone follows up, you get pressured and then pass on the stress to someone else. You are one of the worst types of human beings on this planet.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, "Good morning."2 -
Hey guys, I created this application for Linux users that lets you download and install multiple essential softwares/tools at once. It's something like Ninite (in Windows) but for Linux. So I called it Linite! It's still new, so it doesn't support many distros yet.
Now, I know there are many package managers and stuff, but I just wanted to make something really simple/basic and user friendly that can help even new Linux users. I was learning Python so I just thought it'd be nice to do some project.
Please do check it out and I'd love to get some feedback. Link's below!
https://github.com/shahlin/Linite11 -
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...3 -
So I work for a company that does outsource, this company is pretty nice, but I don't get to see it too often. The one where I'm outsourcing though is the one where I spend all of my time.
Now, this company is a kind of a startup working with AI and Deep Learning (but not if statements :o ), but I came here as a full stack python developer that should implement their AI modules into real apps (mainly web apps).
Everything sounds good untill now, I learn lots and I'm doing what I wanted: python development. The problem is: management + one kiss ass guy.
The amount of work that should be done and the deadlines that should be kept are so messed up that I end up working extra hours, sometimes even in weekend, just to get it done. I'm the only apps developer there, so passing my tasks is not an option. I tried to talk about this, but I was met with a "loser can't keep up even with these few tasks..." kind of attitude.
Moreover, there is a guy that would do anything for the boss's attention, so he speaks everyone there behind their backs (and we all know it, but he's the favorite and he actually knows his stuff so we can't do much about him).
Now the question: what should I do? I only have 5 months here (so leaving would put a hole in my CV, I don't even know what to answer at this interview question "why are you leaving"), plus that the managers from these two companies are highschool friends which means that if I go and ask for a different project, the atmosphere at work will change (maybe this is overthinking already, but I can't help it). Also, last week I could barely get through the days without crying from stress.
TL;DR: I learn a lot from this company, but the deadlines are killing me and my stress level is at an all time high. I want to leave, but I kind of can't because I want my CV to look good.
So yeah, this is my first real rant, feels good to put it out there13 -
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 -
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 ..." -
Being a developer is a fucking struggle and no one fucking understands it.
Trying to keep up with new technologies and working with Project Managers that wants stuff to be delivered in no time is what makes you regret your career sometimes..
Maaan I FUCKING HATE THIS JOB!!!8 -
Project managers have been pissing me off immensely today with little anal pixel for pixel changes so I've simply been making their requested changes and then telling them it was already fixed and that they have failed to clear their cache before addressing. Transfer that egg to their face.
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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...1
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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.2
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I HATE PROJECT MANAGERS
They are so busy with their “schedule making” they skim over details and then blame us developers3 -
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..8 -
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.3 -
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?11
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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.5 -
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 code1 -
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.5 -
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 done6 -
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.5 -
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?5 -
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!!! -
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.2 -
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.1 -
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!!9
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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.
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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.4
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Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'
Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.
They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.
• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".
• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop
The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).
• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).
But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!
And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...3 -
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.2 -
Rant against a new religion: the Agile Religion, started by the Agile Manifesto: https://agilemanifesto.org
This manifesto is as ambiguous and open to interpretation as any religious text. You might as well get advice from a psychic. If you succeed, you'll start believing in them more. If you don't, then they'll say you misinterpreted them. The whole manifesto just re-states the obvious with grandiloquent words.
For example: "Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale." What does this say REALLY? To me, it just says "deliver software, try to be fast." Great, thanks for re-writing my job description. Of course, some features take "a couple of weeks", while others "a couple of months". Again, thanks for re-stating the obvious.
"Value *working software* over _comprehensive documentation_"
Result => PHP
"Welcome changing requirements, even late in development."
I'm okay with this one as long as the managers also `welcome the devs changing deadlines, even the night before the release date`. We're not slaves; we're more like architects. If you change the plans for the building, we're gonna have to demolish part of what we've already built and re-construct. I'm not gonna spring just because you change your mind like a girl changes clothes.
"Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project."
Daily? Fine. ONCE a day, sure. But this doesn't give you the right to breathe down my neck or break my concentration by calling me every couple of mintues.
"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation."
- Not if you could've summed up that meeting in an email.
- Whereas that might be true for clarity, write that down.
"Working software is the primary measure of progress."
... is how you get a tech debt the size of the US's.
"The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely."
Have you heard of vacations?
"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."
So you're telling us "do good". Again, thank you for re-writing my job description.
It's just a bunch of fancy babble, more suitable in poetry than in the dev world. It doesn't provide any scientific evidence for any of its supposed suggestions, so I just won't use it4 -
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.1 -
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?1 -
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? -
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.2 -
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?7 -
Very eventful day, please see enclosed several smaller rants.
===================
My college's systems are shit and not only do they use HTTP for everything, even the stores and financial aid purchase system, they have homebrew JS shit for PGP site encryption (nifty...), but they exchange the PRIVATE KEYS instead of the public keys. Over HTTP. Not even HTTPS. Also if you log in more than 10 times in 24 hours it's supposed to lock you out of your account until you call... except it locks EVERYONE out. Found this out when on campus, trying to get my textbooks, when suddenly everyone had login lockouts because i'm a "paranoid bastard" and "afraid of idiot college students" for not telling a PUBLIC PC to remember the one password (enforced by password auto-sync across all their shit, not ideal, no) guarding my SUPER-SENSITIVE FINANCIAL AND ACADEMIC DATA... among the other hundreds of issues this college has. I now see why this college is the only one I can afford...
===================
Can't pass-through raw DVD drive access to VMs as VM managers crash when I try (yes, even QEMU...) so i've gotta install Windows on a shitty 80GB laptop HDD for literally one quick project. On the bright side, if my theory proves correct, you'll no longer need modchips for PS2s.
===================
Found a couple odd lines in my xscreensaver config:
GetViewPortIsFullOfLies:False
nice: 10
pointerHysteresis: 10
the first 2 I can't seem to figure out what do, and the last taught me a new word. Fun!
===================
that's it, it's over, why are you still here11 -
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.4 -
The place I currently work at has got this culture of ignoring developers.
