This happened a while back but thought it would be an interesting story.

So there is this guy, I'll call him Jack. Jack was a weirdo. He just graduated high school but thought of himself as very hot in terms of dev skills. He boasted lots of good programs, that are the best in industry, except they don't work (like the best proven file compressor, that just can't decompress anything because of some "bugs"). He also entered language holy wars quite actively, saying that Delphi is the best platform ever.

Aaanyway, a couple of years pass. Jack is now a student. Jack tries to make some money, so he talks to some guy, that offers him a "job" at the tax office, where he has to modernize the data infrastructure of the tax authorities. If you think this sounds very wrong, then you're 100% correct. But it gets better. After 2 months of work, the guy manages to do that. It's a simple CRUD application after all.

So everything works, but the guy who gave him this job refused to pay. He stalled and then just stopped answering the phone. Jack is now furious. So what he does, is publish the databases online, so everyone could see the income of every citizen. Authorities are in panic. They send the police to his door. They seize his computer and lock him up for a few days.

To sum it all up: Jack took up a job, without any contract, without any NDA, which is completely illegal in of itself, but he did that with the tax authority. And delivered the product before getting paid. And when he understood that he was owned, he published all online. He got bit back. The guy who gave him this job had no consequences for illegally hiring someone and not paying for their work.

Lesson: Don't be Jack

I love Linux, but its community can be so full of incompetent assholes..

Just now I asked in Freenode ##linux how to get the process ID of my current running process in bash. I got my answer - it's a shell built-in called "$$".

Then people start to nitpick some more - why do you need it? How is that different from an exit? - to which my response was.. well I know the whole idea behind exit codes, and I'd use it whenever possible, in all defined behavior that allows my program to terminate itself whenever it can. This pidfile however would be used to exit itself and provide diagnostic information whenever the program enters undefined behavior - a segfault in C language. Scenarios in which I don't have full control over the script's behavior anymore, such as the system entering an unworkable state where the system stalled, still got some binaries in RAM but the rootfs got unwritable, such as now - very helpfully, thanks HP! - when my laptop likely overheated and shat itself. I issued sudo reboot into it, but even that wouldn't issue properly anymore due to the /sbin/poweroff binary becoming inaccessible too. I had to issue a hard power cycle.. one of the few times in which I'm thankful to HP for actually causing shit like this, lol.

Point is, that undefined behavior is what I'm trying to mitigate against. I certainly can't let any files other than diagnostics remain in nonvolatile storage like that, especially when their state should be predictable in order to ensure good operation (like files expressing whether the script is already running or not, i.e. lock files).

Back to that IRC chat. Aside from the answer, I got ridicule from people who probably don't even know how to properly compile a kernel. Ubuntu users, overconfident scum. Sometimes I feel like I should ask questions in channels like #archlinux only, where such incompetency is ridiculed on its own.

Don't do like my work supervisor:

Step 1:
*gives task*
Me, starts working on task early in the morning
*task requires his interfering, and is stalled without it*
Me, messages supervisor

Step 2:
*supervisor takes the whole work day to reply, saying that he didn't have time to look into it*

Step 3:
Me, does almost nothing at work the whole day; closes laptop upon seeing the message of the supervisor

Step 4:
Profit: go home early

21:30, sysadmin, chatting with my colleagues, when one posts a screenshot of a message he just received from a dev :
"Hello, sorry for bothering you this late but we have a demo tomorrow morning and the app is completely stalled. It fails with the message 'cannot write to <file>, no space left on device'"

I say "I bet that they somehow managed to make their DB grow uncontrollably".

Colleague asks which server hosts the app, Dev answers "one of ours", then adds after a few seconds "wait, do you need the IP of the server? Dev2 should be able to provide it", before finally adding "we use a scheme in <other project> DB actually".

Finally, Dev2 declares that the bug is solved: "There was a loop that caused a DB view to grow constantly and it filled the filesystem".

Me: "Called it".

They cleaned the view: 41GB freed.

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

I am a manager of an entry-level employee who share with another manager. Our shared employee, let’s call her “Jane,” is terrific — a hard worker, very smart, quick, and organized. Jane has been with us over two years and we would like to promote her, something she’s clearly earned, but our progress has been stalled by the pandemic. And though we’re working to push the promotion forward as quickly as possible, with budget cuts to contend with, this has been slower and more difficult than expected.

Meanwhile, Jane has shared with our team (including my boss, her grandboss) that she’s interested in returning to school for graduate study but was not sure when she’d want to attend. However, later Jane confidentially asked me to write her a recommendation letter to include in an application for study beginning this fall. I happily agreed and we discussed that she didn’t want this shared more widely, so I wrote the letter and kept it to myself. A few weeks ago, Jane texted me that she’d been accepted to grad school. I was thrilled for her but concerned about her departure. She stated that it was her intention to defer until 2021 due to the pandemic. We love Jane and I’m happy to have her as long as she’d like to stay, and again kept it to myself per her wishes.

