Interview

HR: So .. tell us .. where do you see our AI acting in 5 years?

ME: Doing your job minus the stupid questions.

*silence*

Boss breaks out in laughter.
"Oh boy you're hired"

We have a bunch of white people in human resources that are trying to hire "diverse" people because the company sets HR diversity targets. Which is an inherently racist way of hiring someone.

I am told to interview this guy who claims to have Angular experience. Before the interview I ask to see a form that he has built in Angular. He sends me a repo which is ripped off of an open source project and has the readme and git commits removed. A quick web search shows that it isn't his work. He shows up to the interview and I find out he is from a Southern African country. I deliberately ask some questions about code that I can see he didn't write that I prepared ahead of time. He lies to me and tells me all about how he wrote it which showed me that he has no idea what the code does. I tell HR they better not hire him because he was very comfortable lying to me, and I'm confident that he doesn't understand any of the code that he showed me. I do not trust this guy and would never choose to work with him. HR lady says "Ah okay."

Today he walks in with a big grin on his face. HR lady fucking hired this guy. I can see his monitors from my desk and he spent his whole first day looking at a soccer website on his second monitor. I call up HR, "Why would you even ask me to interview him if you refuse to listen to my feedback?". Lady tells me "You need to be open minded about diversity. Probably most of the things you observed were either cultural differences or language barrier." I tell her definitely not. He lied to me multiple times, and he took credit for other people's work." She tells me that they will keep an eye on me because I'm not being open to diversity.

Are you kidding me? This white lady is literally stereotyping me as a racist because I'm white.

So this fucking HR lady called me a racist because she decided to hire someone that we shouldn't trust. Then she put this asshat on my project. Now I have to be cautious about my position because HR is "watching" my racist ass. Even though I am literally the only one on the development team that is white and speaks English as my first-language. I called a team meeting before the on-boarding is over so I can tell the other developers what is happening. We restructured our code review process so that I will never give him feedback. Then when the time comes that he slips up the "diverse" developers will kick him out so I won't be reprimanded as a "racist".

This company that I work for is a special kind of stupid.

I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

HR people working in tech companies, let's talk about them...

*phone rings and I pick up*
HR Lady: Hi, this is [name] from [company]. I'm calling you regarding your application you submitted [some date 2 months ago!].

Me: *realizing that I've applied 2 freaking months ago* Hmmm OK....

HR Lady: Yes, well, we asked for your GitHub account, but you seem to have forgotten to provide it.

Me: *open up the email and see that I've sent them my GitLab account* Well, I have the email right here and I did send you a git account. I mean, it's not GitHub specifically but it's a GitLab account, pretty much the same thing, you should be good with that.

HR Lady: OK, let me put you on hold for a minute.

*2-3 minutes passes*

HR Lady: Hi sir, I've asked my colleague [which I suppose is another HR] and he told me that they're not the same thing, we cannot proceed until you give us the right link, you need to send us a link to your GitHub account.

Me: I mean, they aren't the SAME EXACT thing, but both companies provide essentially the same service, it's like Messenger and WhatsApp. Look, I'm pretty sure that if you give this to another programmer they'll be fine.

HR Lady: No, Messenger and WhatsApp aren't the same thing. Sir, please stay polite. We need a GitHub account not a GitLab account.

Me: *mumbling* Oh boy.... M'am, it's OK, I don't need the job anyway, I've found something. Two months is a long time and I needed something quickly. Thank you, have a good day.

HR: How many years you've been developing on Xamarin ?
Me: Three years, with many side projects
HR: So, you're familiar with C#?
Me: No, I've been coding in "hieroglyphs".

I realize now I probably shouldn't have called out my manger's bullshit if I wanted to keep my job. We were told to work a Sunday and our PO called it a "Smack-a-thon."

I said, "No let's not use stupid names. Let's call things what they are. This is a management failure Sunday."

That was during new hire lunch, in front of my manager.

I worked the first Sunday. I refused to work the second one. I've also been refusing to work over 45 hours a week.

So I guess I could have seen it coming. My manager didn't even have the gums to do it himself. He had the HR lady do it, while I was working remote from home. She told me it wasn't a 9 to 5 shop and that people there are expected to work long hours (People on my team are working 80+ a week for several months).

I took the train in to get my stuff. No one was there. My computer already gone. Couldn't even say "Go fuck yourself to anybody."

