!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Me and my wife are software engineers
Started dating while doing a project together
I guess you could say that we...
MERGED WITHOUT CONFLICTS

No doubts, the software engineers suggested this.

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rich Cook

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rich Cook

So we're both software engineers and we're getting married tomorrow

How you can make the perfect clickbait that will even bring highly intellectual software engineers to click on your things?
It is very easy you only have t... [read more]

EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2020)
-------------------------
We've been at this a few years now, and over the last 6 months we've been working closely with a brand consulting agency, and after numerous developer interviews, surveys and focus groups, we've come to realize "devRant" is simply not capturing the cultural zeitgeist of this new decade. Therefore, we have a bold new brand that will be rolling out over the coming week. devDucks is our bold vision for the future, today. devDucks speaks to a new generation of software engineers who resonate with a more upbeat, optimistic tone when they go to an anonymous web community to swear and lament their current work situation. While we finalize the new logo and other key marketing collateral, we have started a staged roll-out of our new brand styling, including the conversion of all avatars to literal devDucks. We hope this brings more joy to your ranting, as it has to ours. Sincerely, David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus) - devDucks co-founders

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

A group of ten top software engineers is sent to a class for aspiring managers. The teacher walks in and asks this question:

"You work for a software company which develops avionics (software that controls the instruments of an airplane). One day you are taking a business trip. As you get on the plane you see a plaque that says this plane is using a beta of the software your team developed. Who would get off?"

Nine developers raised their hands. The teacher looked at the tenth and asked, "Why would you stay on?"

The tenth said, "if my team wrote the software, the plane would not get off the ground, much less crash.

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning"

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots.
So far, the universe is winning."
-Rick Cook

A: Why did you leave your job?
B: To pursue my passions.
A: Which passion?
B: Jobs. I leave one and get another.

Software Engineers I tell you!

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.

Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".

Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?

Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?

Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.

Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?

I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.

But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.

Four engineers get in a car. The car won't start.

The mechanical engineer says:
It's a broken starter.

The electrician's engineer says:
The battery is dead.

The chemical engineer says:
There are impurities in the gas.

The software engineer says:
Guys, try getting out of the the car then back in!

So I just had an interview a couple weeks ago at one of the largest employers of software engineers in the country. After multiple stages of group interviews it came to the 2 on 1 individual interview with some project leads (picture devs using a MacBook with Github stickers - lads). Among the questions they asked me we both had a laugh at 2 of them:

Q: Explain how deadlocks work?
A: Hire me and I will explain how they work.

Q: Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
A: Celebrating 22s 22m 22h 22/12/2022.

Strangely enough they hired me 😎

A group of ten top software engineers is sent to a class for aspiring managers. The teacher walks in and asks this question:"You work for a software company which develops avionics (software that controls the instruments of an airplane). One day you are taking a business trip. As you get on the plane you see a plaque that says this plane is using a beta of the software your team developed. Who would get off?"Nine developers raised their hands. The teacher looked at the tenth and asked, "Why would you stay on?"The tenth said, "if my team wrote the software, the plane would not get off the ground, much less crash."

Everyone should learn to code" is a movement to flood the market with Software Engineers so that salaries can be reduced.

Conspiracy theory that I just read on reddit and sounds about right.
Would you feel the same?

rant

The Java course at our Uni requires us to do an end semester project - A Java App with Swing for GUI and some Multithreading code in it.

They asked us to upload the code to drive. I was bored and was checking out my friends' projects.

The code below is what I saw in one of the projects. They have simply called a thread with an empty run method because the project required to use multithreading concepts, wtf.

But then, It is no surprise to me cause these are the people who memorize code and vomit code for marks.

I am worried that people are going to be awarded degrees and called software engineers.

God save the software industry!

Looking for Software Engineers with POOP experience!

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

When I got positive feedback from senior and lead software engineers in PS4. They were in Namco before, and developed the games I played when I was like 8-9. Real life heroes.
It was a technically complex collaboration, tight deadlines and 0 documentation in places where it was crucial. I was the only one they mentioned specifically for good work, and the only one who got a gift from them when they came to visit :)

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

If doctors were like software engineers, they would say things like “Have you tried killing yourself and being reborn?”

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

I met with the CTO of a local tech company today for a beer, at the recommendation of a friend who currently works at the company. They're looking for Software Engineers and wanted to see if I'd be a good fit.

I'm not actively looking to leave my current job, as I love it there. I was just curious to see what other opportunities were out there.

After the beer, he pretty much offered me the job on the spot for $30,000 to $40,000 more than my current salary, along with benefits. When I asked if there was any sort of technical interview, he said that this meeting was actually the technical interview, and that by the time he had finished his first beer, he could already tell that I would be a good fit. He wants me to meet with his Lead Architect and CEO soon just to see if we all click and then we'll go from there.

The only problem is that I really love my current company. I love the work, the atmosphere, the autonomy, and my coworkers. But an extra $30k to $40k per year is a lot of money.

If everything works out and they give me an official written offer, I'm going to see if my current job will counteroffer. I know my boss would happily counteroffer if he's given authorization from the higher-ups, it's just a matter of exactly how much they're able to counteroffer.

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

I think the main issue with Computer Science is that it's considered an Academic study, while 99% of work is very much dynamic, quickly evolving and hands-on.

I think all forms of (higher) education should be part time, starting at 4:1 college/work, gradually moving towards the opposite.

Currently, combining work and study is only done for "lower level" education, at least in my country: For example a car mechanic needs to work on actual cars, and barbers need to cut actual hair.

To me, it makes sense if engineers work on actual software, during their education.

It also feeds back into the education itself, when companies are paying for courses and the course doesn't teach practicalities, there's a lot more feedback to the colleges on how to adjust their material.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

Computer Science is a mysterious world of three kinds of devs, irrespective of what background/profile/language they had/worked in.

The ones at the top, who keep doing crazy shit in big companies or open-source and keep adding material to the unstoppable code flowing. These constitute 5% of the dev community.

The ones at the bottom are the newbies who try to become masters/ninjas of programming by following the shit on the internet but don't understand logic or how things work. This is like 75% of dev community on the web. If you don't agree to that percentage, you don't know the number of students and non-CS people trying to code. I can see hundreds of classmates/colleagues with no understanding of basic Javascript concepts but introducing themselves as a software developer and ruler of the Web.

The remaining 15% in the middle are the "experienced" fellows who keep building shit to get to the top 5%. They work on enterprise/commercial software until the next upgrade and while the wallets keep getting fatter, they don't actually contribute to the community.
This is the part where I want people to understand the power of a dev.

What sets apart programmers/devs from other engineers:
while everyone else is busy solving the current issues/requirements of the world, we devs are the ones who 'build'.
With a right motive, a developer can solve in-numerous problems of the society, be it education, poverty or unemployment.

An experiment by Lee to put data on the web created a world of unforeseeable opportunities.
Hope to see more of Musks and less of Zuckerbergs in the future.

>be me
>drop out of uni studying civil engineering
>"self-taught" "web programmer"
>start freelancing in 2010
>Make money, feels good man
>clients keep me busy, feel important
>Code just for the fun of it
>be 2019. Married, code to make ends meet
>lose all interest
>mere sight of the ide makes me want to bash the screen
>have zero motivation
>never get any projects done
>become broke af
>look at old friends on fb. They are "Something".
>look at real software engineers and programmers with education
>realize I am an imposter
>start dropping all projects and studying theory
>become more broke
>start taking "motivation pills" to just start working again
>lose all motivation and pissed at all the real programmers and engineers for their success
>be me on May 20, 2019 at 2:56 AM
Yep, this is the end.

