I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

Dev: boss, there are some abnormalities and confusion in the client's specifications.

Boss: So?

Dev: Shouldn't we get clear about them and then start coding?

Boss: No need. We assume and code. Then show them to our clients and then ask for their opinions. We will change again according to their opinion.

Dev: ..

A few months later....

Dev: *seeing so many specifications change and realizing now have to refactor a lot of codes* , FML.

My smartphone specifications list
1. Should come with 3.5 mm jack
2. No exploding battery please.

My five-year-old daughter asked me to program her Android tablet today.

Daughter: Daddy, can you make my tablet do something?

Me: What do you want to make it do?

Daughter: I want it to get games for me. I want it to pick games I like and get the different games so I can play them after I get home from school.

My daughter asked me to implement:

1. At the least, a predictive algorithm to choose new games for her based on her likes and dislikes.

2. At the most, an adaptive artificial intelligence that will learn what games she likes to play.

Current specifications are unclear. Need revision.

Software engineering is doomed.

The next generation of developers is going to suck as fuck

I've come across a lot of situation that made me think this way.

The most notable examples are right here on devrant.

I've seen a shit ton of rants blaming languages for "bugs" when in fact those "bugs" wouldn't have happened if those fuckers would have read the specifications of said languages.

This new generation doesn't read, when they've got a problem they just fucking go to Google for answers, they don't bother reading specifications, language books, rfc, etc, they don't bother reading where the true source of information are. The documentation ? What's that ? Let's go to stackoverflow first, let's think second.

Same back in school I've seen people in the highest grades that couldn't fucking decompress a tar archive.

In the coming decades we will loose the high skilled people, the people that made the software world as it is today we will be left with fuckers only able to blame things for stuff they don't understand.

This is my first true rant. This is me being pissed off.

So, continuing the story, in reverse order, on the warship and its domain setup...
One day, the CO told me that we needed to set up a proper "network". Until now, the "network" was just an old Telcom switch, and an online HDD. No DHCP, no nothing. The computers dropped to the default 169.254.0.0/16 link local block of addresses, the HDD was open to all, cute stuff. I do some research and present to him a few options. To start things off, and to show them that a proper setup is better and more functional, I set up a linux server on one old PC.
The CO is reluctant to approve of the money needed (as I have written before, budget constraints in the military is the stuff of nightmares, people there expect proper setups with two toothpicks and a rubber band). So, I employ the very principles I learned from the holy book Bastard Operator From Hell: terrorizing with intimidating-looking things. I show him the linux server, green letters over black font, ngrep -x running (it spooks many people to be shown that). After some techno-babble I got approval for a proper rack server and new PCs. Then came the hard part: convincing him to ditch the old Telcom switch in favour of a new CISCO Catalyst one.
Three hours of non-stop barrage. Long papers of NATO specifications on security standards. Subliminal threats on security compromises. God, I never knew I would have to stoop so low. How little did I know that after that...
Came the horrors of user support.
Moral of the story: an old greek saying says "even a saint needs terrorizing". Keep that in mind.

Does my old computer count?
2016:
Windows XP
Visual Studio 2010
1GB RAM
An old Pentium inside
I am now worried that both Raspberry pie 3 and my phone, both costing less have better specifications

One of my friend at college asked me why her computer is running slow even when she is running only chrome.

Me: how much memory does it have?
Her: 1TB.
Me (somewhat confused): no no I meant RAM.
Her: yeah yeah it's one TB. I read the specifications of the laptop.
Me: *in my mind, fucking read it again* please read it again. You must have misread it.
Her( grinning face ): alright.

Guess who didn't talk to me for a week. 😂

I’m so mad I’m fighting back anger tears. This is a long rant and I apologize but I’m so freaking mad.

So a few weeks ago I was asked by my lead staff person to do a data analysis project for the director of our dept. It was a pretty big project, spanning thousands of users. I was excited because I love this sort of thing and I really don’t have anything else to do. Well I don’t have access to the dataset, so I had to get it from my lead and he said he’d do it when he had a chance. Three days later he hadn’t given it to me yet. I approach him and he follows me to my desk, gives me his login and password to login to the secure freaking database, then has me clone it and put it on my computer.

So, I start working on it. It took me about six hours to clean the database, 2 to set up the parameters and plan of attack, and two or three to visualize the data. I realized about halfway through that my lead wasn’t sure about the parameters of the analysis, and I mentioned to him that the director had asked for more information than what he was having me do. He tells me he will speak with director.

So, our director is never there, so I give my lead about a week to speak with her, in the mean time I finish the project to the specifications that the director gave. I even included notes about information that I would need to make more accurate predictions, to draw conclusions, etc. It was really well documented.

Finally, exasperated, and with the project finished but just sitting on my computer for a week, I approached my director on a Saturday when I was working overtime. She confirmed that I needed to what she said in the project specs (duh), and also mentioned she needed a bigger data set than what I was working with if we had one. She told me to speak to my lead on Monday about this, but said that my work looked great.

Monday came and my lead wasn’t there so I spoke with my supervisor and she said that what I was using was the entire dataset, and that my work looked great and I could just send it off. So, at this point 2/3 of my bosses have seen the project, reviewed it, told me it was great, and confirmed that I was doing the right thing.

I sent it off to the director to disseminate to the appropriate people. Again, she looked at it and said it was great.

A week later (today) one of the people that the project was sent to approaches me and tells me that i did a great job and thank you so much for blah blah blah. She then asks me if the dataset I used included blahblah, and I said no, that I used what was given to me but that I’d be happy to go in and fix it if given the necessary data.

She tells me, “yeah the director was under the impression that these numbers were all about blahblah, so I think there was some kind of misunderstanding.” And then implied that I would not be the one fixing the mistake.

I’m being taken off of the project for two reasons: 1. it took to long to get the project out in the first place,
2. It didn’t even answer the questions that they needed answered.

I fucking told them in the notes and ALL THROUGH THE VISUALIZATIONS that I needed additional data to compare these things I’m so fucking mad. I’m so mad.

Worst part of being a dev: "we need this done by the end of the week"

Me: "ok what are the specifications?"

PMs: "not sure yet, we have a meeting with the client on Thursday."

Me: "cool, I'll look at it Monday."

Don't come to me with deadlines before you know what I'm building.

Pessimistic people: the glass is half empty

Optimistic people: the glass is half full

Engineering people: the glass was not manufactured to the correct specifications

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

DON'T LIST A JOB UNDER "PHP DEVELOPER REQUIRED" IF THE SPECIFICATIONS MENTION NOTHING ABOUT PHP BUT ASK FOR WORDPRESS AND WOO COMMERCE EXPERIENCE YOU UTTER BLOODY GRAVY BOAT

Client: I want you to build me a website.
Then makes an order on freelancing website.

Me: Okay, Sir. Can you send me your specifications, please?

No reply.

2 days later

Me: Hello, sir....are you still interested?

A week later
Me: Sir.

Me: Sir.....

No reply

2 Weeks later
Me: Sir......

No reply

Client: Oh, sorry.(Then gives some lame excuse) Okay I will send you the specifications.

Me: It's Okay. Waiting for it.

A week later
Me: Sir, you forgot to send me your specifications.

No response.

#Life of a freelancer.....No stability or security or decent clients.

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

I'm really close to just quitting coding all together. This job is sucking the life out of me. I've lost my interest in code and the idea that there are better jobs out there.

My "boss" who's not even really my boss but behaves like he is, is micromanaging my every tag, and is an information hog. He doesn't document, he doesn't tell me anything, I've been here six months and still don't know half of what I need to know to do my job properly!

I'm expected to implement a new responsive design, but we don't have design specifications.
Cool, you'd think, new ideas, complete overhaul! Let's get a good foundation in bootstrap going!

WRONG! It needs to fit in with the old, fuck- ugly pre 2000 design.

Not because of any design constraints in particular, but because HE wants it that way. You know what was fucking trendy in 2000? Tables. Tables fucking everywhere. YOU KNOW WHAT TABLES ARE NOT? RESPONSIVE YOU FUCKING ICE LOLLY CHEWER!

