Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API

From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "question of the day"
-
So one year ago I was working at this company from the US, me being in Europe, which automatically implies there is several hours of timezone difference.
The eng. manager decided we would have a release tomorrow (decision was made one month earlier), and stuff was being prepped up to make that happen.
In the US the workday was about lunch time and in EU it was one hour before finishing. The manager gets us in a meeting and asks me and another dude to do some testing that would take several hours to do. This testing could have been done several days or weeks earlier.
40 minutes after that meeting I get a private message from the PM asking for the status of the test...
Me: aaa.. well I started it and will continue tomorrow
Manager: wait what? we have launch tomorrow, this testing has to be done by tomorrow
Me: it's the end of the workday here, I got personal errands that I have to attend to
Manager: uhm ok ... I see...
I was just messaging something in the public chat right before calling it a day and the manager writes "thanks for the input, your day is over now", completely out of context to the conversation I was having with whomever.
There was no question of "can you stay extra hours and do this?", there was no "hey, I know your day is over we will pay you premium hours with this amount as according to our contract, could you do this now as we have release tomorrow?" ..no ..just .. "do it!". I automatically assumed that ..hey, maybe he wants to do this during and after the live launch (and yes I do admit my mistake of not asking just to be clear, but I assumed the manager knows that there is a timezone difference ..like it's a no brainer).
I can not tell you the heat sensation I had after that last reply from the manager ... it was completely uncalled for, and unreasonable.
I mean why not make a pre-launch phase where you put stuff on the staging server, and perform all the necessary tests and then when you get all the green lights from testing you then proceed with the actual deploy? ...no ... mention this like right at the end of the day before the launch....
And another thing that scratched my neuronal cortex is, how does he know exactly how long the tests would take?12 -
During the interview they asked if I had other interviews or offers. I had one more interview and am offer. They emailed me the next day and say "we don't like to be strong armed". I'm assuming it's because I told them the truth about having an offer? We hadn't even talked about salary yet so it's not like I somehow "bullied" them into giving me more money.
Part of me didn't care because obviously this company was garbage and I dodged a bullet (plus I had an offer that was decent anyways). But the other part of me couldn't believe how fragile they were and how entitled they felt. Why ask the question if you don't want to know the answer? Where I'm at now, I got another offer before they made a decision. I had to decide within a couple days. I told them, and without any further conversation made me an offer 10k above the originally discussed salary. It was clear they were decent and so far I've been right.7 -
Is this really what tech-startup culture is?
A year ago I wanted to make a change and joined my friend who is a VP at a startup. She and my team are great even up to the C-suite level. But after a recent encounter with the core developer team here… I’m at my
breaking point.
This dev team is extremely tribal. It’s as if they view other tech teams as “others” and it’s “us vs. them”. My team works on a different vertical so I’ve never interacted with them before and a timeline of events is below. Is this kind of behavior a normal thing at a tech startups?
/story
Here’s some highlights from the last month…
- Customer demands a deliverable because it’s in a contract signed a year ago.
- No one in dev can be troubled to lift a finger (holiday season). I get called in to support.
- This isn’t my code - I’ve never seen or used it before.
- None of dev’s documentation is up to date.
- Find out dev hasn’t touched client’s project in a year.
- Spend weeks working with it. Find fundamental flaws which could have put us in legal jeopardy.
- I realize dev never finished this project because it doesn’t even have basic functionality to do what customer needs.
- Spent entire Christmas/New Year working.
- Create dozens of bug tickets and merge requests.
- Barely squeeze by and save multi-million $ contract renewal.
So what happens next?
- Reprimanded by the dev lead. He tells me I’m “hurting people’s feelings” by pointing out so many problems.
- A PM in a public Slack channel told me I was “passive aggressive” for a Jira issue where I wrote (verbatim) “Can we enable code highlighting in this text box? It’s difficult to show steps to reproduce the bug.”
- get told by VP to stop talking to them
- a bunch of merge requests rejected without explanation
- weeks later I see someone in dev run into a bug I found. I sent him the fix. They accepted his MR in the same day and it actually added another new bug.
- I lookup the recent commits of the lead-dev who chewed me out, he’s been working on adding colors to his console log output for print debugging. This is a time-critical application and he adds 30% overhead with logging debug information in production.
- Meanwhile dozens of major bugs exist and are ignored.
- The CTO at this company loves these people - though he hasn’t brought in any new business (literally) ever.
- My team is about to close a new contract and we’ve spent 15 days to work on it.
- The CTO said my team is slow and doesn’t fit with the business model of the company.