Deadlines get made by 3rd parties and project managers who don't have the technical nounce or experience of our system to make a call on deadlines.
Demos of products are arranged without a discussion with developers as to whether said component will be ready on that date.
3rd parties make decisions about future architecture, offer to assist, then disappear for days on end, to only come back and make out as though they've not been holding us up.
Upper management take no interest, don't listen to the people they pay to do a job.
Currently just moved a PHP web app into a multi tenant scalable EBS environment, but apparently it's not worth asking our view on technical aspects of the business before the shit hits the fan.
Lies to clients about documentation and policies, for example, claims from Sales we have a DR and BCP plan, client called is out, they sent a 2 paragraph A4 document to the client claiming it was our DR and BCP plan without talking to anyone technical, including myself who has years of DR experience. Embarrassing.
Could go on, but rant over.2 -
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?5
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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.2
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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.rant project management incompetent fucks project management fail last minute changes project managers1 -
PM on the phone with a client: "Your email is down? Who hosts it? You know, it would be a company like MailChimp."
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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.1 -
sales-managers: How long do you need to implement feature X ?
software-dev: Hmmm, that's nothing we have in our default-packages ... could be nasty, because it won't work without feature Y, which also does not exist in the current version 3 of our system.
I need to investigate this issue.
... 2 days later:
software-dev: This is really a nasty problem - to make X work, we've to reimplement Y for our system version 3, but this won't work with feature Z.
If we do this, it may take several weeks.
sales-manager: we need to go live in 2 months.
software-dev: might work.
------
1 week before go-live:
sales-manager: The customer saw us testing feature X. He does not like it. Could we just do it in ... blabla ... this way?
software-dev: This would work out of the box with feature Z, yes - we've to remove feature Y and X for that. But be warned - this might work next week without testing only.
sales-mamanger: do it now!
day of go live:
The customer tried the new feature X - it won't work.
software-dev: But it's not there, was removed, instead he has to use feature Z.
...
sales-guy comes back: He does not like it.
software-dev: why not? its working!
sales-guy: Yes, but he still wants it to work like feature X as he ordered.
software-dev: according to the specs, its exactly what he ordered. look at that: (showing the general specifications of project, showing feature Z).
...
sales-guy: The customer did not review this new document since last week.... Its still feature X
...
dev: really? why? I sent that version to you the day, he said, he doesn't like feature X, and you said I've to change that just urgently.
sales-guy: Please switch back to the version with X of last week. - could you. please ?
me: This won't work, because the other colleagues already finished their stuff on that currently running system - we'll lose all the optimations we've done to make this and other stuff work.
----- FAIL ------- NEVER DO ANYTHING WITHOUT SIGNATURE OF THE CUSTOMER !!!
One week onsite and rescheduled go-live is just so-what expensive.
Today (some weeks later) ... I saw someone else sitting in sales-guys office.1 -
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.3 -
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.4
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I came up with what I considered to be a brilliant approach to a festering internal knowledge management problem using a third-party SaaS. I rolled it out and it was very popular. Weeks later, after my profile had become the "linchpin" by which hundreds of other employees had joined the service, I was told that a female employee (yes, gender is important to this story) had produced a proposal for a more in-house solution that used a different company's software and that I would be on the team to roll it out. I thought it was a great idea and I deferred to her on pretty much everything.
Months after that I was accused, by several other female managers, of trying to take over the whole leadership of the project just because of one minor suggestion I had proposed. One day, after a lengthy interrogation about their take on my emails on the matter (lacking only the bright, hot spotlight in my eyes) I was booted off the project and the woman who had proposed the project was promoted. She then proceeded to lord it over on me and treat me like crap.
This type of thing was a general pattern within the company that amounted to a form of a reverse discrimination "policy" (unwritten). The effect was that the ratio of men to women in upper management was not equal but completely flipped. Way more women than men had upper management positions and higher pay.
In their eyes, the ends (women broke through the glass ceiling) justified the means (discrimination and bullying) which I guess is good and "equal", again in their eyes, in terms of the overall perception modern feminism has about men needing a comeuppance.
But in the context of HR's stated policy on equality, meaning 1:1 men and women in position of power and pay and a non-threatening work environment for all, which we all (men and women) were forced to sign every year, it was an utter fail as far as the math and intimidation went.2 -
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.2
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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 coding3 -
You "following up" and "just checking in" doesn't actually make anything go faster...quite the opposite actually..
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PM: How long do you think this will take...
Me: When does it need to be done?
PM: good question.... last Tuesday...
Me: ... -_- -
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.4 -
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! -
My spouse is my project manager which is ironic since I normally seethe with anger when around project managers. It works though.4
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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. -
My biggest challenge was trying to convince my old boss why things need to be done the way I'm saying and not the way he wants (of course, arch wise and not business wise)
After giving up, I ended up going back to collage, studying Masters in Business Administration just to know how managers think, took me two years, and now I'm in my final semester, even though I left my old job, I am now able to handle things in a better way in my current one regardless if I was arguing with general manager, or project manager, luckily clients are not allowed anywhere near me ... -
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?1
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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.1 -
Because of my managers attitude I have lost interest in her project ...not fun any more. Now it’s not gonna be of such good quality because now I won’t be developing it with lovvve, won’t be going extra miles ......fucking idiot.1
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A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.3 -
Writing codes never been hard.
Making user stories come to life for the stakeholder has never been daunting.
Architecture however I find to be difficult. SOLID principles at a class level and project wide level I find complex. Im finding an all new love for programming in the realm of this abstract planning.
Most of the population with an average IQ and enough patience to learn some basics are able to write enough to solve rather complex issues. The evolutionary jump to simple abstractions is inevitable and the eventual understanding of frameworks is unavoidable as the problems grow more unique. For example, Ive had semi-technical managers as of recent write small web apis in node.js to help them integrate data from a headless CMS into excel. Point being, the problems that use to be trivial in our positions are becoming much less so.
The code writing aspect of development is getting easier. Frameworks are becoming more and more automated. The real world problems are also growing more complex and requiring larger solutions. The problem at hand is rarely the algorithm. Theres a package for most needs that arise.