We have no development timeline, no process management, no fucking project management. THE FUCKING PASSWORDS WERE STILL STORED IN PLAIN TEXT UNTIL LAST MONTH YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BANANA DEEPTHROATER! 😤😤😤😤😤😤

I'm doing my best here to get something resembling the old page, but there needs to be some fucking compromise! We are in fucking 2017, let's work with Bootstrap instead of against it, how about that you fucking bald cactus!

I know enough about UI to know that the way we're going, this is just going to be another unusable fucking clusterfuck.

YOU KNOW THE BEST FUCKING PART? I'M A FUCKING BACKEND DEV AND I WAS HIRED AS SUCH! GIVE ME A DESIGN TEMPLATE AND I'LL DO MY BEST TO IMPLEMENT IT, BUT FUCK YOU FOR EXPECTING FRONT END LEVEL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE YOU DUMB FUCKING SPAGHETTI!

"Make us a one-page website for our new company!"

I build the site, to their exact specifications and show it to them

"There's only one page"
"You only asked for one page."
"No, we didn't"
I show them the email they sent me, asking for a one-page site
"Wow, you suck, we are finding another developer!"

Been working on this project for a month now. Everything is going fine, meetings are short and to the point. But then...

Client: "I'm leaving the project, this is the new person taking over."

Me: "Hello new client."

New client: "Burn it."

Me: "Uhm, what?"

New client: "Throw what you have away. It doesn't meet our new specifications. We're starting over."

Me: "Ok..." 🙃🔫

Fuck software assurance.

Fuck functional specifications, fuck software requirements, fuck V-model bullshit documentation, fuck integration test plans.

Fuck trying to shoehorn waterfall requirements into what clearly was an interative development.

Fuck me for being a single dev handling all this bullshit by myself.

Fuck you dickhead. If you don't like how I'm doing things, just fucking do them yourself. Or how about you give me some specifications, designs, a consistent database model? No? Fine, then don't fucking complain when I make do with what I have.

I feel that I should mention my reason for having joined devRant.

Although I often write computer programs, I do not consider myself to be a computer programmer, for the problems which I solve often do not pertain to the method which I use to solve a problem with a computer program. Rather, I am an intelligence analyst, and this has been my title for approximately sixteen (16) years.

I joined devRant not only because I wished to better the computer programs which I write, although this could be better accomplished by again reading the specifications for the programming languages which I use, but also because I wished to join an on-line community of which the members are interesting and competent. As I read threads, I observe that both of these requirements have been matched, with the emphasis being placed on the latter requirement.

I thank the majority of you for maintaining an on-line community which is not (total) crap. Ha.

Something I can never understand with my boss. This really makes me concerned with the future of the company imo.

I was given a project contract with all of the specifications and how many hours I had to each assignment.

I did my work and I kept myself within the time limit.

Today my boss and I had a status meeting about the project. In which he had an addition to one of my features which would basically require us to start over with it. He started to blame not only me but also my coworker on why we didnt predict that HE would want this addition to the feature. We got into a heated discussion over him putting that blame on us. My point I stuck to, was that the responsibility of specifications lies in the person who briefs a worker, not the worker who is supposed to play guessing game of what the briefer want. He vehemently denied that is how things work.

He basically shushed me and said that is how the order of things go.

Am I in the wrong here?

Here's to clients who wish to pay "per project" instead of "per month". Man, fuck that.

Back when I was still a novice, I took on a couple of small time projects from clients who contacted me after looking at my GitHub, and they all wanted to pay me a lump-sum for the project. Because I'm an idiot, I thought sure, what difference would that make. Boy was I wrong.

What followed was me finishing the projects well before time but because of the clients' constant reiterations and changes in design and nitpicking every decision I made while creating the websites for them, the projects dragged on for weeks longer than they were originally intended. And I fucking got paid that one-time amount in the beginning. All this maintenance, for free. Even though I had not explicitly agreed to the maintenance part, since they never finalized the specifications of the project, it just never got "done" officially, and all the maintenance part just came under development.

How many different kinds of disgusting does someone have to be to do this? I should've fucking said NO to those terms, but I had to have experience. Well, nice experience that was. Never again. :(

Big rant.
Just finished my first year of uni. I took an extra course on c# (mvc, entity framework) and android development in java. We learned a lot of stuff and at the end of the semester they held a contest. We had to develop an app respecting their specifications and add something from ourselves for extra points. Problem was that we were supposed to work on the project during our finals, which we didn't, finishing uni is on the first place. But we had a week after finals to work on it. I, like many others, slept very littlre during that week, only to work on that app, I worked for more than 13 hours a day to finish it (it was a pretty big app) and I was pretty happy with the end result. Today they were supposed to announce the apps that made it to the final. They just announced that no app deserves to be in the final. They know that we had finals, but that we could still do better. They just peed on our work, probably threw our code away, fucking +13 hours a day, 5-6 hours of sleep everyday, almost no fun for a whole week after finals, and they think no one deserves to win. Fuck them, fuck their shit contest. Fuck you essensys, I hope your devs read this, fuck you bell ends.

20+ years ago we got a contract to replace an old home grown system for managing rented equipment for a company with offices in two countries with a new standard system.

I was tasked with building a few addon modules to handle import and reporting that the standard system lacked.

Over the course of 8 months and multiple trips to their head office for on premises development along side their people that knew how it should work (there was a lot of waiting for info so it was not 8 months of actual work) we finally was ready to present the finished solution.

After about one hour of demonstration their boss questioned why we did not demonstrate the connection to their corporate group accounting system ...

“Corporate group accounting?”

After some confused discussion it turns out that in one of the first meetings the sales person had they had mentioned this accounting system and that all accounting info was to be exported there.

This requirement was never listed in the specifications we got and looking into it it turned out that the standard system did not support such exports at all.

In the end we had to throw it all away as it proved impossible to get that info out of the system (which was not of our design).

We barely avoided having to repay all fees as their people had approved the specification but standing there without a clue to what he was asking for was a very scary experience, thinking “how could we miss this?”

Everyone was a noob once. I am the first to tell that to everyone. But there are limits.

Where I work we got new colleagues, fresh from college, claims to have extensive knowledge about Ansible and knows his way around a Linux system.... Or so he claims.

I desperately need some automation reinforcements since the project requires a lot of work to be done.

I have given a half day training on how to develop, starting from ssh keys setup and local machine, the project directory layout, the components the designs, the scripts, everything...
I ask "Do you understand this?"
"Yes, I understand. " Was the reply.

I give a very simple task really. Just adapt get_url tasks in such a way that it accepts headers, of any kind.
It's literally a one line job.

A week passes by, today is "deadline".

Nothing works, guy confuses roles with playbooks, sets secrets in roles hardcodes, does not create inventory files for specifications, no playbooks, does everything on the testing machine itself, abuses SSH Keys from the Controller node.... It's a fucking ga-mess.

Clearly he does not understand at all what he is doing.

Today he comes "sorry but I cannot finish it"
"Why not?" I ask.
"I get this error" sends a fucking screenshot. I see the fucking disaster setup in one shot ...

"You totally have not done the things like I taught you. Where are your commits and what are.your branch names?"
"Euuuh I don't have any"
Saywhatnow.jpeg

I get frustrated, but nonetheless I re-explain everything from too to bottom! I actually give him a working example of what he should do!

Me: "Do you understand now?"
Colleague: "Yes, I do understand now?"
Me: "Are you sure you understand now?"
C: "yes I do"

Proceeds to do fucking shit all...

WHY FUCKING LIE ABOUT THE THINGS YOU DONT UNDERSTAND??? WHAT KIND OF COGNITIVE MALFUNCTION IA HAPPENING IN YOUR HEAD THAT EVEN GIVEN A WORKING EXAMPLE YOU CANT REPLICATE???
WHY APPLY FOR A FUCKING JOB AND LIE ABOUT YOUR COMPETENCES WHEN YOU DO T EVEN GET THE FUCKING BASICS!?!?

WHY WASTE MY FUCKING TIME?!?!?!

Told my "dear team leader" (see previous rants) that it's not okay to lie about that, we desperately need capable people and he does not seem to be one of them.