Our software uses a lot of video/audio hardware. But this hardware goes away when we deliver to the customer.
So everyone was asked to think of a way to be less depended on hardware.
I thought of a very clever idea and I told it to two senior software engineers who both saw much potential in it.

I've only worked here for close to 2 months. And I feel like this is a major contribution if they'll use my idea

Next week at the brainstorm session I'll have to present my idea (informal meeting)

I'll make an update when I know more

The company I work for (very big IT consultancy) has made the absolutely genius decision to put a block on the corporate proxy for GitHub. GITHUB. Because no fucking software developer ever needs to visit there. Their reason? "We don't want people publishing our intellectual property". Mate, I can fucking guarantee you that if unscrupulous bastards want to publish code against our T&C's, they will do so. Why make every body else's job harder and block it?!

But the best bit, you can submit a request (that is accepted without question) to get yourself an exemption. WHY THE FUCKING FUCK HAVE THE BLOCK IN THE FIRST PLACE THEN

To add to their fucktardery, they blocked the CDN that hosted stackoverflows css and JavaScript last year (CloudFlare) weeks after the alleged hack was fixed, and seemingly without any research at all. This obviously rendered stackoverflow unusable. Because again, why would a company full of engineers need to go there.

Morons.

Don't you just love it when upper Management people that never wrote a line of code in their life tell you, the software engineer peasant, to refactor all of your projects with Inclusive Terminology?

I mean I'll do it, the company is just protecting their image and money... But I blame the sick mind that came up with this in the first place.... It's implying that all sofware engineers are somehow racist and sexist and I'm somewhat offended by that notion. Whoever started this trend should seriously burn in hell.

P. S.
Apparently "the elderly" is also non-inclusive and should be referred to as "older adult"... What the fuck?

Do you not realize that you're just disassembling words and nothing else? Also "AIDS patient" should be referred to as "person living with AIDS"... Ok? Same fucking thing? If not even worse? At least "patient" kinda invokes that professional help is given... A person living with AIDS just implies you're infected and seeking no help...

You help no one with this non-issue bullshit. All your replacements will be deemed outdated and non-inclusive in the next 5 years again... Fucking hell... Waste of time and money

I think we're going two sides:

For one, more and more technology is being developed/engineered which is even more and more and more intrusive as for personal privacy, I'm genuinely worried how this'll go as privacy isn't just a about not exposing certain things like passwords/bank account details and so on, it's also about being an individual who has their own thoughts, opinions and so on. If we keep taking that away more and more often, society will change and go towards the Orwell scenario (we're on our way there right now). We can change this as software/design/server engineers but that's up to us and I sadly don't see that happening quickly, also due to the 'nothing to hide' bullshit.

Second one is that were going more and more towards open source.
This is a good thing as this:
- gives freedom to devs around the world to improve software and/or modify it to suit their needs.
- gives people the opportunity to look through the source code of softwares in order to verify it as for backdoors and find security vulnerabilities which otherwise can remain hidden for the general public while spying agencies have way more resources to go vulnerability hunting.

For the people who think this isn't a good idea (even more open source), without it we'd be completely fucked as for moving forward/security/privacy. (I can give examples if wanted).

software engineers be like “i don’t read books” then proceed to read api documentation for 4 hours straight

Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding

That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.

I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.

Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.

Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase

but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol

Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.

Around 45 days ago after years of burnout and abuse I finally quit my job when I finally realised that all the promises of greener pastures and reinforcements were nothing but tales of sugar candy mountain.

I had no idea where or what I wanted to work on or even have any leads for work but I knew if I kept recursively burning out soon there wouldn't be anything left of me to give.

Flashforward 45 days and I am the proud owner of Sane software solutions which I am currently the only full time employee of.
My old company has become my customer since no one else knows the legacy system, 11 days after quitting their invoice exceeded my previous salary with a quarter of the work and I just landed an awesome contract with some engineers I feel privileged to listen to working on some neat IOT stuff, I've quadrupled my income and now work an 8 hour day.

Don't be despondent, there are better things in life to bleed for than another mother fuckers ambitions ✌

"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"

I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!

"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|｀O′|┛

So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.

So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.

Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.

Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..

I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.

People/companies talking about ooh we want gender diversity we want more female software developers, IT professionals etc

You talk the talk, do you know how to walk the walk?? Do you know how to deal with female engineers?

I am a hardcore engineer worked and studied majorly with men for years. I lead, managed teams had my own company worked as a consultant for years.

Then I got into the IT industry as developer later. I was completely against the idea of being female would make any difference or you would be treated differently.

Finally I had my own enlightenment and stopped resisting that idea.

Some treatments made me think what are these guys doing? Don’t treat me like your sister. I am not your sister. Don’t see the femininity or looks. I am not a Merrilyn Monroe to say oooh you are great you know soo much. I am not paid for that act, I do my job! It’s same as yours mate.

Don’t underestimate me or try to preach me as if I am a cute little girl. Don’t show off and boost your ego next to other guys.

Now I regretfully I agree the ladies ranting about male dominance and getting different treatment in IT.

I am literally trying to avoid red nail polishes or red lipstick god forbid. Maybe I should put some fake beard and a belly, loose jeans with an energy drink in hand. Here comes the expert IT professional, already ticking a box.

Honestly you are not taken seriously most of the time. If you are a guy then they are all ears..And those guys talk about they want gender diversity blah blah

You feel like a ghost when you express your opinion. You are not taken into account even when you have a comment or suggestion.

Even humiliated by a guy giving me a speech about how to be a good developer next to a manager. Look buddy I am not a yesterday’s child. I am at your age. I haven’t come to this position by jumping around picking flowers in a field. If I was a man, would you dare saying those to me? There could be a street fight coming.

LinkedIn selfie takers with body show offs putting ooh I am an IT recruiter as a female I got into IT. You can do it too. (don’t get me wrong I respect that achievement that’s good) but those girls get thousands of likes and applauses, you are working in IT for years people say they are seeking for. Your technical post doesn’t even get 20 likes. Your encouraging comment on a guy’s post isn’t even acknowledged. You are not even taken into account. Am I a ghost or something?

Honestly I don’t understand.

What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?

Leave this gender bullshit. Look at the knowledge you don’t even know what equality means. It’s not having even numbers of genders. It is respecting knowledge and hard work regardless. Listening and acknowledging without judgement. Looking beyond male, female or others

Companies that say we want to have more females, you don’t come and knock on my door either. You are already stating a difference there. Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here.

I’m telling you this sector is not getting proper gender equality for 25 years. Talk is there but mentality is not yet there.

I am super pissed off and discouraged today. I don’t even get discouraged that easily. Now I understand some women in IT talking about insecurities. I am on the edge of having one, such a shame.

Don’t come at me now I would bite!

This is my generalisation yes. Exceptions apply and how good it would have been if those exceptions were dominant.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

P.S. happy chrismahannukwanzika!!

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

Software engineers who hate a programming language because they are bad at it: Fuck you

Pay pay paycheck..

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

Told by Gerald Weinberg in various incarnations:

A group of ten top software engineers is sent to a class for aspiring managers. The teacher walks in and asks this question:

"You work for a software company which develops avionics (software that controls the instruments of an airplane). One day you are taking a business trip. As you get on the plane you see a plaque that says this plane is using a beta of the software your team developed. Who would get off?"

