I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

Project management

Act I

Me (Lead Developer), Boss (Head of IT), CEO

> enter stage left CEO

CEO > "Alright Boss, give it to me straight. Are we going to be able to release app x by this date?"

Boss > "Yup we'll have a beta release on that date"

> exit stage right CEO

Me > types long email to Boss outlining exactly why we won't be able to release app x anywhere near that date, beta or otherwise, because:
1. We have a development team of 2
2. I've never developed an iOS app before
3. Developer 2 is still trying to understand git, because
3a. Developer 2 isn't even a developer (but he's doing iOS front-end so w/e)
4. We don't have the required database systems in place
5. Or CRM
6. Or CPQ
7. We'll need to conduct a security audit

Boss > "yeah, but CEO is gonna need to hear that date a few more times before he can fully understand"

Me > *internally screaming BUT YOU HAVEN'T TOLD HIM THAT AT ALL*
"ok cool just glad we're on the same page on that one"

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

So this other senior dev got seriously ill a couple of weeks ago and the project he was working on was assigned to me. His code was so aesthetic, loved his work, the structured code helped me a lot in meeting the deadlines. He returned a few days back and now the company has given him two weeks notice because "his pace is slow". I am frustrated, PM is frustrated. The guy is such a gem that he is still helping with all the new requirements client is throwing at us.

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

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

Dev: …

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

My whole team was a circus:
- Dev 1, the senior: he will be spent his days coding his personal projects and will convince management that everyone else needed to prove themselves so he will have nothing to do and we will do all the work.
- Dev 2, the junior: he was convinced that his mission in life was to be friends with his team. He's desk was far from the rest of the team so he will show just right after lunch EVERY FREAKING DAY with a list on his phone of random things he wanted to talk about like music, artists, art, news, etc., he really thought I didn't notice the list.
- Dev 3: the vegan: you will hear on every chance how she was so awesome for being vegan.
- Dev 4, the expert: if you ask him anything he will stare at you in silence to make you feel like you are a stupid for not knowing the answer and then turn around like nothing.
- Dev 5, the ghost: he will show early every day, code without mouthing a word and leave at 5pm, I think I heard him saying "hmmm" once but I might be wrong.
- Dev 6, the coder by accident: he was a graphic designer and ended up doing front end so he hated his job.
- Dev 7, me: the one who didn't care about anything but doing his job and leave.
- The project manager: she didn't knew anything about technology but will attend meetings with clients on her own, commit to deadlines and then inform us that the project that we estimated for 8 weeks will have to be done in 2 with new additions to the features.

You know the drill, here's your potato :/

Once, I overheard a conversation between my former PM and a client during a phone call.

Client: I will send the final draft of the project by Thursday.

PM: That's great to hear!

Client: When can I expect the updates to review the changes after the draft is sent? I need to present it at a meeting this weekend.

PM: It should be ready by Friday without fail!

Client: Excellent! Thank you. I will be expecting it.

PM: Sure, goodbye.

(After the call, PM joined the team.)

PM: So, team, the client for Project-A will be sending us a new draft for review and updates. They are putting a lot of pressure on us and need it to be ready by Friday at the latest. We need to treat this with a sense of urgency.

(After hearing this, we felt compelled to respond.)

Me: There's no way they would expect us to deliver an unseen draft within a day. Both the backend and Figma team members were forced to work last weekend, on Saturday, because you mentioned that Project B was behind schedule and the client needed an update by Monday. We simply can't continue working like this.

Backend guy 2: I also worked last Sunday on Project B.

Me: We overheard you telling the client that they should expect an update by Friday. It seems like you're the one directly putting the team under pressure, even though we still have three ongoing projects with tight deadlines.

(The office fell into an uncomfortable silence.)
(PM left the office without saying a word.)

Later on, I heard that he contacted the client to reschedule the expected time of arrival (ETA) after receiving the draft.

Eerily familiar.

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

Met a Project Manager (at a friend's party) who had transitioned to a PM role from a developer role (most probably he wrote shitty code)

Smartass PM to me (after I told I code for living) : I really pity poor programmers and I feel sorry for them, the work they do, the effort they put in l, it's just now worth it

Me : yes you are right if we don't code PM are just not worth it, I understand it's a skill to talk about deadlines and features and what not, but the Pre-requisite is that some one would code it first. Also coding is not that anyone can do, I do it because I enjoy it, I m just not meant for superficial talks and I love building things, that's y I do it..

Smartass PM : (dumbstuck)

After half an hr of bullshit conversation...smartass PM has realized it by now that in Silicon Valley (where we live) it's much cooler to be a developer than being a PM (he has recently moved from east coast)...

PM to me : I just live on stack-overflow
Me thinking : Really !!

People should not compare their career paths, every one has their interest and personality

Hello.

Is there anyone else who starts massive amount of projects and never finishes one?

It's a big problem when you lose time you should spent on orders because you work on that-amazing-idea that you'll drop few hours later.
I'm lucky as my employer thinks that all these unfinished stuff are pushing my experience forward, but for me it's depressing to not be able to focus on my work.

What do you do to fight with the urge to code that one more project? What do you do focus on the current work?

I've tried making myself a system for better client-programmer communication to keep myself motivated with better organised feedback and deadlines but ended up dropping it and sticking to terribly messy mailbox.

Full Night coding for project with tomorrow's deadline. Hopefully this will suffice...

had a project manager who was heavily religious.

any time he would give me impossible deadlines and I explained why that cant be done he always said "god will find a way"

I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.

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

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

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

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

Fuck Everyone.

Time to find a new contract.

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

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

I 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

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.

Big project this week. Lots of fires to put out. Deadlines approaching.

Monday: I can get by on just four hours sleep. No problem. Will be just like college.

Wednesday: I'm going to just close my eyes while this file uploads. Maybe I will backup the server while I'm at it; Just take a nap while that processes.

Friday: Sorry if my office smells like vomit. It's because I am so tired I vomited.

Sunday: I'm not getting out of this bed tomorrow. Let them fire me. I think I will just will myself into a coma. That will be nice.

Just finished my internship.

I entered knowing nothing and spent the entire year on solo projects.

My company does not use any frameworks because "they don't want to run code on a server that they didn't write", they use waterfall, only use version control on half the projects, use notepad++, never once even glanced at my code to check I know what I'm doing - even when i asked.

Also have never heard of a code review, have absolutely no QA in place other than the devs making it and quickly testing it visually, no requirements gathering - just pictures and have never heard of tdd.

Recently was given a project with no designs, no specs other than a verbal half thought out explanation and was dumped with random deadlines like "this needs to be demoed tomorrow night" with no idea about the project progression or what it looks like. Apparently it's all my fault that it failed.

I am very grateful to them for teaching me so much and giving me opportunities to teach myself on nice projects but come on.

What boggles my mind is that the company is 6 years old and has big, big clients. I don't understand how. I once tested a project about to go out the next day that had been "tested" and found pages of bugs. They would have lost the contract for sure...

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.

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

Hello everyone 👋

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

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

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

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

Just rant. Please feel free to give ur thoughts

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

Our project schedule is quite full at the moment, we are basically at the limit for the next three months.

In comes one of our sales people: "Hey, can we squeeze in a little project, nothing fancy just a very basic static web page." (No question mark there, it was not a question...)

I say no, we are full, the deadline is to tight (3 weeks), can't do it.

In comes boss: "Sure you can, just push everything else back." (We won't change deadlines, what he actually means is for us to do unpaid overtime for two months so he can barocke make a few thousand extra bucks...)

So I cave and allow it. It were just 4 hours of work, we can squeeze it in, maybe do a little less R&D this month.

Next day, the project scope changed, suddenly we are not taking about 4 hours but 80. Sure, we can squeeze two extra weeks into the month.

That is when I realized, I don't hate my work, just my work environment.

