Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

IBM. Fucking IBM. I have not heard ONE person say “We should totally become an IBM shop!” Because only people who were already STUCK with IBM when better options presented themselves still use IBM bullshit. And those people... ooooooh those fuckers are in SO MUCH denial. “Yeah but IBM does such-and-such too.” YEAH? Well your business model shouldn’t be built on businesses held captive to your antique bullshit. That shit is Stockholm syndrome. Textbook, fucking Stockholm syndrome. Don’t tell me “It used to be we could only have EIGHT character file names.” THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A THING. EVER. Fucking THINK about it. If you have to justify something based how much WORSE it used to be, that thing probably fucking sucks.

Anyone else get Stockholm syndrome for languages? Like you gotta use a language you hate for something and the more you use it, the more you warm up to it?

Dear intellectual crew, your double-digit IQ little shitposter needs your help.

The situation in Russia is always bad and it will always become worse and worse. In addition to that, it's illegal to have medications that can potentially cure me. Add 15 sunny days a year in my city and it becomes clear that I need to leave.

However, despite the absolute lack of sunny days, I FUCKING LOVE my city, Saint-Petersburg. When I was living in Moscow for like six months, I liked Moscow but I was missing my city every single day. Sometimes I forgot that I'm not in St. Petersburg anymore, tried to figure out what street I'm on, realized that I'm in Moscow and felt like I'm physically suffocating. I always miss my city so bad.

I'm not going to talk about why do I love it so much. If I ever start, I'm going to write a book about it.

Questions are:
1. Is it Stockholm syndrome? I don't miss Russia and don't identify myself as Russian. I only miss one city and I wasn't even born here.
2. How do I leave in that mental state?

This is the only problem that is holding me. Money, finding a place to stay and finding a job I can approach rationally, but my problem I can not.

Is this here your bloody fucking diary?!

Then maybe back the fuck off to Insta and Fagbook commercials Stockholm syndrome circle jerk. Right where your mind is at ease.

I want to write something in PHP.

Yes, coming from me, it sounds like stockholm syndrome, but for me PHP is reminiscent of simpler times.

I want to get a server right where I bought the domain, with CPanel, log in with FTP and ~~push~~ (excuse me, _send_) index.php and other files there. I want to open phpmyadmin and throw some stupid fields together that won't work at scale, but "scale" will never happen.

I want to design websites without normalize.css, without any kind of javascript but some silly UI stuff, I want to send emails with sendmail and not sendgrid. I want my gradient buttons back.

Symphony and Laravel can kiss my ass.

Freelance Headhunters...

No idea where they got my name and the number of my work phone...

- they do not give a damn and call me 1045 am to discuss "EXCITING BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES™"

- they are sure I am having a case of stockholm syndrome, because I could NEVER be satisfied in my current employment

- they call every other day with a new number and start the same process again

How fucking dense can people get?

I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.

But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.

And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.

People treat me like the adult that I am.

I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.

I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen.

When I realized that programming is the greatest way to make one's living, that I will never love anything more than programming, and that every feature and quirk in a new language is like a new friend.

I bought a Macbook about 6 month ago and I became in love with development in it... I've got a fucking MSI dream PC sitting here with two monitors acting as a glorified paperweight...

Its so weird because I know I could just put some Linux distro and use it more often but its almost like so many years of Windows make you doubt that you can ever fully leave the ecosystem... Its like some sort of sick Stockholm syndrome.

I can’t control my thoughts.

When someone says “wrap your head around” something, I imagine it. It happens every time.

It’s always 50/50. The one times the head of the person inside my head turns into a play-doh kind of sausage that wraps around a random object, usually a cube, and his face looks confused. It’s hard to separate his head from his neck and it terrifies me.

The other times the head appears extremely solid and has an overall round shape, then I subconsciously try to forcefully wrap it around that object but it doesn’t work and that person screams. It terrifies me even more.