Nine developers raised their hands. The teacher looked at the tenth and asked, "Why would you stay on?"

The tenth said, "if my team wrote the software, the plane would not get off the ground, much less crash."

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

A misconception that software engineers just sit in front of their laptops and code 40 hours a week, with no social interaction.

A software engineer’s job is actually pretty social. Personally, I probably spend around half of my time interacting with people. This could be partially due to 1:1, team, and other meetings. But a large part of it is spent in bouncing off ideas about your project with your project mates (especially during the planning phase), chiming in the conversations about some recent or urgent problems to help find or propose solutions, answering others’ questions, organizing some events, etc.

Of course, I do need some dedicated uninterrupted time to focus on programming and to get into the zone, but it’s certainly not the only activity I do at work. The main point to understand is that the software engineering is not a solitary, but a social job.

Overall, I’m very happy with my profession. The enjoyment I get out of my work vastly outweighs all of these points combined.

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

Long time lurker, first time poster. This site has been a huge source of fun and laughs for me on bad days.

So dear fellas,

I've been a software engineer for about 5 to 6 years which was intense as fuck and I've been burnt out multiple times. My highest rank was a senior software engineer so far.

I was offered a new job recently as a Technical lead for a small team which would mean I have to make architecural decisions on top of good ol grunting out the code. I took up the offer but I'm more worried than happy.

Impostor syndrome has kicked in heavily ever since I agreed to the job. What if they realise I don't know certain things that engineers are supposed to know? What if I get in an embarassing situation where somebody asks me a question and I'm not able to answer? What if people who I work with laugh behind my back cos I'm not a rockstar engineer?

I'm depressed and scared as fuck right now. Usually I had someone senior to ask my questions or get my doubts cleared with, now it looks like I'll be making those decisions and getting things done and I'm shitscared and worried as fuck.

Does anyone have any pointers, tips or anecdotal advice that might help me? It would be much appreciated.

Sorry for the incoherent rant. Have a good one y'all

I often want to scream at co-workers because of their lack of attention to details.

I believe attention to detail is important for software engineers.

I tell my junior developers that "it works" isn't enough, you need to make sure it works as perfectly as possible and paying attention to detail helps with that.

In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.

One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.

This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.

Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning

+ Death of Wix and WordPress (hopefully)
+ Abandonment of Java
- Bajillion JavaScript frameworks
- Software engineers trying to automate everything
+ Cloud blockchain AI containers that mine bitcoin with machine learning technology in high demand

When your company uses an awesome online software and your bosses want you to rebuild it internally to save money.

Me "OK, but, product A had a team of engineers and probably took a year to build."

Them: "well, they have the bugs worked out then. Shouldn't take you as long. Just copy what they did."

A group of ten top software engineers is sent to a class for aspiring managers. The teacher walks in and asks this question:

"You work for a software company which develops avionics (software that controls the instruments of an airplane). One day you are taking a business trip. As you get on the plane you see a plaque that says this plane is using a beta of the software your team developed. Who would get off?"

Nine developers raised their hands. The teacher looked at the tenth and asked, "Why would you stay on?"

The tenth said, "if my team wrote the software, the plane would not get off the ground, much less crash."

Good things come out of software engineering.

My best friend supported her husband for several years, financially and emotionally. Her job allowed him to focus on his training, and also allowed her to move with him to the US. Yesterday he got his UFC contract.

I am so incredibly proud of them. As engineers, we rarely get the spotlight, but we have the ability to help our loved ones go very far.

how do you piss off 25 software engineers?
by switching our coffee to decaf without telling us!!

I've already read two stories of software engineers working on the field to end up becoming farmers years later. Almost as if there's a connection of disconnecting from the tech world after getting close to it.

Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).

1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.

I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.

If your parents are Software Engineers, and you still want to be a Software Engineer. Chances are you are adopted.

I left my country (France) because of the working conditions that are absolutely terrific in software engineering.

Basically, 80% of the time you will be hired by agencies which rent you in a dishonest way to other companies. Half of the later use the agencies services because they are scared by the work code, which is tough but fair, and the other half can’t hire because the agencies put a lot of money to get the engineers and make money by renting employees.
Most of the companies you will work in in France will have outdated stack, and an awful bureaucratic hierarchy.
Your boss will suspect you do nothing.
There is also an untold competition taking place in every companies : who will stay the longer in the office, sometimes taking place until 8pm.

I moved to the UK, the country is absolutely awful, but the working conditions for engineers are a way better, more realistic.

DevOps is a huge scam.

Whoever sold companies maintenance-free cloud is God-tier marketer, they would be able to sell fire extinguishers in hell.

First, the platform is constantly moving, keeping up with all the updates for Kubernetes/CNI/Ambassador/Calico/kube-proxy/wtf/foo/bar/etc requires a huge team constantly peddling the boat; and if not updating in time - eventually everything will suddenly break when AWS deprecates old Kubernetes version (1.23 in EKS has just 1 year and 2 months (!!!) of support) or whatever else. At least they don't deprecate services that often.

Second, all other tooling either suck, or expensive as a Boeing. DataDog/Splunk/NewRelic/Grafana? Data centers were built for the monthly prices of these tools not so long time ago. But, capex vs opex, what stupid software engineers knows (though, it's hilarious to be present on a meeting with an agenda "reduce cloud costs").

That's all really.

On the bright side, when the team is solid and really care about the product and build it in a cloud-first manner (with understanding of all the requirements, caveats and limitation) - it can be rock solid, stable and fast platform.

To bad it's incredibly easy to implement some impressively wrong architecture (much more easier than f'up single-server architecture).

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning. " - Rick Cook

Can we just give a round of applause to the brilliant recruiters that decided to add Microsoft Word as a requirement.

You know...to weed out all the computer illiterate software engineers......

Attention Software Engineers!

Quit shooting yourselves in the fucking foot! And this ESPECIALLY goes to new grads. I get that you have just finished school. I get that you need a job! But don't fucking settle for a $30-$40k salary because you're "entry level"! The only reason why there are employers who offer that type of salary is because they know that there are enough idiots who will settle for it!

On average, an entry level software engineer's salary is between $50-$60k at the very least! For Senior developers, it is at least $80K/year (although an argument can be made for why they shouldn't settle for less than $100k/year).

Each time a moron low balls his/her salary, that brings down the market value for that talent. And keep this in mind! They don't have a choice but to hire you. They could choose to outsource their work to poorer countries but they don't want to do that due to obvious quality-related reasons so they HAVE TO hire you if they need the work done. And since the ball is in YOUR COURT, demand your fair salary. You went to school for 4 fucking years. You dealt with that stress for 4 fucking years. Why settle for a salary that you could've made without going to school?

Software engineers: "Maths is hard and scary!"

Also software engineers: "I've learnt to write a balanced binary search tree in c++ as interview prep!"

Mathematicians: "Have you guys heard of an AVL tree?"

The Evolution of software engineers😀

So someone decides that the employees need to do these stupid Web-based training's that not even high school kids should be looking into.
What is about ?
Security and Cryptography, and now event the real stuff.

What it covers?
Alice and Bob, Bob and Alice.
Alice wants Bob some pics/messages that she suspects someone else will see. DDDDDDAAAAAAAFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAKKKKKK

A total of 7 useless time wasting interactive and annoying training's, 20+ min each.

But someone forgot that please do not send this shit to engineers of your company, specially Software/Network engineers. Oh another subset, specially not to those who work deeper into the domain.