My team has never dealt with these devs before, so I checked Glassdoor for other experiences, the dev team apparently…
- uses “vulgar slurs for women”
- talking about technical issues “resulted in a lot of resentment”
- has an apparent “desire for revenge”
/ end story
This last month really shocked me because for my career so far I’ve never dealt with this kind of behavior. I could see a startup accepting this kind of culture if was bringing in a lot of revenue but they aren’t. They dropped the ball so hard we all lost our bonuses this year. It’s made even worse with the fact that they are constantly producing complete dog poop code (I’ve kept that opinion to myself though).
I’m really left wondering if this is just how it is in the high-stakes startup world.
Sorry - this started out as a question but ended up another dev rant.10 -
So one day on tech huddle my tech lead got frustrated, don't know why and told me - "the tasks you're doing can be done by interns"
I felt bad. Ofcourse I was putting my 100%.
That day I decided to put the resignation. I didn't discussed with anyone about it and sent the resignation email directly.
After serving 2 months of notice period I was able to land a better job successfully!
I called the lead on the last working day in that company and shared him the news about my offer letter and a little about the company.
His first question was - "Did you cleared all the interview process?"
In my mind - "That's only why I'm sharing the news here with you man! Stop thinking of me as a noob."
I replied with - "yes, if needed/the new company try to get feedback about me then please be honest atleast there by keeping your ego aside."
You shouldn't pull someone's leg if you aren't able to climb higher!!
Lesson I learnt;
DON'T STAY AT A PLACE WHERE THERE'S NO VALUE OF YOUR WORK AND THE DEDICATION TOWARDS IT!
Working in a startup isn't that easy, mostly for those where there's no work life balance.2 -
how to become a true scum master:
- formulate jira tasks for your inferiors as vague as possible, best they don't make any sense
- before sprint start, ask the subhuman being to estimate storypoints, and if they say they can't really tell with this description and choose the highest estimate, say "okay, let's estimate it to one sprint length", so they can actually work on it within one sprint (which makes total sense)
- if the scum dares to question the content of the ticket and begs for more details, be like teflon and give no useful answer at all. if they continue asking for a meeting to discuss the ticket, tell them to have a meeting with a coworker about it (who also has no clue). don't be available for them because you have more important stuff to do.
- bully them during daily standups that they didn't create clear subtasks from this task and criticize them because you have no idea what they are doing. tell them they are having performance issues and suspect them to sit on their lazy asses all day.
- criticize the team in general for bad performance, bad item tracking and never say something nice, to make sure everybody loses even the last bit of intrinsic motivation for the project.
stay tuned to learn how to make yourself a skull throne out of those filthy dev smartasses ^.^7 -
The company I work for offered a Javascript Course/Training for every developer to enroll, which happens to take place on 3 days. In the description it was ensured to be for everyone, doesn't matter if you are an expert or beginner: there's something to learn for everyone.
The company described him as a top coacher in Austria and that he is overbooked for 2 years. High in demand indeed. "Has to be good", I thought. As a relatively average JS developer, there has to be something to learn for me.
Sitting here the second day, I fucking regret to join this shit. I have never seen such a bullshit in my lifetime. Why the fuck would you even book this man, he doesn't even understand basic concepts of software engineering. Just reading down the script, opening the script on one laptop and showcaseing it on the other. When someone asks a question, there's a 70% chance he doesn't know the answer. It takes this scumbag 30 fucking seconds to define a function; probably making spelling mistakes alongside.
I don't even want to know how much this dude will make from this "coaching". Hoped that it'd get better over time but I don't see an improvement. Contacting my boss that I'll leave this "training".7 -
TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.
I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.
I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.
Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.
Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!
So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.9 -
Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.
Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?
Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.
SH: But what if it happens again???
Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.
SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.
Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.
SH: That email … gets filtered.
Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬
PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.
—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.rant this meeting could have been an email stop filtering out important notifications i saw my product manager’s eyes bug out -
[Half question / half rant]
Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?
Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.4 -
The convo between my friend and me back then
He: dude I heard you can code can you help me with this coding challenge on codechef
Me: bro, I try to let's check the problem
After 15-30 min we solve the question together
Then after 3 days or so he again meets me
He: do you know about Kali Linux
Me: no man not heard of Linux but what is Kali seems interesting
He: trying to hack WiFi
Me: *getting excited* bro teach me
He: I'm learning too
That day he got to know he can't hack WiFi and I got to know that my friend doesn't know jack shit about Linux, also Linux is awesome
But that moment changed my whole engineering life, I got to learn about Linux and I'm getting good at it every single day since then.
