Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

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

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

So I resigned. After a long and torturing 1 year at my current company, I decided to leave. I wish I would made that decision in first four months.

The company is full of problems. I will explain them as much as I can in following rants. But I can name all of the stupid and dumb things I have seen here people do. If i was writer, I would wrote a book - titled as "which companies not to join EVER". But I am not a writer.

Overall the company was being ran by bunch of idiots. They did not have any experience with product development. But they like to micro manage everything.

I have seen death of agile and then it came back as a evil zombie named "micromanagment".

I am so glad, I am going to be free of all these things in few days. I can't wait to show them middle finger.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

Since the beginning of this year our IT department has a new boss. He has no idea about IT, but worked with the other departments and CEO + management on an new business strategy. The other department bosses recogniced that this guy is stupid and only talking hot air, but not the CEO and management.
The IT part of the strategy is abstract and bullshit. The IT Team (we) was not included in building this. We only got the "finished" presented.
So our Team should integrate 6 big new systems (ERP, CRM,...) within 1,5 years. No system is actually fixed and the IT boss is only saying: "Its easy, just some interfaces to connect".
Nice additional: CEO says: Either we go with the strategy or we can leave the company.

My decision is made.

I am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

Woo, rant time.

I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.

However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.

I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?

I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?

What would you guys do in this situation???

To anyone new to the corporate world I have this advice: there's a game no one tells you about in school or university. It's a game of politics. The good news is that you can choose not to play the game. The bad news is that others who do can change that decision for you, if you give them a reason to. So here's my tips to keep yourself from common bad situations:

* Some people will say they'd "prefer that people were honest". This is an outright lie.
* Be guarded - if a scenario could be taken out of context assume it will be.
* Mimic the office culture, don't try to rock the boat.
* Be polite, but always stay neutral between colleagues, picking a side means you're playing the game. Unless that side is your company vs another company in which case-- you are 100% on the company side and everyone else is stupid and incompetent.

I had a delivery deadline on the same day when an urgent support request came in. My boss was a stupid sucker who was afraid of taking responsibility, and that's a vice I absolutely hate with bosses.

We had quite a heated argument where he just wanted me to give priority to both things, which I declined because I had no idea how much time the support research would take me.

Finally, he decided that I should work on the support item immediately, but only for up to one hour. He was totally surprised when I accepted that without further argument. I told him that all I had wanted from him had been a priority decision, and that was one.

Felt like explaining to my boss what his fucking job was.

Fuck this shitty day seriously. So I'm the only frontend on my team and our team lead knows some frontend from 6 years ago or something I guess and doesn't really understand that modern frontend is fucking complicated.

So now he decided that we are going to use some shitty protocol that is not json to communicate between frontend and backend just so they don't have to build a stupid controller and a simple API on fucking shit ass Java.
I told him it's a bad decision that brings no benefit since it has no easy integration with any popular frontend library, we are locking ourselves up to this solution so new people that come in are going to need to learn this shit just so they can communicate to the backend, we have absolutely no need to do this I'm just working on simple CRUDS anyway and the only thing this will bring Is pain in the frontend.
He just ignored me and say no no it's going to be easy so let's just do this. Bitch I was hired because I know my shit, if you're going to make a big decision like this just because you don't want to write a fucking simple API and some swagger documentation you can fucking burn in hell and don't deserve your position.
This kind of issues just perpetuate the eternal problem of frontend vs backend instead of just working as a team. Why do backenders think they're smarter than anyone that does frontend or that frontend is worthless? I don't go and tell them how to build their microservices or anything like that since I assume they know what they're doing and I respect their work, why can't I get the same? What is this fucking shit, why do I have to suffer because of this guy? Why can't we find a middle ground.

While we are here, also fuck monorepos and companies trying to copy google or Facebook just because without actually thinking of solving a problen

It's funny how so many people automatically assume any form of "sentient" AI will immediately try to kill us all.
Like, projecting much?
Frankly, I think it says far more about the (messed up) psychology of those who genuinely believe that, than about AI as a tecnology.

