The university system is fucked.

I've been working in this industry for a few years now, but have been self taught for much longer. I'm only just starting college and I'm already angry.

What does a college degree really mean anymore? From some of the posts I've seen on devRant, it certainly doesn't ensure professional conduct, work ethic, or quality (shout out to the brave souls who deal with the lack of these daily). Companies should hire based on talent, not on a degree. Universities should focus more on real world applications or at least offer such programs for students interested in entering the workforce rather than research positions. A sizable chunk of universities' income (in the U.S. at least) comes from research and corporate sponsorships, and educating students is secondary to that. Nowadays education is treated as a business instead of a tool to create value in the world. That's what I signed up for, anyway - gaining the knowledge to create value in the world. And yet I along with many others feel so restricted, so bogged down with requirements, fees, shitty professors, and shitty university resources. There is so much knowledge out there that can be put to instant practical use - I am constantly shocked at the things left out of my college curriculum (lack of automated tests, version control, inadequate or inaccurate coverage of design patterns and philosophies) - things that are ABSOLUTELY essential to be successful in this career path.

It's wonderful that we eventually find the resources we need, or the motivation to develop essential skills, but it's sad that so many students in university lack proper direction through no fault of their own.

Fuck you, universities, for being so inflexible and consistently failing to serve your basic purpose - one of if not the most important purpose on this earth.

Fuck you, corporations, for hiring and paying based on degree. Fuck you, management, for being so ignorant about the industry you work in.

Fuck you, clients, who treat intelligent people like dirt, make unreasonable demands, pull some really shady shit, and perpetuate a damaging stereotype.

And fuck you to the developer who wrote my company's antipattern-filled, stringy-as-all hell codebase without comments. Just. Fuck you.

My teammates are working on a legacy codebase so shitty awful, so poorly written, so full of pitfalls, hidden information and intricate relationships, they gave a name to their development style:

Indiana Jones programming.

when you had to maintain some stranger's shitty codebase, and you couldn't resist looking up his name on LinkedIn, then you found his profile which says he is a Rockstar coder

"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

I started a new job today (remote) and my first task was to improve product sign-up process, basically the UX is shit and the backend is even worse, never felt so bad looking at terrible software design my entire life and career. My first assignment was to introduce some sanity. (Mr. Supervisor's exact words)

Anyway, I report directly to upper management but need to get onboarded by current technology expert who's highly skilled at writing shitty code and is also stupid, literally.

It took the whole day to get him to grant access to the private repo in order to start working but that's not the story.

So, I'm seated, demoralised about the structure of software I have to work on and here I was refreshing localhost:7878 consistently and was consistently getting the message:
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

So, this same codebase I have is suppose to be the exact same one that's powering the app in production. I was furious and confused. Is stupid calling me a bitch already??? He wants to fuck??? What the hell!!!

I called him and turns out, I was suppose to switch branches. The branch I had was suppose to show that message intentionally (??!???!???) (His words exactly), I couldn't even muster the words "Why" completely before he hung up.

So basically, I got onboarded today. Quite successfully, I must add, because I know exactly the battlesuit I have to wear to my new remote job going forward!

MOTHERFUCKING SHIT FOR BRAIN RETARDS POSTING UTTER DUMB QUESTIONS ON STACKOVERFLOW EXPECTING YOU TO JUST GIVE THEM THE ANSWER AND FUCK OFF.
I'M SICK AND TIRED OF THOSE MORONS THAT DO NOT EVEN HAVE THE DECENCY TO SAY THANK YOU, LET ALONE ACCEPT YOUR ANSWER WHICH THEY JUST COPY/PASTE IN THEIR SHITTY FUCKING CODEBASE FULL OP STRING CONCATENATION BULLCRAP. CRAWL BACK TO THE SHADOWS FROM WHENCE YOU CAME YOU DUMBASS SLACKER SOFTWARE-NOOBS. YOU HAVE NO PLACE AMONG CARING DEVELOPERS!!!