The size of todays problems require multiple domains of logic and multiple systems to maintain. Throwing code at wall no longer scales far enough for a business to stay alive. Devs come and go, we do not enjoy growing idle as complacency means we are being left behind in such a quickly growing field. Without a sophisticated architecture in place from the class all the way up to an agnostic domain layer, a few cycles of developers will leave a codebase in shambles.
A summarized point of what im finding more and more of is that the writing of code is becoming much less a talent with a high dollar sign. The architects, the well weathered solution builders, the consultants preaching of the past and whats to come are where we will find most of our value as our solutions grow beyond rational understanding.
And what a fucking brilliant problem for us to solve in the coming of days: Mass service communication and organization. Being able to solve that problem cannot be an easy task.3 -
Oh god where do I start!?
In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.
The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.
That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.
I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.
I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.
I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:
PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.
The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.
Also recently, and in another direction:
PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.
*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.
Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*
I'll think of more when I can. -
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!
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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.3
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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.2
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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. -
A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.
Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.
We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.
I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.
At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.
At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX
You might get where this is going...
None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.
Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.
Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board
No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.
Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.
Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.
One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board
Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.
At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).
The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board
I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).
There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).
I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.
The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.4 -
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>1 -
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.1 -
I need help and advice!
I currently work as an consultant at a large corporation. Came onboard for 1-2 years to help rebuild one of their platforms. From the beginning the mindset was that the finished product should not be developed based on anything else than customer testimonials and interviews regarding functionality and design. However, they’re building their platform developed and distributed by this other company. Basically they bought a system that is incomplete regarding to being compliant to the specifications brought to them when they decided which system to go with. Now we’re trying to build around all the issue this platform is causing us. The code base for the system is like something a monkey did with their feet. Nothing makes sense and it’s layers on top of layers of 10 year old code. I f-ing hate it. I don’t know what to do. We have some many technical limitation that it’s impossible to create the vision they had from the start.
I’ve been thinking about talking to the highest chief in the department as he has been pissed earlier about project managers not escalating issue to him earlier. But I don’t want to step on anyones toes. Should I leave the project? Should I talk to the chief? What do I do? I’m miserable🤯7 -
So one of the PMs arranged a meeting last week for today, where he was going to "talk to us about a project we're currently working on".
Today the PM was off, so myself and a few other managers attended said meeting. Once everyone was in, one of the managers looked around, then at me and stated: "Have you not prepared your handover for this meeting?". I was just sat there like "WTF? What handover!?"
Apparently the PM decided to raise a meeting saying he was going to talk about the project, but then told all the other managers I was going to give a handover. He told everyone, but me!!
No wonder he didn't show up for it -.-2 -
I don't understand why managers are not held responsible for the under estimated timeline of the project, the developer will suffer from the overtime and crunch of coding.4
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I have a biased, opinionated favoritism towards project managers who can symphatize with their developers.1
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I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...
So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).
Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.
Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.
What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...
The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.
The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.
Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.
One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...
Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.
Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.
Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..
ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....
Ahh yess....
Clean code..
Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...
I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.
OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..
Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.15 -
You would think that one might get used to the following scenario, but it still pisses me off every time it happens. I'm getting a design created by the customer that is specific to a pixel-level. The product I create in turn is very close to a 100% match visually and functional. And then a few days later, the work already done, I get renewed versions of the same designs. Just like that. With all those nooks and crannies replaced and new ones added, as if it didn't took time, effort and experience to make them functional in the first place. And no one blinks an eye. Not the customer, not our project managers. So after having me built you intricate card board house, you just smash it and tell me to rebuild? It's not always a huge deal but it happens so often and I guess it's part of the "customer is king" mentality, but it's bullshit. If the customer hands in a final design, then that's it. Any changes afterwards need to be paid extra. Otherwise it feels like I'm wasting my time and those changes will not get the same quality treatment for sure.1
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Im currently doing my first project as a junior dev. I'm working with asp.net core and I had only used regular asp.net before. The project owner who was the guy that used to own the company I work for had only asked me if i was versed in asp.net and said that it was what I was going to work with. So from the start I'm a little bumed out. The difference isn't enourmous, but still.
First day, he says that we are going to use TFS for version handling (god damnit) then he says he has started a bit and has done the first push... And we're missing files. But he's asleep by the time i do the pull (9 hour timezone difference).
Next day he has gotten all the files up and I also get to know that I will be working alone and still have to use TFS.
A few days later he tells me I'm gonna present the first version the next week...
Oh, and did I mention that this is for one of the biggest companies in the world that the very top managers will use. Including CEO, cto etc4 -
Just found out that I have been reassigned to maintain an in house shitty project... It's full of crap code, no documentation, has lot of duct tapes to keep the project together and 20+ open bugs and issues...
I am so happy with my current project. But my manager is always pissed off at me for no apparent reason.
Fuck this shit... Any excuse or advice to dodge this BS project? Can't quit job, I am getting payed alot here.7 -
15h/day for at least one month.
Manager to someone: How long do you think it will take you to build this?
Someone: Erm... 6 months.
Manager: Fine, I'm pretty sure you can do it in 3 months.
I was invited/forced to join someone's team because he could not do it in 3 months. Neither did we, but we managed to deliver the project in 4 months.
The dickhead manager got a promotion, money prizes etc for burning us out. I can't stand this kind of managers.
Neither I or someone work for that guy anymore.
If a Dev tells you it would deliver something in X believe him, he's telling you the best he can.1 -
I happened to come help with a project that deadline was in two weeks. It was hardware project for customers with UI.
They said to me - help us 2 weeks and it’s done. It only needs polishing. There was nothing working and we finished it after half a year.
Hardware was crap and drivers wasn’t working. Managers called me stupid when I tried to explain that this is hardware team fault. They used to say that it was tested in laboratory and there is no defect. Laboratory my ass fucking assholes never released anything from scratch.
I got depressed after this project for a year. It was fucking nightmare.
Everything, literally everything was rewritten 3 times cause of stupid decisions that I questioned all the time. At the end of project most of those assholes stopped commenting my decisions. I believe we released impossible product that was crap but based on usage rates I got later when I left it returned expenses.