I'm getting paid to do this time wasting activity, and still.

I also may come back and remove this BUT FOR NOW I NEED TO RANT.

Half Life, Portal and Halo as well as a hate over windows vista.

I don't shit on things I can't comprehend. So when I bought my laptop with vista and hated how shitty it was I decided to find out the culprits. Turned out they were software engineers, but I was not about to shit on engineers without knowing what they go through. Down the rabbit hole.

Portal and Half life are what inspired to focus on Comp Sci afterwards and Glados and Cortana fascinated me. The fact that good money follows in the field played a big part as well.

Also, and more importantly, mom wanted me to be a programmer since she wanted to be one, she always thought this was the future. She won't read this, but I always thank her for pointing me on this path, she is my biggest fan.

I never thought clean architecture concepts and low complicity, maintainable, readable, robust style of software was going to be such a difficult concept to get across seasoned engineers on my team... You’d think they would understand how their current style isn’t portable, nor reusable, and a pain in the ass to maintain. Compared to what I was proposing.

I even walked them thru one of projects I rewrote.. and the biggest complaint was too many files to maintain.. coming from the guy who literally puts everything in main.c and almost the entire application in the main function....

Arguing with me telling me “main is the application... it’s where all the application code goes... if you don’t put your entire application in main.. then you are doing it wrong.. wtf else would main be for then..”....

Dude ... main is just the default entry point from the linker/startup assembly file... fucken name it bananas it will still work.. it’s just a god damn entry point.

Trying to reiterate to him to stop arrow head programming / enormous nested ifs is unacceptable...

Also trying to explain to him, his code is a good “get it working” first draft system.... but for production it should be refactored for maintainability.

Uggghhhh these “veteran” engineers think because nobody has challenged their ways their style is they proper style.... and don’t understand how their code doesn’t meet certain audit-able standards .

You’d also think the resent software audit would have shed some light..... noooo to them the auditor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” ... BULLSHIT!

I wanna meet the dumbass that decided it was a good idea to teach scratch, basic, java, or even python as a first programming language course in college.

I’m so sick of seeing developers out of with shitty code structure and practices, and absolutely no understanding of what is going on behind the scenes of the IDE when you push run.

In order to be a good engineer you MUST know the basics, the root level, bare bones, bare metal shit.

I fear the future, less and less software engineers are comming out of colleges, the majority today is script kiddies, and folks with some basic java experience.

Who the hell is going to be writing firmware in the future then?

It’s insane the lack of foundational skills these students get in college. If they would get a strong foundation in C, and C++ they can easily attack at problem in any language, but missing the foundation, and relying on IDEs.. you will never be-able to go from a knowing only a high level languages and scripts to Lower level problems.

RIP the future of Software Engineering
Welcome to the hell full of script kiddies

So my father has to deal with some vendors providing niche hardware and software solutions for a single department in the company.

Once the hardware finishes its work and transfers results to the managing PC, the PC has to upload those results to the server on the internet. The problem is that if no one's working with that setup for a few minutes the software in the PC can no longer communicate with the server.

Naturally, since idle time is in the equation, I thought of SO_KEEPALIVE (or whatever it's called in Windows). Wireshark confirms the absence of keepalive packets. However, the app doesn't seem to have any means to enable it... Hence the need to work with support guys.

One would expect the support to be professional, experts considering anything related to the app.

One would NOT expect to receive a call: "Hey, look, I was doing some googling on the internet... You might be right, enabling KA might help with the issue. We were discussing with our engineers and we tried to find some application that could enable KA on your computer. We couldn't find anything, but we believe that's the way to go. So give it a try and try to find some app on the internet that enables KA for our proprietary application". // everything in Lithuanian ofc.

I mean...seriously...?
I was startled to hear this suggestion. Since I expected them to be experts I assumed there's something IDK about Windows sockets -- could Windows enable KA globally, by-default? Did not find such a thing. Could Windows allow application A to control application B's socket options? Frankly, I'm too afraid to even look for this. I dislike Windows already. If this turned out to be true I'd probably become an anti-windows evangelist.

There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):

John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.

Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.

Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.

Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.

Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.

Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.

Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.

Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!

Arguing with a co worker.... he is writing a serial data plotter, and wants me to send the data as text. I’m like ugh no I’m not wasting bandwidth for text data, you are getting it as binary, as my embedded system has a lot of other stuff todo than send debug info, so the quicker I get the data to you the better... plus his program is running on a pc there is no issue regarding resources handling binary data.

He tells me I’m am wrong, and is trying to defend his stance, then all the electrical engineers and other software engineers all stand up and said why in the hell would it be faster to send text than binary? He has no response.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

PSA to all non-software engineers:

Hacker instanceof SoftwareEngineer && !(SoftwareEngineer instanceof Hacker)

Please, next time I say I am a software engineer, do not assume I can magically hack the FBI nor can I get those nude pics off your friend's phone.

A company in Switzerland keep re-posting job openings for "ninja software engineers" on the university board. Maybe I should slide in with my black pyjamas and a katana and see If I make the cut?

Data Scientists/Researchers

Stop building libraries.
You can't build libraries.
You're not software engineers.

Write your script as plainly as possible.

Why?

Cus for every fucking paper that has code associated with it, unless it's from Meta or Google, I'm having to edit to make shit work.

Stop over-engineering shit.

Write your model and fuck off.

Upwork is absolute GARBAGE.

PLEASE tell me alternative to find a job as a dev and work remotely. I have to work for foreign international software company.

I cant be working for my local city companies because the salary even for engineers is TRASH

PM in sprint review, after some colleagues complained about having to develop requirements on their own:
you are software engineers, your main task is to design software systems. this is the tricky part. coding is easy... it's a stupid task, i could do it, my nine year old daughter could do it.

shall i feel a bit offended? also i think, he is wrong... i also design while i'm coding, i'm designing all the time.
also, i love coding :( this is the most satisfying aspect of my job.
but then again, i heard there are people who code without designing... even though i cannot imagine how to work like that at all.

What is it with certain colleagues who "wanna write C, not C++"

Motherfucker if I see another malloc in the code I will physically asssault you.

Like damn we're failing to teach people C++ badly when a newcomer from university, who had 2 semesters of "C++" doesn't even understand RAII.

And how in gods name do software engineers with *decades* of experience get so stuck on old technologies?

Like I've seen them write 3 nested try-catch to make sure a delete is called or some mutex is unlocked....

If youre in the position of teaching others C++, please stop teaching C first.

If doctors were like software engineers, they would say things like "Have you tried killing yourself and letting yourself be reborn?"

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

A group of ten top software engineers is sent to a class for aspiring managers.

The teacher walks in and asks this question:"You work for a software company which develops avionics (software that controls the instruments of an airplane).

One day you are taking a business trip. As you get on the plane you see a plaque that says this plane is using a beta of the software your team developed. Who would get off?"Nine developers raised their hands.

The teacher looked at the tenth and asked, "Why would you stay on?

"The tenth said, "if my team wrote the software, the plane would not get off the ground

Some of these Software Engineers on YouTube are so frustrating me:

YouTuber:

- Hey guys, I'm doing YouTube because I interviewed at Google/Microsoft and got rejected. I really wanted to work at Google/Microsoft because it's my dream company to work.

- Hey guys, I wanted to let you know that I got the job at Google/Microsoft. I will still be making YouTube videos.