"Sorry about that NeatNerdPrime but be patient, he is still a junior"

YOU FUCKING HIRED THAT PERSON WITH FULL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HAI RESUME AND ACCEPTED HIS WORDS AT FACE VALUE WITHOUT EVEN A PROPER TECHNICAL TEST. YOU PROMISED HE WAS CAPABLE AND HE IS FUCKING NOT, FUCK YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE MANAGEMENT SKILLS, YOU ALREADY FAIL AT THE START.

FUCK THIS. I WILL SLACK OFF TODAY BECAUSE WITHOUT ME THIS TEAM AND THIS PROJECT JUST CRUMBLES DOWN DUE TO SHEER INCOMPETENCE.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

FUCK YOU BUSINESS GUY
FUCK YOUR SCOPE CREEP
SOLO DEV AINT GIVING U 20 FEATURES IN ONE MOTHERFUCKING WEEK

Seriously, though. Being a solo full-stackq developer who can do both frontend (react, redux) and backend (feathers, node) does NOT mean you have twice the manpower to accomplish all of your shitty shit. Just because you have an idea does NOT mean I have to implement all of it. You don't even have a motherfucking specifications for me, yet you expect me to deliver shitloads of complete fucking feature in a fucking week. This is not a fucking joke. I am NOT your mother fucking tool. I need time to build my stack, design and perfect the interface. I don't want a shitty motherfucking product on my fucking portfolio.

*dies inside*

At one of my former jobs, we devs had to do all sorts of non-dev work, such as writing quotes and even contracts!

The CEO of that company had this naughty habit to contact devs directly without delegating through the CIO. Sure, if it's really urgent like when some system is down because of a bug, go ahead and disturb a dev. But interrupting coders to write some freaking quote? Come on!...

Once, that CEO asked me to stop everything I was doing to write a quote to a customer ASAP, as this was really urgent.

I spent several hours writing that quote. It had to be done right as any specifications in our quotes were used in our agreeements and were referred to in the case of any dispute. So not only were we devs and salesmen in the same time; we also needed to be lawyers.

When I was done and delivered the quote to the CEO, he told me he had no intention to take on that customer in the first place. Instead, he wrote a polite we-are-not-interested e-mail to the customer and cc:d it to me just so that I could read for myself how very sleek a businessman he was.

Me: why did I have to write that quote when you knew all along that you were not going to use it anyway?
Him: It's for your own personal development.

Another naughty habit of that same CEO is that he made "jokes" and remarks that I found inappropriate, such as "You walk like a drunken sailor".

Later, he decided to discontinue our team/product because "it isn't proftable". Well, what do you expect when devs are forced to waste half day completing pointless tasks?!

It was for the better anyway, and I was actually relieved when I left the company. I'm still thinking though, that the real reason he sacked me is that I am too honest and not the docile kind of employee that would be ideal for him. I did question some of my tasks, and worst of all: I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes.

Have you ever had a problem with a partner, but you cannot prove at 100% that he has something against you? But you cannot stand him?

Well, this happened two years ago. I was working as a tester, and “John” (I won’t say his real name) was the dude who tests my tests, but in production.

I ‘m a sociable person, and I don’t mind talking with another people. Suddenly, I noticed that my co-worker started to behave a little bit... rude? Plain? I don’t know, but sometimes he didn’t answer my conversations/questions, or sometimes answered with extra-negative stuff.

“Well, his life is not easy” I said to myself. “Everybody haveproblems”, “I have to understand him and calm down”.

Two weeks later started to report really REALLY absurd production bugs, and with absurd I mean, for example, that he didn’t like the color of a button, a point next to a phrase, etc., things very very simples, but sometimes he ignored big errors.

Once I had to went out of the city for few hours, and asked to permission to go out. I had pending tests, but I left a document with specifications in case of emergency. Even passwords. Before I could finish the thing in the other city, my partner called me two times, and asking me obvious things! I had to go back to the office ealier that I had planned, so f*** angry 😡 and when I arrived to the office, John said “no, forget it, let’s solve it tomorrow” 🙃 WTF?!!!!!!

I decided not to argue with him.

Also noticed that his headaches suddenly increased, and looked so tired ☹️ I felt guilty to judge him

I felt so guilty, and even today I don’t know what to feel about that or what to think. I don’t work there anymore, but, What do you think? What would you do?

Before implementing a feature that is one hour of work for one developer, let's have four meetings about it, a user survey, specifications and endless discussions on resources.

WHY???
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SO FUCKING SURPRISED SHIT HITS THE FAN EVERY GOD DAMN TIME A CHANGE IS MADE IN YOUR LIMPING SYSTEM?
YOU GAVE NO FUCKING SPECIFICATIONS NOR ANY CARE TO DECIDE ABOUT WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT IN IT.
EVERY TIME I SEE THE CODE I GET EYE CANCER, DEBUGGING THIS SHIT IS AS HARD AS FINDING THE FATHER IN A HOBO STREET ORGY
AND YOU FUCKING THINK ADDING FEATURES INTO THE SYSTEM UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES IS SO GOD DAMN EASY.

I hope life's god damn dandy for you, get fucked with a pipe bomb.

Oh, hello DevRant, sorry for sitting on the fence for the past months.

My friend told everyone in my school class that i programm...
And now they are asking, can you do this and that and what for specifications should my PC have to run this game...

help

When an application is nearly complete and suddenly there is a recommendation thrown from management to change a technical specifications . Which will change the whole cycle effort meaningless. How does that feel?! Getting it now.

!rant

Hey all, I just wanted to spread some aware to mental health issues in this industry since I'm very close to burn out according to my psychiatrist.
I'm not even 25 years old, just worked 1 1/2 years full time and 3 years apprenticeship before that. So, I'm pretty young and "new" as a software developer.
Many projects got wrong horribly and fights with the clients felt as they were carried out on the back of the developers. Timings and specifications were communicated poorly, deadlines were undoable but no one listened.
I thought, this is normal. Now, after weeks of on-off-working because of reoccurring small illnesses, clearly caused by the permanently high stress levels, my psychiatrist, which I visited yesterday for the first time, was totally shocked. She was surprised, I could even handle it so long. That hit me quite a bit. I already expected it to be bad, but close to burn out... That came, I don't want to say unexpected, but quite unexpected.
It was really hard holding the tears back while telling her my story.
And now here I am. I'm currently on sick leave till the end of the year (then my employment at this company ends) and I feel bad for them, to leave them. I know, they could use my knowledge and abilities, but I shouldn't damage my mental health even more.
I will not work for the entire January. If my psychiatrist thinks, I shouldn't work in February as well, I will do so even though my plan was to work again.
I will not work full time again, since my brain seems to not be able to handle it. Maybe some time in the future.

This turned out to be way more sad than expected. I just wanna leave this here. Thanks for reading.

If you people are in such horrible situations, try to break out.

TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.

I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.

I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.

Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.

Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!

So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.

For a new project I first try to get an overview about the specifications, hosting and platform.

Depending on this information I decide which language and frameworks (if any) to use.

Basically always the first part I create is the backend, so I have all the data interfaces ready. For web stuff Postman is really useful.

Later on I start with the frontend, get myself really angry because I hate frontend.
Then I get into a hate-overdrive because browsers suck and I delete everything and quit.

When the test database has better specifications & performance than the production one.. FML! 😭😭😭😭😭

Am I the only one that thinks it's extremely fucking stupid that the software engineering industry is simultaneously experiencing a "shortage of talent" and maintaining the same ATS that filters legitimate talent just because the resume doesn't fit keyword specifications?

We see it every day. People with years of experience that should never be allowed to touch important code. People with little to no experience that learn fast and perform well. Fuck years of experience being the only thing some recruiters see.

"We generally don't hire people with less than 3 years experience" shut your fucking mouth. Ridiculous. You hire people out of college, don't lie to my face.

Oh and don't even get me started on how many people fabricate their industry experience and get interviews from it. That's what happens when recruitment patterns fail to catch up to an industry that increasingly trains people better up front, and in shorter time periods, and values skills that ATS doesn't give a shit about.

Crazy idea: make job applications test problem solving competency instead of weeding out quality candidates.

Job searching is frustrating.

We are required to use corporate SSO for any authenticated internal websites, and one of the features they require you to implement is a "logout" button.

They provide a whole slew of specifications, including size and placement/visibility, etc. They provide an SSO logout URL you must redirect to after you take care of your own application logout tasks.