I lost like 2 years of my life and about 20kg during those 6 months. Never again. -
So there is this project of my firm that is comepletly dependant on Facebook api, I've actually told it many times to managers at first but they've just waved their hands over it.
Now what didn't happen. Facebook data leak and the api being taking down ..juust a week before the project going public.
Our app is still not reviewed and not able to access the so vital api and there are actually many similar projects getting published (even Facebook Local greatly rivals to our app, actually killing it because they have native data... And we don't have any. )
I told them again. "Nah we will have this and this feature that makes it soo exceptionall."
And you are sitting here thinking if the salary you have asked for is still good enough to stay or to run away.
(Well, I am still getting some coding experience from this so that's why I stay, and oh yeah I have the backend repo only for myslef because except the frontend dev no managers knows what git is. This is how freedom feels. )2 -
I've seen some posts on remote work. I believe all companies should permanently implement remote work if they cannot arrange a proper office.
I have been working for a company where programmers and project managers work in the same room, and sometimes I was trying to understand some problem in code when managers were screaming next to me at other developers or on the phone, because they couldn't hear themselves.
This happend so often that I would literally go home burned out.
Also there were people coming in the room to talk to the managers or just passing next to my screen every couple of minutes which was extremely distracting.
I bought a pair of over ear noise cancelling headphones and on top of that used ear plugs, but eventually I developed a very strange stress condition over the course of a year. Also listening to music while trying to focus for 8 hours a day while at work is very tiresome.
Also couldn't quit because it was my first job.1 -
That moment when project managers all demand a share of your weekly hours, failing to accept that productivity diminishes exponentially with the number of projects you have to switch between.
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Scope creep.
Stopping scope creep when it rears its goddamn ugly head.
I kinda want project managers to recite "The Riflemans Creed" but replace rifle with the project scope. So they realize how important sticking to that scope is.
"This is my project. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My scope is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my projects' scope is useless. Without the project scope, I am useless...." -
Best part of being a (freelance) dev : working from home, being able to see my newborn son slowly growing up. Not easy to run after clients days after days, but I don't regret the silly project managers, the dumbasses from the marketing, and, gosh, I don't miss the CTOs. :)1
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Vocabulary for the day.
Screed - An abusive rant is called a Screed.
Usage - I'mma screed the shit outta dem pathetic species of blood sucking parasites AKA dickhead project managers who do dem (developerEstimatedTime/2) quick maths.
Fuck you1 -
Daily stand-ups might seem like a joke when done remotely, but I believe they help unite the team, and they play a key role for project managers, even if they're brief. The bigger issue might be just some of the dev's attitude towards it, and the lack of communication through out the project development.4
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Project managers moved all the tickets around and then got mad that we couldn't find them to log our time.
Mass mutiny about logging time in general and expected dev hours per week.
They returned the tickets to the old system at least -
Here to represent project managers.
Who was saying what about us?!
Talk now or forever hold your peace!4 -
Boss calls a team leads meeting which is just me and the other guy. Rest are product or project managers.
Turns out they concerns over how our last few sprints are always left unfinished as the work in it doesn't get passed QA.
Tried to tell him how can devs work on something that failed QA on the last day of the sprint.
We have one QA person who tests 20 something devs work. We are massively under resourced and yet they want us to do everything and always end up making promises to clients that we can't keep coz our sprint doesn't have capacity.
Yet they are hiring more product managers instead of getting some more QA help.
Sick & tired of this shit. -
Lesson 1 of developing a project with managers: never make it known that solutions to some bugs are simple. Managers will assume that all bugs are simple and require little thought and effort. Then, when there is a bug for which you have no idea what the solution is just by looking at the issue, they will become upset.1
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If you could remember that I'm not your staff anymore and stop assigning me to projects. That'd be fucking swell.
I'm meant to be infrastructure now so fuck off. Oh a devs leaving let's hand the project to the infrastructure guy who's fucking leaving also!!
Fucking genius. I'm so close to just to saying fucking swivel and walking out. Fuck the notice period. -
https://forums.theregister.co.uk/fo...
I thought it worth repeating the wisdom I spotted there:
---------------------
"That's what the Test Track at Velim is for"....methinks that modern managers, project managers and beancounters need reminding of this.
My experience lately is that when folk of their ilk hear 'apply all the edge cases', what they hear is 'blahhhhh blahhhhh blahhhhhh un-necessary time and cost' and promptly chop those 'edge-ish' bits out of the test and/or approvals plan.
I'm lucky enough to have had a diverse and very enjoyable career testing things for a living, in an organisation where you were *expected* to try and break the thing you were working on (within sensible limits).... the rational being that if it went wrong in-service, it would be seriously inconvenient for users, if not downright Goddamn dangerous (Think national-scale 'phone infrastructure - no 112/911 service=big problems!).
We were well paid to have a negative attitude towards 'Product Whatwever' in those days - actually a realistic attitude from a Systems point of view - which was endorsed by the C-Suite as necessary for product quality. The attitude was that if Joe Public doesn't have an issue then we've done the job right.
Most of the time, we would end up fixing an issue, even the 'Very Low Probability, Medium Impact' ones on the (proven!) assumption that if Mr. Sod can stuff it up, he will.
With this modern 'continuous delivery' way of working, I find the 'edge' cases get ignored as a fix is seen as 'only a software update away' - no matter that the poor sap trying to use the thing has to wait weeks/months/forever for a fix.
Nobody wants to take the time and trouble to create a robust product any more, and it's hard to take pride in your work (About 50% of my output at the moment is crap, because 'timescales' and workload).
The world is increasingly run/managed by people who have absolutely no idea of the technicalities and complexity of modern systems.
Here endeth this rant.
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Poll: do you think everyone, especially managers, should read The Phoenix Project?