- Hey guys, so I have resigned from Google/Microsoft after working for 1 year because blah blah

Hmm...recently I've seen an increase in the idea of raising security awareness at a user level...but really now , it gets me thinking , why not raise security awareness at a coding level ? Just having one guy do encryption and encoding most certainly isn't enough for an app to be considered secure . In this day an age where most apps are web based and even open source some of them , I think that first of all it should be our duty to protect the customer/consumer rather than make him protect himself . Most of everyone knows how to get user input from the UI but how many out here actually think that the normal dummy user might actually type unintentional malicious code which would break the app or give him access to something he shouldn't be allowed into ? I've seen very few developers/software architects/engineers actually take the blame for insecure code . I've seen people build apps starting on an unacceptable idea security wise and then in the end thinking of patching in filters , encryptions , encodings , tokens and days before release realise that their app is half broken because they didn't start the whole project in a more secure way for the user .

Just my two cents...we as devs should be more aware of coding in a way that makes apps more secure from and for the user rather than saying that we had some epic mythical hackers pull all the user tables that also contained unhashed unencrypted passwords by using magix . It certainly isn't magic , it's just our bad coding that lets outside code interact with our own code .

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

So I had a problem. MongoDB replica set connection was not accessible to server in another container. I’ve used ChatGPT. Gave it my code. It showed me the things I didn’t know and helped me work out a problem I’ve struggled with for 2 days.

It’s awesome!

ChatGPT is basically StackOverflow 2.0. It’s a tool and a great one. I can’t wait for an actual production level implementation target to software engineers.

P.S. I think co-pilot sucks.

Why do people think as software engineers we can hack the whole fucking internet?!

What companies think they're hiring for - software engineers. Actually they're looking for unicorn duct tapers.

Competent software engineers are in high demand in Belgium. If you are looking for a workplace that treats devs as demi-Gods, relocate now.

Perks available to you are:
- working from home 2-5 days/ week.
- English at the workplace because the northern & southern parts don't speak each other's languages
- terrible rush hour traffic jams allowing you to flexibly choose your schedule as long as there is enough overlap
- pension & hospital insurance
- a company car (electric or fuel)
- ability to get away with any lack of soft skills as long as you're technically strong
- a competitive salary (2-4k/mo), even with almost half of it being eaten by taxes
- limited competition, because there's a sore lack of competent developers

Hey this is the first time i post here.

I just started working part-time for this company last week. What i have to do is to change some windows from Win32 to WPF. As i was reading the legacy code i just had to sigh man. They have like 100 projects in a single solution, from C++ to C#, everything acctached to each other, with almost NO comments or docs. Wtf man? I don't know how it actually works in the industry (this is my first dev job) but when you write fucking 20 classes with each one contains bunch of attributes, methods, properties, you can't just leave all the code's semantics in their names. And by the way the app is so fucking ugly i bet they have appointed part-time developers as UX engineers... Even i have little knowledge about UX/UI, i just can't bear with this kind of ugly and confusing and unintuitive production with a cost of a good photo editting software.

Ok there may be much more to rant in the future but let me try through this and tell you more. Have a good day. :)

I feel like only software engineers and IT can answer 2 part questions. Everyone else just answers the first one...

There was a time when backend engineers used to make fun of frontenders and tell them 'you arent a real software engineer', nowadays frontend is getting so complex and cool that even backenders are now starting to learn frontend. I am so happy that because of new tech and frameworks frontend has gained such a massive respect.

I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:

I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'

Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.

I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.

But it ended and I let it go.

In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.

I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.

And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*

And that's how I got my current job.

*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.)

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

Why are most developers/software engineers so absolutely fucking shit at their craft?

I understand incompetence exists in every occupation but it seems in development the ratio of bad developers to good developers is like 9:1. There’s a serious lack of quality in this industry and it’s only further exacerbated by coding bootcamps and orgs like general assembly pumping out more dog shit

Coding YouTubers existence is the reason the quality of new age software engineers is going down the hill.

Learn MERN stack,
PHP's dead,
Buy my course, it's 20% off
Learn just good enough that you can land a job
Learn how to prompt ChatGPT better

These shitty pieces of advice will never enable software engineers to truly understand the core concepts of what they're doing.

It's sad, really.

I learned how to program during my MSc at UC Santa Barbara in 1988. But the real thing happened during my first job as software engineer at Chorus Systems, in Paris, with the guidance of some of the world's best mentors, Russian engineers who taught me how to approach code design as if it was playing chess. These guys were brilliant!

A local employer is getting desperate in my area I think. My wife owns a business and talks to people from all sorts of backgrounds. Today a hiring manager that employs software engineers talked to my wife. My wife mentioned that I write software. They now want to talk to me. I have seen their adverts and thought about applying. Pretty sure they will pay a lot more than my current employer.

I think the universe might be telling me something.

Tomorrow's my first day as an SRE intern.. wish me luck fellow devs and engineers :)

More DevOps rants coming in the future with my best mate @tahnik who is also starting his software engineering internship on the same day coincidentally in a different company

Any embedded systems software engineers out there with practical experience in writing/designing safety critical applications? (think DO-178B/C) I've got a few years embedded experience under my belt between internships, my projects, and now my relatively new job at a major aviation company, but I feel like I'm behind on this topic of safety and code that can't fail. It's simply not taught and I really want to learn more. Partially it is out of personal pride because I want to make a great product, but more importantly, what I work on is protecting a human life. I really really really want to feel confident in what I build. Is there anyone out there who's got some years under their belt that can point me to some good references? Or maybe some helpful tips? Much appreciated. If it helps, all my work is in C.

BANGALORE JOKES by Bangalorean....

👉If you throw a stone randomly in Bangalore, chances are, it will hit a dog or a software engineer.
While the dog may or may not have a strap around his neck, the software engineer will definitely have one ! 😜

👉In India we drive on the left of the road.
In Bangalore, we drive on what is left of the road !😜

👉Q: What is the easiest way of causing traffic accidents in Bengaluru?
A: Follow the traffic rules !😜

👉A guy is hunting for a house in Bengaluru.
Meets old lady who is a potential landlord.
Conversation goes thus:
Old lady: "Where do you work, son?"
Guy: "I work in Infosys."
Old lady: "Oh, that bus company! Sorry, we rent only to good IT people!"
It appears that Infosys operates more buses than BMTC in Bangaluru!😜

👉Bengaluru, where PG (Paying Guest) is the first business and IT, the second.😜

👉When someone says it's raining in Bengaluru, be sure to ask them which area, which lane and which road!😜

👉If a Bengalurean stops at a traffic light, others behind him stop too because :
The others conclude that he has spotted a
policeman that they themselves have not!😜

👉Bengaluru is the only city where distance is measured in units of time.😜

👉Rickshaw driver, grocery seller and common shop keeper think that you earn atleast 1 lakh per month if you are in IT sector.😜

👉Out of every 100 software engineers in Bengaluru,
90 are utterly frustrated and the rest have a gf/bf !😜or they are married.

👉Bus drivers use horns instead of brakes !😜

👉I quote: Bengaluru:
The City where more people know Java than Kannada !

👉Universal answer in Bengaluru is
"Adjust maadi!"
😜😜😜

*Power cuts are the only time the whole family assembles together and members speak to each other.
Seeing this, BESCOM has decided to have a tagline called "Connecting people by disconnecting power"!

Don't use your senior software engineer title or years of experience as reasons in a debate or argument about software

My manager was asking me what steps needs to be done to perform a disaster recovery for our cluster( on production). I will be honest here, I have not maintained this type of cluster(kubernetes) in production before. However, I have enough understand of the system to answer my boss question. I basically told him there are A, B, C you have to do.

