I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

I went to sleep at 7 fucking AM.
Mom kept knocking on my door until I woke up. Apparently I am the only one in this fucking house who can give directions to guests coming home.

I mean I feel like a fucking Gollum right now. Fuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkk !!! 😠😠😠😡😡😡

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

One night, after one very stressful week of production code fixes (I was working on a game with some friends and I created the network infrastructure for P2P and database communication from scratch), I was at my gf's house. After we fell asleep, I stood up and screamed right at her something like "I fucking already told you how X works and how to communicate with Y. Learn to write code properly and after double checking yours then you shall ask me for a non-existing 'bug' fix. Learn how to properly write event based code and use polling you moron!". After that I turned to the other side and fell asleep immediately.
When I saw her the next morning sleeping in the couch, I could not understand why... Only after she described to me the whole incident I started laughing.
After that I just took two weeks off the project and after that period I never actually worked the same way (so hard) in my free time with them.

Okay. So my dumbass boss took this project that had a steep timeline. I told him straight up, it won't work because we won't make the timeline. If we do this, I will be the one bending over backwards to deliver. I don't like to promise and fail. I got the oh don't worry let's just try. If we don't make it that's fine. Unfortunately that's not how I work. I refuse to deliberately fail. So I say okay and we begin. I suggested open source is the fastest way to deliver bit the fucked up part is, I am the only senior dev in the team. I will be expected to reverse engineer the open source app to connect our own deployment parameters. Use tech I have never used before. Connect frontend and backend. Handle dns bullshit. I have literally been working on Vibes and coffee for the past two weeks because ofcourse I ran into so many issues. Now I have an extension for Monday and I hate to fail. So I am not sleeping or resting just working on a fucking java app I didnt build and I am expected to make it work seemlessly on our production environment. I made some progress. Deployed frontend, deployed backend. Forgot to connect production dB so I decided to go with azure database for mysql driver since we have credits on azure. Now my java app is pissing itself over ssl handshake. I generate my keystore and add it and now java socket just times out. I want to pummel somebody or a punching bag that looks like my boss.

Please take sleep deprivation seriously!
Take care of it and don't allow stress to take you over.

Here's a little story of what happened to me:

I've had sleep problems for all of my life, but the beginning of last summer 2018 it went too far. I turned 18 and somehow all the school, dev and personal work started to pile up, I stressed about them and started to have no sleep every other day and little sleep another. Immediately I took time off from everything for trying get better sleep.

Having no sleep means that your brain starts to run in really low gear but you might not even notice it. So I started stressing about every little detail, making ridiculous decisions and doing stuff that didn't really make any sense.

I went to a doctor and was ordered to take time off for a month or so and start medication with bunch of different pills. At the time I thought the medication could wait for a day and went to an old work friend's place for night stay to discuss about everything. That wasn't obviously the thing I should've done. I was up all of that night, he slept, and in the morning he noticed something was really a bit off about me.

We went to the hospital and I agreed for a treatment in there. They got me to sleep normally again and I rested there for a while. I went back home or actually my parents' place and the problems continued, and back to the hospital I go. This time there was no choice. After a really long while, my mind started to stabilize enough that I was allowed to return to my everyday life: enjoying my summer break. It was an awful summer. I often felt lonely and bored. But at least I slept normally.

In the fall I returned to my usual busy schedule. And life's good again. This time I will manage my stress and sleep better and take them to account when planning schedule.

Tried getting enough sleep for the Monday and failed miserably.
First, I made my kids washed, like usual, around 6pm. Then tried to put them to sleep. The younger one went to sleep, the older refused. Wanted to play, run, jump, sing and scream. After an half an hour his screaming woke up younger. Now I had two kids to put to sleep back again.
The younger is one year old and requires more attention, otherwise cries.
After serious fight the older was forced to sleep. He tried to jump over me, bite me, kick, hit, eat chocolate, wanted to pee, then jump, run and fight again. I ended up lying him forcibly in the bed, holding his hand by kind of a block, so that he couldn't move to much. Took 15 minutes, but he felt asleep. It was 22. Joys of having 3yo kid.
After more 30 minutes and a bottle of milk the 1yo was sleeping.
At 2am the older woke and cried. I woke, tried to make him calm, he pushed me away and went back to sleep. Now it's 3:40, my sleeping pill wore off, and I won't take another one, because I need to get up at six.

This is how you get a good night's sleep before having a busy week.

time zone shift.

Am I the only one whos's inner clock seems to go absolutely crazy...

Might be due to my health issues, but whenever these one hour time shifts happen - trouble sleeping starts again, feeling sluggish and blue and nothing seems to work.

I hope it doesn't take long to readjust, cause today was completely unproductive

I have a rant. A genuine rant, not a funny story, etc.

I want a keyboard. I need one. It can cost €500, as long as it won't break in a year and fulfils all my needs. Make it a €1000, I don't care. What are my needs then? Well...

It has to be a split keyboard - two halves. But wireless in every aspect, ergonomic, with multimedia keys on its outer edges (preferably pointing outwards, not up) and a heavy metal trackball on the right outer edge (preferably upper right corner). That's a bare minimum.

On top of that it probably some magnetic scrolls for things like navigating pages, changing volume and fidgeting in general wouldn't hurt. Also I'd prefer it to snap back into a one-piece whenever I need it to lie on my knees, e.g. when I type while sitting on a coach (I have a coach PC setup, no desk, and there's a reason). Why do I need it to split then...?