Today, to my surprise, my boss called my attention to a tweet that Jane had shared, publicly on her personal account, announcing that she’d been accepted to grad school. My boss was blindsided since she didn’t think of this as an immediate plan and was particularly upset because HER boss (my grandboss and Jane’s great-grandboss, our president) was the one who saw it and alerted her of it. What’s worse is that my boss’s boss has been the one doing the hard work in negotiating Jane’s promotion with HR. Worse worse, after sharing this development, my co-manager (who shares management of Jane with me) revealed that she too had learned of Jane’s acceptance on Twitter. For the record, this tweet is about 10 days old at this point — time for Jane to have made a plan to speak directly and openly about it at work if she chose to.

I’m all for private use of social media and the right to have an online presence that is separate from your work. However, this puts me in an embarrassing position. I was honest with my boss when confronted, confessing that I did know about her acceptance and had provided a reference, but I can’t help but feel a little taken advantage of after Jane had asked me to keep it confidential. Additionally, her other boss heard of this news on social media and so did people above her who are gunning for her promotion — valued coworkers of mine and superiors of Jane who now feel disrespected for being out of the loop. I do not believe that Jane’s attendance at or deferment from grad school should affect her eligibility for a promotion, but it will surely be another hurdle to overcome among many other pandemic-related ones now that the news is out in this manner.

Extra notes: 1) Jane has previously announced 10-day vacations on Instagram (plane tickets booked) before asking for the time off. 2) Jane runs our company social media channels, so people look at her personal ones with scrutiny.

I feel compelled to speak with Jane in a friendly but direct way to explain that it’s her choice how or with whom she’d like to share her news, but that social media is not the place for bosses, grandbosses, or great-grandbosses should discover employment-altering news. Ever, really, but particularly when we’re working hard for her promotion. How can I do this without overstepping? Am I overstepping?

I'm a dev lead. I'm trying to consolidate a squad. There's a senior in it preaching the dream of career climbing and LinkedIn optimization.

Now all interns want to switch squads. I'm all for personal growth... but now everyone wants to be everything at once and productivity stalled. The job descriptions for our squad were perfectly clear, there's tons of different tech stacks... We can build a lot of cool things in this scope, and now no one can see them because Data Science or Data Engineering or Front-end is suddenly sparkling.

I'm tired.

I would love to finish a personal project that I've spent three summers making. Wrote 3500+ lines of code and never got around to finishing it. 😕

This is a true story when I was working as a application technician a couple of years ago!

Before I started working there, they had a couple of incidents with ppl with less knowledge accidently deleted stuffs in prod databases, and only a handfull of ppl get the full access to them. I started working in this team, and one day I was asked to run a snippet in one of the prod databases from a co-worker with less privilege.

Loged in, run the snippet and the server STALLED for a couple of minutes! When the snippet was finished I looked at the screen and saw the output "1724217 rows deleted". The fun part here, was that we went to a coffee break right after this, and after a couple of minutes we started to hear ppl mumbling that the network was slow as f*ck, servers didn't respond etc etc.

Well, I responded that I got a snippet that deleted 1724217 row in a table and we ran back to our computers and started to work backwards to solve this.

The best part in this story is that:

* Was not my fault! Even thou I was the one that executed it.
* The tables was deleted from a live prod server that was not heavily used!
* I asked for a life line for us in this team, that we needed a prevented output so we can "match" the actual output after we ran it in prod from the ones from the developers!

Even thou it was not my fault, this is the worst mess up I have done working in IT over 10 years. O_o

When you have stalled at 1am debating a decision because you're too tired to trust your own judgement.

Bitcoin ain't going to change shit. Speculate while it last. The development stalled since they start pushing that LN crap.

So this is my first job at a corporate company and my God I need to apply for permission and wait for it for so long just to install common freewares for dev like VS Code. Is this normal? Really I am pissed when requirements pop up and I get stalled for over a week.

tl;dr: azure support are utter bollocks

so about late june-ish, my azure student subscription expired, which i wasn't notified about. but that's fine, surely once it's expired i can get my data back, right?

...right?

i try to download the .vhd file with my nodejs project on, and then contact their support after failing to mount the vhd. i asked them whether they could get my data for me (or at least provide some clear instructions, in case i mounted the vhd incorrectly). instead i was told to do loads of things, creating blobs, making snapshots, etc... all of which did absolutely nothing.

mid-august, i'm still trying to get my data back, when i get a call from, you guessed it, microsoft azure. a manager had told me that all my data had been lost, and that i was eligible for $500 in credit in compensation. i was angry (and rightly so), and refused their offer. i emailed azure support again expressing my anger, for them to tell me that my data wasn't lost...?

come to mid-september, and and i was fed up of waiting for my project. i wanted to finalise the fucker and launch the website, but azure had stalled me for well over two months. i had to put some money towards azure just to start up the vps, zip up the project, transfer it to another vps, and shut it back down.

and that kids, is why i wouldn't ever recommend azure.

ps: yes, i'm backing up files daily from now on