My senior developer jumped in and said "No you should do A,C, B because C is more critical than B. " I then replied to him: "I understand your point, I notice that too, but .." Before I can even finish my sentence, this dude has already rolled his eyes and interrupted me very loudly: "Have you worked with these systems on production before? I did". The asshole knows I haven't maintained Kubernetes on production yet of course.

I got super pissed at him and pretty much shouted back to him and my manager: "Just because I haven't worked on this system on production yet, does not mean my argument is wrong" .

I then dragged my managers, that asshole, and other engineers in a room and settle this out. In the end, people agreed with my steps over that asshole senior engineer dude because I gave them rational reasons.

The conclusion is: Your senior title is given by the company, It doesn't mean anything to me. Also, it doesn't make you more right than another person just because he has a "lower" title than you.

I think at Apple they only hire software engineers that only worked with Apple computers before and therefore have no idea what good software is, turning their product with each hiring round into an ever larger layered vicious circle of shit better known as macOS.

It's unbelievable how many senior software engineers there are with 2-3 years experience within the industry... damn boy, you just became intermediate, if you're still not a junior

So my company is using the cheapest software products out there; to save money of course. Naturally you pay what you get for, aka shitty products. I wonder how much money we waste by demotivated engineers using this Scheisse!

When it comes to the idea of programming and magic, or the comparison between software developers/engineers, computer scientists etc as magicians or wizards, nothing brings the idea much more close to hearth than the C programming language.

A while ago I read the R.A Salvatore books concerning Drizzt, the dark elf. I loved the books, have not continued reading them but I remember them vividly. There was one book in which a human magician came about wielding extremely explosive magic, humans were capable of channeling large amounts of it through explosive and unwieldly ends.

This is the same feeling I get from C

Consider:
int items[] = {1, 2, 3};
printf("Third : %i\n", 3[items]);

and fuck me if shit like the above is not dangerous, it makes sense, arrays have the first items of it server as the pointer address to a first element, doing the above operation returns the third element of the array of 3. But holy shit if I don't think this is dangerous and interesting as fuck

there are many more examples I have that I am finding through me fucking around with: language development (compiler, interpreter), kernel programming as well as net sec. C is the most powerful and devastating thing we have in our hands indeed.

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

If Uncle Bob Martin took all software engineers who are better in designing architecture than him, he could fully book Hilbert's hotel.

I've been on the job hunt for a developer job for about two months now.

Last Monday I finally got my first response. Later that they a recruiter from a local telecom reached out saying they needed software engineers and wanted to meet.

Tonight is my first interview. Wish me luck. Feeling pretty great right now

So, I worked away from our software teams and directly with engineers for a few months to examine the capabilities of a new piece of hardware we expected to integrate with. It wasn't necessary that I be shut out from all the other software projects, but my boss decided that I shouldn't go to them. When pressed, he said he didn't want the meeting to be too full.

I studied this hardware thoroughly, and even know the engineers who designed it personally. This is, in every sense of the word, my project.

... So when the product owner asks to meet to discuss another feature around it, my boss decides he should invite the rest of my software team to meet with the engineers. There's some non negligible engineering background behind the tool and associated workflow.

When asked why he invited them, despite me being concerned about lack of focus in the meeting, he said he "didn't want anyone to feel left out".

This is the same man that cost me an entire week of work (and is now costing me my time with the systems experts) because he doesn't want to hurt the feelings of my junior colleagues. He's shown repeatedly that he's just fine excluding me, but heaven forbid my junior colleague feel junior.

I don't think he'll ever realize how much he's playing favorites here. Ugh.

Your company bio says:

"We are a global network of elite, independent software engineers and digital designers"

And then you go ask a native iOS developer if he's interested in an EmberJs role ..... not very fucking elite apparently

What do the elite 1% of the software engineers actually work on these days?

Software Engineer
Nerdious Geekius

The elusive Software Engineer is a nocturnal creature, rarely found at their desks before 10 or 11 in the morning, but often staying late into the night. They dislike being interrupted while at work, and it theorized that their penchant for twilight hours is an evolutionary adaptation to reduce breaks in their trance like state of coding.

Not surprisingly, Software Engineers are solitary creatures, except for occasional gatherings called "code reviews". In these gatherings, engineers gently pace around a clearing, sizing up each others work. Although occasional battles will erupt, they mostly end without injury and the engineer will retreat to their desk and continue to hibernate.

Fun Fact: Software Engineers have been know to kill each other in brutal fights over identation styles

Is it okay for software engineers like us to go out to eat every day? I just don’t find the time to cook for myself. And honestly the time spent cooking would be better spent learning (judging by our hourly rate). Do you think it’s okay for devs to have such a luxurious life style (eating out is a privilege!) because our minds are so taxed on learning and creating?

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far the universe is winning." ~~ Rick Cook

This guy single handedly explained GANs back in 90s and nobody noticed

What happens when you get bored of working as a software engineer?

3 years after starting my career as a dev, I'm already in the middle of a crisis, struggling to find motivations to stay in tech aside of the good salaries.

Don't get me wrong, I like solving problems trough code, designing complex solutions, I love software architecture. My problem goes around the jobs themselves, doing engineering for a living is just so boring, makes me feel so empty inside.

It is not the same doing something for someone else company than doing it for yours, I usually feel like I could be happier raising my own startup, immediately after that, I remember that I must stick around working for someone else if I want to put food on my table.

I have been thinking about quit and get a normal job, but money is a huge deal, i'm used to a lifestyle that is hard to backup without a salary like the ones of software engineers.

In short, I feel empty and hopeless. What are your toughs, are you going trough something similar?

Man I am tired of my company's dogshit software release process.

We have to commit to fucking estimates for 6 months (2 quarters), SQA shadowing dev by 2 weeks, and freaking estimates and work done at the end are not even close. And then we call it a minor release. These shitty estimates are based on requirements that basically say "we want feature x, plz make it work". It's some fucked up agilefall garbage that does not work for shit.

We rush like motherfuckers during the final weeks because estimates are bullshit but we are still expected to be done with every story points which somehow are days instead of other better metrics.

I swear this fucking bullshit has been designed by the board so they could plan their money entries based on the software release.

The only reason this company actually still holds itself up is because the engineers are good at their job.

Go fuck yourself high management.

<internship>
Yesterday, was my last of Internship. It was wonderful to work with all the software engineers and the amount of stuff I learnt in this period was immense.. I would like to also give special thanks to my Manager who gave me opportunity and trusted on me. And I can't miss to mention my mentor. She helped me in solving so many problems.. in my early stages, she was my only hope to start things working.. she taught me not only how to program, but also how to program effectively. And yes, the smartest thing I did in my internship was introducing devrant to my mentor.. she liked it a lot, and her posts gets so many ++ compared to mine.. (m so jealous, 😝😜😓😂)
</internship>

(mostly !dev) Fuck humans! Really: what a scum bag race. All that shit talk about human dignity, the highest values are just sugar coating the low base motives we mostly live by. Like people have such fine antennas for your income, social status, the power or lack thereof you exert over other. They know it before you open your mouth, that they can pick on you, harass you, because you're the one on the receiving end, the one that bows away. The bullies feel that. On an overcrowded chicken yard you'll find more dignity than in human society.