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

A coworker and me did together a "hackathon by choice" this week to finish a project. We did it only because we thought it would be cool and be able to finish the thing. Well it was surprisingly fun to stay awake 36 hours, coding all through, having a good flow. After that, our boss came and was very proud of our work and he was able to send it for inspection to the client. I stayed a bit longer to fix a few minor bugs, but after 42h I was finally in bed. 😁
Our boss gives us the following Monday off.
But I think on other projects, often deadlines take the fun out of it, if they are not estimated well... I mean you do great, high-professional work but in the end you feel bad, useless, slow and incompetent because of the pressure.

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

Paraphrased with imaginary ending:

Me: Ok so this X will never be more than Y items and not more than one pages?

Person: Yes. it won't be more than Y items and never more than one page.

Me: If this is always Y items or less and not more than one page, I can hammer this out quick then. If it is more than that it will take much longer to complete.

Person: Awesome!!!

-later-

Person: OK here's the template for Y x10 items and multiple pages.

Me: Oh I'm sorry, we're going to have to stop working on this. I thought you actually gave a fuck about this 'important' project and that you had deadlines you cared about, but apparently not enough to participate in this conversation with any level of intellectual honesty. Please fuck off now while I go work on more productive tasks....

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???!!!?!

My Project Manager to me, after attending his first ever Hackathon of life

PM : Did you see, how people create a full project in a day,
So it is POSSIBLE and here you always complain about the deadlines

Me : Yeah true :|
Of Course it is possible to create a well documented, bugs free, features enriched, stable and properly structured project in a day
My Bad :/

I have been a frontender for a long time. I recently showed interest in backend development, and said to my boss that that is what I would like to pursue. He said that was never going to happen and I would only be a frontender in this company.

A lot of horrible things happened, some of the Lead Developers bailed and another developer flatly out committed industrial spionage on the company.

Then because of shortage of staff, gave me backend tasks, which all I completed within deadlines with few exceptions of course.

My project manager was very impressed about it.

Then I noticed the project management didn't concern themselves with ongoing projects, they became more focused on customer support and management of unhacking etc.

I noticed a wide gap that made it so all projects went past due the time because lack of coordination and planning

I stepped in because I was annoyed that this was common practice in the company.

While my two bosses were on vacation, they nominated me to be the "boss" of the company.

I earn close to minimum wage, and I felt this wasn't fair if I was to continue to do what I have done. So when our boss called us into a meeting and he said that he was going to move slowly away from the company, he said we should keep the reins of the company.

I didn't say much then, because I didn't feel like taking on so much responsibility I knew I wasn't to gain anything from more than knowledge.

I confronted him today and told him how I have felt throughout a long time. He basically said I hadn't proven myself and because of my young age, I didn't deserve to have more right now.

I was annoyed, he said he expected the same from every coworker and that I wasnt special or unique and that I could easily be replaced.

Not to mention I never got to finish a sentence without him interupting me or raising his voice to deafen out mine.

Have you ever had this experience and how did you feel? I feel terrible to be honest..

I really wish people valued health over profit.

So I joined a company last month and last week I got assigned to the biggest client we have. The project is quite big and there are no deadlines coming up. I was sick for a couple of days and hence could not turn up at the office. Apparently the client called up my manager and went on a rant about this situation. So now I have to work on the weekends to cover up for the missed work while on meds that make me sleepy.

Fuck such clients.

There's this huuuge project I was a part of for half a year. I was kicked off along with a few dozens of other devs (>60% of total manpower) a while ago for particular company reasons.

Now the remaining devs are oh-so-enjoying their time there..

1. workload has not changed
2. deadlines have not changed
3. no one will have Christmas-NewYear vacation
4. a new k8s-based infra is scheduled to roll out to PROD on Dec 23 (k8s is still far from ready - might need a few more months)

The most fun part is that it's not client's mgmt who has decided for #4 -- it's our own....

Boys.. Girls.. Save yourselves.

As a software house, we have many teams on different projects. One project was due to a Thursday, and the PM asked the team 1 week before if they could work over the weekend since there's a lot of things to do.

On the Friday before, one of the devs showed up a bit later than usual (around 10am), but ok...

After lunch he asked to talk to HR and also the boss. They talked for around 2h, then he started to say "goodbye and good luck" for everyone.

The project was on fire and he just... leave.

On the next 2 months another 4 people leave the company. All from the same team/project (but not with a big surprise like him).

Apparently, the team was constantly complaining to PM and boss about unrealistic deadlines and constant requirements changes, but they didn't did anything about it. Just when more than half this team had left the company they started to rethink this actions to this project and the others on the company.

Today I learned why it’s so important to have life outside engineering (better put, I remembered this).

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working hard to catch some deadlines, contributing to a large oss project. Getting up at 4am, working with the team in my timezone, having some time with family then working with people with 6-9 hour difference was extremelly challenging and I was so tired I literaly was a fucking pain to bear with.

Today, on Saturday, my wife started cleaning the bathroom sink drain. You know, started... “won’t fix” was not an option. First, the dirt and the smell, mmmmmm, you just have to love it. And then the thing collapses (yes, I was optimistic, trying to clean it just partly - I learned not to fix if it aint’t broken, I wonder where).

It’s of course built of trivial parts, but the water just finds its way. Needless to say, I am afraid of it :). In the end, it got resolved. Just as any bug we squash - with some anger and plenty of dirty words.

During the whole thing, I thought to myself, that all that stress at work is quite bearable; it put everything back into a perspective. Great feeling!

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Work out the major requirements,

Identify platform(s) and environment best suited to project,

Design and develop around core features,

Allow 6-12 weeks for scope creep and the additional BS features,

Build, test and deploy in a week or two to meet unattainable deadlines.

Spend new couple of months refactoring and fixing everything.

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

The problem being a dev at a big company (around 1000 devs) with huge codebase (I mean huge, tens of thousands of modules, if not millions) is that, as many hands touch the code of a project and deadlines are always short, not everyone care about changing the documentation afterwards.

This translates to double the work everytime you need to fix a bug or something as you have to quickly reverse engineer the modules to understand it - the documentation often reflects an old version and it messes things up much more than it helps you out.

Damn I'm pretty hard hitting my limits here

My company asked me if I would like to work some extra hours because otherwise they don't make all the deadlines

But damnit asking 10+ hours a day from a junior web developer is quite a lot

😒 Especially if it's an old legacy project where I have to work on...

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.

I’m working at an architecture firm these days, so I don’t have many “dev” stories to tell. However, I’d like to share this anecdote to reassure (or demoralize) you all that the kind of nonsense we’ve all dealt with as software developers isn’t limited to the software industry.

I’ve been working on a project to build townhomes and apartments on vacant lots in an urban environment.
Space is limited, so the client assured us early on that they would be centralizing all the mechanical equipment (water heaters, air conditioners, etc.) in the basement of each building. We finally got all the apartments laid out and presented them to the client last week. During that meeting, we get a casual “oh, by the way, we need a 3-foot by 3-foot mechanical closet in each apartment.” Did the project manager push back? Of course not. Have our deadlines been adjusted as a result of changing requirements? Don’t be silly! Starting tomorrow morning, the team gets to feverishly search for an extra 9 square feet in each of a couple dozen different apartment layouts that are already “cozy” in time to meet our next deliverable.

Clients suck.
Changing requirements suck.
Pushover PMs suck.
In every industry.

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

Fuck my company. Let the technology people work with technology.

I work at a small company who constantly brings in people who are absolutely useless. The project manager requires me to take items out of azure Dev-ops into an excel because he will not take the time to understand how a board works. The business analyst hands bullshit requirements in formats which no one but him can understand under the pretense that the Devs and architect can ask him when they feel like it. The CEO wants a power-point which again the technical teams have to prepare for him because the project manager or BA will not have time for it. However they make sure to gut the estimates handed over by the Dev team and introduce unfeasible deadlines.

Meanwhile the client has zero problems as the work still somehow gets done due to people in the Dev team overextending. Goddam leeches wasting mine and my teams time doing bullshit.

