Special Awards: In a previous life, I employed a South African gentleman by the name of Jack Howell. He had a thing about finding other South African ex-pats, and could often be heard asking people on the phone “Are you by any chance from South Africa?”.

Jack Howell would also do very stupid things. Like forget to come to work. When asked, he’d come up with random excuses - “It was my wife Gwyneth’s fault”, or “I was confused, I took wrong turnings”. Generally, he was a bit of a twat, and had a weird kind of smile he’d give you.

After he left the company, we came up with the idea of having an award for whoever acted the most like Jack Howell on a given day, or week. It was known as The Jack Howell Award. The award itself was whatever shitty thing we could find at the time - a construction made of folded paper and paper clips, or a weird 3 inch statue from a charity shop, or whatever really naff-beyond-belief item we could find at the time.

Where I work now, we have a shitty 12 inch statue of a woman with a dog that turned up in our office, courtesy of our Maintenance Manager. This is the new Jack Howell award. Currently awarded to a senior dev colleague who spent a day chasing a missing variable.

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

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!"

On friday a colleague reveived an email from one of our biggest customers. The email was about a public repository on github which contains our software. In the code were many emails from employees...

I'm the guy who is actually writing this software and we are in an early stadium of development. So I wrote this emails for a dropdown field plain in the code for testing. I would never do this in a release version!! We have a company bitbucket server where I push all my stuff to.

Two months ago my team leader aquired a student, he will be working during his graduation, and he has many fresh ideas. And he coded some cool stuff for a big conference here germany. But, BUT!! Last tuesday he has the awesome idea to publish our code on github. He didn't ask anyone. This repo was 3 days online, with emails from our customer. I asked him for a reason to do that. He thought they wouldn't find the repo. WTF?!?

I don't know what we can expect, but this is really shitty!

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

Been at a startup for 2-3 weeks, hood some presentations about Linux and Foss stuff but they didn't have any work for anyone and as such didn't pay anything.

Pretty shitty.

So a colleague was like "hey man, I seed you making those presentations and stuff but not getting anything back, I think I might got a job for you".

And now I do small data analysis at another company. And get money.

I've had a shitty day. Spent half an hour arguing with my manager that my disability was something that they have to take into consideration. Literally had to explain that ADHD is protected under the UK equality act. Was fucking furious by the end, did no work for the afternoon, couldn't deal. I literally work for a medical company.

A couple of years ago I got told, "jokingly" by a colleague, that "learning disabilities are made up excuses for stupid people". I have a learning disability (dyspraxia). They lacked both the skills and knowledge to do my job.

Don't make jokes like that. They're not funny, and make you look stupid.

In my previous work, my boss my horrendous. He didn't know anything about programming, databases or scripts. He often had ridiculous requests that we (two developers trainee) had to refrain.
But he wasn't the one who pissed me off the most.
My colleague, who was supposed to have had the same cursus as me, was as skilled as someone without any knowledge. He spent one year to make a database for a new site, with one table per product type and sub-type, per company and per slider. Today there are 93 tables in a database made for a presentation website. When I proposed to see his work, he refused, saying he knew what he was doing.

Now he's still there, I switched job, but I know he'll get the same diploma as me for this shitty pile of fuming crap, and it pisses me off beyond imagination.

I'm going insane.
My colleague wanted to sort an excel spreadsheet and got an error. "Can't sort, column width must match" (or something along the lines) . Which basically means you got non uniformly merged cells.
Without telling me this, he asked for training on how to change column width precisely, after spending 30 minutes explaining he done just that. Column by column for all 40 columns he did just that. Resized to 10 of something (no one really knows what those width numbers in Microsoft Excel really mean) and try to sort.
I Shit you knot, he got the exact same error and flipped out angry at me for creating a shitty system (I think he spent an hour or two total with double and triple checking the sizes)
I did laugh because of this, but I do feel bad for not asking what was the real reason before all of this.

When git blame tells you name@example.com wrote the shitty code, but he is actually reusing the address that was assigned to a former colleague with the same name.

Imagine a time when a colleague contributes a shitty spaghetti of non-optimized code that neither use mnemonic variables nor conventional naming of functions, and you can imagine the dark hours of maintaining it and your fingers itch to fix it but you don't have the time and the responsibility too to do it. He doesn't listen to you and you feel bad to tell this to the boss as the colleague is also a friend you've known since college and is a good person otherwise. No options seems to give peace.

So, I move house with my amazing, already configured and stable router with built in VPN, DDNS, Port forwarding and DHCP addresses.

Received ISP shitty router at new address and want to use as modem only, so I go read the manual.

"Bridge mode requires you to configure your other router with PPPoE and the ISP's credentials"

Landline is not working, so I cannot call the number to retrieve my password. After 2 days of waiting, engineer visits, installs master socket, dial tone yaaay.

Call number to get password, automated voice message has such a bad sound quality that I cannot figure out if it's saying F or S, and there are two of those letters.

Put ISP router in bridge mode, set other router to PPPoE and put credentials, nothing. Try with F and F, S and F, F and S, S and S... Nothing. Put it back to dynamic IP address, it works.

