So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

Want a backend in Node? You got it. PhP using the plethora of frameworks available? No problem.

Feeling like a gipsy guitarrist and want to lay it down with Django? Good taste!

In a hurry and need your startup off the ground with React integration in rails? Piece of cake.

Feeling springy and want you some coffee and Java with your app? A la carte.
Wanna pull my leg and force me to do .net? Mm ok if you insist.

You sure you want Perl with that? Ok no problem.

.....but you sit me and my awesome powers of backend mastery and force me to do css and design all week and you literally destroy my soul......this shit is soul crushing I swear.....

Getting zero encouragement or positive feedback from my boss is really killing me from the inside. There isn't even a negative feedback. There's absolutely nothing.
PhD is such a lonely path as it is, and being ignored by your advisor is just...soul-crushing.
I did a collaboration with my friend from another lab, and even though her lab is bigger and crazier than ours, her professor found the time to compliment our work and even told us he will present it in a presentation he gives in Meta. Really, it's not that hard to say a kind word here and there.

Sometimes I want to slap myself.

I’ve been making progress with my voice activated TV remote project - coz you got to use a Google Home and a Raspberry pi for something right? Right??

Anyway, when the API you have written suddenly stops working and you’ve spent hours trying to solve it, it is really soul crushing when you realise you’re using a class variable incorrectly

I’ll just go cry now, while I control my tv 😥😎

Class TVAPI{
Private $tvIP = “192.xxx”;
Private $args = $this->decodeArgs($_GET);

Function of tvVolume(){
exec(“python tvRemote.py {$tvIP} {$this->args}”);
}
}

My job feels (and acts) like a soulless void.

Wow, that sounds like lyrics to an emo song for adults. screw that.

But it's still pretty accurate: While I have quite a few coworkers, and they're at least somewhat chatty, they never seem to respond to me, or even notice me. I see them talking, but anything I do or say gets ignored. It goes into the void and disappears.

I talk in the off-topic channels. People talk around me.
I make comments on releases. No responses.
I talk about music I've been addicted to. No responses.
I talk about food and cooking -- a popular topic at work. No responses.
I respond to an invitation to join the security team. No responses. (well, an empty deferral)
I release various features, some both my boss and a coworker described as "soul-crushing." No thanks, priase, appreciation; honestly, no one even seemed to notice.
I build useful utilities and functions for other devs to use. Nothing.
I optimize the scripts everyone uses on a daily basis, and mention it to others. Still nothing.

The void eats my efforts, and occasionally spits out parcels of work for me to do. The only responses I recieve from the void are when I ask about its parcels of work. When I send them back completed, nothing happens -- unless they need more work. If they do not... nothing.

My previous job was friendly and nice and rewarding.
The job before that was Hell.
This one feels like Purgatory, but ... somehow emptier.

We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.

Well check this shit.

At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.

My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)

One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.

The conversation was like this:

Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps

Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!

Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.

Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?

Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours

Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?

Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)

Retard: Well You need to fix this

Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us

Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it

At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?

Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps

At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life

Retard: Well....I did not know

Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.

First time back to work today after a month long break. It was soul crushing. I don’t know if I’m permanently burnt out or just seriously disenfranchised with the corporate world but I would have thought after a holiday I would be energised and ready to go. It turns out after coming back to work I feel exactly the fucking same! Tired, exhausted, discontent, irritable and most importantly BORED. I am bored spending 8+ hours a day at a computer chair responding to emails and teams messages! Has anyone felt like this before? Did you ever overcome it? I’m worried as I’m getting older I’m losing my love more and more for programming whilst simultaneously hating the concept of work more and more.

Best:

Leaving my work in the soul crushing dog eat dog world of transportation and logistics for higher education software for colleges and universities .
I work at a college and I fucking love it and love my team.

Worst:

The soulc crushing dog eat dog world of transportation and logistics where I worked as a backend developer and lead mobile developer. Not only did it made me hate and despise native android development, but it also made me despise the human race as a whole. Watching a motherfucker letting go of employees that he knew personally (as in bbq with their families and shit) because my software automated a large portion of their work(it was meant to make it easier for them for that i was originally told) was absolute and total bullshit and i still carry that fucking remorse with me. After that I vowed never to do that sort of bullshit work again....sort off. No one gets fired at this institition for it. Logistics sucks big monkey dick and the people there are the absolute fucking worst. Every single motherfucker i met was a fucking shark, all of them and they would not think about fucking people over if it saved them some money.

Yeah, that even tops the military and that was fuuuull of fuck fuck games and other similar fuckery.

Since graduation, I have worked in IT for 2 years, mostly in testing and implementation side. Finally I got a developer position in the field I wanted (Data Engineering). I had never thought that it would be such a soul crushing experience. My current company is very notorious for its bad management practices, but there is indeed a bigger picture to this. The IT industry in general has devolved into a gigantic ponzi scam built on exploitation and BS. Quality of solution and quality of work was replaced with a ‘Does it work now?’ approach with zero contingency. And the fact that geeks and nerds are naive only helps the white collar crooks to exploit them as code monkeys. Fuck all of this!

My biggest regret was leaving school for the workforce. I had aspirations of climbing the corporate ladder and maybe even being a leader or CEO someday myself.