I am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

I was hired as JS Dev, done some projects with Angular and Node, after several months my boss told me to maintain a FUCKING PHP webapp with no documentation and shitty codebase. After he saw the results, he told me *man, you got some potential*, and he assigned me to build websites using wordpress(WTF is he thinking!). I thought that was the last time he would do something ridiculous, Yesteday he asked me if i can do Video Animation(After Effects)!!

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

Hired a designer below me.. guy never wrote a full back nor frontend... Used npm shit for all his solutions and worked his way above me just by kissing ass and polluting the codebase in such a way 70% would be open source shitty plugins for shit he could not do by himself code wise...

At some point he assigned some of his tasks to me and I couldn't work with his patchy framework that was non existent within the codebase I worked on ...

At some point between npm installed tantrums I got pulled up to HR because my code quality dropped... And it was this fucktart that accused me of this saying I could not do modern development...

In the end I either had to butkiss after his butts or just quit, so I did the latter... I told him and HR I owned alot more code quality than this asshat but just not his way of working and therefor it was more an issue of code equality I was never aware of ...

A month after that the company got overtaken by some silicon valley bullshit company buying up competition, and he is still working within that shithole dealing with 90's tech...

Was the best thing that happened to me, after that I grew alot in skillset and such by investments from other jobs and projects... If I would still work there today I would consider myself a caveman

I fucking hate my boss so much

He looks down on me like I’m some idiot who doesn’t know his shit.
The other day he was trying to explain OAuth2.0 to me in the most dumbed down way ever, even after telling him I do already know how OAuth 2.0 works. He just said “oh well just making sure” and continued explaining it to me the exact same way. Felt shitty having something explained to you which you already know in such a way in front of all of your coworkers

Whenever I give my thoughts on something he answers with an argument that’s essentially true but pretty stupid:

B: “We don’t need to bundle our JS files” (see my other rant)
M: “Our load time is around 15 seconds though and it takes forever to update our script tags”
B: “Yes but it’s only 15 seconds once and the tags are already there so it’s fine”

How do you reply to something like that??

On top of that, his code is absolutely awful, always looks hacked together, lacks documentation and i don’t think he has written a unit test in his life

I don’t even like frontend, was told I would mostly do backend and it seems like all I’m doing recently is write fucking javascript because even if I wanted to write backend code, it’s nearly impossible to write clean code in this pile of horseshit codebase

I got in trouble for refactoring code to be modular. They said “thats too complicated the maintenance team”.

Said coworker produced a kludge of copy pasted code so the dumb ass maintenance team could understand it.

tldr; interfaces and abstract classes are too advanced for our employees so make the codebase shitty on purpose.

Read the following in Morgan Freeman’s voice.

Okay everyone sit on down and get ready for story time. There once was a workspace that was a pain in the ass to setup. It often would take an entire day even for the most experienced devs on the team...for it was a workspace perched atop a swamp of shit that would require a whole year to refactor into something that isn’t shit.

It was inherited, passed down, stepped in and scrapped from the boot soles of every programmer that ever touched it. It was an amalgam of old, new, and third party components with a class path a mile long and no package management because the company although physically in the present, somehow maintained a temporal presence in the past. And there was nothing that the team hated more than setting that workspace. In short it was an unholy mess that made Satan cry and Dennis Ritchie spin in his grave so much that the state of California attached magnets and a coil to his body and casket to generate electricity.

Then one day the untalented clowns known as App Group decided that our IDE should be owned and configured strictly through them. They took poor Eclipse and mounted so much silly shit to it that it resembled a riding lawn mower with a fax machine and a blender duct taped to it. Eventually as everything the company touched did, it simply turned into a broken, shitty mess that not even Jesus Titty Fucking Christ could bring back the dead.

And then, every month or so the IDE would break in such a grand way that every developer had to rebuild their workspace...the very same Lovecraftian monster disguised as a code base. It was just too much to bear for old Deus. He was all out of fucks and there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to quiet his injured soul. So he stood on a chair, carved his name in a rafter and tied a noose to it, put it around his neck and finally kicked the chair out from under himself. I am told he even pooped his pants and the post mortem shit in the seat of his pants was still better than the codebase at work. I’m Morgan Freeman.

Alright, biiiiig rant time.