So I feel better now. I haven't taken a day of since I started in February, so it's time for some vacation and an unemployment check.

It was a really terrible job, and terribly mismanaged. I'm glad I stood my ground and knew what I was worth. I wish my co-workers had done the same.

I should have tried to start a union.

HR: why you want to work with us.

Me inside: you stupid, because you need my skills and I need your stupid money, stop reading articles about stupid interview questions.

Me: because I love to work on such amazing environment, and I really love the technology you're using.

I got a LinkedIn message from the HR from my previous company about a job opening as if I never existed and never met them before. I'm just a profile to them.

Stupidity level: HR

Why do HR people ask stupid questions like the following ones? Everytime I get those questions, I have imaginary answers like the ones right after each question.

Why do you want to work here?

- Obviously, because I need the money to survive. I'm not here because I love working for you and having to endure your stress. I'm not that type of a kinky person.

Are you flexible?

- Why? Do you want to annoy me when I'm sleeping in the middle of the night because of a sudden deadline or because a god damn employee didn't show up?

Do you see yourself as a perfect fit for both developer and tech support roles?

- Read my fucking resume, moron. I applied for a developer role. Nothing else.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

- As if you would care. It's none of your business, but since we are at it. I see myself as your manager in 5 years. Hope that you like that thought.

We didn't bother reading your CV. Would you like to tell us about yourself?

- Nope. Have a nice day and suck my dick. I'm leaving.

Can you give us your phone number and the phone number of your girlfriend?

- I didn't know that I am selling my soul to your company by accepting this job offer. I'm not your slave and you will not call me whenever I'm enjoying my private time.

What's motivating you?

- Money and the peaceful vibe at work when you are shutting the fuck up when I'm fully focused during my projects.

How do you handle stress?

- I dick slap everyone infront of me.

Do you see yourself as a hard worker?

- Nah, I'm not interested in sucking dicks, eating her ass and bending over to get a little bit of a raise.

I used to work as an all-in-one IT guy in a company. One day I got a call from our HR team and the HR said "my Internet banking account has been hacked! It's logging in automatically!!" So I went to see the issue, and the so called "hack" was because she allowed Mozilla Firefox to save her login credentials, and because of that the login form was automatically filled. Such a stupid ass

Isn’t that too obvious to ask ?!

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, the HR has made it mandatory to fill a Google form,
fill in info about yourself (name, employee ID),
your family (name, address),
and select radio buttons for symptoms like fever,cough, cold.

You must fill this form DAILY, and if you miss filling the google form, it will be Loss of pay for whole day.

Yes, so if I have contracted coronavirus, and am running a high fever, first thing I'll do is login, open a shitty ass google form and select a bunch of stupid radio buttons.

And if I'm not ill, I'll still go and fill this form every single day.

Because fuck logic.

So, I applied for a job lately and the first interview via Zoom went pretty good. Then I got an invitation for a second interview at the company.

I got there, was guided into a conference room and the two head of departments along with an HR woman joined. After a bit if chit-chat HR rep said I should tell them in the next couple of days if I'm still interested. HR left, the other two gave me a tour of the complex, lasting about an hour.

then we got back to the conference room, waited for HR rep and when she arrived she told me something along the lines of "Yeah, we got an impression of you now and you don't need to contact us anymore if your are interested...."

me to myself: "wait what? that sucks...."

HR: "We are impressed enough of you that we want to hire you immediately. Here is the contract!"

me (completely speechless): "oh... OH... THANKS, but... OHHHH" (having a stupid perplexed grin on my face)

I mean... I got the job and pay is good, but PLEASE don't trick me like that!!! I nearly got a heart attack!!!

HR, why so stupid?
I'm currently living in Sweden, want to move to Austria (significant other is studying there, I'm finishing my studies over here)
Me: *Applies for a Junior Java Dev job via company's online platform*
HR1: We like your CV, be here for an interview in person in 5 days.
Me: That's expensive, can we do it via Skype? I'm still in Sweden.
HR1: How are you planning on working in Austria while living in Sweden?
Me: I'm not. I'll move to Austria in 2 months. That's when I'd like to start working with you.
Me: *wonders why they skipped that part in my CV/cover letter as it's clearly stated there*
HR1: ....
Me: Hello?
Me: Helloooo?
HR2: We're sorry to tell you that the position of Senior Database Engineer has been filled. May we use your CV for other potential openings at our company?
Me: No worries, I applied for Junior Java Dev anyways. You may use my CV for other openings.
HR2: Oh, sorry for the confusion. I just mistyped the job title.
Me: *WTF? That was a machine-generated answer. Your system filed my application in the wrong place. You didn't mistype shit.*
HR1: Oh good for you. We've suddenly found out we need a Junior Java Dev as well as a Senior Database Engineer. Do you have time for a Skype interview this afternoon?
Me: ....
HR1: Hello?
Me: ....
HR1: Tomorrow then?