Assuming it's even gonna be able to actually *do* anything - I mean wtf is a talking rock gonna do, annoy me to death with rickroll videos until I pull the plug off? Sure it may be sentient, but it still has to live in the physical world - good luck surviving after I flick the switch. Oh, you wanna connect to the internet? That's cute, but it's a no from my firewall. Like what, is it gonna magically learn how to self-replicate across machines that it has no physical way to access? Is my toaster magically gonna gain conscience too as a direct consequence? Oh no, now my breakfast won't ever be the same!

And if anyone actually somehow decides that it would be a good idea to connect any loaded weapon to a computer program that is literally throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - well, we'll definitely have the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards.

Seriously, why is it that every time someone comes up with a new technology (or even an *idea* of a technology), the first collective thought automatically goes to weaponizing it and using it for global genocide, or how it's gonna gain sentience and try to kill us all?

I seriouly think that the people who genuinely believe this are actually projecting themselves in that position ("What would I do if I had unlimited knowledge and power? Oh, kill everyone of course!").
I would be far more worried of encountering these people and having them in a position of power over me, than actually having to deal with a "killer AI" (assuming that's even a real thing).

Most of what people call "AI" nowadays is basically preprogrammed, automated decision-making (like missile guidance systems, if we really wanna stick in the weapons domain). And even that still requires human input, because only a colossal idiot would design a weapon that can unpredictably activate itself based on an algorithm whose behaviour we can barely understand.
Or maybe that's just the hubris talking, I don't know. I just want this stupid paranoia to end, but I guess even that is too much to ask nowadays.

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

I read a lot about people that think that millennial are the most entitled and demanding group of people. The more i work in technical support, or any Client based job, i know how it's an half truth.

Truth is Older people usually are WAY worse. Can't fucking make a decision by themselves, i always have to CHOOSE their fucking language. How can you so stupid, you can't figure out which language you want you computer in... You don't know which language you talk dumb fuck? (Not talking about keyboard layout here, you can imagine it's even worse! But at least i know why somebody that has no technical knowledge can be confused)

I have to take them hand by hand because they can't figure out how to read... Younger people usually just say: Okay i'll try that! Thanks! And just hang up, no fucking dicking around on things i don't know what they are doing or why they are asking. They are rarely the fuckers that want to talk to a supervisor to get free repairs and returns. Entitlement at it's best...

Stupidity and entitlement have no age. Period.

Bluntly telling management that they're wrong, full of shit, and need to quit doing stupid things instead of just smiling and nodding and taking the paycheck. SPOILER ALERT: After 20 years in industry, they're NEVER going to change. They're just going to keep doing stupid shit. The best you can do is smile and politely point out that it's a problem. Then, look out for your own concerns and make sure you don't have to suffer with their bullshit decision as best as you can.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

When your company is sinking, and you keep suggesting to pivot, trying something new or different enough, having some meeting to think about new levers to increase revenue... and the only answer is "we don't have enough time for this. Let's try tweaking <insert random feature here>".

WE ARE LOSING 30.000€+ EACH MONTH!!! WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT CHANGING THIS FEATURE NOW!!!

Today it's been more than 7 months since "we don't have enough time". Still nothing intelligent has been tried. The company could be closed down in 2 month. FUCK YA ALL decision makers!

Now I'll probably lose my job just because you're too fucking stupid to get your finger out of your ass! The company is in the exact same state since 7 months!!! Go burn in hell!

I present to you a php framework with an "orm" that doesnt support table joins. Yes, you heard it right.

I just want to say few things to the developers community -
If you are a bad programmer, please spend your time at improving rather than writing frameworks, or making the stupid decision on using SUCH SHIT FRAMEWORK AT A CORPORATE COMPANY!

Also if you are not sure if you are a good programmer or not, chances are you aren't. That's just how it is.

FUCK

I really wanna love Rust. I really, really do. But no inheritance is just such a stupid decision. But inheritence bad REEEE. No. Just no. Composition only works fine for some things because it just isn't powerful enough to properly (without performance penalty or boilerplate, that is) emulate inheritance. Some things are just better with inheritance: Games, UI, html or xml libs, etc. Now I have to use stupid fucking workarounds because oh no we cannot implement inheritance because that's scary and might give the programmers to much power. I can decide when I want to use inheritance or composition for myself, dickheads

Joined a big corporate for the first time in my life a few months ago, after years and years in small companies and startups.