Shitty webdevs who randomly use an entire framework for some tiny feature in the middle of their codebase because they couldn't figure out how to do it with native and completely fucking up their syntax, consistency and standards set beforehand (not that there were any to begin with, this dude program's​ like 3-4 people just jumbled all their crap into one massive pile).
Not only that but throughout the entire backend this guy flip-flops on passing an the error value before results in his callbacks, so now i have to check his functions everytime I use them after spending 2-3 sessions debugging to figure out wtf was going wrong.

Please for the love of god, if you wanna dance to your own beat, LEAVE COMMENTS

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

Overwhelmed by a shitty codebase? Use the boy scout rule and leave the code you're editing a little better than you found it.

Worked wonders for me when I realized I could spend literal months refactoring and desperately needed a systematic approach.

Little by little that rotting house of cards will turn into something okay. It's a nice feeling looking back after a couple of months and see what you've done to make things better.

Also, make sure to remember the cost of wrestling with hurried legacy solutions in your estimates as well. Just adjust the level of bluntness depending on your work environment: admitting that things can/need to be improved can be unpleasant for some to hear even though it's true.

Working in a non-IT department makes working as a developer really painful if the whole organisation is set up to be restricted with software installs or using specific hardware etc.

For context, I work in a marketing team with literally myself and one other developer, and some other people in a completely separate organisation, physically separated. We're responsible for overhauling the website and associated sites as part of a transformation project.

Had to use my own, shitty 2013 macbook to run XAMPP because I'd have to file a software request to IT for anything remotely developer related (even trying to run Git, Node, or Python or anything is a pain because I can't actually install anything permanently or to an actual drive as it's all network accounts).

I'm not asking for equipment/access because I'm an elitist bastard, I'm doing it so I can actually do my job.

God forbid I want to use a text editor, or some kind of build tool to manage our codebase better than just cowboy coding it without using my own device for work matters.

Fucking hate my job 😡
I joined as nodejs dev at a mnc 3months ago involved in banking software in which i dont have any domain knowledge.. first 10 days I was told to go through fucking udemy nodejs and graphql tutorial (wtf) which i already have experience with before joining.. after that my reporting manager gives me task to resolve fields and gave me shitty jira story link to read.. that shit story link had no explanation about the fields and what the database it is, then she says to use some shitty sdk which is built internally by shiity devloper which had no documentation and have to follow other module which was again written by that sr. Dev... They hav fucked up the graphql and nodejs and entire stack and also till date no one has ever given any explanation about the domain and the fields and database schema.. this manager refuses to share knowledge about the domain now how the fuck i resolve the graphql schema which was again written by non technical b.a.. all they have used is latest technology in a shitty way with no standards to to follow .. no dataloading no caching no batching.. use shitty sdk which does not give access to dbconn and fucking tightly coupling expressjs which when i start consumes crazy 400Mb of memory .. these fucking seniors devs + the fucking b.a having 12+. Yrs exp each have fucked the entire codebase... Each day killing my passion for app development.. fuckkk ... Dunno what to do now

Fuck you google android IME team and fuck their open source policy..

So recently i had a chance to work with AOSP LatinIME code, basically our Android keyboard was forked from very old code base of LatinIME and my job was to change its base version to latest Version available on AOSP repository. Downloaded latest Android 8 codebase. Did 2 weeks of deep investigation of what improvements we will get from upgraded code base.

And I came to know that those Google fucking cunt sucking dick heads deprecated that project and broke the whole thing to a pice of shit. Half of the code is broken with fucked up todo stuff and motherfucking missing method implementation with not implemented warnings. What those motherfucker did is that they abandoned the open-source project after they released Google GBoard, and fucked the stable code by adding quard gram support and dictionary download with multi account features which was never completed by those motherfuckers..

Those misguiding donkey shit fuckers kept a depreciated project in AOSP build tree which has not received a single fucking commit from shitty ass Google IME team, is said to be reference model of Android IME implementation..

What kind of fucking shit is going with open-source code in name of making competition high with thirt party Android keyboard developers ..