Makes sense... except the logout URL they provide to serve the actual SSO logout function broke over 3 months ago, and remains non-functional to this day.

Apparently I'm the first person (and perhaps one of the only people) who reported it, and was told "just not to worry about it".

So, we have a standing feature request to provide a button... that doesn't actually work.

Corporate Security - Making your corporation _appear_ more secure every day...

I've discovered that working with artists on a videogame is the equivalent of the chapter when Homer asks for a wish to a monkey arm on the Simpsons.

- I want a png image of the player on idle position. And I dont want a 30000 x 30000 image, neither an image which half of it are transparent pixels, neither the image not to be centered or any strange thing ok?

*They send the image*

- Normal resolution, well drawn, no visual artifacts centered on the image...

*Tries to import it on the game engine*

+ Can't import .jpg format images

- FFFFFFFF#@€&£$$}•{^÷|CK!

This happened after a year working on the same project on the same engine with the same image format specifications.

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

Product manager calls me at 7 PM. "There's gonna be a slight change in the module. You can reuse lot of existing code and I'm sure it won't take much for you to finish. "

Me: Okay, let me take a look at it tomorrow morning.

The next day I saw the spec change.

One and half weeks later, I'm still doing the change.

#FML

Just had a talk with my manager who wanted to know why I removed a feature from an application we had. This removal had been discussed WITH THE MANAGER several months prior, but apparently they hadn't written a little note or anything down about it.

I told them we had discussed it earlier. They didn't believe me. They checked the project technical specifications that said it _should still be there_. I told them we talked about it previously. They told me to prove it, so I go looking through the commit history.

Lo and behold:

- Commit <hash> authored 4 months ago.
- Update to specifications, asked for by <manager>

Eat it.

We founded a 3 man startup.
I am on holiday for two weeks and my mates paid 50k to someone so he programs a prototype app without any specifications. They told him about what the app should display without any mockups or images via Skype. Returned Monday, found out about it, and on the following Monday we will see the current status..
Oh boy, dog help me. I expect a clickdummy made with Adobesomething, and we paid 50k for that. Why didn't they wait for 2 weeks?!

A story from around 2005:

Customer laying out specifications: “We expect this software to need to last 25 years or so, and it will need to keep historical file processing data by dates for at least that long, assume storage is no issue.”

Devs at the time: “look best I can do is support that start with 200 or 201, anything else is really too much to ask. Also understanding how to work with dates at all and not just string manipulation is waaaaayyy hard yo.”

Fuck you lazy motherfuckers. This is why people thought Y2K would be a problem.

balancing school work between life and sport and programming is so hard. i mean, school is complete bs. what’s the point?

ffs it’s not *just* that im never gonna use the shit im taught, but that if it dont learn it, im punished. even in some classes (code.org), information that we’re taught is blatantly incorrect. either way, being able to find the foci or an ellipse and the latus rectum (hehe) of a hyperbola isnt going to make it easier when i get my job and just adjust css to my bosses’s specifications. i maintain a 4.0, and i fucking hate it. my friends are working hard, and getting into mit for racial diversity, while im doing just as much work, for what?

i want out. i really do. but this redundant thing called a degree is holding me back. i really want to have some way of proving my skills without a degree. i’m currently building a social media application i believe will take off, but frankly, i dont care.

take off or not, hopefully it will be enough to prove my skills. i’ve been working on this for two weeks now, and, well, that’s my story.

That’s it I’m done with writing documents like Software Product Specifications and Software Requirements Documents and Software Architecture Documents, manuals, data sheets and more in MS word..

I’m doing it all form this point forward in LaTeX... I can stay in my editor, it works beautifully with version control because it’s just text... I can split it amung multiple files.. it looks damn sexy. I can focus on the content rather than being distracted by formatting and spelling issues and the rest of that shit.. ALSO.. it doesn’t crash or get corrupted.. well at-least I’ve never had a text editor crash or corrupt my files.

Idk why I didn’t learn latex sooner and do the switch.

My company has been looking for a project time tracking and reporting app/website for 2 years but are too cheap to buy one. So they want me to develop one to their specifications which are forever changing. Let's say I've intentionally wasted so much time "perfecting it". it's been done for 2 months.

Change your fucking specifications and priorities again. Change them. I dare you.

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

FUCK YOU $CLIENT_NAME !

You tell me I've spent the last 6 months molesting and hacking your piece of garbage multistore prestashop?

Just for you to yet again, change the specifications, saying "I don't want a multistore anyway please split them up"

What an imbicile moron, you want me to duplicate the codebase/database 7 times? just to start "downgrading" each one individually? To make a few adjustments to each one.

What the fuck have you been smoking? I wasn't born with enough middle fingers to let you know how I feel about you.

You know what? I'm done with this bullshit of "do it and we review latter" when I ask clarification on requirements.

No you fucking stupid piece of shit, I'm a mother fucking professional developer, treat me with fucking respect!

I can't spend weeks trying to figure out wtf is your specific domain specifications if you ain't answer my questions with clarity I'm gonna keep asking them in slightly different ways as if you where a search engine and I'm trying to search wtf is in your mind.
Only then I'm gonna start planning/coding your shit.

I have better things to do.

Your lack of planning isn't my priority.

I guess it has to do with the kind of background that I have. But I always get contacted by government contractors for development jobs. On one side I think: oh nice, stable income and benefits plus the addition of this kind of work to my resume.

On the other I cannot help but yawn at how incredibly boring these jobs sound. For those that might recall some of my comments from certain posts: i am a job mercenary.

I will code in anything that pays me well and i won't give two shits about the stack.

But man, some of these fuckers can really put me to sleep while reading their specifications or projects requirements and I cannot help but feel completely and utterly BORED.

In short: si pero no.

Specifications called for user logins to be stored in a session and not be persistent. When the session ends, you need to login again. The system deals with insurance policy information and persistent login was deemed a security risk.

First ticket submitted by the client after go-live? "Please make the login page remember my user name and password, or that I've logged in previously."

sales-managers: How long do you need to implement feature X ?
software-dev: Hmmm, that's nothing we have in our default-packages ... could be nasty, because it won't work without feature Y, which also does not exist in the current version 3 of our system.
I need to investigate this issue.
... 2 days later:
software-dev: This is really a nasty problem - to make X work, we've to reimplement Y for our system version 3, but this won't work with feature Z.
If we do this, it may take several weeks.
sales-manager: we need to go live in 2 months.
software-dev: might work.
------
1 week before go-live:
sales-manager: The customer saw us testing feature X. He does not like it. Could we just do it in ... blabla ... this way?
software-dev: This would work out of the box with feature Z, yes - we've to remove feature Y and X for that. But be warned - this might work next week without testing only.
sales-mamanger: do it now!
day of go live:
The customer tried the new feature X - it won't work.
software-dev: But it's not there, was removed, instead he has to use feature Z.
...
sales-guy comes back: He does not like it.
software-dev: why not? its working!
sales-guy: Yes, but he still wants it to work like feature X as he ordered.
software-dev: according to the specs, its exactly what he ordered. look at that: (showing the general specifications of project, showing feature Z).
...
sales-guy: The customer did not review this new document since last week.... Its still feature X
...
dev: really? why? I sent that version to you the day, he said, he doesn't like feature X, and you said I've to change that just urgently.
sales-guy: Please switch back to the version with X of last week. - could you. please ?
me: This won't work, because the other colleagues already finished their stuff on that currently running system - we'll lose all the optimations we've done to make this and other stuff work.
----- FAIL ------- NEVER DO ANYTHING WITHOUT SIGNATURE OF THE CUSTOMER !!!
One week onsite and rescheduled go-live is just so-what expensive.
Today (some weeks later) ... I saw someone else sitting in sales-guys office.

On the beginning of a project I'm not yet ( 😒 ) taking part of I questioned the use of firebase because I understood the client was gonna ask for the web app to be hosted on their servers lately, but people told me not to worry.

Today... Only 2 fucking months later they are asking for the specifications/technologies used so they can prepare their server to host it and I was laughing my ass out internally while saying to my boss:

Well, looks like you are gonna need to rewrite huge parts and probably write a back end from scratch if you are gonna use postgresql.