My personal opinion: yes... They need to understand the horrors from unplanned work and how to prevent it... I'm getting really tired of checking up after people...1 -
I work as part of a small international team in a big corp , we work product quality of sorts but work closer to dev than qa , last week we found several giant issues and reported them in . Dev and Qa teams of said project are Indians . Meeting starts , two of my colleagues are indian as well , so dev , qa and all the other involved parties from india decided they should join in from the same conference room . My manager(he's a brit) presents the issues . Dev manager starts talking , qa manager talks over him , they start to formally yell at one another . One of them (couldn't figure out which one) started asking my two colleagues which one of them found these issues . At this point I had already passed a headphone to my ex-colleague who still sits next to me , he looks at me when he hears the question . I panic . Colleagues say they don't know (*phu* I didn't CC them in emails and my manager didn't tell them ) . My manager tells them to calm down , take responsibility and find solutions else he'll veto the product back into fullblown development . Other managers start growling and fighting again (more than 10 people were in the same room arguing) me and my ex-colleague decide to go take a coffee since I didn't have a saying in the meeting . We get back 10 minutes later , indians are still arguing over my manager trying to explain the issues a 4th time . I IM my manager and ask to drop the meeting , he gave me the ok and I dropped out, my head was hurting after an hour long meeting of angry indians arguing in a conference room and it kept hurting the whole day...yeah...meetings...fun time...
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In recent time my anger comes from a junior dev who keeps saying he's got no time to test and breaks working code leading to others getting the blame and the team leader not addressing the problem.
In the past it was micro managing managers who thought they knew how to make a UI best, and also that one project where they gave a client carte blanche on changes to avoid legal trouble. Nothing more infuriating than multiple people telling you how to change things over and over while you're being passed around in their power struggle.1 -
the look and chat project managers give right before they tell you the specs changed.
pm: heyyy
dev: what is it?
pm: how are you?
dev :{realising the spec changed} -
I’m really getting fed up with the situation I am in!
I was brought in as a development lead, which in my eyes and from the sound of it leading on the technical delivery, inspiring and leading technical development decisions and generally leading my team (one additional dev) in the delivery of work items and user stories which the PM or Business analyst produces..
Then it “evolved” into what felt more like a development manager where I was reporting to senior management on KPIs and stuff, I sucked it up and did it.
Then they brought in two new people which they call application specialists. These people spend all their time managing existing off the shelf applications, communicating with the vendor, running user groups where they work with our users on moving the product forward and planning the configuration and enablement of new functionality.
Because they are “developing” the application (in the same way a child develops, or the same way a story line develops and evolves) they fall under me..
So now I spend a split amount of time developing software and also managing what I can only explain as project managers, product owners...
Oh but then it gets better!! Now they want me(as well as our info sec lead and our infrastructure lead) to be a kind of all round delivery lead, gauging the requirements of a project, reporting in its risks to senior management, resource planning, everything a PM does! And also be the technical person delivering these projects!
Honestly, it’s seriously starting to take the fucking piss!
I am a technical programmer, a pretty good one if I say so myself, the developer reporting to me is good but needs hand holding which I am ok with! But would never be able to deliver an element of a product by himself in line with what we expect in quality of code..
Why would anyone think you take a person built and only interested in doing a technical role and make then a generic all round manager of a project??
I know why they did it! It’s because there are other managers in our department paid the same “level” as me, but because of their management responsibility’s , I however feel I am paid this much for my technical experience and abilities, thy are just blanket covering everyone the same at this level.
You would never get a manager at this salary scale with the technical skills they need, and you would never get a technical person with the skills interested in doing that type of management at this salary scale!
I’m just a mug and they know it!
So fucking angry!3 -
This is why we can never have enough software developers
It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.
Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.
Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.
Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.
Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.
Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.
Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.
A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.
If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.
With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work. -
A="all bad recruiters, project managers, CEOs, CTOs, clients etc."
B="//replace A \"good version of {A}\""
1=A+B+"GIVE ME 1 MORE (DEATH) WISH EVERYTIME I GET STRESSED"
2=???
3=Profit -
It’s always fun when you are asked to push to production on a friday afternoon...Because the project managers and owners won’t have be the ones who have to fix something on a friday night or weekend 🤷♂️
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Story of my first successful project
Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.
Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"
I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).
I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".
Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.
Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)
Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."
End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team. -
I am a human being... I have feelings... I have a family who love me... I have friends who hang out with me...
I am treated worse than Katie Price (for American readers insert some talented hoe with a penchant for plastic surgery).
My name is Andy and I am a Project Manager *sobs*
This is Project Managers Anonymous ... Isn't it?????? 😕3 -
I was working for a project with one of the project managers. Despite several discussions, he was not ready to have provisioned for procurement of couple of extra drives for database backups. Also because it's always how they worked, developers were allowed to make changes to the production databases directly.
Since I knew it was going to be burning some day, despite his negligence, I ran a script to take full database backups every night, compress, and remove old backups all to do in the drives we had on server. Sat it automated using scheduler.
One day it happened that one of the junior developers deleted one major table taking whole production down. Next thing you know everyone went crazy. Since I felt bad for the managers and users, I was able to restore database using backup from last night.
You know who jumped in first before senior management to take credit of all this and got some nice kudos..that project manager. Also, you know who got burned..it would not be a rant if I did not got schooled for not following on the wisdom of project manager.
Anyways, we are still not taking database backups (as per project manager) -
This is probably the worst place to start my Rant saga but this is recent (this is one of the last few episodes of a 3 series cluster fuck of a job so you're missing out on all the straws that go into breaking the camels back and making him unaccommodating)
TL;DR I do good work, management dont like me and go out their way to try and fuck up my days
So, lets start, I'm a contractor, got funeral Tuesday, book leave, book WFH for day after.
I leave in 3 weeks, woman who is the CIO's right hand bitch takes me into a room the next day or so in the morning to discuss my WFH day. Leave on tuesday is cool but this WFH day...there's only so long until I'm gone so they want me to stay in for more face-to-face time blah blah blah (considering this woman isn't even part of the project I'm working on anymore because she decided to deflect it onto a underqualified junior with no PM experience)
So I sit there, thinking of all the blood and sweat that I have shed, the mountains I've moved just to be told to move the mountain somewhere else and whether coming in would kill me (in other words im fucking burnt out!!! I have built their GDPR database and app backend single-handedly with no requirements, project managers who can't plan and being chastised for asking for documentation/plan/anything written down and having the CIO who is also the fucking DPO ignore any emails/slack I send him relating to the project and having to keep up with a team of devs....).
