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My job is so f**king unbelievable.
I'll try to sum it up by first telling you about the folks I work with:
First, there is this supermodel wanna-be chick. Yeah, okay, she is pretty hot, but damn is she completely useless.
The girl is constantly fixing her hair or putting on make-up.
She is extremely self-centred and has never once considered the needs or wants of anyone but herself.
She is as dumb as a box of rocks, and I still find it surprising that she has enough brain power to continue to breathe.
The next chick is completely the opposite. She might even be one of the smartest people on the planet.
Her career opportunities are endless, and yet she is here with us. She is a zero on a scale of 1 to 10.
I'm not sure she even showers, much less shaves her "womanly" parts.
I think she might be a lesbian, because every time we drive by the hardware store she moans like a cat in heat.
But the jewel of the crowd has got to be the fucking stoner. And this guy is more than just your average pothead.
In fact, he is baked before he comes to work, during work, and I'm sure after work.
He probably hasn't been sober any time in the last ten years, and he's only 22.
He dresses like a beatnik throwback from the 1960's, and to make things worse, he brings his big f**king dog to work.
Every f**king day I have to look at this huge Great Dane walk around half-stoned from the second-hand smoke.
Hell, sometimes I even think it's trying to talk with its constant bellowing.
Also, both of them are constantly hungry, requiring multiple stops to McDonald's and Burger King, every single f**king day.
Anyway, I drive these dicks around in my van and we solve mysteries and s**t.49 -
Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*
We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:
- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings
Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!
*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*
Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason
*audience: ooooohhhhh*
You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.
*audience: laughs*
Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.
Backstory:
We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!
... oh to have a time machine
Working with C:
- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.
- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".
- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.
- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.
- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.
- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.
- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.
... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.
- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:
Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"
... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?
- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.
- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).
- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.
- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.
- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.
- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?
You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.
I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.
Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex20 -
Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!
*sitcom audience cheers*
Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.
2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?
So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".
"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.
I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems
- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)
While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.
Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.
But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked
"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"
... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not
... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not
... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!
Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?
Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!15 -
If I learned every spoken and dead language ever created in human history, I still wouldn't have enough swear words to describe how much I loathe SharePoint.5
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PM: Hey. I need this data right away so I can generate some reports!
/me runs some queries, creates some csv files, emails results
PM: Thanks! I'll look at this after I get back from vacation!3 -
Currently written on the conference room whiteboard:
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
I couldn't agree more.4 -
Pet peeve:
Putting screen shots in Word documents, then attaching the doc to tickets.
Mucking forons.5 -
I've been coding for over 8 years, and whenever a recruiter says we have you do these coding challenges or recite them an algorithm from memory, I say "You know, the longer you've been programming, the less you remember how to do this stuff, because you don't use it in real life." They say, "Well we just want to see how you think and how you solve problems." B.S.
These types of algorithmic programming challenges besides the simpler ones don't show how you think. A lot of stuff like the dynamic programming and other optimization problems were solved by phd professors after many years of research. Nobody would think up these solutions on their own.
These programming challenges weed out
experienced developers unless they want to
take the time to re-learn this stuff. It explains why google, facebook or amazon are filled with young and inexperienced developers and how come it takes so many thousands of them to get anything done, and they still have buggy products...23 -
Dear project managers,
Learn to use the fucking ticketing system. And by "use" I don't mean emailing IT asking them to open a ticket for you.
#GrowUpPinheads1 -
Least favorite "enterprise" application?
SharePoint
It sucks the shit rope from the chocolate starfish.5 -
In the Vietnam War, soldiers called M16A1 "Mattel 16" because of its plastic parts and it being notoriously unreliable.
Though, Eugene Stoner didn't design a bad weapon. M16A1 passed the test phase perfectly, but it was tested by experienced marine soldiers who knew what they were doing. Eugene and Armalite didn't realize that even though the weapon worked reliably for marines didn't mean it would still be reliable in the hands of inexperienced privates.
This is why you should always account for proficiency and experience of your users.8 -
Worst part: being everyone else's Search Bitch. Seriously, how the hell do you have a job in the tech industry when you can't use a fucking search engine, whether it's Google, a builtin search facility or, hell, scrolling down the goddamn page?3
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Dear Project Managers,
If you schedule a status update meeting for the end of the week, it is NOT okay for you to stop by my desk every day and ask if the project is on track. You will get your update during the update meeting you scheduled.
KthanxBye1 -
Client: We need to deploy some Windows 2003 servers.
Us: Sure thing, Mr. Client. Your money is more important than the security and stability of our systems.
What we should have said: Sure, but you need to stop in our office, put your dick in a vice and we'll take turns cranking that bitch closed until you agree to use something more modern.4 -
A ticket got escalated through 3 levels of techs. I open the escalation email, then do a Reply-all and ask one simple question:
Is the client really asking why there are gaps in monitoring when their servers are shutdown?1 -
Ever since I installed Winblows 10 Anniversary edition, my laptop is slower to boot and bluescreens once a week.
Windows: if your system is fast and reliable, don't worry, we'll fix that for you.4 -
me: Hey. This looks like a cool component that will save me lots of time and effort in the project I'm kicking off next week.
/* Two months later */
me: WTF was the name of that component that did that thing?
======================
I really should write things down more often.1 -
If you ask me to run your reports, saying that it's urgent, then leave for a week's vacation, I will throttle your bandwidth to that of a 1200 baud modem for the next 3 months.
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Been on winter holiday for 3 days. Went to log in to my work laptop to clear out email - took me 20 minutes to remember my domain password.
Getting old sucks, kids.1 -
Staff meetings would be more tolerable if they started off with karaoke.