Lol, why do people never listen to me? This is becoming ridiculous....

So i’m looking through our backlog... and there is one issue called “gain trust”. No specifications whatsoever. Just “gain trust”. Wtf

App specifications

We support a system we inherited from another company, it’s an online document store for technical specifications of electronic devices used by loads of people.

This thing is the biggest pile of shite I’ve ever seen, it wasn’t written by developers but rather by civil engineers who could write vb...so needless to say it’s classic asp running on iis, but it’s not only written in vbscript oh god no, some of it is vb other parts is jscript (Microsoft’s janky old JavaScript implementation) and the rest is php.

When we first inherited it we spent the best part of 2 months fixing security vulnerabilities before we were willing to put it near the internet - to this day I remain convinced the only reason it was never hacked is that everything scanning it thought it was a honeypot.

We’ve told the client that this thing needs put out of its misery but they insist on keeping it going. Whenever anything goes wrong it falls to me and it ends up taking me days to work out what’s happening with it. So far the only way I’ve worked out how to debug it is to start doing “Response.AddHeader(‘debug’, ‘<thing>’) on the production site and looking at the header responses in the browser.
I feel dirty doing that but it works so I don’t really care at this point

FUCK I hate this thing!

The past few months i got a bunch of emails and calls from my previous "boss" (hes the head of the research), that he would be grateful if i helped them out. I got a few friends still working on that piece of shit project so i said yeah, i can help.

Now this whole thing is a research involving most of the big universities, lots of math phds, and is kinda secret. They couldnt find anyone to sketch up a few stupid algorithms for them so i did just that.

Yesterday i got the specifications for the task. Its the core functioning algo, the one i made from fucking discrete integer data, it took me 3 fucking months to correct their mistakes, and now they want me to create 2 similar patterns for 2 completely different...things. Yeeeah no.

Most awkward video meeting?

Can a conference call count? This happened several years ago.

Diving into international markets that could potentially make us millions of $$ (no pressure), while the phone was ringing the CEO's number (in Norway), my manager leans over and whispers
DevMgr: "This project will be managed using *proper* software development methodologies, none of this agile shit you want to use."
<CEO picks up>

I had already been in talks with their dev team to get a feel for their tech stack and we had discussed project milestones, potential release cycles (laying the ground work for using agile methodologies) before getting upper mgmt involved.

The partner dev team was listening and kept throwing out agile buzzwords and I could tell my manager was getting pissed. He would blurt out "Those specifications will need to be fully documented before PaperTrail writes one line of code!". No one said anything, but I could tell the other mgrs/VPs in the room were uncomfortable with the hostility towards discussing features.

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are FROZEN

There is that meme "I've no idea what I'm doing" and there's the meme "it's fine *in a fire*". Currently I feel like a combination of those two. I'm in unexplored waters and nobody knows what's going on anyway, so I just make sure my part is technically correct according to specifications and when everything comes together I'm ready to respond to the expected disaster..

I tried to spread awareness of the coming disaster but nobody listens so I'll just wait and see what happens..

At my institution there is a sys admin that belongs to an entirely different department. They have their own systems on their own network, separated from ours. I do not care, nor do I mind at all, but this is the second time I've had to put their admin in his place.

The first instance was when we had a security firm gauge our systems for vulnerabilities etc. The one that they have was fine, but required some additional configurations on their Tomcat servers. The "sys-admin" contacted I.T (my department) in order to request assistance, the net manager was the one he contacted, and he told the dude that he is not familiar with the Tomcat environment that they have, but that I, the dev manager, would possibly give him some pointers. The net manager is my friend, and he knows how much of a dickhead I am, so he was careful in what he told him. So the dude calls me:
"Hey, I need some items fixed on my Tomcat servers, they told me you have to do it"
Me: "Who? those are your servers"
Him: "The net manager said that you would do it"
Me: "I am certain he didn't tell you that bud, no one here will take care of your servers, they are yours, I am not doing any configurations on your stuff, that is your job"
Him: "Can't you just do them?"
Me: "No, bye"

The little bitch escalated it to my department director, who told him exactly the same thing, the director did ask if I would be willing to assist, I told him no since even though his configurations were minimal, I was not going to put myself in the position to which that fucker's ineptitude would cause him to point fingers at me, director backed me up and told the fucker to deal with his own shit.

This year it came to my attention that not only do they have their owns servers, but their own SSO system. This moron contacted me, tagging VPS and such in the email to tell me that I had to configure his SSO because "they told me you had to do it". The same shit happened, but this time I put him on blast during a meeting and told him that as "sys admin" for his stuff it was his responsibility to deal with the SSO that they have, and to contact the vendor to ask for the specifications. In front of EVERYONE he asked me if I could do it for him, I fucking looooooooled and told him that he just admitted to not being able to do his job (for which he is paid handsomely) in front of the entire room of VPS. One VP asked me why I was not willing to help him, and I told the VP that it would be the equivalent of me taking his vehicle for services, it is not my vehicle, thus not my responsibility. The VP agreed and told the fucker to get on with it and do what I said: contact his vendor channels to figure it out himself since it was indeed his position.
Yet again he said that he didn't know about SSO configs and that he was "told that I would do it", everyone asked who the fuck told him that and he said that the vendor, they asked again how it was and he showed the message from the vendor telling him: "Have your SSO admin perform the following <bla bla bla bla>" they asked him who was the manager for the SSO that they had. He said that it was him. Then they asked him what logic made him believe that it should be me, he stated again "they told me it was him".

I could hear everyone's brains shortcircuiting as no one could believe someone would be this fucking dense.

I don't think he will continue to have his job for much longer. I understand not knowing something, and I would have been happy to give pointers since I do administer systems of that level, but I can't with the whole made up "they said he would do it"

Bitch who said that? just say that you want me to do it because you can't, I mean, I am still not fucking doing it, but damn. Fucking morons man.

We write our feature specifications in Gherkin, so it is clear to every member of the team (even nondevs GASP!) exactly what each feature should do.

SO WHY THE FUCK, AFTER BUILDING THE FEATURE, DO I GET REVIEWS FROM THE pRoDuCt MaNaGeRs, SHOWING ME THEY WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT FOR THE FEATURE. YOU WROTE THE FUCKING FEATURE DID YOU HAVE A CHANGE OF HEART MID THOUGHT YOU IDIOT!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I'M SO SICK OF IT I'M SICK OF WORKING 12 HOURS ON A FRIDAY FOR YOUR STUPID SHIT

My boss uses agile development so he doesn't has to think about use cases he wants to be covered by the application.

He's just throwing in a "design" (an image that is probably created with Paint) without any further specifications and inconsistent elements, let the developer work two days on it, see the outcome, complains why it's not how he wanted it to be and then starts thinking how the feature should be integrated in the app and notices that his "requirements" from the image could not provide any advantage or usage at all for the user of the application. Asking for clarification before starting to work just leads to spongy statements or silence when he notices that he didn't think through to the end.

Sad is that this has not happened only once but is usually the way a new feature is developed...

Damn specs! Why do you have to change as the project goes on?!! Every project seems too easy at first.

Am I the only one who actually enjoys writing technical specifications?

"Could you send me the project specifications and requirements?"

*sends 3 edited screenshots*

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

Damn clients, they'll never tell you what they want.
And when you give them something, they'll point out useless "problems".
Either do it yourself, or give exact specifications

I got the requirements specifications today.... for something I've worked on for a year and is 9 months delayed due to design constantly changing and management always lagging behind.
Best part is specifications have requirements we have no chance of meeting in time.
Yet another failed deadline. Yafd

I need help and advice!

I currently work as an consultant at a large corporation. Came onboard for 1-2 years to help rebuild one of their platforms. From the beginning the mindset was that the finished product should not be developed based on anything else than customer testimonials and interviews regarding functionality and design. However, they’re building their platform developed and distributed by this other company. Basically they bought a system that is incomplete regarding to being compliant to the specifications brought to them when they decided which system to go with. Now we’re trying to build around all the issue this platform is causing us. The code base for the system is like something a monkey did with their feet. Nothing makes sense and it’s layers on top of layers of 10 year old code. I f-ing hate it. I don’t know what to do. We have some many technical limitation that it’s impossible to create the vision they had from the start.
I’ve been thinking about talking to the highest chief in the department as he has been pissed earlier about project managers not escalating issue to him earlier. But I don’t want to step on anyones toes. Should I leave the project? Should I talk to the chief? What do I do? I’m miserable🤯

Friday 4 pm, the time when clients change the specifications. FML!

