Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

So yesterday one of the "senior" python developers woke me up at 1 am (we work in different time zones, and he knows how many hours I'm ahead) asking why isn't his code working. The error message was:

[ERROR] Runtime.ImportModuleError: Unable to import module 'app': xxx is not installed, run `pip install xxx` Traceback (most recent call last)

I am at lose of words and patience. Not only idiots who can't google simple stuff are seniors, additionaly we went from "DevOps is a culture" straight to "hey I'm developer in my silo, if it doesn't work on my machine it's DevOps problem, plz fix".

My boss, delusional as always and getting worse every week, conveys the news that eight interns have been taken on. Without asking us seniors if that would be a good idea.

Us: ”who should, you know, actually help these good people out?”

Boss: ”we will have to work that out”

Us: ”we don’t have the time actually to do this without seriously pushing deadlines forward”

Boss: ”we will have to work something out so that this does not happen”

Us: ”soo, we don’t have to actually help these guys and girls once they are here?”

Boss: ”no, they obviously need a lot of help. What we do here are really complex”

Us: 😬

I'm almost an introvert. I don't like talking to people much. I prefer to listen. Today one of the graduating seniors told me I should talk to people more. But I've been doing fine so far without talking to more people.

So I just found out that my colleague who I often have to work with does not use a debugger to troubleshoot any bugs at all. Actually, he does not even run or test his code locally either with prints or something similar. He just commits java code directly on bitbucket, no source control, without making sure it compiles and then he runs a CI provided by devops that takes 4 freaking hours to run because he bloated that shit up somehow.

I suggested politely to help him find a more efficient approach and to use my hardware setups for speeding up his work because I assume it must be pretty painful to work with, but he just refused.

That and those "seniors" with 10 years Linux development XP in the embedded field who don't know basic commands like ls, cat and touch and code in notepad.

Fucking me, who the hell am I working with and can someone please end me?

Oh boy.

I've been partially on-loan to another team that's relatively new at the company for a couple of weeks now, mostly to help them get some testing sorted out, and had scheduled a call with their lead the other day. The call basically started like this:

Lead: Hi
sudo-woodo: Hey
Lead: Okay, so let's talk about <subject>, but I guess you've been told the news
sudo-woodo: What news
Lead: I'm putting in my notice

I love listening to seniors because they always drop some wisdom, but this was some serious wisdom. Guy sounded exhausted at everything, talking mad shit about the company and certain people and I'm just here like 🍿. Seems understandable, a lot of butting heads with the higher-ups and not being able to do his job properly.

Unfortunately we all kinda needed him to do his job because his job involved juggling fifteen different things that the project (and like 90% of my backlog to be honest) depends on.

shit's fucked 🙃

I work in a fintech company and our product is a point of sale app. Two senior indian dev contractors just spent 3.5 months on a feature where all they had to do was map two tables by using a third mapper table and display 2 lists to the user so he could update the data in those two tables.

After hearing same excuses (that they are working in it) for the past few weeks, I took it upon myself and made a proof of concept for them.

Yeah our codebase is kinda shit but even me, a fcking junior with 3 years of experience managed to do it in 1 week.

Meanwhile these fuckers spent 14 weeks beating around the bush and couldnt even save data to a fucking database. They just added UI and thats it. When asked how investigation is going fuckers couldnt even come up with any findings. For weeks. Seniors my fucking ass.

If not for me, I guess they would have taken till the end of the year. No, fuck you, here is an example now pickup your slack.

Im tired of picking after you. God damn incompetent leeches

Biggest challenge was to accept that no matter where you go, what you do, you will have to deal with stupid people.

They come in all ranges, starting from hr, interns, juniors, coworkers, code reviewers, seniors, managers, boss, clients.

And in order to grow in life, you have to learn to deal with them. Better even if you could make them a little less stupid.

So, yet another "senior" web developer employed by my contractor who utterly fails to understand CORS.

I mean, easy enough to config their servers to provide the headers. A good and quick buck.

But I swear the level of idiocy I find in so called "seniors" infuriates me. I swear, he didn't even figure out that

A) you can't make the browser omit the Origin header.
(But it works on curl 😭😭😭)

B) it's the *server* who must include access-control-allow-origin in the response, not you in the request. Like, what use would that be? I don't even...

😞

I guess if I ever need to hire web devs again my only question during the interview will be "explain CORS to me".

Ok so we have 2 useless remote contractors in our team who got hired as seniors but actually are juniors. They take weeks to deliver most basic things and never ask for help or offer help for others. They take days to fix most basic comments after review.

Today our teamlead in a call said that it's a cultural difference, these guys dont ask for help because they are very independent.

MOTHERFUCKER, I WOULD BET MY SALARY THAT THESE IDIOTS DONT WORK EVEN 10 HOURS A WEEK.

I was doing more than them when I was a mere junior.

It's weird how these "senior engineers" bash on other people's code while they themselves are still stuck coding in 2007 and refuse anything new or different. "Software Engineer" has become a laughing stock that I don't want to associate myself with the title anymore. Instead of engineers, I'd call those seniors "software tools" (also human "tools" for that matter).

Hello all,

I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.

The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.

The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.

The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.