It's been 3 year since I met that fucker.
Tagging my amigo @ashwini0529 -
In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.
I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.
I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."
I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.
I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.
I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.
This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).
All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.
Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.
And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.
I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...
Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.
p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.
In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.4 -
Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.
On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.
At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.
And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.
Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:
> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed
I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.
Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.58 -
I wake up with so much interest and enthusiasm for programming and tech. It all goes away when I start work at 9 AM. Everyday at 5 PM, I question my career choices. I don't have the interest from the beginning of the day nor the energy to do anything.4
-
I've got a kinda basic networking question I can't quite figure out
How does a push notification work?
Like, on an Android app. A good example is an authenticator. Say I don't login to the service for 4 months.
Then, one day, I try to log into the web portal and it prompts me to accept the request on my authenticator app on my phone.
Immediately, there's a push notification on my phone.
Wtf.
Is there a socket open for 4 months? Does it send requests every few seconds for 4 months? I can't imagine that either of these options scale whatsoever: both horrendously waste bandwidth and server connections.
How the fuck does it work? I don't even have the first idea.7 -
Question of the day:
What to do when listing fees on exchanges too high?
Answer:
Unicorn;)
And a happy new year (delayed though :p)!11 -
Cordova is the perfect example of the importance of managing a state.
You have 100 plugins in your config and one of them fails? Well, now you are in an inconsistent state. You can't delete the plugin because it doesn't exist but you can't add it because it already exists. If you search any question about cordova on StackOverflow literally ANY answer is like "delete the platform and install it again".
In average I find myself in an inconsistent state more than once a day. No error is handled so I find myself debugging their code and it's horrible, looks like written by someone that had no idea of what he was doing. I know it's legacy and capacitor should be preferred, but what the hell? Really? -
This got me wondering...
Was shown a product today, doesn't matter what it was, because that part is irrelevant for question. Just out of unsubstantiated curiosity, I'm curious to hear other opinions .
How do you judge a product during first impressions period? Doesn't matter if it's a piece of software, gadget, food product, or all of the aforementioned at the same time.
As I just said - I was shown a product today, well, okay ... not in-person, and not actually shown, rather, made aware of a product. And after looking at it, I realized, that I can no longer look at a product and not focus on "red flags" or look for "where's the catch?". This product, that I'll just keep referring to as "the product" for the sake of keeping it neutral, was unfamiliar to me - I know nothing of it's manufacturer, so any trust to the brand is non-existant, the product brief on the website only made me question every marketing bulletpoint claim they had listed, aņd it didn't make me interested enough to go look up feedback from other users. This drew my attention to the realization that I do this with everything - I only look for whatever i'm looking for... I no longer pay any attention to discovery or suggestions. If I'm looking for HW, I'll focus on what it can and cannot do for the price and the actual first impression will form from using it, if it's SW - same deal, but actual first impression will form based on cross-platform compatibility, state/quality of documentation. Oppose to me, back in the day, where I'd just pick it up irregardless and "flubbed it" along somehow until it worked out.4 -
How do you do your CI/CD pipeline? Sorry if this is a dumb question. Just wondering how the tests and deployment usually runs. Is it on a per team basis? Is it the whole release getting deployed to Test many times per day? What happens if too many automated tests fail or there is not enough coverage, does it abort the deployment? If so, how can every team get delayed by every issue - is that actually a good policy?
My pipeline is very slow and requires a team of 12 people working in shifts to complete it. I’m not an expert but I know it does a lot of steps and never completes without manual intervention. I would like to help but I’m not sure how bad it is.3 -
Since the 3rd day, I have been telling y'all but none of you listened to me.
I kept repeating that I am the dumbest person I know. Why didn't you believe me when I said it?
Remember, Booking feedback? They sent me another official rejection with additional feedback. Mind blown.
That feedback really helped me understand what was going wrong. And now today in an interview, I was asked a question and the interviewer said, "I am looking for a specific details like xyz for why you should be a Sr PM".
That's when it clicked me, that I have done stuff and I know things. It's just that I didn't understand the question and wasn't able to articulate and communicate well.
My dumbass just needs constant feedback to learn. How much I love feedback more than ever.
The feedback cycle is interesting too. When I was new, I hated it. Then started to realise the value of it.
Then it did felt bad in the very instance whenever I got one, but quickly I used to incorporate the changes.
And now, I am crave and desperately seek feedback. It only helps me improve.