I don't understand why I'm getting triggered by this… Someone please send help

I think karma is doing me a favor today 😍

So I started to work fir my current company early January 2017, on a project I'm still currently working on (well, now discussions are made around the next sprint, so I'm working on something else but you get the spirit)

We had the most PAIN-IN-THE-ASS-ish client I ever met. Dude gives schemas of what a page should look like (no real visual model but well things were pretty clear so there weren't big problems around).

The client was the kind of dude that could send these models, let us work on them then opening a fuck-ton of tickets, ranting about how the elements' display isn't good. Then we have to make remember him that he gave us nothing else, and he agreed on the functional specifications. And this for two WHOLE fucking years

Today, the project director came by our office and casually sat down next to me to tell me that the dude have been fired by his company for being a huge douchebag, blocking communication between us and simply being useless.

The sun is shining again 😍😍

So a product manager emailing devs long essays on requirements? how does that sound? Aren't developers just supposed to implement the specifications? Is requirement gathering and design their job too? Maybe I need a new job before I go crazy.

How hard is it to make a custom steno-lithography API? And do I even need one?

Hi, all. My name is J.A and I am co-owner of 3DPrintedDreams with my best friend. (We are both 17.)

During a brainstorm of what should be the flagship feature of our shop should be. We decided to take user images, (exact specifications TBD), and then use an API to transform them into .stl files so my friend can print it on his 3D Printer.

I am asking how hard or "easy" would it be to make such an API and what would be the bottom dollar if I were to make a collab post here about it? If anyone would be willing to listen, I could explain how all this would work in relation to the full stack of my website.

p.s. I understand that experience costs money and I myself have experienced this, but, we spent most of our money on the Pallete 2 from Mosaic. (about $500).

HOWEVER, we still have some money left. If a suggested price is to much for us to pay up-front, 3DPrintedDreams is willing to pay you in installments dermined by mutual agreement.

Thanks for your time and have a nice day!

-Josh

Co-founder of 3DPrintedDreams, LLC (Pending).

So I've been back to work for 2 weeks after going on a holiday. Getting back into the flow of things was easy, but seeing the status of the project that I am a part of, and seeing the kind of implementation work that my co-workers has done, it's kind of a no surprise.

So the past 2 weeks I've been completing features that I left my co-workers to finish, but didn't. And rewriting other features that they worked on, but does not meet the specifications.

Will I ever be able to work with reliable/competent developers?

PM: we have plenty of time to develop this app. The client is so slow in providing designs and specifications that it took them 2 months just to give me this lousy mockup where they copy/pasted UI element directly from Photoshop. Btw, i have a meeting this afternoon with them :)
ME: ok. since it's Friday, monday you will update me :)
[Fast forward the weekend]
PM: where the hell is the App ? the client told me we have less than one month to deliver it. why didn't you provide a fully functional pixel perfect prototype yet ? Why don't you communicate with me ?
ME: :|

TL;DR - an entire emulation of a closed source CMS to develop a theme

The longer version:

We are using a cms that is closed source, and we only have access to frontend files alongside twig files. The CMS is custom built but many aspects are in a very rudimentary state, for example it is nearly impossible to develop locally, we have to use an integrated text editor to code stuff.

So out of frustration, and for my development needs, I decided I would make an emulation based on Symfony 4. Also because my PM was pressing me to optimise our site. I wrote some custom JS to handle everything smoothly, a semi-sass framework and well-structured twig files.

I was also supposed to work with our graphic designer, but she didn't get any alloted time from our pm to work on it...

Now PM asks me to write a specifications document in order to make another company build the new version

I mean wtf, I'm so bored, I can actually enjoy my day by coding, and no, I'm just there to write the specs.

When I told PM I am currently building the new version, she's like "but we didn't validate anything", when she explicitly said I had a green Go to code it a few months back

Instead I have to make prezies and convert them back to PowerPoint because we have computer-illiterate people in the company who aren't flexible to understand simple tools.

Let's hope it won't get useless by Friday (I have a presentation to give, alongside my estimates and project management presentation)

spent two weeks fixing a solution for designer who constantly changes his mind...
manager takes one look at it and says it's too complicated and proceeds to change it to something simple which completely ignores all of designers specifications...

designer no longer cares about his specifications...

I guess this means I shouldn't care about specifications...
yea right...

Once upon a time we had to integrate our backend with the billing service of another company. They sent us a Swagger API Description, describing the payload they will send to us. Everything was ok, and we implemented it.

We told them our background was ready to run some tests, but they got some error. After some quick debug i asked for the actual payload they just sent to me.

The payload had different field types, different field names and non-nullable keys was explicitly coming as null.

THEY DIDN'T FOLLOW THEIR OWN SPECIFICATIONS!

So past week our Web Design teacher proposed a little HTML5 project for the class to make. I have been since that day until today trying to implement an OBLIGATORY drag and drop functionality to reorder a list and back it up to localStorage, but for some reason it wont work as it should. But what a surprise, today I arrive at class and he has changed the specifications of the project, allowing us to not implement that, or implement it differently. That singlehandledly made my day.

Elsie: -Does that make it a glass half full or glass half empty type of situation?

Bernard: -We're engineers, means, the glass has been manifactured to the wrong specifications....

Gotta love Westworld :)

(Also, damn.. Do those foldable tablets they use look awesome?!)

(Src: Westworld s1 e6 around 5th minute)

When I accompanied my Dad to buy a laptop. I listened to the conversation between him and the dealer an I was like "will I ever understand anything to do with pc specifications".

!rant

i hate the QA guys when they gets excited finding a "SUPER REGRESSION OMG THE APP IS BROKEN" just to find out that they haven't read the new specifications.

Client: Hey, can you explain to me how this feature works? I'm totally confused.

Programmer: *explains the entire feature to client* Actually, you made the specs for this. *shows specifications document client created*

Client: Oh right. Sorry, completely forgot about that. It works great. But can we make some changes on...

OH HELL NO.

Dev1: "what was that requirement? I mean, do you remember that little yet hugely important detail ...?"
Dev2: "hmmm sort of ... Maybe it's in one of the emails, possibly 2 months ago. Let's try to find it"
Dev3: "wait, probably Dev1 was not included for some reason in that thread of emails"
Dev2: "no wait, I mean the other, the one we used to talk about those other specifications from previous meeting..."
[and the story goes on]
Now you may think "ok, this event happened once and was a misstep. Shit happens"
Actually, this is the bread and butter in this company I collaborate with. All their requirements are spread across thousands of emails, usually mixed together and possibly forked into different threads. Often people are cut out from conversation because someone forgets to "reply all", other times they're lost in time.
When I asked them "why don't you use some other tool, maybe something more organized and easily searchable, something structured..."
They replied "no no, we prefer to use email for historical reasons"
My brain just melted like chocolate under the sun

!rant/story:

Aaayoo issya boi the OG rapper straight outta Compton, wassup?!

Nah, for real, though.: How are y'all doing? It has been a long time. I hope y'all are having a great time (can sense some peoples' incoming negative comments due to corona).

I built my completely new first gaming rig like a few weeks ago after my school laptop stopped showing any signals.

The specifications are the following.:
- Mobo: MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (no iGPU)
- dGPU: KFA2 RTX 2070 SUPER OC
- 2nd dGPU: GTX 550 TI (this one gets a new rant/post)
- RAM: 2x G.SKILL Ripjaws V 8 GB 3600 MHz
- PSU: Be quiet 650 W (It was the platinum edition afaik. I originally bought the 600 Watt Gold edition, but somehow they sent me the 650 Watt for no additional charge... which is great for me haha)
- HDD: 2x 4TB NAS HDD in RAID1 configuration (to load all of my games around 2 TB right now. Got the two HDDs for 110 Euro including the SATA Data cables)
- SSD: One Intenso 240 GB SSD and a reused Samsung 256 GB SSD from my old broken Lenovo laptop
- Case: Be quiet Pure Base 500 black with a glass panel on the side

While building my first PC, it was one hell of a challenge. I knew how it all was working in theory, but to put it all together, practically, was a bit of a challenge, but it was a nice challenge. I learned a lot and have a performance gain I could only ever dream of.

