Story time!

A little over a year ago I was in the hiring process with a new company and countered their initial offer. I was told by the CTO that it was no problem and they would get back to me soon.

A couple days go by and I'm then informed that they're hiring a new IT director and would like me to interview with him as well. It felt kinda lame since I'd already been offered the job but I rolled with it.

When I showed up to the office for an interview I tried to call and let them know I was there and couldn't get a hold of anyone. 30 minutes later I get a call from the CTO saying they couldn't find the new IT director and when they got him to answer the phone he said he had left early and would call me to do a phone interview.

Obviously the whole experience so far has been pretty lame but I stuck with it because I knew the CTO personally. I did the phone interview and quickly realized this dude was a prick, and would be a terrible boss, but I spoke with the CTO again who told me to stick with it and eventually I did get the job.

Fast forward about a month and it's clear the new director is trash. He literally bragged about firing a dude over an accidental outage (wtf!?).

He had the technical experience you'd expect of a junior help desk and his management skills were pretty clearly sub-par.

He was also, for whatever reason, completely unable to communicate with the only woman on our team. When assigning work he would always feel the need to ask if she could 'handle it' rather than just assigning it to her like it's done for everyone else. He was pretty clearly sexist.

The whole team hates this dude by this point but he's somehow managed to woo the executives into thinking he shits gold.

I was helping him set up a Python venv on his machine when I noticed another VPN client installed which certainly piqued my interest. After a bit of digging it was clear he was using company time and company equipment to continue working for his previous employer.

We turned over logs and he was fired the next day. He tried to add me on LinkedIn afterwards and I have never declined something quicker.

Moral of the story is don't be a dickhead.

(Computer reboots)
Me: F**k!
(Starts up, chat window pops up)
IT guy: Okay we fixed it.
Me: Fixed what? You shut off my PC I was in the middle of something!
IT guy: I have here Jeff needs Java updated
Me: This isn't his computer
IT guy: Have a good day (chat status changes to "in a meeting")

For retaliation I found him on AD and spent the day writing a script to reboot his PC every hour.

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.

I was young and stupid. Remember floppy disks? Yeah, we still had them when I was studying. Went to a computer cafe, rented a PC and DOS was already booted up (I'm an old fucker). I didn't want to reboot because PC rental was metered. I inserted my floppy disk and got infected by a virus that deleted my work. No git back then and my backup was on the same disk (fuck me). Back home, rewrote the whole thing from memory.

I got mad and wanted revenge. De-constructed a floppy disk, replaced the magnetic media with sandpaper and went to each and every PC on that computer cafe.

It was closed for day.

Dear Microsoft Kusto Query Language (KQL)

Screw you. You suck like more than a sudden depressurization event in an airplane. Creating your own freaking query language is bad, the people who invented SQL based it on a the principles of mathematical relational algebra, which although confusing, and not suited for all use cases is at least consistent.

You were invented by a bunch of oxygen deprived halfwits based on the principles of sadism and incompetence.

The only situation in which I would voluntarily use KQL as my tool of choice is if my purpose was to extract a Dantesque style revenge on someone who had committed grievous harm to myself and my family members. In that case forcing them to work with you day in and day out would still border on cruel and unusual punishment.

Sincerely, A developer who has spent the past 2 hours dealing with your Lovecraftian madness.

P.S. I hope you choke on a raw chicken bone and no one gives you CPR.

Use this as a template to send rejection letter to your recruiter as a revenge.

"Dear Recruiter,

Thank you for considering me for the software engineering position at your company. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your offer.

As a highly qualified and skilled software engineer, I am confident that I could bring a great deal of value to your organization. However, after reading the job description and learning more about your company, I have come to the realization that I am simply too good for the position. I have no interest in joining a team where my talents and abilities would be underutilized and unappreciated.

Furthermore, I am a bit concerned about the working environment at your company. I have heard rumors that the office is dingy, the cafeteria food is subpar, and the company culture is lacking. I am a true perfectionist, and I refuse to settle for anything less than the best.

In conclusion, I must decline your offer. I wish you and your company the best of luck in finding a candidate who is worthy of the position.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]"

I hate, I really really hate other students leaving their homeworks and assignments on the school's computers, they clutter everything and bloat the desktop with garbage, at least have some decency and put it inside a folder!

Today I got welcomed by another of those desktops and I decided to give them some help with their assignments, i.e I changed their python scripts for improvised Ackerman functions.

someone took my car parking place, I thought it’s just a week but it didn’t changed, do you think shitting on his car and leaving a note that’s beginning would help ?
Maybe I should just shit over his car and wait for reaction without a message, I can’t imagine how someone would like to steal from me, I started to thinking about different ways of revenge so they can remember that they put their car at wrong place

you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?

noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few

but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.

example.

if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.

and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.

if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.

i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.

there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?

the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.

and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.

everything is so backwards in this country.

people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'

or

'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'

or

'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'

its pretty gross as are these people

well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people

took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.

still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?

I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.

I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.

i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.

and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.

there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.

starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.

everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.

the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.

so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.

years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.

don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.

I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.

oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.

So I am pretty fair dev at Java and have been doing freelancing for sometime apart from normal full time job.
Got a client , a well funded one, who raised a decent chunk of money recently.
Got me do a couple of different areas right from refactoring and bumping their performance to all the way setting up AWS Services like RDS,Lambdas,Dynamo,SQS.
It was going good , money was coming in for the initial part.
Thinking that money is not the concern here , I accepted work at runtime and gave quotations about the additional work.

However now that all is done and deployed , the client simply refuses to pay me the money and has ghosted me horribly than my ex ever did.

I have access to their GitHub,AWS(I setup myself).

Need suggestions of whats the best way I can fuck them up if they decide to not pay even after a few more professional polite attempts I do .

sidenote : They had a pretty dumb db design and blindly had resorted to services in AWS and the pricing is still a major point of concern for them.

That's The Larry Ellison Taking on AWS

question to my male homies (or ladies too, if you are equally violent) hey what are your thoughts about someone fucking with your priced possession? you might not have a generic answer, so here are some specific scenarios:

1. some random drunk guy intentionally keys your car/breaks a headlight and you see it.
2. some guy teases /touches your girl/wife/SO/kid inappropriately.
3. some guy drops your phone and breaks screen.

my personal angry reaction for above things could go from either slapping/punching a guy to possibly do him a permanent damage (break arm,leg,nose,hand etc). i am not a violent guy , but some things matter more than a crime i guess (although, does it really count as a crime tho?)

i feel we can give a very these violent reaction for 2 reasons : these possessiona are so damn expensive that we genuinely get hurt and want an instant revenge and secondly we don't trust the judiciary to give a worthy punishment

i asked a friend of mine a simialar question and his violence meter is even lesser. he (20 at that time) once slapped his 50 year old neighbour coz they entered his home and started shouting at his dad, another time caused a big scene on a T-point as an auto driver accidentally dented his car while turning (the car was 2 days old)