I resign myself and manually configure everything I had on the good router to the ISP one. A few issues with my server and DDNS, but hey, internet works.

Start missing the other functionality, try the password idiocy again. Nothing.

Next day, go to work, talk to a colleague that lives close and has the same provider: "I just put it into bridge mode and it worked".

Go back home, bridge mode on ISP router, Dynamic IP on good router, no credentials. It works.

Why do I always overcomplicate stuff?

Today I had to write some shitty code that should work on ie in compatibility mode which is like ie in Version 6. I only coded on the clients system and never backed up. Silly me. Every think worked so I continued with another clients project. Suddenly my colleague came in our office and told me that the client deleted my code by accident. I never will keep code on client systems only again in the future.

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)!

Well here it goes,

I started out in customer support (A lot of stuff to tell here).

1.
One of my colleagues would come to work drunk, like every day he would smell of boze (the hard stuff 80%+). When a customer got on his nerves he endet the call and threw his Keyboard across the room. He worked in the company 3+ Years after I left.

2. Another colleague would connect to his Personal Computer at his home and play WoW while at work ( Allthough the man was a genius with a lot of free time, until a new task was assigned to him)

3. My Boss at the time did some really shitty things. I worked 17 hour days (while I was 18) for a week, and at the end of the week he shredded the accrued overtime with some Bullshit Explanation. (I did not stay long after this shitshow happened).

4. A dispatcher who sent our technicians out scheduled their tasks so that they were on the road for weeks and did not see their families. This led to a very strong turnover among technicians.

And yes, this company still operates today.

So this is my first experience of shitty code written by colleague

God, for REST API she used ?id=<int>
Not only that,
if the route was /cms

she used GET method for /cms/get/?id= to get single record and
/cms/getAll again in GET method to get all records

Damn

Colleague (Lead Engineer): Hey, check my code. I'm trying to group a list of Request objects by their id. Something is not working here

Me: * saw his code, had a lot of shitty loops, called all for a quick meet, changed his shitty mess to one liner

list.stream()
.collect(Collectors.groupingBy(Request::getId))

Walked out like a boss*
😎

Reminded again why every professional developer should at least read and understand basic algorithms...

Colleague: I don't understand why this agregation query is so slow, the counting is on the DB.

This function used to work fine... Now it sometimes hangs.

Me thinking: why does everyone assume db has unlimited resources and computing power so everything should be quick (no time or space complexity)...

Maybe if everyone understood this stuff our code base wouldn't be so shitty from the start...

So here I work with this colleague that , at first , had a reasonable résumé. Whatever.

Time goed by and he is just doing tickets, clicking left and right, the usual grind of a shitty monitoring system which I am working intensely on deprecating that shit. Anyhoo

The last few days it became apparent that his resume was basically a hot air cake and he knows basically nothing intrinsically.
As I have stated before in previous rants, "everyone was a noob once"... But this guy...

He wants to do "something with Ansible"... "Ok what do you want to do?" , I asked (and I regret to have asked).
He basically wants to write new files on targets. Easy enough, I show him how he could do it with playbooks, inventory and role just for demonstrating the entire chain.

This guy chanes everything up, thereby breaking host group assignment, he launchea it on ALL machines...

Luckily it's a harmless file, so dodged a bullet there.

But the real wtf ia that he did it with the root account for our systems, without understanding the difference between "authentication" and "authorization"...

I am now explaining him what the difference is and how he can be able to check it. I give him the commands literally! ( sudo -l -U <user>)

Manages to fucking open up each sudoer file in vim , mistype or whatever he did in an attempt to leave vim... Breaks sudo...

Now he tries to spin it in such a way that I have steered him to break things.

"Dude you just fucking failed a copy/paste and you did absolutely fuckall without understanding what you are doing, then splurge out accusations because you did it wrong!"

FML

Worst: forced to work for 9 months on a shitty wp theme:
- colleague with no clue trying to make me do their work… check
- incompetent manager doing shit about it… check
- idiotic pipeline requiring to redeploy for every asset update… check
- micromanaging cto which for some fucking reason didn’t want to allow access to the writers, forcing the role of content editor on the devs… ducking check! Quack!!

Best: automated lots of processes in my free time, all stuff which I can reuse!

Hate feeling embarrassed for shitty quality work that I had no involvement in but the customer doesn’t know that. I keep reiterating that my former colleague did it!

Under pressure for a big feature that had to be merged into develop like one month ago. But I couldn't because of issues I discover every single fucking day.

Today's issue is that a Cucumber test fails. I try reproducing it on my machine, it fails with a different error. Apparently I need to download some 10GB database file from some company server.

Alright, let's download it. But it's damn too slow. Well, let's have lunch in the meantime.

I come back, the download timed out at basically the same point I left it at.

I don't wanna try again. Not without trying to improve things. Download speed is ridiculous. Switching from Wi-Fi to Ethernet definitely helps, I thought.