In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.

With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?

seeing questions like "finding the Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters" and being unable to find answer for hours make me question myself as a developer and wanna leave the tech world entirely.
And i am the dev who reduced an app size from 64mb to 27mb and rewrote the entire payment stack for a 10million user base company :|

DSA and competitive programming is seriously a bullshit. The world runs on fancy buttons and screens, and grabbing user's attention should be the ultimate goal to get profits. nobody should be learning this aweful stuff anymore. We are storing the open source and stack overflow content below the oceans and glaciars for a fucking reason!, so that our future gen could use those stupid knowlege without recreating the wheel

Why do we have this inferiority complex component in our life? do foot doctors also feel low for not able to understand heart or the working of eyeballs? they all are doctors to us, and all are equally appreciated by peons, HRs, receptionists the owner and even his freaking colleague doctors and seniors!!
But here we will be judged by a stupid "coding interview" for the role of a dev . the interviewer will be laughing at me for not solving a trivial problem with strings, as if I am seeing those bloody strings for the first time. I will be like some peasent to him, asking for more wages while portraying myself as some unqualified filth

FUCK this SHIT

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.

Guess who just spent the entire day before launch debugging why compose doesn't work on an ec2 instance where I DIDN"T INSTALL FUCKING DOCKER

I guess this is the key difference between me and seniors. Seniors know where to look where shit breaks because they have been breaking it for at least 5 years.

It's all based on the dev's experience. A beginner always faces trouble estimating a feature/project, but seniors don't, cuz they have the experience to get over the hurdles in software development.

One of my seniors is leaving the team. Honestly, I did not talk about personal stuff with him but during this lockdown, he was the only one whom I talked to this much. My most projects are with him, so in the team I kind of only know him. And now he is leaving, I feel so heavy.

I was anyway feeling no interest in my work, and now this, I really don't want to work at all. I don't want to be in this team, really without his guidance I can't do good. And this reminds me now I don't have anyone in the team to guide me. It's the same feeling as you get old and now no one to support you and you need to support yourself and slowly others. It's frightening.

On a good note, I hope things will turn out to be good for him, he's a nice person after all :) Everyone respected him, and he was trusted so much.

What to do as junior, if multiple seniors (4) aren't in sync with each other. Following different convention on same client's project. Even after 3 years they didn't able come up with seemless infrastrure. The code is getting ugly day by day. No review happens. Is that normal? As they are not in sync, we, juniors are frequently getting confused what to do. What could be done? I'm planning to leave the project somehow. Don't know what to do. 😑

Third week in this job and it takes seniors 2 weeks to approve merge request that consists of 3 lines. So many pretentious discussions. Fuck all of you approve this shit so I could be happy with at least some progress.

OK How do you guys overcome it when you guys "Hit the walls" when coding/programming?

ive been stuck to finding solution for some days,

AND I FEEL STUPID ALL THE TIME

dear seniors, please enlighten me!

My first interaction with Computers started in 1996/1997 and it was Dangerous Dave, PacMan, Mario, Pre that pulled me in so deep. We had multiple Floppy Disks and each of them used to go awry after a few months of use. Had to keep deleting stuff to fit all my Favourite Games

A year later I learnt the basics of MS-DOS and GWBasic. Looking at seniors do C Programming on Borland Turbo made me feel scared and one of them said it is the real language to make Games, and all types of Animation stuff. I was very intrigued but only for a while. I kept playing Games which was what I was fit for at that time

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

(No punchlines just a rant sorry, very angry at this person. Can't leave the club. Talked to seniors about it. Talked to coworkers for some voluntary help. No help here ;-;)

Yesterday: we need to have a meet to plan things out. 3 PM?

Rainbow eating monster: Yes

Yesterday 5 PM: Reminder

Rainbow shitting monster: I can't I have important things

Yesterday 5:01 PM: Children eating monster (in group): hey yall watching the event going on rn

Yesterday 5:02 PM: is this what you're busy with?

Rabbit pooping monster: this of course I can't miss. And anyways I have 5 more things to do: thing that I've already done, this club meet that you asked me to do yesterday and I said I'd have done, a meet with a friend, I'm having lunch now, and a meet with you. Hence I can't meet with you.

...

Today (in group): Kidney stealing monster: @me (irrelevant to discussion) can you meet for other thing that *I* was supposed to do a week ago?
Will you be available @me at 5 PM?
Okay everyone, assuming @me is available, tentatively we meet at 5 PM.

Today 12 PM: i wake up to this faeces

I thought 242 errors per hour was an impressive feat, but in another project I got topped by one of my seniors with 18130 errors per minute. Guess I'm still a rookie in that regard 😔

I guess the whole "can work from anywhere!" mantra doesn't apply to those looking at junior positions. I wonder how the industry will handle the lack of new hires coming through as more and more seniors demand WFH accommodations.

The culture in engineering org is to address each other as 'brother' and seniors as 'sir'.

Bhai is the local term for brother.

This is how an average Slack message reads:

"We will make the changes.
CC: @John Doe bhai, @Marcus Fila bhai, @David Elliot sir"

And even though these people are part of the conversation, everyone tags everyone else in each response.

Slack culture is a mess.