Fucking shit fucking ime team .. fuck you .. wasted my fucking time reading your shitty code base .. Fucking shit

FUCKING SHITTY PHP WITH NO FUCKING COMMENTS AND A JOKE OF A DOCUMENTATION WELL I DON'T FUCKING KNOW WHY THAT BUGS HAPPENING NONE OF THIS CODE MAKES SENSE AND IT APPEARS TO BE HELD TOGETHER BY DUCT TAPE AND PRAYERS AND IM GONNA LOSE MY MIND IF I SEE ONE MORE FUCKING 200 LINE FUNCTION WITH A NAME LIKE 'transformData' WHAT THE HOLY FUCK DOES IT DO I SWEAR TO GOD THIS CODEBASE NEEDS TO BE FIREBOMBED

Ever work on a codebase that's so shitty, that if you do something in a generally accepted and expected way the entire product shits the bed? Cuz that's the situation I am in. Been working on the same fucking feature for like 4 sprints because it keeps being sent back because every time I adjust it to the shittiness that is currently in the baseline, someone changed something and it explodes again. And the worst part is that this is a well known and established problem. Basically every engineer, except the guy who wrote it of course, hates this system. Hates the baseline, and hates the platform. Yet I'm the one who is "losing trust" with the team, even though I get my shit up and running early all the time. They just break the foundation every time.

So.. how does being in a company makes you a better engineer?

For eg, this year my team shipped these 2 interesting features (among other things) that were never part of our product.
these were crazy ideas, that got liked by our users, and might have impacted the finances of company positively.

However the engineers (not me, i worked on them even less) that worked on it, did they got their knowledge growth? they just analysed the old codebase, its shitty architecture and drawbacks, and added the feature around it in a similar manner. so basically it was building debris over the debris

but is this growth? if that engg was me, would my experience in dealing with debris and building debris over it (that somehow works) be helpful for any other organisation?

And number (2) : is my organisation even a good one if its allowing to build debris over debris and not leaving a space for discussion or cleaning the mess or thinking about better architectures, data structures for scalability and robustness?

An engineer's growth should be made by giving them a chance to explore new and best solutions and not the best hacks i guess

We are at the end of the school year, at least in France.

This is my recap of this shitty year.

My school try to teach programming, and that’s just a try.

Some of the dudes do not event know what a variable was.

For a second year university diploma, they don’t teach OOP, no Git, no DP, no JS, no clean code or whatever.

So at the end of the year, you’ll be able to code in procedural, no versioning, spaghetti code and a big mess in folder structure, lack of interactivity because of poor JS knowledge.

Well a codebase which makes you crying blood, literally.

And that’s what a second year university diploma ...

Fortunately for the most curious there’s so much to learn out of the school but, damn, why are some schools so retarded ?
For almost 8k€/year you just receive a piece of paper and you’re still a shit in your *suppose to be* job.

I'm the lead dev on this team. The project is split into multiple separate modules to comply with separation of concerns, and so new devs don't need the whole fucking codebase (risking them running away with everything) to contribute to the project as a whole.

So we don't need a fucking config file to enable and disable features.

So we don't need to upload a 500mb monolith every time we want to test a change.

So we can test old fucking versions of modules without merging it back into the entire codebase.

What did this fucking dev do? He was having one small issue with Maven. One. It wasn't updating his local snapshots to the correct Artifactory version.

He decided, instead of trying to fucking fix it: HEY, LETS IGNORE THE LEAD DEV'S DEMAND TO KEEP THEM SEPARATE. IM GOING TO MERGE THEM INTO ONE MODULE FOR SOME FUCKING REASON.

I refuse to continue working with this dev if he's going to sidestep my demands and undermine my authority. He wants to go it alone? Be my fucking guest. I'm not touching his shitty single-codebase monolithic monstrosity.

If this is going to be a regular fucking occurrence, he can eat a dick and choke on it.

I really need to get out of this clusterfuck of a mess I got into, A.K.A. our website projects. Now, it feels more and more like all these problems and issues we're having are all my fault.

Here's the thing: I had 0 experience on web development before I got this job. I started as an intern, expecting to learn all the right practices and techniques on building websites. Nope. What happened was I was thrown in this big project, responsible for almost every functionality that it was supposed to have.