Everybody drooling over that polished photoshop life on facetubeinsta: materialistic, consumeristic, masturbatic wastage. At least we now say it openly: that if we were the winners, we'd also take it all, live that empty luxury, life of fame. But 99,99% of us, we aren't in that position, just working off our arse to only keep afloat. And for the stars, those fake images, we're just rats to click on ads to better train Google.

No wonder that software, as a picture of human communication is such a shitfest of arbitrary, entropic conventions and endemic epidemic of quirks, bugs and evil trap doors. As a whole: an insults to reason, a challenge to sanity. (...Conway's law)

And I'm still a bit pissed at our profession, that, you know, as engineers, scientists, physicists, we still see us in the lineage of that "great" age of enlightenment and reason,.. while it's all just a cover up. Sure science and their ideas are nice as long as you serve a purpose or make some money. Sure democracy and free speech are great achievements, but in the end some elites and monopolies rule the world at their gusto - and will not stop destroying the world unless we're already one feet in the abyss (like 1962, be we ain't had enough of that shit, hadn't we?)

Gotta love software engineers. I'm writing some python to generate PDFs, so start by looking at chrome command line, which will be some headache with temp files and other madness.

Then find puppeteer, which does exactly what I want, but requires NodeJS.

Then find the unofficial python port, with a 5 line example of pretty much what I need to do.

Are software engineers going instinct??

I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.

Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.

While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us

this year, for the first year ever, computer science majors were invited to the engineering banquet

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof software, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."
Source: Can't remember

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

Browser are so bloated. Why does it use so much memory?

*Closes 62 tab*

Seriously why?! Damn you modern software engineers for making everything so bloated.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

I watch a lot of coding content these days just to get a feel for what's the message given to freshers or non tech people about the IT industry.

One of the things I immensely disagree with, is the idea that software engineers learn throughout their career. I disagree with the word 'throughout'.

They completely ignore stagnation on the job and also this fact that learning new technology at some point in ur career just wouldn't make sense, effort wise and financially.

Here's something I'll never do - Learn Ruby and then proceed to Ruby on Rails. Because the system wouldn't consider my past experience with NodeJS and Laravel, as a result I would be considered a fresher. So it wouldn't make sense for me to put this much effort and start all over again.

Also, your learning curve does plateau at some point in ur career for a certain amount of time. You may learn new things but sometimes you're only concerned with maintaining pre-built stuff so you don't learn new things.

I know some engineers are motivated enough to learn new things outside of a job. But I just wanted to say this.

What's up with recent Bootcamp grads putting themselves as "full stack engineer"s or "software engineer"s on LinkedIn when they haven't even had their first job yet? They build two projects and they think they are already engineers with zero relative job experience?

I don't get it.

If software developers / engineers and various other technical people stop serving banks and governments and become free minded we’re be having our own clothes and food served to us whenever we want and where we want by now.

Fucking capitalism and stupid dickheads.

I think being able to be served by robots in your own house to provide you everything you need is first step for long spaceship trips that can take over galaxies.

Living on this planet is boring as fuck.

Spent 4 hours debugging to figure out I needed to hit the enter key smh.

In my defense 3 other software engineers looked at the problem and couldn’t figure it out.

In my offense I only solved this problem by talking to the engineer who made it.

Quality work, Fast work, Happy Engineers. . . Pick 2

Large majority of rants is about incompetent project managers.
No matter where you live the problem stays the same. Most of them have no clue how software is being made and how dev/qa work looks like.
I frankly do not understand this phenomena. I have friends in automotive/constructions industry and theirs managers are engineers too in that field. Why it can't be the same in software development?

There are too many people that consider software engineering a "job". Anyone else here love the process, people and programming? How do people end up at these bad companies and WHY DO THEY STAY??!?!?! There is so much demand for programmers, designers, software engineers, et al. Such that I do not understand how people stay at these companies that hire people who want to make money instead of code.

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

So in my org, as far as I can see, senior engineers and normal engineers do about the same amount of work, and the senior engineer is useful at PBRs for bringing up tech points that other engineers might not know about due to lack of experience. Is this a common thing across the whole software business? In terms of responsibilities, I’m seeing pretty much the same amount, don’t wanna sound arrogant here but we never task work etc based on seniority which I like but just want to know if it’s common

Had my first day as a Software Engineer in one of the most trending software companies. Absolutely crazy how organized a company can be. There are so many talented software engineers I‘m a little bit afraid of the expectations they‘re having. Wish me luck, I‘m just a little software dev who graduated 3 months ago :(

What do they teach software engineers these days? How to be arrogant? If I were present when Mrs. Junior was writing this I would put her out of her misery and send her to clean toilets at McDonald's

What do Software Engineers think of Capitalism ? Do you see yourselves just as “white collar” workers and code monkeys to be exploited ? Or do you see yourselves as harbingers of change towards a more knowledge based economy ?

Stack Overflow people have profound buffallo bullcrap on their skulls, they are some software engineers who have fucked COBOL and BASIC, probably somewhere like NASA, just pondering out where someone post a question. They're probably some etilist cult banging a prostitute while delivering that awful downvote imitating the slap they give the chick during sex. They desire questions such as

"RANDOM_fuck_module_Abdul.method() not working in python" or "how to dock the dock by undocking" (tagged: AWS). Not things like "why does the audio tag not work in a PC but works in w3school tester?" or a genuine programming question. Fuck.

We don't tail recurse or loop abc for k in godfuck loops, huh? We make simple things as: a form, a http request to dell.

I hope there penises get rotten in the hell. Period.
this is just a part of SO.

Just finished fourth interview with a company (fuck me) for a solutions engineer position (I am a self taught dev that is transitioning to technical roles from a pretty "soft" background with the hope of being in a software engineer role within three years). Anyone have any experience with the solutions engineer role and some advice about it? Note: this IS an invitation to rant about solutions engineers so I know what NOT to do.

Just tried out Jupyter Notebook for the first time. I can see why software engineers wouldn't like notebooks, especially if you intend to actually publish the notebook as code for other people to use (please publish a module that can be imported, not a notebook that has to be hacked to pieces to make it reusable), but it's pretty handy for early prototyping or documentation.

I'm playing around with save-editing for a few GBA games as a personal project, and I used a Notebook to document the save file format with examples.

Saw the Tesla self-driving capabilities? When Elon said he was looking for rockstar software engineers, he wasn't kidding.

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

What if there was like a 1-2 day workshop that helped recruiters be more technically fluent? Like the basics of software development (not programming, but concepts and what engineers really do)?

Eat
Sleep
Code
Debug
(Keep debugging
Debugged? No? Goddammit
Yay debugged! )
Coffee
Repeat

Why don’t we make a pathos-filled video about high salaried software engineers suffering in big tech cities due to housing prices?

We can show a man who goes to some $20-30 dinner per plate with his wife and they come home to a studio apartment. They tip generously..

*Sad music starts*

“This is our life in Silicon Valley. And this is our struggle.”

We can even show one of them holding an iPhone 6s and that it starts lagging due to not getting that battery replacement from Apple.

“We can’t even dream about a house here. We have to consider going out of state where there aren’t even tech jobs out there!”

*Even sadder music plays*

But no joke. This life sucks. This is far from the dream life I dreamed off. This is reality.

I am tired of a glorified code monkeys cosplaying software engineers.

Disclaimer: in general, I have immense respect to engineers and technological advances that came from FAANG/MANGA. Bbbuuuuttttt...

Especially people that has a few relatively short (less than a year) stints in a few of them and thinking that their salary expectation for their skills is reasonable.