Thoughts like this haunt me through my life. I hate it but I also somehow feel like I’ll miss it if they’re gone and at the same time I can’t decide whether it’s like a Stockholm syndrome towards that terrifying thoughts that are somehow both so personal yet so alien, or just my intuition lies to me again. Both of those possible reasons scare me even more.

My intuition is very valuable to me, I value it the same as I value the freedom of thought – above everything else. Those situations compromise both. Intuition is a major decision-making instrument to me, so terrible things will happen if I couldn’t trust it.

I don’t know what exactly I did wrong to become like this and I can’t remember when it all started

SHOCK CONTENT PROCEED WITH CAUTION

Star tattoos on knees means "I'll never be on my knees for cops", "I'll never do what cops say" in russian criminal culture. However, these tattoos are dangerous. Russian cops don't like them. If you're just arrived to a russian prison and they see the tattoos (and they see it), they tie your legs the way that makes you knees face the ground, then two cops hold you and drag you around the huge asphalt prison yard until there is no stars on your knees, only the naked kneecap bones or lack thereof.

I have to leave but it's psychologically hard because russia is the country that gaslighted and threatened me into becoming a slave. It's a stockholm syndrome and I want to break it.

I hated lotusnotes until we upgraded to Outlook, pretty sure there was an office-wide case of Stockholm syndrome for at least a week...

Also Microsoft Communicator, flashbacks to MSN messenger and the most infuriating shortcuts. *shudder*

Just purchased a new domain and decided to once again design my website personally (Fuck wordpress man) but...

I absolutely hate working with HTML and JS at the same time (I actually love JS on its own), its like bloody Stockholm syndrome!

HTML may beat me senseless.. But i love it too much to stop!

Yep, IntelliJ is definitely worth $60/month. Look at this feature where it can’t create a java class.

Seriously, if I am paying money for this, it shouldn’t perform worse than a free IDE. Are you sure you IntelliJ fans aren’t just experiencing Stockholm Syndrome? Because your IDE is so god awful it’s sad.

Two real reasons people write unit tests:
- mommy’s boy can’t even fart without mommy’s approval, but instead of mommy, there are unit tests now
- Stockholm syndrome

javascript or The Stockholm syndrome

Me: Why do we do this this time consuming, low value thing?
My tech lead: Because if we don't, a box becomes red on some executive report.
Me: Why is this deadline so important? It's not customer facing or any kind of critical bug/vulnerability?
My tech lead: Because it was a company wide mandate, and we'll show up on some executive report if we're late.
Me: *angry dev noises*

They must dole out lashings to the tech leads and the directors any time we fail to meet some completely arbitrary demand. The act like the world is going to end any time we get too close to a deadline 🤦‍♂️

Makes no sense that they then turn around and worship the ground senior leadership walks on. I wonder if it's some weird form of stockholm syndrome.

Fuck.

I've just seen work offer in my city for junior unity developer. I'd love to work as a game dev (and currently am finishing my first "real" game in this engine) but I feel too anxious to send my CV.

Also for some weird reason I feel attachment and loyalty to my current employer, even though I'm more often pissed about working there than not. Stockholm Syndrome?

It's bit like having Stockholm syndrome. I fear that all this sitting and staring at tge monitor can cause many health problems ... Bu I still can't stop doing (and loving) programming.

So for one of my uni courses we're writing arm assembly. That's pretty cool. What's not cool is the shit textbook written by the instructor, the asshat elitists on every single fucking help thread, and the fucking garbage documentation.

But hey, maybe I'm doing something wrong. I mean, after all, you should need to spend 5+ hours to discover where the fuck you should place a label for a god damn binary constant. Oh, and once you've finally got code that'll link, good fuckin luck getting it to load the address of that constant in a register.

At least I have a good explanation on why those guys on the forums are such fucking dicks: Stockholm Syndrome.

How many of you ever developed (Or partially) "Stockholm syndrome" with your boss / project manager?