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 there

My side project is distracting me from my corporate, gotta pay the bills somehow and meet these damn deadlines, project! 😫😫

I really think there should be a subject in every CS course to teach us how to handle/work-under Grade-A assholes and dumbfucks. Not that it would help, but atleast warn us on what we are getting into.

In my opinion, development is not *that* hard or frustrating but is made so by these shitty people. But again, what do I know.

I was scolded by my boss for using for-loop to iterate through an array recently. Apparently for-loop is not used in real world projects and this iteration should be done "in-memory". My colleagues and I are still trying to understand and process that.

I was asked to add fitbit integration to a project within 2 hours just because I had "already done it a week ago" in *another* project. Luckily, it was then given to a "senior" developer who took 4 days for it and essentially copy-pasted my work without much changes, ofcourse it stopped working every now and then.

I am given unreal deadlines on my tasks, on technologies I haven't worked on before, and then expected to churn out production ready code with no bugs in them.

My boss literally just sends me the links of 1st three google results on the problems I encounter and report, after humiliating me ofcourse. Yes, I did google it and yes I went through all I could find from Google forums to GitHub issues. When the library/plugin author himself says that this feature is not yet available, don't expect me to develop it in 2 hours you dumbfuck.

And for the love of God, please stop changing the data model every single day and justify it with agile development. Think before making any changes to it. Ever heard of Join queries? Foreign keys? Or any other basic database concepts.
We reached a point where each branch in the repo had different data model. Not kidding. And we were a team of just 4 developers. Atleast inform us when you change models after discussing it with your shit for knowledge "senior" developer, so we don't have to redo it all over again. The channels on slack are not for sharing random articles only.

I am just waiting to complete my year here.

I should have known what I got myself into the day he asked me to remove the comments I had added to explain what my code does. Why you ask? Because "we don't write comments".

"We need this project done by friday"

When:

Requirements changing on a daily basis.

No standards whatsoever, anywhere.

5 different people commiting changes with no code review.

Original team leader quit a month ago.

Current team leader doesn't know our own deadlines.

QA looking at layout through a microscope at every single possible resolution. (please move this 2 pixels to the left between 934px and 936px range)

QA being too vague some times (this looks weird some times)

Same thing being changed back and forth because no-one could agree on how exactly should it look.

PM implying at every chance that I did nothing and what little I did broke everything all the time.

I'm very tired of these impossible deadlines, it feels like as soon as one project finish, we have to rush to finish the other.
I should take some holidays.

Boss: How long will it take to finish the project?

Me: (Gives date for finishing dev and deployment.)

Boss: great, sound reasonable.

Me: ...

Boss: wait. Aren't you on vacation the two weeks after that.

Me: jup.

Boss: yeah we are not doing that again. Client can wait another two weeks.

Before someone says no Boss/PM is like that, he was/is a developer too so discussing deadlines and efforts is usually pretty relaxed since he knows our codebase and how long it takes to do things.

My daily routine:
*wakes up*
*goes to class*
*procrastinates about project deadlines*
*cries to mum when stress levels are skyrocketing*
*legit does nothing to rectify life and then cribs about everything*
*cries to sleep*

Also, mum’s tired of me wailing.

Spent 20h working non stop on a project we were presenting to customer on the next day. Had a shower at 6 am and drove to the client with a colleague. We were presenting the features one by one. As he was presenting I was finishing the missing features and we switched every couple of minutes. Never again working for a company that sets deadlines on the first meeting with customer

We are forced to work on weekends because the management and the project manager loves to kiss the ass of our clients. I was even scolded by working from home.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.

ITS NOT FUCKING FAIR THAT WE HAVE TO SUFFER AND SHOULDER THEIR INCOMPETENCE IN MANAGING THIS FUCKING PROJECT.

Damnit. God Damnit.

I've found a job as a junior developer several months ago, but I really want to find another job...

I know, my knowledge and skills aren't superior yet, but I am tired of that feeling of being useless.. I constantly self-educate myself after work and university, but still, I often need to ask co-workers "where's this form?", "wtf is that", "how do I access this"... Plus, their projects are HUGE, but no matter how big the project is, there are 2 to 4 people working on each at a time. And 1 person may work on 2-3 projects. And we are usually late for deadlines :/

Also code quality is meh..
Me: Why do we implement it here?
Co-worker: oh, we don't actually use it, it's just to hide warnings and pass the test.

Holy shit, wtf, I've spent half day trying to figure out wtf is this and why is it not working :/

How to waste money as a dev company, 101:

Give people ton of budget for their education to do whatever they want with it with no oversight at all:
1) Devs go to some shitty confs in places across the world that teaches them nothing (new) so they can visit interesting places on company's money
2) Go to a conf where you learn ton of stuff that can be implemented right away

...Then you come back, no time to do stuff properly, just "make it work" (or make it seem like it works), because of deadlines, poor prioritization, new features, bad planning, vague roadmap and poor client management. And the worst of them all, LGTM code reviews.

Few months later, who the fuck wrote this shit? Oh, dude that left? What about this mess? Oh, he's a goner too. What the fuck should this random undocumented chunk of code do?!

Do that a few times and you've got bunch of pissed off clients with a ton of bug reports nobody can solve without wasting 20x the amount of time it would originally take.. LGTM

RIP project.

Not the code review itself, but having repeatedly to nag my project leader just to get a review is the worst.

I'm "only" a student and it's a project without fix deadlines so it's alright with me that it is low priority.
But - I want to learn something here, I really do, I'm new to C# and far from mastery. Apart from that my focus was mainly hardware during the last years.
I need some fucking brutal and honest criticism on my code, damnit!
That's all.

Battling impossible project deadlines and maintaining a work life balance. Estimating projects properly.

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.

OMFG HOW CAN SOMEONE FUCK A PROJECT SO HARD IN TWO WEEKS???

I struggled for 6 months to keeps a minimal pattern and logic throughout the project between tight deadlines and changed scopes, but in two weeks they managed to literally shit on top of it and now I have to fix this bullshit?

Oh boy...I really don't know if I fucking scream, punch someone or rage quit.

I was hired as a junior game developer and I had a senior who was working alongside me on a client’s project.

Within one month they moved my senior to another project and made me the project manager of the project that I was working on.

Worst fucking experience ever. Client’s were unresponsive for a week sometimes and pretty strict when it came to deadlines. Needless to say my employer lost the client and I was made the junior developer again.

So, a few years ago I did an internship at this company really close to my house. It was a total disaster but a few months ago I decided to give it another shot and apply for a junior position there as I needed money and they knew me there. For some reason they hired me and now I work there for about 2 months.

There's one other developer here and my problem is that he's the senior here. Guys I don't know what to do about it, this guy is so controlling. He won't allow me to decide ANYTHING.

I have a whiteboard with all my projects and he wrote deadlines there (because his boss said he needs to set deadlines since he never finishes anything on time, but he decided to put that on me) when I finished something in time (like 3 days early!) I wanted to put that under the project on the board. But he didn't want it. No reason. Just no.

He's also constantly talking, all day long. He writes 1 or 2 functions per day. Maybe fixes a small bug. And then one day per week he actually works. Constantly complaining about me, bugging me, removing electricity from my screens, setting my wallpaper to 2 dudes kissing ect. ect. its fucking annoying me. This guy even plays video games on his nintendo or call of duty.. Working for other customers that have nothing to do with this company. And the boss thinks he's great..

So 2 days ago, the whiteboard filled with his drawings was completely emptied because of me. It felt so good, he was so angry he didn't talk all day, to no one. What else can I do guys? I can't go to my boss, the other guy in this office doesn't really care and he's on his side. But when I code I need to be able to concentrate. I can't even have a serious conversation with this guy because he just doesn't take me serious. He always thinks he's right and wants control of every little thing...

What do I do?