I used to play my games first on a Toshiba satellite l750d laptop (around 40 fps in cs:go with the lowest gfx settings) and then on a Lenovo e51-80 laptop (around 30 fps max minecraft with no shaders and texture packs).

Now I play cs:go on Kubuntu with 400 fps at peak with ultra high graphics. It is unbelievable.

I couldn't trust the system when I turned on the fps display the first time I saw it.

Question: Why do we write software specifications?

Answer: Because in the beginning there was the word.

Specifications

PM comes into my office: "Hey, if <client> asks about his edits, just tell him they're scheduled for this week."
me: "I thought they were scheduled for this week, I thought that you were currently in a meeting to get final specs so you could tell me what needed changed."
PM: "Yeah, he wants to take the plugin from 5 steps down to 3, we told him it wouldn't be a problem and we would have it done this week."
me: "Ok, there are limitations as far as what I can cut out of the process, his tag line when he started as a client was '5 easy steps' and I built something that did what he wanted in 5 steps. Changing things this late in the game is not simple, I'm talking a minimum 6 hours of work."
PM: "Well I tried to make sure that what he wanted was possible but I didn't have a developer in the meeting. It shouldn't change anything that much."

He ended up scheduling a meeting with me and the designer to go over the edits Thursday afternoon. So I will have the new specifications which I said would be a minimum 6 hours of work and I will be given ~10 hours in which to do it. I sure hope nothing unexpected pops up while I'm working on this.

I'm also the only developer this week (and technically speaking I'm junior) since our senior dev wrecked his car over the weekend and isn't planning on being in all week. I'm the only computer literate person in the office of 50 or so, which means that if there is any kind of tech issue I'm ripped away from my desk for 'emergency help'. I have two other sites to get ready for client approval meetings by Friday afternoon and if the clients approve I will be launching their sites that afternoon as well.

The sign on my door currently says "Error 500: unable to handle your request" I need something to throw at these people.

Is it possible to make games on hit anime's like bokuno hero academia, naruto.. Without facing any copyright issues?
If no, what all specifications should I look forward to cater?

Ugh, I feel like fucking crying every time I have to explain to the other developers and network sysadmins that we can't have the same Redis server for both session and caching data in the current project we're working on. I wrote all this down in the specifications which NO ONE reads!!

There are times like these I wish I just had access to the AWS account so I can do all of this myself.

The worst is having to rewrite/refactor another person's implementation either due to not follow the requirements or specifications and having made something completely different or useless.

But recently is having to re-explain what needs to be done or what the requirements are.

If I would have gotten my last feature request as a part of the (barley existent) specifications i wouldn't have needed more than one week to do it. At least no one is complaining about me being slow.

Poor specifications are the worst..
I developed an application for a client of the Company i work at.
Everything done according to what i was told, but since they cant keep/remember the specifications we agreed upon, i keep getting contacted about stuff that does not work. And everytime its because they changed something and is now not using the program as intended... anyone been in this situation?
i mean i account for the hours spent modifying, but it pisses me off..

I am so fucking tired being the handy man that solves every problem that arises from a disgraceful project management.

I was minding my own business when a project was handed to me two weeks before the production rollout. In this project they needed a ton of integrations with the destination system and nothing was done.

So naturally I started to ask where were the integration specifications and what infrastructure was supporting the project so I could start development right away.
There were no DEV nor QA infrastructure, only production, and no one could give me a straight answer about what exactly they needed to do. That alone was a huge red flag but the kicker was that I could only start when the software provider development team finished the configurations of the system that they wanted to integrate with. After reviewing the due dates I only had 4 days to implement the integrations before the rollout.

During those 4 days I was constantly on the phone trying to get enough information to implement everything in time. After an immeasurable effort I managed to implement every critical component for the rollout.

So fucking tired of this shit.......

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

Collect project specifications & details.
- order by relevance.

List & install dependencies (possibly spin up a vm).

mkdir ~/Code/{lang}/{framework?}/{project}

Bootstrap skeleton & scaffold.
- ensure functional base.

Iterate specs list & create test case(s) one at a time, going: test => minimal to pass => refactor => next(repeat_cycle)

What specifications should I look for when looking for a laptop I want to program with? I prefer Windows OS and I'm training to be a web developer.

We are a remote team of two android developers for this startup. I have 3 years of experience and my protege has 1 year of experience.

One month a new guy with 10 years experience joined our team and hes working onsite. He's supposed to be scrum master and be good ad dividing and delegating tasks, but what he's doing past two weeks is appaling to me.

Basically we got a request for a new feature. He skipped discovery and planning steps, went straight to implementation and one week later showed us his implementation.

Note that at that moment my remote team was not informed about anything. He started reinventing a library to capture a picture and video, while there are tons of other well developed libraries out there.

What makes things more difficult is that his english sucks.

I don't understand what he's doing but now it seems that either he's playing office politics and is trying to stay ahead by not informing us so we would be forced to follow his implementation. Or maybe he is totally oblivious and don't have any sprint management experience, so he's just trying his best by working hard and trying to prove his own worth.

Eitherway it sucks that he is not able to communicate specifications from HQ to us, because even I did a better work with planning our sprints by communicating remotely.

So now I started asking him questions and turns out the guy doesn't even understand specification. He already half implemented the feature and can't tell us why we need it and why we are not using what we already have in the app. So now he's back to square one: doing discovery. It's fcking ridiculous.

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

understand the client's specifications on point BEFORE implementation starts.

I have lost track of the whys, but I'm writing something that loads a datastructure not unlike specifications of C types (plus struct single inheritance and generics) from any DLL-s tossed in the same folder, then organizes them into a pretty database. Now I just gotta keep gradually broadening the scope until I get to the feature set of the modern C# type system.

Freelancers, how many hours would you charge your client per small projects?

Situation is that I am leaving country but will still work as a freelancer android dev in my company at hourly rate 27EUR/hour.

Now from experience I already feel that most specifications of tasks/ux-ui sketches will be not clear/vague. Also there is a question of overall app architecture, prevention from crashes, memory leaks and etc.

Basically they will give me some spec and I will have to evaluate how long it will take to do it. I never worked as a freelancer so I need some advice on how to deal with problems like this. If I guess that something might take 5 working days to be done (40h) should I charge for 60h and etc.?

Fucking monstrous specifications!

What do I need 4500 pages of specification if half of the defined behaviour is specified as user-overridable and every fucking blithering idiot that has only read the cover page defines behaviour for his system just slightly different.

'Oh the specification lists 999 ways to structure data, but I don't wanna be mainstream. I want an egyptian hieroglyph at the end every 42nd data item received'

So many things are already standardized, just use what is already there and don't re-specifiy the wheel. How hard can it be?

F U browser vendors!

Why is it, that we have specifications for HTML, JS, CSS, etc and we have browsers for more, than 10 years now AND THEY STILL CANNOT MAKE SOMETHING CONSISTENT THROUGHOUT EVERY PLATFORM!

An event is not being triggered somewhere? No problemo. An extra event there? Nay, still okay. Inconsistent state for the same operation on different platforms? Cool, simply cool!

But instead of fixing these shitty things, they introduce bullshit on top of this, like a media element requiring a user interaction to be able to play content.

Question for Support:
What are the recommended system specifications for [X]. We have a client using a laptop with an [BEEFY-CPU] and 32 GB of RAM and your program hits 100% on both resources when this program is used.

Answer by Support:
Those specs look above our recommendations. Programs using 100% of computing availability is a good thing and it means that it is functioning correctly. Of course if they have a more powerful computer it will run faster, but I would say that they are well positioned.