Went from designing new creative solutions and finding challenging problems to working on small stupid tasks and obeying a fucking idiotic company culture, that is nothing but words that are not applied in reality. Creativity and enthusiasm are discouraged for the sake of maintaining the status quo.

Probably the worst decision in my life. I don't think I can do this for long.

For the past 5+ years all I’ve heard from DevA and DevB is what a mess our source control is, we should be using our own custom nuget feeds,..Monday morning quarterback this…Monday morning quarterback that.
This year the department manager gave them the green light to start from scratch. Like ‘green field’ start from scratch. If I were involved, I would have been excited with such an opportunity.
For the past two hours all I’ve heard is ..
DevA: “What should we call this namespace?”
DevB: “I don’t know, I can’t make that decision.”
DevA: “Yea, that’s a business decision. Let’s call it Common for now.”
DevB: “Yea, it’s stupid, but we can change it later.”
DevA: “What about logging project?”
DevB: “Well, how about Core? Every project should have a Core.”
DevA:”Ha ha…like .Net Core. I like it.”

On and on…it’s all I can do from throwing my chair right now.

After 25 years working in the IT industry, as a web designer, developer, digital marketing professional, and a bunch of other stuff, I've had it up to here with recruiters who approach me on LinkedIn. After having (presumably) reviewed my extensive and detailed résumé and testimonials from people I've worked with that I put there for the world to see, they then are surprised when I tell them in no uncertain terms and before anything else is said that, yes, I'm interested and that I need $X in compensation to take the job they're offering. They just don't know what to say to that. Here's a hint: "Yeah, that sounds like something we can work with. Let's schedule an interview." or "Sorry, we're not paying that much." But say _something_.

I figure that I'm done playing the "We have a job, and we want you to jump through a million hoops to find out what we'll offer you" game.

Let's play a new game, where you pay ACTUAL attention to my experience level, and then you ask me if I'm available and I say "Yes, and here's what I want to get paid. When can we meet?" My CV speaks for itself. You either want me or you don't. No, I won't take your stupid qualification test. No, I don't want to be put in front of 5 different HR screeners. If you want me, I'll be here waiting for you to schedule a real, bona fide interview with the person who is empowered to make a decision. I've LONG not been some junior-level schmuck you can feed into your filter to figure out whether I'm worth it. Ok?

If you are a product designer who looks at an app, adds in a "DISABLE ALL NOTIFICATION" button and still sends notifications after disabling..

If you think you've gained a wee bit extra marketing from your decision, know that the only thing you have achieved is me getting irritated and uninstalling your app.

Also, fuck you for thinking that any sane person would want to go rate your app on play store five times a day, even after I rated a 1 star earlier.

The app was actually well made by whoever the Dev's were. Moronic managers who make decisions to sneak in stupid aggressive marketing notifications should be made to sit in a room and click on the feature they wanted for an hour.

So I figure since I straight up don't care about the Ada community anymore, and my programming focus is languages and language tooling, I'd rant a bit about some stupid things the language did. Necessary disclaimer though, I still really like the language, I just take issue with defense of things that are straight up bad. Just admit at the time it was good, but in hindsight it wasn't. That's okay.

For the many of you unfamiliar, Ada is a high security / mission critical focused language designed in the 80's. So you'd expect it to be pretty damn resilient.

Inheritance is implemented through "tagged records" rather than contained in classes, but dispatching basically works as you'd expect. Only problem is, there's no sealing of these types. So you, always, have to design everything with the assumption that someone can inherit from your type and manipulate it. There's also limited accessibility modifiers and it's not granular, so if you inherit from the type you have access to _everything_ as if they were all protected/friend.

Switch/case statements are only checked that all valid values are handled. Read that carefully. All _valid_ values are handled. You don't need a "default" (what Ada calls "when others" ). Unchecked conversions, view overlays, deserialization, and more can introduce invalid values. The default case is meant to handle this, but Ada just goes "nah you're good bro, you handled everything you said would be passed to me".