"Dude, the earnings were cool and all but, man, you sure carried that note during 'Come Sail Away. '" -
Architect: I know we said we would never do The Thing because doing The Thing is really bad, but can we do The Thing for a proof of concept?
Me: How about Fuck No! Unless you are proposing a solution to fix The Thing, we are NOT doing The Thing just to satisfy some perverse curiosity you may be harboring.4 -
Every time I see a client open ssh or rdp to the world when the servers sit behind a vpn, I die a little inside.4
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You wanna have a meeting, fine. We'll have a meeting. But for the love of balsamic vinegar, put a fucking agenda in. I automatically decline any meeting request with no agenda, regardless of who sent it.
Guard your time well, my friends. It is precious and fleeting. -
Why yes, yes I do sort my M&M's and Skittles according to color, then eat them from fewest to most.3
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At a previous company, we got stock options. My options wouldn't have made me a millionaire but it wasn't chump change, either.
For months, we went through the whole "we can't say we're going public but watch what you say" game.
One Monday, they called us down by groups to one of the large conference rooms to tell us paperwork was filed, that we were in a blackout period, and, oh, by the way, all those stock options were split 1-for-2 (half the stocks at twice the price.)
I really wanted to punch those smug motherfuckers when I watched them ringing the bell on the balcony of the NYSE.3 -
I look forward to Friday's Nerf dart battles in the office. A great way to blow off the steam that built up during the week.3
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Wrote code, tested it, and pushed to production for the first time in 3 months.
Great {diety} in {afterLifeLocation} it felt so goooooood to get back to developing. -
Just got handed a dozen servers. Documentation shows a (Linux) database cluster is using ldap authentication. I try logging in with my creds. No joy. I look up the root password and log in.
Not only is it not configured to use ldap, it's also not clustered.
I need more coffee. -
Work on something else. Have nothing else to work, invent a feature and work on that for a while. Do something other than that specific problem and an answer will come to you.
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So, I have a major deadline coming up and was writing some edge case tests when the gf calls.
I'm already in the "dog house" for beeing an obsesive twat lost in my thoughts and not listening to her so I decide to answer.
She called to vent about some coworker of hers and how she got screwed out of an advertising project.
The moment I heard "let me tell you what she said.." I instantly tuned her out, went into aha, yeah, aha mode and back to my tests (the irony is not lost on me).
Her: blablabla blablabla
Me: aha
Her: and then blablalba blabla bla
Me: wow, aha
This goes on for about 4-5 min up until I heard a change in the blabla pattern.
To self: Oh crap, that was a question!
To self: Wtf did she ask? Quick, say something!
Me: Uhm, yeah, of course!
Her: Yaaaaay, I love you! I'll get the tickets!
To self: aaaaaaaaw crap, what the fuck did I just agree to?!
Me: Sure thing! I'll see you tonight.
Hey everybody, guess who's going to London next week to spend four whole days with her old colledge artsy-fartsy-stoner friends?
I hate those assholes!3 -
I would cause intense pain to any project manager that calls a useless meeting that could have been avoided if they had read the fucking status emails I send.
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Okay govs and schools should stop this robotic production by forcing children to learn coding since an early age of 10. It's ridiculous !
Not only are you not giving a shit about whether they are interested or not, you are saturating an already saturated industry. Moreover, you are encouraging young children to sit all day in front of a screen when they should be playing, doing and learning other things.
Let them discover the subject. Let them fall in love with programming and coding. Don't force it onto them...4 -
Is it normal for "enterprise" software to have 14+ pages of known issues in the release notes, including issue descriptions that use phrases like "may lead to data corruption" and "may cause the cluster to crash"??2
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Ahhhhh. Deleting data. Delete. Delete
Delete.
With authorization, no less.
It's almost as pleasurable as drinking coffee. -
Sitting in a meeting discussing writing end user docs on a new feature and one of the product managers literally said "we'll end up picking a number out of the air."
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/observation
I've found that a caramel latte pairs nicely with kettle-cooked bbq potato chips.
Or I'm just weird.2 -
Any advice for a Bachelor's in Computer Science ? I often find myself lost in between all these career options and subjects and degrees.
I just need a little guidance 'cause I got no one to talk to about this...10 -
Why was my code push today completely flawless?
Because I didn't do it on Friday at 5 pm when it was actually complete. -
Jr dev: I need to log in to servers via ssh and run commands.
me: [posts link to Fabric web site]
Jr dev: Does it support python 3?
Gee...here's an idea. Why don't you try READING THE FUCKING DOCS?!?!?! -
If your resume lists 10 jobs and you've spent 1 year or less at each job and you were not a contractor, that is not viewed as a Good Thing. I toss those resumes in the trash.5
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When I say I'm working on an important update to the application, what I mean is "go away and stop bothering me, right now, or I will cock-punch you, right now."
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Learned to program by shutting myself in my dorm room with a Shareware Modula-2 compiler and a well-written tutorial.
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Searching in Confluence sucks so bad it was faster for me to check out a branch of my code to find a url in a comment for a particular user story than it was to type the query, go through pages of unrelated results only to give up and hope I got the details right.
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Quote from an email: Please confirm that the attached list is the list of people that have the ability to load "versions" into SVN.
Gods, I hate non-technical project managers. -
Guitars and genres they're shine at:
• Les Paul: Alternative, Progressive, Indie, Hard rock, Psychedelic rock, Classic rock, Punk, Folk, Glam, Grunge, Blues, Southern rock, Garage rock, Post-rock, New wave, Shoegaze, Heavy metal, Stoner, Emo…
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• PRS: lawyer blues5
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