The cable doesn't work. The port LEDs are both off. Is that cable even connected to something? So I follow that damn cable throughout my colleagues' desks. I'm now doing things without even remembering why.

I finally find the other end. It is plugged to the wall. I try another plug, but that fucking LED is still off. A colleague tells me: not all the sockets are actually connected to the switch, you have to call IT to have yours patched. Stay calm, stay caaaaalm...

A small lamp turns on in my head. Maybe something in my laptop is broken. So I try with a colleague's ethernet. That fucking LED is still off. A-ha.

Turns out, the shitty macbook adapter has this Ethernet port that DOESN'T work out of the box. It needs a driver to even realize there's a port. I look for it, I find it. I finally have wired connection. It's like having drinking water again.

I turn off WiFi, I re-try downloading that fucking database.

Nope, it's still stupidly slow. The bottleneck was in the dumbfuck internal server.

FUCK.

At least I have Ethernet now.

Few months back I got a decent increment as a token of appreciation for my good work.
Yesterday we all received a Special townhall meeting invitation.
We all were wondering what it was about. Now my colleague who sits beside was guessing that it may be about a salary revision and she complained that she didn't get any increment last time.

Inner me: Why the heck company should increment your salary for the shitty work you do.
You are simply incapable of doing what you are supposed to do.
You spend more time talking crap rather than trying to learn and use it to write some non shitty code.
You should be thankful to the company for not firing you.

Today our PM planned to deploy in production an e-commerce based on PrestaShop.
A colleague of mine mamaged to implement everything that was necessary, and I made a small script to add random sales on random products every sunday.
We tested it several times in our environment, on multiple machines, and everything was working fine.

BUT
Today we launched the script on production server, and we was a little mistake.
"A bug? Say no more pal, I'll fix it!".

Fixed, tested on local environment, deployed and.... The first steps weren't working.

"Fatal error".
That's what I got. No exceptions, no error messages, no references.. Just "fatal error".
We spent two hours looking for the problem, thinking it was a server error that was just outputting that shitty message.

And you know what? Some fucking fat cocksucker son of a bitch thought it was an excellent idea to stop the code execution with a simple and very helpful "fatal error".

"oh, wait, there is an error here, let me print die(" fatal error"), ao the other developer will be able to find what's going on", he thought.

FUCK YOU MORON.

TL;DR: Avoid French software, they are a bounch of asshole (except some goos guy..)

So, I have this colleague (tho he is a student in my company, while I'm an employee), who wants to build a site, but doesn't want to learn how to build one...
I literally gave him everything one needs, yet he still complains about it not working the way he wants...

He literally does one out of 3 things:
- play shitty games and cheats in them
- attempt to build a site without understanding the "why does it work?"
- bother me with dumb questions that have been asked 1000000 times on StackOverflow...

Guys, i am having a tough time in work. So, i am sharing the story and questions here-

Initially, i was doing well with new projects and other existing projects where implemented new features.

But recently, i am assigned to a old project created by clients and some senior developer worked on it .

Ps: I was also assigned to this project 8 months earlier but was reassigned to other projects.

Now, Our senior developer who worked on it resigned because of the messy project and a lot of pressure from boss.
my colleague also resigned because of this.

Due to this, all this pressure thrown upon me. I am working on it relentlessly but i am soo burned out that i am actually feeling sick and constantly having headache.

And main thing is that the project has so many errors which iam getting during testing and i have to fix all of the error.
And yes they have documentation but shitty unreadable documentation . My manager also rebuking me why i dont remember things said to me 8 months earlier. (That time i just joined the company)

I don't know what will happen to me if i cant tackle this project.
And what should i do in such cases as my mental health is deteriorating day by day.

[opinions welcome]
I'm just furious right now!!!

So I'm on this project where we have to make a whole *very old* website look like it's brand new.

Thing is, the whole point of the project is to make exactly the same pages as on the existing website smh. No UX or UI suggestions.
Just put the navbar in a component that looks like a tab bar, who cares anyway!?

Btw, I'm in charge of the UI.

My colleagues and I (mostly my colleagues) made a react components library and we use it for this project.
Fucking inputs get thrown into tables and all that, but hey, that's what the client asked for.

So here I am with my shiny new page, and I just hand it over to the front-end dev who just arrived.
She's supposed to feed in the data.
I don't give a fuck you use flow or redux or whatever fancy tooling.
Just call your back-end, get the data, format it and feed my damn table with it. That's it.

So today, after 5 weeks she's in, she calls a meeting where she's screening a presentation to the team complaining about how long it took her to understand what I did and change it completely.
Pieces of code on screen, saying it's crap and it shouldn't be like that.

I'm not responsible for inputs in fucking table, the client is!
Of course I have nested components with data passed through all the way: it's a series of fucking radio buttons within a table within a form!

During 5 weeks, yoy didn't even come to me once saying it's not what you expected or you're having trouble with my work!
And there we blaming my job like I'm the bad guy?!

Tonight, everyone's going home thinking I'm no good at what I do and completely lost, all because of her.

If you got this far, I'd like to hear from you on how I should act with her and how to tell her what she did is awfully wrong?