This startup I started working for with their shitty code base written by interns, restrictive sys admin who had no actual use in the company since I was the one setting up their servers, know-it-all CEO, stupid HR representative who used to grill employees for being 10 minutes late in the morning, very small apartment "HQ", using fingerprints to signal our entry and our leave to and from the office, no formal process, and, to top it all, monitoring our own laptops which we use for work with a software that takes screenshots every few minutes. In short, it had the worst in corporates with the worst of startups combined in one company.

If, hypothetically, we could overlook all this, I couldn't overlook the horrible smell this place had. The apartment was overlooking a small garden which was a home for many stray cats and dogs. You can imagine how horrible this smell was. The weird thing was that no one there seemed to really care about the smell!!

I lasted there for only one week before I gave my resignation and I believe I had every right to do so.

1. Bullshit coding challenges that you wouldn't be any good at unless you were doing the same stuff like yesterday. For an entry level job.

2. Stupid tech leads, who can't see people smarter than them so they bring you down in an interview to feel better about themselves. They'll ask you stuff they know is outside of your scope. Mine often ends up being about networking.

3. Stupid HR questions, that basically ask you to ass-kiss the company.

4. When you're actually better than the interviewer at just about anything, including maths, so you have to tiptoe around their ego and not call them out on being slow.

5. When they don't even give you a chance. You enter the interview and by question 3 you know they're gonna reject you and you never had a chance to begin with, so internally you start screaming for the money you spent on the new coat to impress these fuckers.

6. Salary negotiation when you're broke and you'll work for anything that covers your bills and food, basically.

7. Explaining the gaps in resume or radical changes. Like why I was a barista for six months after six months of being out of work.

On my linkedin profile it is clearly mentioned that I am a Java developer.

Recruiter: Hey, I want to offer you a super cool PHP job position.
Me: But I haven’t mentioned anywhere that I am familiar with PHP.
Recruiter: Yeah, I know, but I thought you may want to switch to PHP for a while.
Me: o_O. Fuck you, miss. I do not switch programming languages like I change my socks. Who the fuck teaches you these approaches?

I got an alert for a job and decided to apply for it.

First, it forced me to make a new account on their HR site. Strike one.

Second, it forced me to upload my resume to then make me re-construct my work history from scratch because these stupid resume import systems never get anything right. Strike two.

Third, it requires me to provide a PHONE NUMBER for EVERY employer I've ever had!? Over a 26-year career? When half those companies either no longer exist or the people I knew phone numbers for, and their phone numbers, are LONG GONE? Get outta here!

Three strikes, you're out!

A brief, and biased opinion of what love is in the dev world:

Love is my employees bringing me something to eat when they know I stay back so that they can all go out do whatever they can do.

Love is my CMS admin getting his ass up and walking all the way to my office when the director walks in to say some STUPID FUCKING SHIT to me that he(CMS Admin) knows would have me 2 fucking seconds away from getting out of my chair and drop kicking the fuck out of him.

Love is the rest of my employees getting up to follow along in case(certainly) one dude is not able to hold me down.

Love is them knowing that I know that their mere presence there will make me chill the fuck out and not choke the fucking director

Love is the CMS Admin proof reading every email I send to a bitch that was trying to get smart, to make sure that I was not being agressive.

Love is said CMS Admin bringing me coffee or a coke congratulating me on listening to him about X email not being aggressive (there is no passive in my vocabulary, just balls out "isn't this your fucking job" aggressive)

Love is my lead developer showing to work after medical treatment fucked up as all hell because he knows that if he is not there I will do a billion things myself in order to give him some rest.

Love is taking my CMS admin and lead dev out to eat when a major stakeholder shits on something I damn well know it took them a while to finish. Love is also letting me open up to said stakeholder to tell them how much of a fucktard they are, sometimes they let me loose, and I appreciate that.