Here's to @Wisecrack:

Some time ago I pitched an idea to my boss about a platform we implement to optimize some fucked-up processes and in fact a whole project and I boasted some 20-30% increase in productivity. Yeah, I know ... what a fucking big mouth.

Truth be told they (almost all project members) went all for it so we started working on that software.

A small step for me, a GIANT LEAP IN A FUCKING CESSPOOL.

And of course it's just the two of us - me and my colleague - as always.
And we don't have requirements - as always.
And now there are deadlines too!
And people be like: IS IT READY YET?

So between playing a consultant, a product owner, systems architect, product manager, designer, front-end/back-end developer, DBA, DevOps engineer, YOU-NAME-IT-ROLE, and dealing with my everyday work-related bullshit (because yes, I do that too) I lost all appetite for it.
I actually loved this idea and what it can be born out of it, now I'm frustrated. It's still relevant and it will still benefit them, but I am already FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.

So my "oh, how I'd love to help them" personality is fighting my "let them sink in their own shit" personality and I'll see which will come on top. :)

Truth is if I had the "5-years-ago me" energy a good chunk of that project would be done by now. 😁

Also yesterday my daughter had shouted at old people and had thrown stuff at them while at kindergarten. I sure hope they deserved it LOL.

FML?

Important memos to future self:

If the specs the client gave you seem written by a confused pre-teen, run.
If the client says something like "this can't possibly take THAT long", run.
If the client can't pay you enough, but reassures that (in return) he won't stress you and let you work in peace without imposing deadlines: he's lying, run.
If he politely asks to do something but then when you say no he keeps insisting, Don't. Give. In. Ever.
If the project seems shitty and not likely to have success, but hey, seems also simple and easy: it's not. But it's shitty anyways.

And on top of all: trust your fucking guts, you've been right tons of times by now. You didn't want to do this but you forced yourself, because "it's still an opportunity" and stupid slogans like that. Never again.

Okay today I wrote a very ugly api.. No f***king json mapper will handle that response in java. The values are dynamic... Good luck to anyone who will integrate into it... And good luck to anyone who will look at my code
Project manager please always give realistic deadlines

(I am talking about my school’s promotional project, look at my rants for reference)

Deadlines were insane and I had nothing to do about it. Had to touch JavaScript for the first time in 3 years and code like I still know it by heart.

In short: H.E.L.L. It stands for:

H oh
E god
L never
L again

...What a day ,
"CTO new priority need this project started and completed ASAP."
Me: "What about my current project you wanted me to work on that was a high priority which took over Another project I was supposed to be working on?"
CTO: "This one is a higher priority than both of them"
Me: "ok sure shall get onto it".
PM: "A client has come in with an issue on another project I need this fixed now".
Team leader assigns me a bunch of tasks that need to get done which is ok but 5 people need me to get it done so they can do the bulk of their work.

Later for a side project CTO asks me to get a list together of things that are missing for this side project, about 60 seconds later he asks me to send him the email now - bare in mind nearly 300 assets I need to go through which are not organised so what the heck I just send him it mid sentence.

End of day get told that CTO wants me on yet another different project...

Each of these projects takes 4 months to get done. But arggggg... oh and then I hear that our new PM has decided to cut all project deadlines by half....

I am but a single person,
I just want to sit back and watch everything burn around me... But the company has a history of Scape goating people on failed project deadlines... Never a dull day in the office but tbh kinda like it.

Today my boss decided that he wanted to manage his project properly. After a year he gave us deadlines (we still had deadlines but usually we did not know them). I open the xlsx file (yeah... xlsx) and I see the date of today as deadline. Well, at least it won't be a surprise this time.

Being forced to migrate an application written to to run on Solaris 9, which uses Sun ONE Webserver, Netscape LDAP Server and Cold fusion and migrate it to RHEL 7.3 ppc64le before the 3rd of January (I was only told about the project this morning), and I'm told I *have* to use the exact same technologies and versions. I'm on leave for Xmas from the 22 until the 5th of Jan. I know exactly where they can put their arbitrary management deadlines.

WHY DO PEOPLE ALWAYS LEAVE CLOSE TO DEADLINES???

My team exists of three developers and a product owner. By the end of the month we have to deliver two new applications. It has not been going as smoothly as we'd hoped so far. However, one of the developers has cut his time for this project from fulltime to 1-2 days a week starting this week. The other developer is also needed on another project and has to run to the rescue whenever there is a problem with the servers, so he doesn't really solve any bugs either. Also he'll be leaving straight after deadline so he has to document everything only he knows and he'll be on holiday next week. Also, the product owner leaves tomorrow and will be back after deadline.

So.. Here I am, junior developer, have been here for about three months and I have to fix everything and do the communication to our testers as well. I'm feeling too overwhelmed right now...

So I've been really Ill the past few days, like litterly been in bed for two days, popping pills like there going out of fashion. I contact work and get the typical "get well soon" so I get a message today asking how I'm doing (still Ill), I said I'll be back Monday and ask if anything is urgent that needs to be done first thing. So I get a list:

Project A: Deadline Monday
Project B: final review Tuesday
Project C: Still waiting on feedback

So I ask any chance we can extend the deadlines by a day or so I have enough time to catch up even though I'm going to have to rush it as I've been off.

Answer.. nope there non negotiable.. oh

So they want basically three days work done in one day, given the fact I still might not be 100%. Jesus Christ 😂

Quick Edit, I wasn't told there were deadlines.

TL;DR: my boss is a dick and I don't know what to do.

Been working at the company for a month now, I enjoy the atmosphere and the culture (startup btw) but I really cannot stand my superior - there's only two of us in the team. Any screw up he blames it on me without a second thought. First week in he assigned their new website project to me and honestly they have quite unrealistic deadlines. I mean they didn't even have the infrastructure for it nor the manpower to build one yet it needs to be finished by the end of this month. On top of that the spec keeps changing literally every 2-3 hours.

Also since I've forgotten to mention the guy I'm working under is one of the founders so I can't really go and talk to someone about it. I feel pretty screwed over, anyone has any advice or been in a situation like this? Is it too early to quit?

We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.

I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.

We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.

We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.

I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.

I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D.

Knowing that my side project will never go to finish.

No deadlines and bullshit.

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.

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.

The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.

Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).

The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.

To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.

Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.

So I work full time at a retail store, but only one person is on shift at a time here so I'm allowed to bring my laptop and code while I'm running the store. This is where I get most of my schoolwork done and make most of my project deadlines for web dev job.

My only social life really consists of me hanging out with my boyfriend. Often when I need to be working on some code or project he will sit next to me and play guitar/sing or will quietly read while I'm on my laptop.

Other than that I chat with some game friends through Discord throughout the day, and often visit/help family members in spare time off of work.

Not much of a social life when you're super busy

Not leaving my last job earlier.

History: Supervisor / Lead Developer was a complete moron who watched videos on facebook and youtube, engaged in heated discussions on facebook, wasted my time by showing the work of other companies and vines, smoked in the office and towards the end gave me shit for not meeting deadlines of the work that he was supposed to deliver. Project that I was working on had very lazy clients so I was free for even 2 days sometimes and that’s why I decided to help my supervisor on the project assigned to him but in reality I was handling two projects all alone.

Aftermath: My indie games started gaining traction on google play and I found a client and I made 5x my salary at my last job.

I'm getting caught up on my personal project because I need to generate a lot of Dynamic HTML using JS and it's just a pain. I hate adding dependencies to a project, especially personal projects with no deadlines, so tomorrow I will be writing a vanilla templating system, and hopefully that will un-funk 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?

I'm working on a rev share game, something I think could be really good but I don't have the personal funds to really throw myself into. I've spent so much time finding a team and getting everyone on the same page, and they all seem really excited about the project.

Now, however, I'm having so much trouble getting them to put in any effort and meet deadlines. I've tried searching for more people but it's so hard to get people into a project like this, and all of the incentives and work I put into getting them to work are ineffective.

Managing a project is fucking hard.