So because there was a momentary silence, she decided to fill the gap
"Oh, you've done some good work so far and I wouldn't want you to ruin it all in these last 3 weeks. So just come in on the Wednesday so that we can have you here."
Hmm....yeah...i didn't notice what she had ACTUALLY said there, still thinking about can i be fucked? So she decides to add
"...there's only 3 weeks left, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges. Remember, we still have to give you a reference"
....Okay....shots fired. So i respond
"You saying, if I take a WFH day, you'll give me a bad reference?"
"Noooo no no no, not saying that, just that you've done good work and we wouldn't want you to ruin it"
"With one wfh day?"
"We just want you to come in because the developers might be coming here that week"
"Oh... I hear that...what day?"
"I dunno, it's not been booked yet"
".............................I'll think about it"
"There's nothing to consider"
*Start leaving room* "I'll think about it...."
So cool, obviously, had a think, decide to shoot over an email (or more accurately, a collection of bullets). Which basically said, in devRant translation, "Fuck y'all, I'm WFH on that day, I wish a motherfucker would fuck up my reference, we can go that way if you want it. *snaps fingers* I. WISH. YOU. WOULD! "
Woman says "I wasn't threatening you, was just saying...dont ruin your last 3 weeks, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges and that we still have to give you a reference"
What kind of Godfather comment is that?
Come in today, the CIO, who is a prick who don't like me for whatever reason, sends me long email trying to disrespect me and in the midst says "I’m sorry that you have chosen to react like this, I’m sure that [my bitch] was conveying a position that your last three weeks of contract are crucial for a smooth handover. I have made the decision to not require you to work from home on Wednesday. I understand you are on leave on Tuesday and therefore this is now extended to include Wednesday. I look forward to seeing you back in the office on Thursday. I hope this will make the situation better for all parties."
.................................thought you lot needed me in the office to ensure a smooth handover................logic..........people.............where the fuck do you get yours from!?!?!?!? All this just so they can say "We made the decision at the end :cool:" -
I spend the first 30 min of my day, every day, cleaning up the shit storm that my "PM" hacked together in JIRA. I really wish she would be taken off this project.1
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A place where you can evolve your skills, competitive and that you're respected.
And NO FREAKING CLUELESS PROJECT MANAGERS that do not understand how software is "born" and expect you to catch insane deadlines... -
Either you're too stupid to understand the beauty that I create to solve your crazy business problems, or you just don't care :/
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DevRant hiring managers - do projects actually matter? Have you really hired someone because of a cool project?9
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Oh here's a good one. When the managers realised one of our apps is a giant hunk of crap that wasnt thought through at all and was lazily thrown together, and their solution is "meh let's just rewrite it in Swift on our new platform. And those other guys can maintain the old one and continue to do hotfixes for it until we are done".
I've been telling them for the past year that its the worst codebase I have ever seen and the lack of tests is disgusting and not something we should dare to release to paying customers (especially when those customers work in healthcare!!!). The best part was when one of them promised we would all be working on the new shiny platform by Christmas. That was last year. And I'm currently the poor bugger doing the legacy maintenance and in the process of trying to get moved to a new project. So much for managers promises amirite... -
Our newest project has 8 leaders / managers pluss project owner and dedicated process manager and 1 developer to do the actual work.
The developer is a rented consultant.3 -
Not a rant but wanted to get some thoughts from everyone.
I have health problems and unfortunately just had a seizure a few days ago.... Below is directed at my managers. They are nice guys and when I do get back I need them to accommodate although I feel the entire team should be run like this.
Now taking a step back, I see I need to reestablish my way of doing things/mojo. I cannot handle constant chaos and changes. I have to be in a calm, relaxed environment where I can think and enjoy coding: finding and building solutions. That's the summary of how I got into programming and learned to pick things up.
Furthermore, the ideas of the Phoenix Project and what I've shared over the years are actually what I need to be able to perform and excel. Probably the same for everyone and a good way to preempt burnout. It's just in this case, I am the first to go. I cannot be jumping around all the time and need to establish a comfort/expertise zone (but I do and can extend out when given enough time and opportunity).
I'm thinking the EU team probably operates like this, in a calm and orderly environment, less the rare issues.8 -
Sooooo I came in to work yesterday and the first thing I see is that our client can't log on to the cms I set up for her a month ago. I go log in with my admin credentials and check the audit logs.
It says the last person to access it was me, the date and time exactly when we first deployed it to production.
One month ago.
I fired a calm email to our project managers (who've yet to even read the client complaint!) to check with ops if the cms production database had been touched by the ops team responsible for the sql servers. Because it was definitely not a code issue, and the audit logs never lie.
Later in the day, the audit log updated itself with additional entries - apparently someone in ops had the foresight to back up the database - but it was still missing a good couple weeks of content, meaning the backup db was not recent.
Fucking idiots. -
Ever since I started out in a programming job, I have always been a sole developer. I have worked in teams before but it was usually me being the mentor, despite my own knowledge being very limited.
However years ago I worked for a successful ecommerce business and it was the first time that I felt like a junior. At the time I was the type that never cared much about front-end and design. But the senior developers there had taught me how design of the website, and how we treat the customers is important. By making sure that we give them the best customer experience, they will come and shop again.
Although I still primarily focus on backend development, I still hold onto what they taught me. Even now at times I give my input to designers and project managers about design, UI/UX, and the customer experience. But more importantly bestow that mindset to my fellow developer co-workers. -
funny when project managers divide a developer's time like its 25% yours per day and 75% mine and then both assign him 8 hours of work.
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I hate project managers trying to stay relevant to a agile development methodology. Our PM doesn't care if we are working and providing value to the customer, only about checking off his Project check boxes.
tech lead CANCELS Monday stand-up becuase they cannot attend. and I work and status and update my tasks in or virtual task board. I forget to send a message mentioning I'll be kissing Tuesday standup. Then he sends me emails like the following sent to me, my manager, and my tech lead: "please remember to notify your team if you cannot attend the standup, and to send an agile status to the team. This is something that is required and not optional. We are trying to firm up all stories and tasks and need to hear a status. We are in week 1 of iteration 4.3. Thanks."