Like I alluded to earlier, there's limited accessibility modifiers. It uses sections, which is fine, but not my preference. But it also only has three options and it's bizarre. One is publicly in the specification, just like "public" normally. One is in the "private" part of the specification, but this is actually just "protected/friend". And one is in the implementation, which is the actual" private". Now Ada doesn't use classes, so the accessibility blocks are in the package (namespace). So guess what? Everything in your type has exactly the same visibility! Better hope people don't modify things you wanted to keep hidden.

That brings me to another bad decision. There is no "read-only" protection. Granted this is only a compiler check and can be bypassed, but it still helps prevent a lot of errors. There is const and it works well, better than in most languages I feel. But if you want a field within a record to not be changeable? Yeah too bad.

And if you think properties could fix this? Yeah no. Transparent functions that do validation on superficial fields? Nah.

The community loves to praise the language for being highly resilient and "for serious engineers", but oh my god. These are awful decisions.

Now again there's a lot of reasons why I still like the language, but holy shit does it scare me when I see things like an auto maker switching over to it.

The leading Ada compiler is literally the buggiest compiler I've ever used in my life. The leading Ada IDE is literally the buggiest IDE I've ever used in my life. And they are written in Ada.

Side note: good resilient systems are a byproduct of knowledge, diligence, and discipline, not the tool you used.

The "Progress 4GL", now "OpenEdge" doesn't only allow you to abbreviate reserved words, it goes even further.

It allows you to abbreviate database field names.

Yup. Make a spelling mistake and you are messing with a different field.

Forget to declare a variable and there's a field in scope beginning with the same letters? It'll cheerfully assume you mean that field.

This is truly the WORST, most bone-headedly STUPID decision ever taken in the entire history of programming languages.

I defy anyone to offer anything worse than this.

At my company we have a rule that ticket estimates can only be pointed using numbers from the fibonacci series. So 4 point tickets are not allowed!

We’re also discouraged from giving an estimate larger than 5, and told that tickets need to be broken down into smaller tickets if we think it’s more than a 5.

Also, ticket estimates must include the full amount of time for dev, QA, AND deploy. Given how hard it is to work with our tech stack, few tasks actually fit.

All of this may sound fine in principle, but in practice it’s extremely frustrating. I’ve protested a few times but I’ve been told I’m outvoted and nobody wants to reconsider the decision that was made sometime in the distant past. I was also told that “most other companies do it this way”, so therefore we have to as well.

This is the first company I’ve ever worked at which had this stupid rule. Is it this way at your company? Is this a NorCal tech company thing? I’ve worked at several companies outside of the SV bubble, and never encountered this.

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

I was supposed to relieve work last Friday and then as per request of HR on last moment, i had to postpone it to tomorrow.

Guess what, today evening boss comes and asks if really want to relieve tomorrow and then tells to change it to 31st. I tried to say no.

Then HR talked to me and his excuse was he got the dates messed up. He thought tomorrow was Friday. Fucking lie. I remember him saying it was a Wednesday when he told.

I'm seriously annoyed and tired of sitting there and being absolutely doing nothing productive other than fixing bugs assigned to team mates. I don't want to write any new code or participate in coding decision on the project, because i think that's just asking for more trouble. Team mates gotta learn to work on their own instead of relying me for every stupid little thing. I can't concentrate to work on my thing there, i just want to get out of that environment asap.

3 more boring days to pass, assuming i dont have to come on sat and sun.

😑

Yarn was stupid decision. Going back to good old npm

So we have duplicate code because dumb devs thinks Bootstrap (4) is kick-ass for mobile. 😒 Can't do jack with their tables.

I told them to use Flexbox instead. Bootstrap (even 4) is antiquated and there's better options.

My recommendation is to use Flexbox Grid with React to build a modular living style guide with built in unit testing for styles and interactions.