A junior-level guy. Doing a huge project on his own. Hell, I'm probably even lower than a junior. But here I am, pigeonholed in this shittard. My boss even said to me, "you know more about the website than I do." Fucking hell. He's not even aware of the clusterfucks I've done on the codebase because, fuck, what did I know? I don't even get feedbacks about my code. I don't fucking know if I'm doing all of these shit right. I don't know if this function is supposed to be here, or if it's supposed to behave that way, and, shit, the concept of test-driven development is probably something my boss has never heard of before.

So right now, I'm a bit obsessed with web development best practices, and how to write clean, maintainable code. I would probably get more learning from going to meetups than I will ever have from this place.

This has been a very shitty start of my career. I hope a much better learning experience will be plentiful at my next job (if anyone's willing to hire me). It would be like starting all over again. Sorry for the long post. I would like to put this as a blog post, but it's probably not a good idea, specially since I'm looking for a new job. Thank God for devRant.

It sometimes really sucks to see how many developers, mostly even much better than me, are too lazy to implement a function to its full UX finish.

Like how can you not implement pagination if you know there's going to be fuck ton of content, how can you not allow deleting entries, how can there be no proper search of content, but instead some google custom search, how can you not implement infinite loading everywhere, but only in parts of your application, how can you not caching a rendered version or improve the page, that loads EVERY SINGLE ENTRY in your database with 11k entries, by just adding a filter and loading only chunks of it.

I know sometimes you need to cut corners, but there's rarely any excuse with modern toolsets to just write 3 lines more and have it ready for such basic things.

I sometimes just wake up during the night or before falling asleep and think "oh, what if in the future he might want to manage that, it's just another view and another function handling a resource, laravel makes that very easy anyway", write in on my list and do it in a blink the next day, if there's nothing else like a major bug.

I have such high standard of delivery for myself, that it feels so weird, how somebody can just deliver such a shitty codebase (e.g. filled with "quick/temporary implementations"), not think of the future of the application or the complete user and or admin experience.

Especially it almost hurts seeing somebody so much more versatile in so many areas than me do it, like you perfectly fine know how to cache it in redis, you probably know a fuck ton of other ways I don't even know of yet to do it, yet you decide to make it such a fucking piece of shit and call it finished.

Stayed up extra late fixing a bug. Fucking bug is buried in a thousand lines of MOTHERFUCKING SML.
FUCKING ASSHOLE SHIT-WAGGLING COCKSMEAR AND THAT SHITTY, GODDAMNED BACKWARDS FUCKING LANGUAGE!
Fucking wasted an entire night chasing down a fucking bug in SML with no positive effect.
I wound up commenting out 7/8 of the entire fucking codebase to try to find the fucking bug. No positive effect.
Finally had to go to sleep because my son was about two hours from waking up.
Getting back to work, and within twenty minutes I found the fucking bug and fixed it.
Fucking wasted nearly an entire night's sleep, and I ended up fixing the fucking bug before finishing my morning coffee.
I seriously fucking hate motherfucking SML.

I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.

We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.

So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.

4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.

I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.

The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!

I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.

Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.

I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.

I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)!

Worst was getting head hunted into my current role at this terrific company.
Three months later I’m done with it.
It’s not shit shitty codebase, or the lack of direction that self governing teams have. It’s not the megalomaniac company owner. It’s the bullshit team mobbing and 8 hours of video calls a day.

The best part.
Come he’ll or high water I’m getting myself out before the end of the year.
I’d rather be busy and have f’k all chance of promotion than any more of this. At least the day will fly by.
Just hope I don’t make the same mistake twice, that’s become my biggest worry now.

Another project, another team, another shitshow in codebase.

Now instead of doing work and implementing long awaited features... few weeks of minor refactorings ahead, untangling unnecessary complexities...

... but mostly - explaining the team why their 12-months work is pile of shitty spaghetti, and how it should really be done.

Explaining basics to "seniors" is the most exhausting thing.

So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.

context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.

in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.

BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.

so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.

boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?

what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.

but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me

When I do the quick'n'dirty against that nasty bug.