My old boss who somehow has gotten his small team of 4 PHP development contracts with Vodafone and Tesco etc. No QA, no tests, no frameworks allowed.

Sets random deadlines and used to suddenly drop demos on me for projects I'd just started and he had no idea of the state of them. Needless to say one project I was so rushed with no idea what I was actually making (for real) that I got sacked.

Deadlines in an agile project

Me: We need to have a developer on our core product

*We fork our core product from a private repo for new projects

Management: No.

Me: But imma die 5years early from stress and anger overdose of fixing the same problems over and over again in every new project we do and still hit deadlines which didn't account for them when we could fix them once and maintain our core product

Management: everything is fine. Lalalalalala

Me: *wonder why every senior dev has left in last few years*

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

I work really well under pressure.
Sometimes I'll be really lazy on a project until the deadlines get tight and I need to go into overdrive.

Finally made my node production server stable enough that I could focus on writing tests*. I start by setting up docker, mocking cognito, preparing the database and everything. Reading up on Node test suites and following a short tut to set up my first unit test. Didn't go smoothly, but it's local and there are no deadlines so who cares. 4 days later, first assert.equal(1+1, 2) passes and I'm happy.

I start writing all sorts of tests, installing everything required into "devDependancies," and getting the joy of having some tests pass on first try with all asserts set up, feels good!

I decide to make a small update to production, so I add a test, run and see it fail, implement the feature, re-run and, it passes!

I push the feature to develop, test it, and it works as intended. Merge that to master and subsequently to one of my ec2 production servers**, and lo and behold, production server is on a bootloop claiming it "Cannot find module `graphql`". But how? I didn't change any production dependencies, and my package lock json is committed so wth?

I google the issue, but can't find anything relevant. The only thing that I could guess was that some dependencies (including graphql) were referenced*** in both, prod and dev, and were omitted when installed on a prod NODE_ENV, but googling that specific issue yielded no results, and I would have thought npm would be clever enough to see that and would always install those dependencies (spoiler: it didn't for me).

With reduced production capacity (having one server down) I decided to npm uninstall all dev dependencies anyway and see what happens. Aaaaand it works.....

So now I have a working production server, but broken local tests, and I'm not sure why npm is behaving like this...

* Yes I see the irony.
** No staging because $$$, also this is a personal project.
*** I am not directly referencing the same thing twice, it's probably a subdependency somewhere.

I was typing a rant about this deadlines of a legacy project I have to work on but I'm just too tired/stressed/angry todo so... Maybe in a week or two when the fucker is finally done...

So I was rejected by the management today for promotion to Senior 2 although I have done several major feature developments + infra design and basically end to end ownership.

Reason for no promotion? That's the best fucking part, according to the feedback, the work I performed on the service I created is well-designed,
and the code quality is commendable. However, they pointed out a notable difference in code quality between the micro-service
I built and the rest of the project developed by others. This, apparently, suggests that I lack a strong sense of ownership over the broader product.

First of all, we have super tight deadlines (almost 996), and I burned midnight oil to make sure the service I am in-charge of is designed really well.
Also, how in the flying fuck the other how the inability of others to maintain good code quality elsewhere in the product is being used as evidence against my sense of ownership
and initiative in ensuring high engineering quality for the repository I wasn't even working on

What a delusional management, the entire feedback feels like just an excuse to fuck off, we are not promoting you...
May be instead of doing actual engineering work, I should have just do minimal work and write more design docs / technical artifacts

It is very demoralizing after I worked hard for so many months, product went out really well.. yet when performance review comes, rejected with a petty reason

1am and I'm waiting for my zipped project to finish uploading to OneDrive, so I can send my prof a link to it, because our fucking intranet just gloriously shat itself again -_-... Because a GitHub link is too mainstream I guess?

Ah yeah, deadline was 1h ago, but who cares about deadlines right?...

I feel a whole lot better. The project that I was so incredibly stressed out over has finally been invoiced for, albeit two months late, and my client has been understanding throughout the process. I now realise that although pressure is great for working to a deadline, too much pressure is heavily impacting on my thought processes and extends my deadlines more than I can manage at the moment.

The words of encouragement in the comments on my last "rant" really spurred me on, and the criticism made me reflect very much on how little squeeze time I'd given myself. I'm very grateful to this community for those inciteful fragments, and I promise to do my bet to take all of them on board.

Thank you devrant community, for giving me a leg up when I needed it.

12 Stages of Software Development:

1. Analysis.
2. Development
3. Realization the whole analysis is complete bullshit and has nothing to with reality.
4. Denial about failing deadlines.
6. "Acceleration": adding more people to the project, bringing out big corner cutting machine.
7. Learning that massive amount of new features needs to be added, while the deadline is two weeks away.
8. Putting some random crap in production, riddled with horrid bugs and security flaws, to technically not miss the deadline.
9. Get the mess almost working long after the deadline has passed.
10. Maintain this steaming pile of crap for a year.
11. Start planning for full system rewrite that "Makes Everything Better".
12. Goto 1

Customer: The quality of the software you’re delivering is going down
Me: That’s because we’re developers, support, and spend all day on meetings without mentioning that deadlines are defined by you, not the technical team
Project Manager: I have added more members to the team so you can deliver faster
Me: That’s just slowing us down because this inherited code is shit, there’s no documentation and we’re always in a rush, without time for a proper ramp up
Customer: *throws money to our faces* I’ll remove two weeks to this delivery so we can test it better
Me: …

rant && !rant

I started my Internship a couple of months ago, but it didn't live up to my expectations.

> The good things:

- I have a structured internship programme, where we are given a independent project to complete during the internship, so all the work is slow and nice, so no unreasonable deadlines.

- Cool-ass supervisors (and smart too). They let us leave if the we don't have any more work planned, no sitting until the end of office hours, so go home early and SLEEP.

> The bad things:

- Shitty-ass people. But I've to deal with them once in a few weeks, so not that bad.

- Restricted wifi, but some websites can be accessed for memes. So, knd of fine.

- NO BRAIN-FUCKING EXPERIENCES FOR RANTING. I thought I would start my internship and meet retarded people and post some rants but NOOOO, someone had different plans for me (that 'someone' is LIFE, just in case if you are wondering)

> Summary

- Kind of disappointed about material for rants, but 10/10 it's been a good internship.

Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

For me the worst part of being a dev is when project managers give unreasonable deadlines
:(

Setting the deadlines according to the hours I actually think it's going to take to finish a project

Just found out that the project I've been trying to save because management needs it to motivate a bunch of engineers into finishing work is on the chopping block.
I never wanted to take it on.
I voiced all my concerns throughout the last year about everything they are saying to me now.
But, after being chased for mundane deliverables and workshop deadlines-- and not seeing my coworkers faces in the past six months I want to just state this:
I've been "triangulating" through work for the past two years hoping either RTO will come and kick my ass into gear or I will end up owning something large enough that I care about, and all I have to show for it is a messy workflow, a flood email inbox, and a burning desire to let everything burn to shit.
If it's on the chopping block because I'm a valuable resource, then I am putting myself on the chopping block because there was nothing of value that I did that seems to be resonating.

All my glue work is ignored. I ignored their deadlines till they noticed what I did. It only led me to realize that I cannot possibly continue doing acts of service. Turns out it's all they ever wanted as they pretended I owned this company.

I am naive, and I hate myself for it.

Here, code reviews are not happening 🙁☹️

When the actual error comes to the prod, we dig into the logs and figure out the reason.

The project is not stable and in the development phase, so requirements are coming too much every month with deadlines.
Deadlines are mostly 1 to 2 weeks.
Sr. Devs mostly merge PR without reviewing it.

I had lots of opportunities though due to various requirements like I learnt AWS dynamo DB, S3, and a few things regarding EC2.

But the coding standard which needs to be learned that I think I'm lacking because my code is not getting reviewed.

Not only about coding, we have to create a ticket in Jira for our task which is decided in the scrum and needs to assigned to ourselves.