Funnily, everyone gave inputs when I didn't want it. And now when I am hunting for it, no one is giving inputs. This is how life is.
Nonetheless, I am pretty impressed with Booking. Good people, nice vibes, and kickass culture for sure.5 -
Hey y'all!
this is my first post, so mind me if my question sounds obvious, but googling around it gave me contradicting articles.
I wanted to ask if there's the possibility to make a living off being an AI developer outside my country (Italy), because, like I wrote in my bio, despite a CS degree and specialization in machine learning, the only jobs I landed were about maintaining useless outdated webapps. I can tell you that the first job's project was a JSP/servlet app that could run only in internet explorer (yes, internet explorer, in 2019), maybe you won't believe me, but if you do, maybe you can partially understand why I want to flee my place.
Add that I had to commute by train + subway to get to work, losing some 3 extra hours a day because of that.
I mean, if I really have to take the hassle of public transit in order to work, at least I want to enjoy it a bit. Please get me outta here.4 -
context i am 20 y/o student studying in mumbai uni college
SO RECNTLY I GRABBED A INTERNSHIP AT A BIG SOFTWARE COMPANY AS A SDE INTERN
so before all this i was that guy of college who was never been invited to parties or nightouts as i am not from a rich Bg they used to tease me on my style of clothing how i used to talk my english is fluent still i used to get bullied. I just had this female friend of mine which everytime used to support me let it be Leetcode question staying up late with me for studies but she was also teased because of me as i was not from a well known family or had money to show flashy things... she was so happy when i got this internship
PS it is my first day of my internship i went to the campus it was so prettty as i havent see anything pretty as this office campus so i clicked the picture standing next to the company logo the watchmen clicked it for me as i was too early to the campus there were no on, i was smiling like a dumb person that security guy was happy after knowing my story then i posted it on my IG and snapchat then i went it wait for onboarding stuff and then i got to meet my HR and she discussed everything she was sweet enough to explain me everything in detail too friends staff then when i checked my phone when the day was completed from office
guess what all those people who used to mock me and my friend for being nerds and used to mock me because of my financial bg now they were congratulating me and asking me how i got this and all
so i just want you to know please don't judge anyone or bully anyone just because of their bg they are always suffering in dark i will like to thank my close friend which was always with me
ty guys for reading till end1 -
OK, so, I see PY files shared on GitHub. All I know is, it is code for certain apps or pages. I download SEVERAL DIFFERENT PROGRAMS trying to get PY to open. Some didn't work, others were in Console and not Form. I asked for help on the Forum, how to open it, they do the same BS; gave me a Console app that just stays black for less than a second, and closes. I ask for a Form version. They made the excuse that it wasn't a program like I was thinking. They rudely tell me to be polite, but something like this IS GOING TO HAPPEN if they can't get their crap working. Eventually, after I TOLD THEM I WAS FURIOUS, THEY HIDE MY QUESTION FOR 10 MINUTES. When I replied, I DID NOT CUSS, I REPLACED LETTERS WITH ASTERISKS AND SYMBOLS, AND STILL GOT SUSPENDED, FOR A MONTH, AFTER TELLING THEM I WAS FURIOUS.
On the other hand, I was using Audacity. I upgraded and a plugin stops working. I thought they messed something up, so I wait using the outdated version for the fix for a few months, and so a few months later I update again, at this point I was a little upset; 2nd update and it still doesn't work. After the 3rd time, I thought they just didn't want to take the time and fix it, as people probably would have reported it by then. So I rant on Audacity's Forum saying they didn't fix an error, showed them screenshots in all versions I got and the 3 newest ones show an error. THEY TOLD ME WHAT WAS WRONG! I was trying to run a 32-Bit plugin on a 64-Bit version! I downloaded a 32-Bit version of the newest Audacity, and the plugin worked fine.
Python could've done what Audacity did, but, "No-o-o, we enjoy banning Winston when he is peed off!" And just so, the Suspension ends a day after my Birthday.
I might just ask when I'm back on, "How to remove my user off this Forum", so they can say "I can't", and flag it as malware because I almost no longer want they're help, and CAN'T GET AWAY FROM IT.
Freak you in the butt, Python.
PS - If anyone knows how to use Python files in Windows 10 or know a free, non-demo program that will more-advancedly edit, save, open PY files in a Form, please, give me the name or link to the software, program or app in the comments.
Before anyone says anything, this page says "Rant", so don't ban this or I'm deleting my account. If this isn't a "Rant" site, please tell me, and/or rename this site.
That is the reason I came here, just to get my frustration out.15