I'm coding and delivering value to the customer. Wtf are you doing dude? -
It really grinds my gears when new hires just start adding themselves to every fucking slack channel and then start crapping up the channel history with irrelevant chatter.
Business Analysts and Project Managers do not need to be in #developers sending mock-ups to a UI/UX designer for one team, or posting an xkcd strip you found on the internet because you "got it" and you think you are proving that you are one of us by posting it there. This channel isn't a fucking club, its where ALL developers at this company across all teams share tools and practices for us to maintain consistency and best practices and to improve our craft, or to give a heads-up about vulnerabilities.
There is a specific channel for your role, and your project. You don't need to be everywhere and in every conversation. And for fuck's sake, PLEASE stop @someone adding people to these channels just because you think you saw something in there posted by someone else that they should see. You can just fucking share that message directly with that person, or in another channel.9 -
If you don’t like to deal with lots of idiots and assholes before you find some decent project and coworkers.
If you don’t mind that half of people you work with have ‘God complex’ and other half want to tell you that it’s easy.
If you got yourself prepared that lots of managers will try to fuck you and treat you like shit in front of your coworkers.
Lots of things that you write would end up in trash cause of wrongly defined requirements.
There is high chance that at the end you will write some excel glue code.
If you are not naive materialistic bitch or you have not strong will to change jobs and don’t give a fuck about past until you find a dream company everyone is writing about in HR job descriptions.
Good Luck.2 -
Project Managers who plan on the basis that weekends are part of the project plan, but specifically only for tasks that do not require them to be present
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I'm sick of managers treating the project I work on as a joke. First, a junior colleague, and now a junior QA. I'm the the most experienced and I'm only mid level dev. It's a very cool project with interesting technologies but I have no time to tutor people...
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God damn project managers...
'we've know about the requirement for about 2 months but we are only just doing something 3 weeks before the deadline'2 -
In the same meeting
Well be moving on to open source technologies. You are devs and are expected to learn this on your own. Preferably on your own time
Minutes later.
Well be holding an agile workshop and also outside consultants to help the managers.
I left a few months later for multiple reasons.
I did stay for the first month and helped set up the angular project and structure. But i had to train a person who never worked with angular or anything frontend. It wasnt her fault. She was a developer and expected to learn on her own even tho she worked just backend before.1 -
Thought I'd post this for my friend in QA, because she's been having a horrible week at work.
So we were supposed to have production deployments last night (Tuesday) and tonight (Wednesday). We were told these dates a week ago, which is fine. The QA support cleared their after-office schedules on those dates to accommodate, since the deployments would be happening at 10pm.
Last Monday they moved the deployments to Thursday and Friday, because our "project managers" want to cram as many fixes and resolutions as possible. So of course, we devs are being rushed to speed these additional tasks through to being included (bypassing a LOT of quality checks).
Of course, the QA team finds defects (we devs were expecting that, so no big) and the PMs start blaming them for the delays. Which is just stupid. And my QA friend? They're trying to make her a scapegoat by throwing her under the bus with business.
Fortunately, she's a smart cookie and not only has all communications with the PMs documented, she also has the other QAs backing her up by running the same tests.
tldr; Fuck those project managers who suck up to business and don't give a shit about the people who do the actual work. May they burn in hell and their souls rot in a cesspool of acidic farts for all eternity. -
Don' you just love it when your project leader's superior (who is not involved in development or know a thing about the dev process whatsoever) barges in and asks you to port a project originally targeted for Oculus (and so, very graphiclly heavy) to Android in less than an hour? Obviously when it's not done on time, has performance issues or randomly crashes on a different API it's the dev's fault, not the shitty decision making behind the managers. (btw the company doesnt even have android devices for us devs to test on, we HAVE to borrow them from other colleagues). FML!!!!2
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Do they fucking use politics to elect the coordinator ?
What the fuck! First it was project managers that give you shitty requirements they themselves don't understand.
Now is being lead by a coordinator that don't know the fuck about anything related the field.
I guess I will just stop the f programming and join politics full team.2 -
So exciting, I have asked if i may join a new AI project and I may if I can get approvals from 2 of my managers and one has now approved it and still awaiting approval from the other, hope and believe I get the last approval. 🤖1
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Anyone else have a manager who absolutely LOVES to "derail you" and then says "sorry I don't mean to derail you but can you work on..." I swear tired of working for another person
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I'd heard about Project Managers being overpromising and dishing out short deadlines but we just got one dumped on us by a fellow developer for something our startup and theirs agreed to work on...
We gotta remake two fully function admin dashboards and the company's app on top of having our own startup shit to work on.
Kill me. -
Newton's first law integrated into work estimation:
For every simple task there is a complex solution which devs will choose and it will take an infinite amount of time, unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
where "unbalanced_force" belongs to the set union of ["managers", "POs"] and "anyone else who doesn't even work on that project".1 -
About a month ago, we got more than 50% of the employees laid out. I got lucky and got to tje graces of the managers and secure my job. Now I am thinking aboit continuing my works on the current company. They talk about family but doesnot give a shit about their employee. Maximum politics on higher level. But the ower doesnot know a thing about it. Working on a kind of dead language without the small security on the job. Most of you will save switch language and shit. I am not in exactly switching mode. Condition is so worst that i could not afford a computer for myself, even for EMI. Loans and being the only working person of the large family. Could not afford to work on the new job as a trainee for kind of free for 6 month or so. And i am going on depression due to cureent and past situation. Not a single person can and wants to understand it. Going alcoholic(with grace of some shit friends). But i am trying to work everything out. Now i am stuck on the lockdown, limited food. I am learning python now and could not even find a training job on python. Now i am trying to start my own project. Its some complex heavy proiect. But still researching and working on it even for the 15 minutes. Lets hope everything works out.3
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I get a call asking how I would handle a problem using the system from one of the Project Managers.
I told him that with very little information, the system is designed to do 80% of what he wanted automatically and walk you through the steps to make sure him and his whole team know what's going on during the process.