In the name of scrum, there are 1 to 2 hours of meeting where they started brainstorming about new requirements and how we are going to implement them.

What should I do to make my code more cleaner and professional?

Today I read a great article on mutation tests, how to use and why they are important. It looks like a great thing, but...
I have never wrote any unit test in any of my jobs. Nobody in my workplace does that. And now it seems like 100% test coverage is not enough (I remind you, that I have 0%), they all should mutate to check if the quality of unit tests is high.
It seems that I'm left behind. I played with tests in my free time, but it seems the more you write them, the better you get at it, so I should be writing them in my job, where I code most of my time. Not only that, of course, I would also want to ensure that what I'm working on is bug-free.
Still, it will be impossible to introduce unit tests to my project, because they are novelty to the whole team and our deadlines are tight. The other thing is, we are supposed to write minimum viable product, as it is a demo for a client, and every line of code matters. Some might say that we are delusional that after we finish demo we will make things the right way.
Did any one of you have a situation like this? How did you change your boss and team's mind?

So basically I am the computer guy in my office. If there is any hardware or software related problem, I am the guy who fix it or try to fix it in my own time.

Little bit of more backstory. Two month ago we got react native project from a client. My boss asked me if I want to do that project. he knew that I don't know react native but I want to learn it. So I said yes. I have worked over 12 hours per day to work on that project while learning react native ( I committed the final version to git today.)

Yesterday there was a meeting in our office about project deadlines and issue with current work and stuff. In that meeting one guy asked (this guy had personal beef with me) in rude way like why I am taking parts of pc and given other people. ( If there is any hardware issue, I use other parts from pc which are not currently in use. So basically a simpe resource allocation.)

I knew it was a targeted questio toward me but before I say anything, All people took his side. (I did all those repair after taking permission from my boss, so he did not take that question seriously.)

I spend lots of time fixing those problem so people work does not stop and this is the thank you I got in return. I did this over one and half year. Right now I am asking my self if I continue the work or not.

Note: I wrote this whole thing to get my anger out of me. Sorry for typos. I am little bit drunk and I am not good with English.

One of my really good friends met me today and she's become a project manager in a big firm and has been asked to manage a project and get it delivered.
A bit of history first. She and I graduated from the same college and got into different firms as software developers. We and our dev friends used to bitch about how PMs don't know anything and don't give a fuck about the quality of project. She moved on to pursue MBA. Fast forward 4 years.. it's today and we are in my apartment having dinner. She's going on and on about how bad the project is, how mess of the project this has become and how she doesn't care at all about the project and doesn't know anything but wants devs to finish the job no matter what. She knows the deadlines are aggressive but has directions to shit all over the devs and get the work done. So she's just doing that.. giving them an earful and asking for daily updates and questioning them about delays without even knowing what the project is about.

When I try to tell her that it's not the right thing to be doing, she's proudly admitting that's she's only going to manage the project for a while and doesn't really care what happens to it.

I have lost some respect for her now.. :(

After paying 3 years in advance to my host, some emails of the owner of a project I work with (very small thing, but still..) began to disappear. She doesn't receive the messages and neither the person who sends receives a error message. I've contacted them but no one could found out what is happening.

In this meantime, I had to change the PHP version (there is a version control in their cPanel). Just after changing, Mysqli and PDO stopped working. It took about 4 to 5 days for them to fixed it (shared host).

Back to today, I needed to send and receive lots of emails of this project. As we are losing tons of legitimates mails, we started to cc our personal emails to avoid misscomunication (deadlines are very important). Of course, exactly today, Microsoft's​ mail stopped accepting any emails of our host IP, as it appears someone has an Trojan hosted there. Of course, except me, everyone else personal email address are Outlook.com.

We have a lot of small projects with different domains that we maintain and develop. Most go into maintainence mode now and get no new features. Now our new department lead declared us the SWAT team bc there are no new good projects. This baiscally means we get pushed to other team's projects that have issues with deadlines and support there. So basically we get to projects with fire on the roof and as reward for extinguishing, we get another burning project.

Either that or in the first department meeting where our new boss introduced himself and managed to say in the same paragraph that due to corona we "shouldn't expect any salary increases bc these are hard times" and "his department has so much money and doesn't know where to spend it"

I thought that if I work for a manager that is a developer as well, I would start getting deadlines that make sense for the project...
Well, now I know that it was just a thought.. guess that It doesn't exist

I work in the Android team in a company whose main product is a consumer facing mobile application. The backend developers around me are always looking to cut corners and do things the fastest and easiest way possible. If they think there might be a dependency to another team they go to extra lengths to avoid it just to save themselves the efforts of communicating and learning things that are beyond their scope of interest. I have to put up such a fight to ensure things are done the right way. Contracts are as optimised as possible.

I once had to fight for half an hour to ensure they processed the response before sending it over to app and left the processing to the end users mobile app. They just wanted to query their database, serialise it and send it over.

For my current project, I have proposed a solution which will not require any app side changes in the near future ever, if we make things generic enough and follow a set contract. The app architects loved this solution, but it was an entire task to convince the backend team. When they finally agreed, they keep hinting at how we should've just done things the easier way to solve just for our current use case because doing it this way is taking time.

Mind you, they are the ones who had set the deadlines anyway. And now they use the excuse of these very same deadlines to try and push out a very sub par solution.

My iOS counterpart is no less. We were given two sprints to finish this task. And he kept fighting me every step of the way to make things the easier way. I feel singled out and I feel like I'm being too pushy and uptight and if things are delayed it'll be my fault and not the because these people are lazy and incompetent.

Our manager doesn't care either. He just wants the feature out as soon as possible. He wouldn't care about the nitty gritties of the solution if it was delivered on time.

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...

*not being the project manager*
*but of course being asked out when it comes to responsibillity for overdue deadlines*
#we don't know why we aren't finished yet, ask the dev

I got contacted by an other company and I am so unsure whether to accept their offer or stay at my current job.

For now I spend 2 years at my current company. The culture is great and everyone gets treated very well.
The bad part is, that it is located in a part of Germany I really can't stand and to this day fully remote is not an option.

Additionally lots of stuff is really frustrating in my daily work, e.g. colleagues that experiment with critical parts if our infrastructure, resulting in every developer who made the mistake to update the local development stack being unable to work for half a day or so.

This and the fact, that our techstack sucks hard. (mostly bad php for backend and server-rendered HTML and a weird mix of Typescript, Javascript, Vue and some old bits of deprecated angular for frontend). This company has it's own product (a web platform) and no real deadlines in the sense of "something bad happens, when your team won't achieve the project in the originally proposed time"

Company number two seems to work with a wide variety of technologies for very different projects (it's a consulting compan), would pay me ~28% more than my currently raised pay and allows for full remote.

When I try to look objectively on the facts everything points to accepting their offer, but on the other hand there is this weird feeling of this being a joice that would come to soon...

How do you make such decisions? I already talked to a great colleague of mine, who thinks it might not be a bad idea to stay at the company for an additional year or 2, because I haven't yet reached the point where there is not enough to learn here anymore, which I agree on, but this company seems to offer everything I want.

I feel overwhelmed with this situation :D that's why I would like to know how you people try to tackle such a situation

Nobody has any use from a 80% finished project (so not finished at all) except it was a lot of time and money to get to that point. Oh boy I need to make progress on about 500 different projects to get them to a useful stage.

Also very important lesson: Dont have your anxiety take over when facing the "omg I have a 6 digit number of things on my 2do list" because you can't say no to the "awesome" ideas you have.