Some days, most of the worktime is dedicated to report invalid/useless specifications and wait for the right ones to actually start working on the project

At the place I intern, we're managing a project that's quite old (about 8 years). There's a specification document that discusses features but the mentioned stuff has been subject to incremental changes over the years so that these documents no longer fully discuss exact specifications of a particular feature. I'm curious on how you keep track of such incremental changes to a feature? Do you update the specification document with the new requirement document or is there some other way to do it?

why the fuck do interviews ask me about architecture and shit?

the role of a normal code monkey ur hiring for probably doesnt have the code monkey making the architecture decisions

i dont make the architecture decisions in my current role either

im happy to learn, and point out if i think things are weird when encountering specifications , but goddamn fuck off

Part I think 3 of Mathematica fails.

So, I'm doing a plot. Initially, I hit the following error: "Value of option PlotRange -> {{3,19},{0,1.1}} is not All, Full, Automatic, a positive machine number, or an appropriate list of range specifications."

Me:Okay, let's change it to PlotRange -> Automatic, maybe I don't know what I'm doing.

Mathematica:"Value of option PlotRange -> Automatic is not All, Full, Automatic, a positive machine number, or an appropriate list of range specifications."

Me:Uh, what? Well then... Oh, please don't tell me it's because of a space in between.

Mathematica:"Value of option PlotRange -> Automatic is not All, Full, Automatic, a positive machine number, or an appropriate list of range specifications."

Me:Oooookay then, what's the problem?... oh wait, there's another space. Why is it that sensitive to whitespace though?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

That fixed it. Then, when I tried to reproduce it, suddenly adding a space and reevaluating did not raise the error.

I'm in need of advice. I reckon this is no stack overflow but that's probably for the best as I wouldn't feel as comfortable posting there as I am doing it here. So, back to the question: I'm currently working with legacy code, written in .NET 2.0. This code is responsible for calling upon PEC services in order to finally create personal smart cards. I was tasked with the job of creating a repository system that would allow the program to call on the old legacy services or the new ones without any distinction. We are talking about SOAP services in both cases. The issues is: the new service definition is comprised of soap policies. This wouldn't be a problem per se, with more modern version of the framework, but with .NET 2.0? Yes, it is. It doesn't support policies and signing the body with a certificate right out of the box. How can I manage this? I feel like the only way would be letting the proxy class do its thing up until the very last moment: intercept the SOAP request before its sent and modify it according to the specifications. But I reckon this is very bad practice. Is there any other way out of this?

Thanks for anyone that would like to help. 🙂

If modern computers have more memory but websites demand more memory, doesn't that defeat the benefit?

For example, let's assume YouTube's HTML-based user interface from 2014 needed 100 MB of RAM per tab. Now, computers might have 4 times the RAM on average, but YouTube's polymer JS-based user interface (UI) might need 400 MB per tab, a proportional increase. In fact, the browser needs to walk through a heavy 10 MB pile of JavaScript before being able to show anything on modern YouTube.

It seems like the higher demands nullify the performance benefit from the increased specifications of modern hardware. Computers get stronger but demands and workloads rise too, so performance isn't improved because some website operators feel the need to show off their "fancy" JavaScript.

So me and a couple of my teammates were developing a website for artists where all the things related to artists such as artworks, events, geolocation info etc. happen to live.
2 months down the line, the client comes up with another team who is supposed to develop iOS and Android apps to give the users the ability to leverage this data.
Now this team is so annoying that they want the API according to the specifications they provide. That's really weird. API should be generic, right?

But no, this doesn't end here, the PM of mobile app team comes up with a specification document for the API and what does it contain, a few endpoints which go as below:-
/home - To bring all the home screen data
/events - To bring all the event screen data. But here is a twist, on Event screen, they have defined different sections for Upcoming Events, Workshops, Talks etc. And for each event type they don't want a filtered API but just this single endpoint which will contain all event types data in their own JSON keys.
FML
:/

So the project I have been working on for the past 5 months was finally released yesterday with only very minor problems, this stemmed from both programming side, and users entering data incorrectly.

It has been a rather hectic 5 months. I've had to deal with crap like:
- clients not knowing their own products
- a project manager that didn't document anything (or at least everything into a Google Slides document)
- me writing both requirements AND specifications (I'm a dev, not a PM)
- developers not following said specifications (then having to rewrite all their work)

But the worst thing I think would be the lack of vision from everyone. Everyone sees it as a "project" that should be get it over and done with rather a product that has great potential.

So with the project winding down, and only very few things left to fix/implement. Over these 5 months I learned a lot about domain driven design, Laravel's core, AWS, and just how terrible people are at their jobs. I imagine if I worked with people who gave a damn, or who actually had skills, I probably wouldn't have had such a difficult project.

Right now I'm less stressed but now feel rather exhausted from it all. What kind of things do you to help with the exhaustion and/or slow down of pace?

So at the moment, I'm currently reviewing the API specifications that got written up as the other developers haven't bothered to update it themselves. When you think about it, that's kind of dumb. If you are in charge of a particular function, it should be your responsibility to maintain documentation.

Anyway I'm cross referencing to what I see that has been done in the source code and finding way too many inconsistencies across specifications and implementations. Even parts where they have the exact same data, the structures are completely different. Or some parts have been documented but are not in the implementation, or vice versa. SO I can't tell which is the correct one!

Professor who never stood up from her chair during any of our lectures and read directly from her powerpoint. When it came to projects, she would deduct points because there was something we didn't implement BUT it wasn't in the specifications or in her instructions.

We did not enjoy or learn from her.

What's your current Desktop or Laptop specifications that you use for work and what's your job title?

What should you do if the project manager is not assigning you any new work after the backlog already has been cleaned up?

I currently work as a junior front-end dev. For the past few weeks, the 2 juniors (incl. me) are lacking tickets. For example, I got 2.5 days of work assigned during our 3-week sprint. We already followed some courses, read some books & created some designs for upcoming features (that have no "functional specifications" written down).

Biggest worry? Having to deal with shitty specifications from random customers.

reading books, documentations and specifications within minutes and remember anything in it, so i can directly start on getting to work and know which solution might be the best without spending days in specs and doc. :)

Hi guys, what specs do your coding laptop has? I would especially like to know if your laptop has a dedicated graphic card or an integrated one.

Mine has an i7, 32gb of ram, 500gb m2 SSD and an integrated graphic chip.

Who has the final say or is in charge hierarchically in your company, product ppl/head/department or the cto/vp r&d?

Pls mention company size small/medium/large

Just want to know what's more accepted in the industry.

To clearify, for example, do most projects ideas get created by the managment and brought to RnD director who then assigns the product team to create the full specifications.
Or, is the idea first reaches product departmnet and then RnD department just gets the specifications and starts work.

MACBOOK PRO 14.2" M3 PRO & M3 - NEW!
• M3 Pro - 12-core CPU - 18-core GPU - 18GB RAM - 1TB
SSD - INT - Space Black - 2800€

I have never seen more brutal specifications for a laptop in my life.

This 1 laptop is more expensive than 2 new iphones and 1 whole imac desktop PC. Why would someone need this?

I love my school sometimes... For a semester project, on the specifications, we have to use Github to host the project, the dumbass assistant wants us to use bitbucket and the client hosted the beginning of his project on gitlab... What are we supposed to use then. 😡

Hello fellow germans devranters! I study Applied Computer Science (dual) in a big telecommunication company at the moment. But I found out that almost every IT related things (programming, configuring servers, databases whatever) are outsourced, we only work on project plans, project specifications or such things. But that is something I don't want to do my whole life. Are there still some big companys in germany where these IT related things are still made here?

I love the feeling of producing the design specifications to a client, who is complaining that a feature doesn't work the way he expected. Even though you highlighted that it would be combersome to use before development.

Hello there !
🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴
What should be specifications of our PC for
video Editing
Graphics designing

Bundle of thanks ! 🥰
🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾

My docker container does not have internet access. I tried so many things from multiple places but unable to resolve the issue.

Please help anyone has faced this problem.

Specifications - CentOS 7, docker ce 19.3.0

2 hours after resolving compatibility issues:

The following specifications were found to be in conflict:
- opencv==3.2.0 -> *[track_features=blas_openblas]
- opencv==3.2.0 -> harfbuzz=1.3 -> freetype[version='2.7|2.7.*'] -> libpng[version='>=1.6.22,<1.6.31']
- pillow==6.0.0

Well done for today. I'm going for a beer. Ah..almost forgot. Fuck you Anaconda and fuck you Python docs.