What I've saw so far, based on a few hires for past few years in a company of ~50 engineers, Python/JavaScript stack, monolith to microservice transition (all people had senior and above titles):

* Have no idea how to setup own development environment on MacBook.
* Have no idea how to run code and tests for Python (from discussion, the two only development experience was "code - commit - push - done" and "clicking button in remote coding environment".
* Have no idea how to use bash/zsh (the person had "Linux skill up to 11").
* Grinding leetcode and interviewing during work hours (were let go immediately).
* Introducing a new microservice for each task (we're transitioning from Django monolith, but not to that extent).
* Ignoring all the onboarding, documentation and ignoring every request for writing documentation "I am not a technical writer".
* Knowing nothing about Kubernetes (this was in the job posting/requirements).
* Person actively hostile to any frontend task (the position is not full stack, but JavaScript is a required skill).

I am pretty open and I understand the eternal "generalist vs specialist" thing, but if the person do not posses certain skills and actively lie about it, just because "I worked at FAANG companies, obviously I have that skills" - it's dishonesty at best and fraud at worst. And if with the end of ZIRP you suddenly became unhireable in FAANG/MANGA - you need to think why.

There are tons of small software companies that nevertheless have a good salary and benefits, and most of the time hiring was a breath, because for the most of the people they were flying under the radar.

Unfortunately, since this year the hiring is exhausting, the amount of incapable candidates is incredible (a lot of them with credentials), and instead of 10-15 candidates per position (before and during pandemic), now there are more than 300 candidates per position with "impressive" working experience and only 10 people who really spend time on interviewing.

In short, if you think you're worth gold only from 3-4 companies in the world and all of them stopped hiring you - you should rethink your worth.

In my country, in almost any company, bank, even major telecommunication companies you'll find that their systems are down at least very frequently.
I'm currently standing in front of a Vodafone booth (they provide mobile communication and are an ISP), their system is down and the operator said to wait an hour.

What's more horrid about this is that these systems are built by fellow software engineers in my country. It sure says a lot about us, unfortunately.

This night I had a fever and seen a weird dream. So, scientists discovered that our whole perspective is wrong, and the notion that anything is but a sum of its parts is now completely irrelevant. One can’t disassemble a thing and know how it works and what it consists of. Basically you want to build a computer, you buy all the parts you need, but you can’t assemble it anymore — it just doesn’t work, and nobody knows why. Same is true for cars, industrial machines, software and pretty much anything that have something to do with engineering.

So, earth went into riots, massive layoffs occured, world economy collapsed, and the forces of what used to be USA, China and Russia joined to tackle the problem. A research was started and we found out that we now have complexity cores (!) that distribute emergence (!!) in an ephemeral way (!!!) and that is what makes things work. Theory of New Complexity (!) emerged, and all the engineers were required to go back to universities to attend lectures about how complexity works and how to make things in that new reality

Software engineers new to iOS didn't know how to pronounce segue, so they started pronouncing it "seg". It spread, and I am now arguing with senior architects about how to pronounce it properly.

Does anyone else find it strange that the stupidest people in the company are making all the decisions.

In order to be able to engineer software you have to understand everything that the product owner knows, the business analyst knows, the product manager knows + how to actually make the system both work in a reasonable time frame and be maintainable long-term.

But we're not the one making the decisions. The irony of it is something that I can't get beyond.

And when I do go out on a limb to point out a logical inconsistency to UX or product... They don't thank me for it they hate me for it and then 3 days later figure out that they should be doing it and quietly follow my suggestions.

Seriously is the goal here to create good software or to avoid stepping on everyone else's toes in the company who is overwhelmed by the complexity of the project.

I think companies based on a hierarchy of non-technical people controlling technical people, in the creation of software products are a dying breed.

When it comes to creating software products everyone in the hierarchy should be technically minded.

I've seriously been trying to come up with an alternative perspective here.

The executives of the company are completely out of touch and the only thing which looks like progress to them in a sprint review is something visual on the front end.

The technical architect, the product owner and the product manager all seem to be engaged in keeping the executives happy and managing their expectations. By means of obscuring the truth.

Imagine how much more cost-effective building a software product would be if the executives were engineers themselves.

I'm keen to do an experiment and build a company comprised of engineers only.

Obviously they need to have insight into the other roles. But none of these other roles are as complex as implementation itself.

So why exactly are we the slaves of these well-meaning under thinkers?

There are no meetings at the company I work for. GASP!!!
Well...we have one, now and again, but it is just an opportunity for the boss to update the support team with changes to the product and we (i.e. the software engineers) come for the free pizza. GASP!!! I would prefer that we have technical meetings, but it falls on deaf ears.

Does anyone think tech recruiters are failed used car salesmen?

Bad experiences this week

One reached out to me on clearance jobs to apply for a job that I applied for, interviewed and was turned down for because of course they do not know Javascript is not Java and they were looking for a Java developer. She didn’t remember and then never responded. Out of spite I replied all to the last email that company sent me but of course no one responded.

This person who says that she is a recruiter for GOOGLE does not know the difference from UX designer and UX developer.

“ UX design still involves coding... idk where you got information that UX designers don't code but they absolutely do. UX designers are simply front end software engineers that work on refining the user experience of a particular program app or website.”

I don’t know because I used to be a fucking UX developer and used to work with UX designers??? Who didn’t code because figuring out what humans what is tough enough on it’s own. UI designers may know html/css but that is it.

I know we are going into a recession and I need to start being nice to these dumb recruiters because I may need them one day.

What are some job possibilities for software engineers that are a bit more challenging?

Software Engineering just became routine and with all the hin abstractions during the past years it’s not really a complex job anymore.

Thoughtful about data science but I think I’d get bored with that as well after a few years.

Looking for ideas with:
- technical skills
- have a lot if responsibility
- at least same pay

Would be interested in e.g. investment banking but that seems far out of my league (education wise)..

Any programmers/software engineers/developers here that studied I.T. or Computer Engineering instead of CS in college?

#include <advice>
using namespace plz;

So I have a soft cozy internship for a large retail corporation, the workplace is fantastic and the people are nice. We run into problems where this company outsources to India for almost all of its programming leaving their "software engineers" to answer emails and support 15 year old applications. This is obviously not the work I want to be doing. I want to create. This company also pays slightly less than average for an entry level programmer. I have one year of college left as well. At the end of this internship it is almost guaranteed that I get a full time offer but I only get 2 months to accept or decline. I feel like I'll say no.

So I guess what I'm asking is, should I turn down the safe first job and go for work that will make me excited in the morning or take the easy soft underpaid email answering job?
Thanks guys

Just completed a 24 hour hackathon at my school in which the 'best software' winner purely had mock ups of yet another mobile app and had no proof of concept. Meanwhile my team developed a scaling platform online that adapts to groups of user's trends to create optimal results.

I guess I keep misreading the definition of 'software' in the dictionary each morning. (RULE #8.2 - Software Engineers shall read the definition of the following phrases each morning excluding Saturday: software, heap, ego, scrum, algorithm, the documentation of C)

Question: is it common for lead software engineers to mostly do paperwork or is that just a quick of my current program?

Where I work it is very common for those titled "software leads" to be almost completely hands off the software. They deal in hiring, fielding user comments and commitments, and scheduling. I would like to be a lead but I was always under the assumption that dev leads had more of a design and/or architect role. Sort of a big picture thing rather than middle management which is what this feels like.