Also: I have made a rule for myself that prevents me from starting/working on a side project when I have important deadlines on main projects

My department never has real pressure like real outside deadlines. Except for this project.
Now guess what happened during the final hours of the project:
Fuckin circleCI goes into "degraded performance" (last time it was "partial outage").
I feel like calling my friends Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels over for some late night work. :P

I dont understand how am i not fired. I literally dont know how to do shit in this legacy 30 year old junkyard code. I am literally alone working on this project on a giant codebase and have no one for help. The project is burning on fire and scrum master is talking shit for breaking deadlines and i cant do anything about it. Why dont they just fucking fire me that would be such a huge relief bro

Use Maven, they said... it's better, they said... you don't have to manage dependencies yourself, they said...

...only now I've spent three days in hell trying to figure out why Maven keeps insisting on sticking INCOMPATIBLE JARs in my WAR that causes a breakage when deployed. No matter what I do it still sticks stuff in the WAR that shouldn't be there!

Like, I'm not a lazy cunt, I can manage my own dependencies! I know what's supposed to be there, oh, and by the way, everything fucking works when I build with Ant instead and I'm in full control of what winds up in the WAR.

So, basically, instead of the "hassle" of having to download JARs myself, I've now got the hassle of dealing with Maven trying to be more clever than me.

I know which I'd rather have, especially right now. ARGH!

You know, any time someone says "this is an industry-standard and that's why you should use it" my first thought is "hmm, which of these buildings is tallest and will ensure a quick death when I inevitably jump off of it?" MOST ESPECIALLY when the company just decides X is what everyone is going to switch to, regardless of what they're using now and regardless of how many YEARS it's been that way and working perfectly. Nope, doesn't matter, just get onboard the freight train, and if your productivity takes a hit, if you start missing deadlines dealing with shit you didn't have to deal with when using the "worse" tools, well, I guess that doesn't fucking matter, does it?!

And that's not even talking about the fact that the Maven build takes almost four minutes, which is just about 4x as long as the Ant build it replaced, each and every fucking time I make a change.

Look, I'm sure there are solutions and I'm sure I'll find them next week because I always do... and I'm sure there's some tweaking we can do to improve the performance... and it's not like this is my first go-round with Maven, though it's probably the most complex project I've ever tried to do with it... by my fucking dear god this is a nightmare, and it's not a nightmare of my choosing.

I'm disgusted, tired and defeated, three things I never get when it comes to technology. Congratulations Maven, you're on the verge of breaking someone who doesn't get broken. Another day like the last three and I'm not gonna need Stackoverflow, I'm gonna need a bus schedule so I can figure out exactly when to step off the fucking sidewalk!

The first dev project, like real dev project, I participated in was a school one and it was double.
The class was meant to make us learn about the software's life cycle, so the teacher wanted us to develop a simple, yet complicated, thing: a Web platform to help tutors send/refer students to the university services (psychologist, nutriologist, etc) and to keep track of them visits.
We all agreed on it being easy.
Boy were we so wrong.
I was appointed as dev leader as well as some others (I was the programming leader, the other ones were the DB guy and the security guy) and as such I was in charge of the technology used (well, now we all know that the client is the one in charge of that as well as the designer) and I chose Django because we had some experience with it. We used it for the two projects the teacher asked us to do (the second one was to find a little shop and develop something for it, obviously with the permission and all that), but in the second one I decided to use React on top of Djangl, which ended being a really good combination tho.
So, in the first project, the other ones (all the classroom) started to discuss and decided to use some other stuff like unnecessary carousel for images, unnecessary functions, they created mock ups for stuff that was never there to begin with, etc. It was really awful, we had meetings with the client (the teacher) with updates on the project, and in not a single one he was satisfied with the results. But still, we continued with the path the majority chose and it was the worst: deadlines were not met, team members just vanished until the end of the semester, one guy broke his leg (and was a dev leader) and never said a word not did anything about the project. At the end, we presented literal garbage, the UI was awful, its colors were so ugly because we had to use the university official colors, the functionality was not there, there literally was a calendar to make appointments for the services (when did the client ask for that? No one knows), but hey, you could add services and their data to it, was it what the client wanted? Of course not! What do you think we are? Devs?
Suffice to say that, although we passed with good grades, the project and the team was shit (and I'm counting me in)
The good part is that the second project was finished by me and it looked really good, yet it didn't matter, the first project was supposed to be used by the university, but that thing was unusable.
Then, in the subsequent vacations I tried to make pretty and functional/usable, yet I failed because I had a deadline for another thing I had to do, but hey, the login screen looked amazing!

Failed to make a decent demo for client because spaghetti code. I want to work on the project to sort out codebase to avoid same thing happening again, boss wont hear it and switches me to another project of which I have little knowledge of the stack when we have another guy who has experience in it.

My main project (the one I want to sort out) is so big it should have 4 people full time on it, but it has me and one part time outsourced contractor. I was hired as a meteor dev and he makes me work on an angular project like its totally easy to switch from meteor to node+angular+Jade.

I am a junior dev, boss has no idea how to project manage and ignores advice I give him.

This is going to be hell when we miss deadlines and have to explain to the client why their product has so many bugs.

"Untested code is broken code"

Unless deadlines are near and you're palming the project of on some other poor dev.

Just delivered most difficult project I had so far, despite all issues managed to deliver (on time). Had help from team but some colleagues only contributed with "I'll tell X and Y to do it".
Told my manager it was really hard for me and sometimes I had to work some hours in the weekends, once even entire weekend with no extra pay, just to meet deadlines.
My manager just told me in my performance review that I didn't deliver on time and compared me to the UX designer that delivers Figma designs on time for like 8 projects and never has to work overtime. I guess dev work is the same as Figma design around here.
Then manager proceeded to tell me that he wants what's best for me.
Safe to say no raise this year.

You really have to decide between a full feature set of a software and deadlines. You cannot have both or in other words if you wand all features of your dreams you need infinite amount of money and time.

The funny part about this is that every student learns this in the first semester if you study anything about project management or management at all... And of course in reality pms and cXos don't even give a **** about this...

Sometimes been a software developer just made me sad 😔.

I'm a student at uni and also one of the two web devs at a website agency.
Today, I got in office and my boss told be, that he just signed off (confirmed) two mobile apps ( we're switching to React Native) and is in the talks with a few other clients, also we're like a week from starting our first big project.
Furthermore, internship deadlines are ending at the start of next month.
Goodbye Life 😂 🔫 💻

Ok so there is this company we work for as a client. They stalled the project for 3 months not wanting to sign the contract in the summer for reasons unknown while we "waited" to start.

In the contract it was noted that the project will take 6 months FROM THE time they sign the contract.
They signed it in September and still want to go live this year. They don't care what is in the contract but they have legal deadlines they must comply and for that they need the project.
I mean WAT? How disfunctional you must be to stall a project you have legal compliance for?

How do you go forward with a project you're stuck on and you can't find the motivation to keep going?

I'm working on a relatively small and simple project for a friend. It's not that complicated overall, I've completed most of it already, and there are no stringent deadlines, so I can take my time.

But the last part has turned out to be a bit more complex to implement properly than I expected, and due to the fact that I can't seem to find a solution that satisfies me I'm completely put off from continuing.

Which is completely stupid of course, I want to finish this (and get paid), but my motivation to even open the project files is nowhere to be found.

The whole coronavirus lockdown situation isn't helping either for that matter, I feel like I'm going crazy stayin locked inside these four walls all day every day.

Sigh

Anyone ever stay on a set of projects they knew were going to fail? I got pulled off of 3 major projects to help another team that was failing at their very high visibility project. I got that back on track, but then they needed to keep me on for stabilization work and to onboard some folks. Then they still kept me on and my projects all suffered. I was very vocal to management about my concerns. Finally, management recognized that my projects weren’t getting done so now I’m back on them. The thing is, now it’s probably too late and I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail to meet deadlines on all three (plus there’s scope creep of course). I want to just walk away from this hell hole, but I’ve made some promises to folks that helped me get the job that I wouldn’t be a job hopper (been here 4 years, and each year is worse than the last). I think I’m just going to do the best I can and see what happens - and try not to have a heart attack in the process.