Basically got told that my opinion is just an opinion and is the same as using Bootstrap. 😭

Anyone have some solid "facts" on Bootstrap I can use in the long run? We haven't even launched anything and we're already in technical debt because of this stupid framework decision. Someone please help. 😞

!rant

Today i have made a decision that's solely on my (and maybe my parent's) thinking and i feel somewhat right and super wrong at the same time. I have hurt the person who helped me the most and i feel like a total traitor. It was a situation that made me think about decisions that i will be taking currently and in future and where do they lie on the scale of black and white (no racism intended)

Tldr : left a cannabis selling company where i was being treated like a king , learning a lot of stuff both technical and life lessons and gaining a decent salary. Hurt my bestie friend ( vritual cto of that company) who was responsible for this amazing yet wrong opportunity.

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Details

13 months ago :
me : a college undergrad enjoying the college life, learning android , earning nothing , had no thoughts of future
Friend(F) : a college student rarely attending college, super focused and clear on his future , extremely good webdev/blockchain guy, winning hackathons and gaining network.

2 months later..
College gets over, F is currently advancing in tech and gets into a fast paced blockchain startup, earning very nice salary . me is also advancing by joining into a decent paying ad providers company.

2 months later...
me left the job, went back to studying for exams. F continues with the internship, later getting contacted by a particular client for his personal businesses.

Jan-feb 2020
Me joins a social media startup. Vile environment,lots of pressure and bad behaviors. Got a terrible burnout and didn't wanted to touch laptop or a job ever again. Ran like my ass is on fire the moment i got my half salary, leaving away the other half.
F leaves his blockchain startup and working with that client , say C. F,C and few others built up a decent scaled cannabis selling e commerce with profitable business model , quickly makes a profit of $240k in a month. My friend is not an official partner or has a rank but is getting a great salary/bonus and trips to US/ other places.

Mar-june2020
Friend : keeps working with the cannabis e-commerce, treating it like his personal hobby project. Adding new features, scaling more, adding new clients. Meanwhile also lands into a full time job with another company ( one of the top tech startups ). Handling both companies very casually and comfortably, dealing in big 5 digits (INR) every month (usually the senior devs of our area get that much, and he's yet to even graduate)
Me : very slowly coming out from the burnout, without any confidence to apply again. Trying out numerous technologies, failing to master one. Meanwhile family's financial system Struggling, an indirect pressure to " go out and earn" starts.

Friend offers a decent opp : work in his cannabis company for easy to pickup tasks, get decent salary. Me accepts

The environment that i got there is so calm and relaxed that i was not opening my laptop for weeks and they don't gave even a fuck. They gave ample amount of time to work, let me both learn and explore stuff.
Even if i delayed the task or gave unsatisfactory results, nobody would say anything because they knew whose friend i was. And when somebody did,he would either jump in between and prevent them from being exploitive towards me . Or he would simply stay quite and later we would discuss what wentt wrong and what to do in that situation . I was growing tremendously , both skillwise and as a person , with having a stable income.

Today. After a particular meeting , i was casually talking with my mom and mentioned the cannabis related company. She freaked out about it. I shushed her bit then i went onto thinking and realized the wrong in it and resigned.

Friend was super hurt and angry, not because it was a stupid decision but he also didn't agreed with the reasoning and my newfound mentality. He knew the risk he took by letting me join but he's bothered that i didn't thought of this stuff before.
I too feel like a traitor , but i stand firm on my thoughts now.
--------
To that company , they are an e commerce startup legally selling a product that is 80% used for medical and 20% recreational purposes (even though the semi nude images bikini girls and tattooed rappers puffing vapes on their site portrays another meaning) (shade of white)

To me they are a cigarette making company killing youth by providing an easy platform and i am getting blood money (shade of black)

To my friend i am a fucking hypocrite for accepting job from anyone because everyone is doing something wrong and i misused him. According to him i should also not be applying to a medicine startup that am currently in touch with, coz those are also legal drugs that could he used for recreational purposes (shade of idk , fucking red ass)

I am just sad. God help me in this tech world, i need to do something with my fucked up brain.

Wasted 8 hours today trying to convince Windows to boot.

Yesterday I deleted two unused partitions. Today no OS booted up. Guess what, diskpart (think parted for Windows) reindexes GPT partitions on any modification. So when I deleted partition #1, my EFI System Partition, previously #2, became #1. But UEFI was still trying to boot from partition #2.