It unfortunately took me too many years to realize it’s all a complete scam. You end up wasting away working on the most soul crushing of stuff, all to support someone else’s dream, and the people on top are not those who deserve to be there, but those who schemed and manipulated their way to the top. They often have zero idea what they’re doing and you end up having to do their job for them, while they take the credit and the big bonuses.

I had (and still have) many brilliant ideas for creations, but not one of my employers has cared about anything other than their bottom line. You are nothing but livestock to them, and they will treat you as such.

I wish now I’d just stayed in school and worked on my ideas and theories in an academic environment. If you think for a second companies will give a shit about you, think again.

So after 7 months of soul crushing searching I was able to land an awesome job I never thought I'd get! I didn't really get hired for my projects, I think I was more of a culture fit that knew enough of what they were talking about. My colleagues are awesome, helpful people but they are also clearly way ahead of me as devs. I know that many new hires have similar feelings and it's more a matter of drive + time. I understand that and I'm ready for the marathon ahead of me but I have one HUGE concern... I don't understand unit testing. I've never written unit tests in JavaScript or Java (just on paper I wrote random assert statements for a college exam question that somehow turned out correct). More importantly, I don't understand when to write unit tests and what my main objectives should be when writing them. At work they talk about unit testing like it's just as basic as understanding version control or design patterns, both of which I have had no problems asking questions about because I at least understood them generally. I come here looking for resources, mainly things I can go through over the weekend. I understand that I'm going to have to ask my colleagues for help at some point but I DON'T want to ask for help without any solid base knowledge on unit testing. I would feel much more comfortable if I could understand the concepts of unit testing generally, and then ask my team members for help on how to best apply that knowledge. I'm sorry for begging, I'll definitely be looking for resources on my own too. But if anyone could point me to resources they found to be helpful & comprehensive, or resources that they'd want their co-workers to use if they were in my position I would be very grateful!!!!

Assigning me to another project because my current project is soul crushing is only helpful if you ever let me stop working on the current one. Otherwise I just have a new set of meetings to attend where my only contribution is that I didn't get anything done, and probably won't today either.

Do you ever get this soul-crushing feeling inside you that says you haven't achieved enough or you don't make enough money?

For context, I've been a dev for 6 years now and make a lot more money than when I started, which was $1000 USD annually. (Third world country).

I used to think that making more money as I grew with experience would drive this feeling away but it hasn't.

At a previous job, I worked on a multi-vendor e-commerce website. It used Magento2 as an API and a separate application we built with Node, Express, and React that consumed it to avoid using Magento's frontend.

The whole stack used should be a rant in itself but our checkout process was dependant on work done by some contractors in India. In short, this entire checkout process would break multiple times a day with no way on my end to fix anything, and that's what I had to reply with every time a bug ticket would come in; which is honestly the worst reply ever to a huge issue like that.

After several attempts of pitching the idea and being turned down for building the checkout in-house to remove the dependency and work on even streamlining the process, the product manager of the brand said as quote "Well the checkout isn't really that important".

At first, I was kind of speechless. How is the functionality of actually buying a thing in an online store NOT important? Shouldn't that be the most important?

Then I realized over time that the only thing they cared about was being a Nascar version of a website, essentially being a canvas of ad space that sellers on the marketplace could buy and paying money just to list their items.

I hated working on that project, and that made it so much more soul-crushing. Gotta chase that revenue right?

OH MY FUCKING GOD. I HATE
H A T E

ACQUIA SITE STUDIO.

"Let's make a low-code 'solution' for developers who barely can stand working on Drupal as it is, and make the completely easy and perfect process of styling a website, COMPLETELY UNBEARABLE!"

Yea this is a great idea, experienced developers can now spend hours trying to fucking find where a single style is coming from. Oh it was too easy to cmd+f a stylesheet or a codebase to find something particular? Yea FUCK THAT. Lets turn EVERY SINGLE STYLE into a unsearchable .yml file where every style definition is now a machine hash. WAY easier to use. Isn't it so cool to fucking click on styles from a dropdown where they come off the edge of the screen. FUCK whichever stupid fuck came up with this dog shit nonsense. I fucking HATE this soul crushing work.

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

I've been replaced twice by wix and squarespace. This is pretty soul-crushing. Both were free lance jobs. Where the user got impatient and insisted that I make constant changes on the fly. I'm relatively new and still in school.

Has anyone else been replaced by a website generator? How do you rebound/recover?

Searching for a job is a terrible, soul-crushing experience. Take advantage of local meetups and tech-job-seekers groups to help keep your morale up.

During the interview: if you don't know something, that's ok. Don't get rattled by it. Some questions are designed to see how you think, not to see what you know.

HP Fortify is utter bullshit vaporware and the fact that it has any influence on my development cycle is soul crushing.

What's the best way to deal with constant dread? I deployed code after following every procedure, got every kind of thumbs up from QA and now it's my fault our 2012 admin site borked. Should I point out all the obvious flaws (again), or should I give up on our stagnant-ass developers and systems?

The fear of showing off anything new is crippling. I wrote up a Pyton API to hook into our current pipeline over lunch breaks but am worried if I even raise it as an option it'll just be cast aside and lost to time, regardless of business value.