I feel super discouraged. I just got a new job from being let go from my previous one, and I’m already thinking about quitting.

They really threw me into the weeds with a couple of complex tasks that require a lot of BE work and all I really do is FE. I’m still just trying to learn how the framework actually works. I think they expect me to become full stack. Now I find myself just starting at the computer screen most of the day because I have no fucking idea how to start working. The codebase and local environment is also fucked up super bad and barely runs on my machine.

Also, whenever I reach out these people they give the most minimal answers and have swollen egos. The frameworks they use have a really shitty community and bad documentation, so googling anything is really pointless. Working on this project, it has made me consider giving up development.

I am wondering if this is just a me thing though. Should I quit or stick with it for a bit?

At this point I fucking hate my project. After 3 months I literally can not concentrate, I am just staring on a screen, smashing my hands on the keyboard and praying that it will fucking work without bugs. At this point it still works pretty well. I am so sorry for everyone that will have to work on this after I leave. According to the project leader it should not take more than 20 more hours. Hes a really cool guy, but if he's going to talk optimistically about this fucking project once more I am gonna rape his wife and his dog. Last fucking time he said that its just 2 already implemented features that just need to get connected together, I spent 30 hours rewriting half of the codebase because how inconsistent and shitty the code was. I am not fuckin suprised that we are going to rewrite whole shit from a scratch, because the code is already unmaintainable. Wish me luck, because I really need it to survive another week working on this trash.

Just reed a comment in the fucking shitty codebase im working on :

/* temporary fix */

I’m fucking done guys !

I feel like i am being forced to own a shitty module in our codebase.
It was developed by previous owners and they made a frankenstien monster out of it: Its one part of codebase that is very huge, does not follow the code standards, is making complex kinds of api calls and using very niche components. It gets bugs once in a while BUT IT WORKS.

It fuckin works and is one of the important steps before customer purchases a company product, so kinda part of revenue generation flow.

But this module was never a part of our codebase which we would usually touch. it was owned by another team, they would add enhancements , new features to it and fix the bugs .

When i joined the team, i was once asked to help those guys as a "resource" because they wanted to get something shipped and were low on bandwidth. So i just worked on one of the screens, added a small bugifx and voila, task is done and am back to other part of the app.

But now out of random, they decided to pass on the ownership to ur team, gave a small KT which didn't really explained a lot of actual codebase, but rather the business functionality of it(and that too poorly). And my TL is saying that i should own it because "I worked on that module before"

I don't know how to deal with this frankenstien monster. Earlier a bug came and i was out of my wits to understand why this bug came. their logging is weird and not explaining a lot, their backend devs help provide aws logs but those aren't very helpful either .

the best i could do was declare that their technical approach is wrong and we should modify it, but that idea was quickly squashed.

ITs quite possible that company isn't going to change this module or add any new features further. but everytime a bug would come, i would be getitngfrustrated looking at their frankenstien monster

Shitty legacy codebase made by shovelling pile of different shit by some 'cool dude' who left the company 3 years ago. Fixing bugs on this pile of shit all the time, but also I have to document everything as documentation wasn't there at all and fix the whole damn project in the meantime. No linters, no types, ancient libraries that have shitton of issues, hacky behaviours wherever you look, no tests whatsoever.

Except when we want to refactor/rewrite we don't get time for fixing the whole shit as it is worthless - there's no value for customers in that.

the other one was shitty HR talk which consisted of bashing on my technical competencies by computer illiterate troglodyte after which I left the company. They asked me could I stay for 2 more months.

That was that one single NO that felt so great that I will remember it for the rest of my life.

so which job pays for improving an existing thing and not being a tool for your boss's whims? I guess the answer is a house-helper cause devs for sure aren't paid for clearing a shitty codebase.

i recently made a commit because i was do angry at the issue . this was the message "fixing a stupid bug from previous owner". it got squashed but i still felt better lol.
there are a few classes in our codebase that are so infuriating that i want to run a bulldozer on them and build from the ground up. multiple bugs ate caused from them, but we simply ignore because we know that our monkey iq QA won't be able to replicate them and we won't be answerable.
I hate to be in this position. the mgmt won't be giving me time to fix this shit but rather want us to add 2k more features to this Frankensteins monster.

adding to this, I can't get my satisfaction creating some hobby project and solving issues in that coz A) it won't be as massive as my company proj and B I won't be interested in building a dimmy project for a longer time, which does not attract any actual users :/

As an android dev when I inherited a shitty project thats when I realized what really means to write readable and most importantly testable code. Codebase I inherited wasnt even really that bad it was quite readable, but boy it was not suited for any unit/instrumented tests. im talking spaghetti code.