He says back, honestly I don't want to learn that, I'm just gonna use excel and here's why
**hang up phone**
It's a walk through that does 80% of the work automatically that will take you days... What is there to learn? -
Last night my subconscious shifts into management monologue mode imagining me and my managers in dialogues discussing all the problems that they're missing using management teens and references to the Phoenix Project, which I reminded I told them to read 4yrs ago in my first discussion after joining the team....
But basically mind was sorta on fire while half asleep?
Woke up this morning, and calm so wondering... Is this the stuff that my dreams are, except usually I don't remember anything.... -
Was going through a Java book that jokingly read 'The volatile modifier may also be applied to project managers'.
I do get what volatile does to instance variables. But I didn't really get the joke though. Anybody care to explain?2 -
Considering that Markdown exists and Readme files are rendered by default in GitLab, Github, and so on
Why devs insist on documenting stuff on Confluence?14 -
Guys, how do you structure branching in an enterprise project?
We're using git, managers are MIA, I'm basically helping another new guy kick off and maintain the projects that we have.
What would be a good branching strategy? Front end and backend in the same project, 5 man team in the future.2 -
I just learn to speak and explain stuff as humanly possible. Most project managers are like us, before we learned how to code. Just read some books on people management (like Crucial Conversations) and you will know how to manage PMs expectations.1
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Hey all! My first post isn't quite a rant, but rather a question.
I see a few posts that are about project managers. Now, I'm still doing IT at uni, but I was quite intrigued by PM when I found out one of my family friends is an engineering PM. The idea of PM appealed to me as I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do mostly after uni (not ruling out development, ofc!).
My question is whether or not it would be beneficial to have a PM with an IT background, and if so, to what extent do the benefits outweigh the lack thereof?
Sorry for the wordy post.3 -
i am currently studying about software project management as a subject under my university syllabus and i kind of understand where the vile mentality of managers come from :
Risk Planning = ways to plan how to deal with risk. 4 possible options are :
1) risk avoidance: avoid the situations which could cause risk
2) risk reduction : reduce/remove the factors that could cause the risk
3) risk transfer: transfer the risk to other bodies( like if a company cannot make good product, they outsource it to some service based company)
4) risk acceptance: do nothing about the risks and let it come, if risk has a very low level impact on the project.
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this 1st and 3rd is used by the managers extensively when dealing with people and tasks : either avoid doing the work/taking the blame or delegate the work/blame to other person2 -
* Automated Technical and Fundamental Expert Advisor trading in MT4 with Python dealing with RSS News Feed on the Financial Calendar
* Food decision/recommender/randomizer app
* Food decision/recommender/randomizer bot
* Personal Companion set up on Raspberry Pi with Jasper AI, buy BrickPi and Lego Mindstorm to make it a friendly moving robot
* Cardboard fort for my kid
* A 3D game that involves hacking with drama storyline (inspired from Mr. Robot) and publish it on Steam
* A SaaS app like Tinder that matches would-be Project Managers with Devs to push Devs to finish side projects that we have and push Project Managers to use whatever PM techniques and methodology (Six Sigma perhaps)
And so much more... Ughh. -
Being greedy is good at some point, but when you're so greedy that you take up a project without any tickets (JIRA Sprint) and requirements over Skype.
That being said, managers should not get greedy all the time.
I mean when the previous developer left he made is so difficult(I am assuming) to run that hourly job, that it took me around
> 4 hours to fix spaghetti code still job not running,
> Fix missing parameters still not working
Finally said to the manager that the configurations are not on the server which are being used in the code. -
Greatest distraction when coding -> Annoying project managers really. I quit a company after working 4 days because the PM on the project just wouldn't respect boundaries. Always asking for updates every 10mins.
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Quote from an email: Please confirm that the attached list is the list of people that have the ability to load "versions" into SVN.
Gods, I hate non-technical project managers. -
Release was supposed to start at 10 am, its now 11am but our release document is being debated heavily. The outage is scheduled to last until 2 and we thought we'd be tight for time when starting at 10 FML to right now..
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Programming, Motherfucker
Do you speak it?
We are a community of motherfucking programmers who have been humiliated by software development methodologies for years.
We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.
We are tired of being told we're socialy awkward idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do... Programming, Motherfucker.
We must destroy these methodologies that get in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.3 -
Only just got around to listing to the devRant podcast #1 this morning. DHH is a little potty mouth 🙃
Excellent content none the less! I kind of agree on DHH's stance on project managers.
On a side note, what other podcasts do you guys listen to? I quite like most of the content from jupiter broadcasting. LAS and Coder Radio specifically. -
I was asked by one of our project managers to create a new big API for a customer.. Next day I found out that he already sent a PDF (that he copied somewhere) to the client, containing documentation of the API before I even wrote a single line of code 🤐1
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It's been over 7 months of being deployed to help finish a project that's crossed the deadline umpteenth times. There's only this guy who had started on this project and me as developers. He's a nice guy, but I'm finding him to be a snowflake that's extremely difficult to work with. Every time I mention a critical problem with his original design, or the approaches he takes on this project, he takes it personally. He would pour out a long spiel of why this and why that, and waste most of the meeting time. Or he would run to his outdated diagrams or documents that he had created himself somewhere deep in the wiki forest, and use that as a defense. He creates his own user stories and tasks on a whim with no PM supervision. I've noted to the managers that this is a project to fail, and all they've done is assign a busy PM to this project, and the new PM is perfectly fine w/ the way the project has been handled so far.
I point out a small flaw with his assumptions just the other day, and he even managed to hyperventilate and again fall back to his outdated document... WTF? I'd rather start from scratch and get this project finished faster.. and even though I've expressed my objection to continue on this path, the managers foolishly believe that this project will be completed somehow. I don't hate my development partner, or PM, or people in the management, but I hate the fact that I don't have control over so many aspects of this project, including the half-assed, unnecessarily complex design, and the dev workflow itself. I feel like I'm tied to a car that's being thrown over the cliff, and assigned to fix the junky car w/ its engine broken before the car hits the ground. Something like this would never be allowed to go in a commercial sector. I just wish that the management could just give me control over project as THE lead & PM over this project, and get this project tied up for good, and with better reusability and quality.1
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