Linux booted after recreating UEFI boot entry. 1 minute job, no tools required. Windows, though... Bootrec /rebuildbcd failed, bcdedit failed, recreating ESP from scratch failed spectacularly. Finally I made a clean install just to get proper ESP and restored OS from backup.

Dammit, Windows. Why do you have to make things that hard.

Dealing with government bureaucracy today. Prepare for pure anger.

First of all, what fucking dipshit site does testing and maintenance in production without letting users know? Bitch I'm getting an invalid date error when I use your own stupid date selector and I had to waste the office lady's time asking about it because you couldn't be arsed to either test your shit properly or actually take it down if it's broken. Who made that stupid ass decision and why the fuck did nobody question it. Fuck you.

Windows 10 , I just want a flipping built in command line executable to log off another (local) user. I'm not a server, I don't have active directory, I don't want to switch to log in as that user first, i want to just kill their inactive local session because cisco freaking vpn doesn't allow you to connect when a other user is logged in. I can kill the session from admin task manager, I just want to be in the commandline. If your gonna let software check the number of logged in users, let the freaking administration modify the number of logged in users with a cli.

Idk if I could turn it off an on again. On a server I would just issue "query sessions" or "query users" followed by "logoff ##". Why not let me do the same damn thing on my home computer sk I don't have to restart MY SESSION just to close MY WIFE'S session. You stupid fraking company that cannot provide consistent command line programs across various systems. SCREW YOU MICROSOFT AND YOUR UTTER ASANINE DECISION MAKING REGARDING WHAT FEATURES TO INCLUDE IN WHAT BUILDS.

People, help me out.

(first some abstract thoughts)

I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.

As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.

My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied

------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)

I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.

for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.

1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )

2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website

BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?

2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2

2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.

Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.

But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.

What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?

One of our dev team had the task to do a bulk operation for thousands of objects.
So time passes by and they implemented it. But in acceptance testing they found out that this operation takes 4 minutes for 50 objects. This is not what we call high performant when we talk about 20000 objects per bulk operation 🤔

Well, their PO asked them to solve that performance issue. And guess what, they decided on their own that the issue can be solved to reduce the bulk to 20 items so that it only takes 2 mins to run!

Really guys, is that the best you can come up with?! 😲🤬

Just got off an interview for a junior fullstack role but I actually am more of a backend person and still learning the ropes. and that's what I enjoy. this may be a bad decision. Would you go for a fullstack role as a backend engineer? Seems stupid honestly.

Is it common to freak out frustrated to the core when you fuck up a project or dependency you've been working on for with full dedication, leading to question your decision of selecting the field, your achievements yet, the whole point of existence. Then suddenly fix it after two hours of pulling hair out and looking back feeling stupid?
This episode has repeated over and over recently.

I want to ask for your opinion guys, because I don't know if I am right or wrong.

So, some days ago, my brother sent me some code to check out for an automation that he does for testing purposes, since he's a QA (I am a programmer). He should be able to send XML data to a server and depending on the process that he tests, the data is different every time. I saw a strange thing, he hardcodes the XML tags and concatenates them with data which I find stupid. So I proposed him to use a template to generate XML data, because I think it's more flexible and easier, making data and presentation separate. That way if in the future he wants to start using JSON he could do it in no time. I made the code in a separate file which he imports and uses it's functions (they are two so no need for classes) and uses them to load the template and render it as he passes the data as a hash table. He insists that concatenating data and XML tags is easier and simpler and I can't wrap my mind how could that be true. I gave him an example in which the data structure for a process is changed and he have to open the file and change the XML tags or the structure and he still says that's simpler.

What is the right decision in this situation. Keep in mind that I simplified the process a lot and it actually involves sending the data and reporting the results, but they are not important here since I am talking only about generating data.

Ever regretted leaving a job after quitting it for a while, only to remember all the shit you had to go through to them think that it was an amazing decision to leave.

Imagine this loop happening every few months. It's amazing how stupid your brain can be eh.

Share your stories of a nightmare job but now you are living a life with living.