Nowadays I refactor apps to make sure they are testable instead of spending weeks writing tests for a shitty codebase which was done without thinking about separation of concerns. Clients hate the extra couple weeks on top of request but what can I do, if they want tests they need to work with TDD approach or give extra time for refactors.

Compare and harmonize the web configs

Oh no someone set execution timeouts to 14 days

Fuck fuck fuckity duck

Hey compare all the web configs of all environments and harmonize them all wtf cmon bruh do your job as a developer

Take them and back them up into svn. What do you mean svn isn't a back up system of course it is well its the only thing we have fuck

What do you mean we have shit logging where people will catch an exception and only print the word exception in the log you can figure it out can't you we have live produxtion issues that hace to be solved now what the fuck

How dare you make a. Mistake copying our shitload of a bloated codebase and configuring our 100s of different options all by fukcing hand what the fuck dude do yoh write anyrhing down?

Please catalogue all the exception mails we are getting but we have no db or error reporting system so they all just plop into tue inbox and thats all ypur fuckjng data figure it out kid

This is a rewarding, fulfilling job whwrw you can be both dev ops and a developer and manage all of our fucking environments of which there are about 15 of all your own with no sort of tool or software to aid you because haha what the fuck we wouldn't make your life easy

Whata that you want to spend time to write stuff or change stuff that will nake it easier fot you fuxk that bruh get back to your biklable tasks like holy shit you thjnk this is a charity ofr aomw shit

Live production issues
Live production issues
Produxtion issues. A ghost in the machine. Find it fix if find it fix it find it fix it cmon why can't you fix it I expect you to spend your day hopelessly pretending to try to solve something you fucker

One of the only peopel able to help you sometimes though hes a bit of an old laxky, yeah hea fucking leaving see ya seeya kid and now we're not hirinf anyone to fuckjng help you no no no managing and monitoring the environments its your jov alll fof them every sngle on do you knkw all the xonfiguraiton values for them yet??

Instead we are hiring a new sales person to fucking make us some more money and we don't need naother seceloper to help you infqct lets have you use this mid end retail computer from 2014 to develop on yeah yeah oh but all our shitty code and visual studip will destry your memory but too bad!! Hahahahahdhsj

Go lice is all you, why sare you so slow

How long will it take
How long will it take
How long will it take
How long witll it tqk2
How long will it take holy shit
Give time estimate for sonethign that I don't fucking know how about it will tqke till fuxk you oxloxk

Fellow Ansible developers. I'm talking to you.
Are you freaking high or simply your morning pills have some serious side effects?
How do you manage to introduce a number of regressions in every fucking major release? How on earth you feel comfortable in breaking API in a minor and even bug fix releases?
You need to get me right. I really like Ansible project but those things... I imaging you every other day as a bunch of hamsters trying to find an exit in a shitty labyrinth which you call the codebase.
If you will not stop to eat and smoke those things this would became a lot worse indeed.

Fellow ranters I have a question.

Do any of you have experience of going from a consultant job to working as a developer for a product company, where the thing you're developing is the actual product and not just some side thing (like a infrastructure company having a website for example).

If so, how did the experiences differ from one another?

I'm considering switching positions to a SaaS company and I'm just wondering how much of all the consultant based BS that I'm constantly stressing over will be erased if I go there.

My biggest gripes about work in my few years of developing have been the lack of team work, really ill formed requirements, low knowledge of the codebase among coworkers and just badly written code bases.

I wonder how much of this stuff is just the nature of the work and how much could be traced back to developers pushing out shitty stuff due to hourly billing, people leaving several times a year.

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.