I had an accident. Kind of broke my back when I was 11. It's mostly okay now after couple years of rehabilitation and many more years of careful living. Luckily the only two wheels I ride on are powered by a 105.97 hp @ 9,970 rpm engine. Still, I try to be careful so I tried tons of work hygiene techniques over the years and I found out anything over 2 hours is best done while lying flat.

Coding while lying flat has its challenges, mostly focused around screen and input. Ever since I got a VR headset half of them got solved but the other half - acquiring a suitable keyboard - it's very hard to satisfy. I tried that with a one-piece keyboard lying on my stomach. Turns out actively bending elbows quickly wears them out (hello tennis players). So a split keyboard it has to be. So far I tried 4 different ones and I had to modify the cable connecting both halves in each and every one of them so that it'd be long enough to go behind my back. The main cable itself I only had to modify once because usually there're extensions available.

Apart from cables, all of those keyboards had issues. Starting from some kind of de-syncing when keys from both halves would randomly register in a wrong order - I didn't know it's possible with a cable connected halves... I did try two generic WiFi keyboards (using one for each hand) and they unfortunately suffered from that very same issue but I was sure it wouldn't happen if the device was designed to be a one unit from the very beginning, right? And yet it in 2 of the tested devices.

Other than that, plugs disconnecting on their own forcing me to take off the headset and fiddle around, too high key travel that'd strain the wrists after a few hours, even the noise that would wake up my girlfriend sleeping in a separate room were all a common issue (I briefly had an almost completely silent WiFi mechanical keyboard from Logitech we both really liked, but it was a one-piece). Once I got a split keyboard that was "natively" WiFi but not only the two halves were still connected with a cable that turned out to be way too short for my needs, it also had a very noticeable lag despite the high price - a lag way higher than any of the cheap WiFi keyboards I owned in the past. So I sent it back. Now IDK what to do because AFAICT there are no more models available, at least where I live.

So yeah, I need a keyboard and I'll probably have to make one myself. Sorry, just had to vent.

fuck.. FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!
I'mma fakin EXPLODE!

It was supposed to be a week, maybe two weeks long gig MAX. Now I'm on my 3rd (or 4th) week and still got plenty on my plate. I'm freaking STRESSED. Yelling at people for no reason, just because they interrupt my train of thought, raise a hand, walk by, breathe, stay quiet or simply are.

FUCK!

Pressure from all the fronts, and no time to rest. Sleeping 3-5 hours, falling asleep with this nonsense and breaking the day with it too.

And now I'm fucking FINALLY CLOSE, I can see the light at the end of the tunne<<<<<TTTOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTT>>>>>>>

All that was left was to finish up configuring a firewall and set up alerting. I got storage sorted out, customized a CSI provider to make it work across the cluster, raised, idk, a gazillion issues in GH in various repositories I depend on, practically debugged their issues and reported them.

Today I'm on firewall. Liason with the client is pressured by the client bcz I'm already overdue. He propagates that pressure on to me. I have work. I have family, I have this side gig. I have people nagging me to rest. I have other commitments (you know.. eating (I practically finish my meal in under 3 minutes; incl. the 2min in the µ-wave), shitting (I plan it ahead so I could google issues on my phone while there), etc.)

A fucking firewall was left... I configured it as it should be, and... the cluster stopped...clustering. inter-node comms stopped. `lsof` shows that for some reason nodes are accessing LAN IPs through their WAN NIC (go figure!!!) -- that's why they don't work!!

Sooo.. my colleagues suggest me to make it faster/quicker and more secure -- disable public IPs and use a private LB. I spent this whole day trying to implement it. I set up bastion hosts, managed to hack private SSH key into them upon setup, FINALLY managed to make ssh work and the user_data script to trigger, only to find out that...

~]# ping 1.1.1.1
ping: connect: Network is unreachable
~]#

... there's no nat.
THERE"S NO FUCKING NAT!!!

HOW CAN THERE BE NO NAT!?!?!????? MY HOME LAPTOP HAS A NAT, MY PHONE HAS A NAT, EVEN MY CAT HAS A MOTHER HUGGING NAT, AND THIS FUCKING INFRA HAS NO FUCKING NAT???????????????????????

ALready under loads of pressure, and the whole day is wasted. And now I'll be spending time to fucking UNDO everything I did today. Not try something new. But UNDO. And hour or more for just that...

I don't usually drink, but recently that bottom shelf bottle of Captain Morgan that smells and tastes like a bottle of medical spirit starts to feel very tempting.

Soo.. how's your day

Dealing with relationships when you are a night owl. I don't burn the midnight oil like in my twenties but I don't want to go to sleep at 1030pm. Midnight is typical but I feel my actions affect my missus as she can't sleep when I'm not there...that said..she has issues sleeping anyway or nodding off. Whereas I can fall asleep in front a TV that's on no problems or whenever my head hits a pillow. I sleep on the couch when I stay up so I don't disturb her. Or does everyone here have a cushy work life balance job where you only work 9 to 5 and don't need to be on the pc.

Im trying really hard to sleep but I can’t. I’m supposed close my eyes and count sheep right?

Day 1 back from sick leave

Can't focus for shit, like even less so than usual
Not sure if it's the meds
General dissatisfaction here
The unengaging task
Personal issues
Or just sleeping like shit last night

Couldn’t sleep all night again... the last time this happened was 3 weeks ago.. so I’m getting better I guess..