I love to build (full stack) 2 whole complex websites simultaneously after 4 months of lacking work and waiting for project plans. And both with deadlines in 2 weeks.
Just why can't our PMs do their job and make usable timings?

Email arrives, contains a list of deadlines AND descriptions of new features and changes to portal... all news to me, Really?! All for next month you say? Didn't we just assign a different project to the team? Did we replace the 50% who leave this week yet? no.... Well done project management... Slow clap for you guys.... It's so idiotic I'm not even mad...

Broke my leg in 4 places on Friday and the biggest thing stressing me out is not being in work. What’s going to happen with all my project deadlines

It is sooooo annoying when team memebers keep on finding mistakes in your work instead of actually contributing themselves. And when they do its way past deadlines and it completely ruins the project cuz they dont want your version and they dont want to do anything themselves. Aah too much blabbering lol!

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.

What do you think about my sibling observation today (he/she is not in software):

- if you want make money in any company, deal with all the shit: incompetent co-workers, shitty management, unreasonable deadlines, misinterpreted Agile, no test coverage, etc.

- if you want to grow and develop yourself: join some easy startup or make your own app/project

So how do you find motivation to finish a work project which is supposed to "go long"?

So, umm, this is weird, but i have been in this situation a few times and i am not sure if i deal with them correctly.

- the company proposes a brand new feature : a feature which never existed in the product before.
- they have high level directions (both business logics and technical) on how its supposed to be build
-they set vague but comfortable timelines (20-30days) to complete it
- they align me as the main dev for frontend, some x guy for backend , some y guy for parallel frontend (ios/web) and kinda forget about us.
- the business requirements are evolved/cleared as we go on making the product, the backend keeps on providing evolving apis which get stable over time.
- the business ppl shows that yeah there is no pressure and we won't mind extending this for release as other systems will be "obviously" taking time.
- our (the folks on new feature) feature is sidelined .nd we are rarely talked about until we reach those deadlines and at that time we are questioned.

I... am not a powerful performer in these situations. adding a new feature required solving some major problems again and again , while solving smaller problems too, so as the product finally takes shape . for eg:
1. i will start fast by adding all the possible screens, their abstract code, their navigation logic, their xmls etc
2. then based on designs, i will try creating designs a bit
3. then once the apis arrive, i start adding them and modify the logic to handle those.
4. meanwhile many smaller problems come up , like when sending an image from one screen to the previous screen, the thumbnail don't show up, so i spend 5+ hours ensuring that it works precisely . or how i could make 3 api calls in async and make the upload flow better.

5. this goes on for days, until and i and other people start to realise that my project is not upto the point of completion

i keep getting distracted from the original goal of making a working poc first and then fixing the nuances

So close yet so far..... All my project deadlines

I wished to not procrastinate
God gave me a life so busy I don't have time to.

(3 internship deadlines in 10 days, 2 colg project deadlines and 2 hackathons next week)

How to work when a project has tight deadlines, give me some tricks of yours?

project time is a tough time (especially deadlines!).
but project time is learning time and a growth time.
so it doesn't discourage me!

Has anybody experience with Scrum in small web development agencies? Especially estimating stories with story points instead of hours/days?
We have a new junior project manager, without any practical experience working agile, who wants to establish scrum because what he read about it sounded so good... I already worked agile with kanban before and I loved it, but I only have little experience with scrum.
I think scrum, or agile in general, won't work with the clients we have. Most of the time, our clients have a fixed deadline, a fixed budget (either money or time) and they know their requirements, so there is no much room for beeing agile.
Regarding story points, I just adding an unneccessary layer of abstraction, because the customer wants to know how long a specific feature takes. Sure, story points are just another, more dynamic unit for time, but then why nut estimate in static time unit in the first place? Another fear I have, is that some devs may be more ignorant regarding deadlines and expectations on customers side. "yeah I'm working for 10 days on this story, but it's 8 points!" instead of informing the project manager "Currently I spend 2 days on this feature, we estimated 3 days, but it seems I need 3 days more".

Maybe I shouldn't be worried, but it would be great if you could share your experience and learnings. Thanks in advance!

That moment when you have 2 deadlines approaching for 2 projects and then your client gives you another project with higher priority.

Recently attended an interview. The guy was some random company consultant. Job description was for spring-boot (also required templating engine experience). He was asking me whether I know angular and JEE (completely different and kinda opposite of the job desc). That's a bummer but good thing I've messed around with these once or twice so I know whatsup.

Also, who the fuck has already got 7 programmers and wants to double up to 14 by only adding university students to the team (after teaching them angular and jee for a month, but whatever, its only a fucking month), in order to complete a new project with tight deadlines?

I don't think I'm sticking with this one...

I'm having a weird time with my current project.There are many companies involved and we are several teams coordinating with each other. My team was initially very large, for various reasons we were divided into smaller groups and I must say that the transition has been catastrophic.

We are doing SCRUM…sort of. The customer assigns the tasks to be completed at the end of the sprint, the story points are given without full understanding of the implementation and the deadlines are tights. I always find myself rushing to the release day with code that isn't production-ready but since the customer requests it and there's no objection among my superiors (please note, i tell them the deadline is tight) I gotta rush to deliver.

The customer doesn't know what he wants, but if he does know the deadline is unreasonable, or if he has just an idea of what he wants he still demands it... somehow without specifying what kind of implementations is expecting.

The current senior project developer takes everything (any task) as an emergency, it's never possible to defer to the next sprint, it's quite demeaning.

And I'm here wondering if maybe I've missed something, if the project simply lacks method and coordination, if I have more responsibility than I think, if my project leadership is too absent but I know one thing, at the moment I'm in anxiety about the current sprint due date because there is a task that will take longer than expected.

Any advice?

So I was given a project to work on a week ago. The expectation given to me was completion in one week. I am a newbie hoping to keep my job so I jumped in head first (didn’t know any better). I ran into several road blocks which I communicated to my boss. Today, he (boss) is freaking out (blaming me for being behind the deadline). We have a meeting with the lead dev (who should have been doing this all along). He says wow. This is way too hard. Let’s scale it all back and focus on an MVP: 10% of what was originally requested. Of course. I get no thanks. No recognition for hard work. I’m just happy my coworker sees the work I’m doing.
- The Scapegoat.

Ive gotten pretty good at web dev that most projects seem easy so i just tell myself i could probably finish the whole thing over next weekend if i spent the entire day coding.

I end up procrastinating my way till last minute, sometimes screw over deadlines, i just cant get myself to want to work on it. and i keep accepting projects for the money and throw myself in this guilt tripping loop every time.

what can i do to get myself to work on freelancing? (in my actual full time job im very productive coz mostly the project i work on is my passion but freelance is just too much of a drag!)

So a new project was assigned to me with Laravel. I don't know abcd of this But have to do within strict deadlines :(
Very much hectic weeks for me... waking up long nights,,,, working on weekends..
Hope so will soon grab on it and will complete task in less time.

Now am thinking does being developer is ok for long term. :( Sometime it really become very very hectic.. And How can I take less stress about the pending tasks.. I mean if something got stuck .. my mind will stay there until I finished/solved that off :(

Any advicess from those are in long run being dev

Two deadlines today. Wondering which project to finish first.

recently, I was working on a project to playback archived call recordings, and another developer was hired. part of my job is also to support a third party automation framework for customers, so I got "seconded" to support a proof of concept. the original project had now been messed up, it works, however, the functionality that made it secure has been MASSIVELY compromised for the sake of effort. I've tried to cause a stink as we have a major customer who will fail the next PCI audit. opinions on the situation. the other developer has a lot more experience, but seems to have chosen to satisfy management on deadlines over the original spec...

Darn!
It's simply the Parkinson's Law guys, it says that 'work' expands as until it reaches it's deadlines (if any), so for indefinite time, I guess I'll plan and admire many projects but COMPLETE NONE!

DEADLINES ARE NECESSARY,

else I'll keep kn moving from one project to another without any plans of completion :3