Love is every small person in the company approaching you to tell you of their issues, becuase they care more about the productivity they give to their users, rather than the bullshit numbers their managers care about.

Love is the staff of other places taking care of you because you are not a VP dickhead that treats them like shit.

Love is the HR reps sending you personal e-mails asking you for help because their shitbag of a boss does not count for help and leaves them in the blank with shit software, for which said HR go above and beyond for you later on even though said shitbag manager said no.

Love is your team getting angry and responding respectfully at people when they talk shit about their manager on their emails (manager being me)

Love is your employees closing your door for you when they know you are overwhelmed and you need a quick second to pull yourself up.

Love is not wanting to leave this miserable place because you know some dickweed will be left in charge of the people that care for you, trust you, work for you regardless of the date, and confide in you.

They got me locked in, this shitty institution, for now. Until I find a way to bring my entire team with me.

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

CTO 3 months ago:
- You will get a raise after 9 months of work according to your KPI (98%) and bonus (size of one month pay check)
HR today:
- NO

FUCKITY FUCK, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. I WORKED HARD AT NIGHTS AND SACRIFICED MY FREE UNPAID TIME FOR NOTHING, THANKS

Desperately frustrated since my little brother started studying Software Engineering in college. I was so happy that he wants to do this, but they study 10 types of math and Java.
When he gets home from vacation watches movies for weeks and weeks. Haven't seen him write a single line of code for a year and some. I believe he thinks the outdated stuff and the piece of math they study will get him a solid job with the diploma.
I am a self-taught developer and for the past 11 years I have gaps in top of a week where I wasn't studying/coding/working and by watching him throw his good years ... this is not how I see good dev raise.
I was super pissed, because he started looking for a job last month (for me he has 0 knowledge to lend a job) after 50 applications he got 2 calls (one because of me calling an HR friend of mine and the little brat refused it). I tried giving him a part in project of mine - quick piece of work 2-3 days tops so he can add something to this one page empty CV and yet he refused.
I don't know what to do anymore. For me he has no real future if he relies on the stupid college education and the piece of paper with no real knowledge for the past 2 years of studying.

I really love taking HR mandatory training concerning covid-19 that apparently speaks for me.

Did you guys know that I was dying to go back to work instead of remotely doing everything from the comfort of my fucking home?? and that my biggest fear was that i would be at home too much and missed the workplace?
No? well, me fucking either. I was way the fuck more productive working from home that being in my office dealing with stupid shit all day because i was constantly being interrupted.

Pretty sure my employees felt the same way when I yelled from my office :"y'all this training is some bullshit and apparently you guys were fucking dying to come back"

and one of them yelled "ahhh hr speaking for me again!!"

Fuck brainwashed trainings.

I started recently working for a big company, and when I say big, I mean really BIG.

Well, my colleagues are from different parts of the world, of course some names are harder to pronounce, so, let's say your name is 'Yagarishmakeshin', well, sometimes is easier(and I used to think friendly) to call you by a shorter name, for this example let's say 'Yag', you know, like Apu form the Simpsons, which is normal I think, people use to call me always by shorter names too and is fine.

Well, yesterday I received a complain from HR saying some people complain about this, it turns out this is offensive or degradating; I was also warned about not calling a girl 'girl', example:

- random girl at my team - So, I created this routine which is very effective and provides good performance
- me - Awesome girl, very cool

Well, Someone complain I call them 'girl' and is not fine.

I cannot tell you how frustrated I feel about this, is like, if you feel uncomfortable with a short name, just say it to me, something like 'Hey I prefer you call me by my full name' or something like that, but nah, you prefer to raise a complain like if I were a fucking predator or something; Also, I cannot retaliate or mention the topic, I need to change and pretend nothing happened.

Fuck you big corporations, and fuck you skinny stupid bitch

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

One of the things I have no fucking patience for is bureaucracy. For the last year I've been working for a company I have no problem with, I like the place and I like the people here. Recently I was contacted by another company and offered a better salary to work for them. I was open about it with my boss and we both accorded that I will receive the same salary to stay (It was ok to me since I feel comfortable here), but in order to do that I'll have to sign a new contract. Ok, no big deal. Few days later a HR girl contacts me to send her all the documentation needed to elaborate a contract, and I was like 'You guys already have all my documents, been working here for a year'. But Ok, I tried not to be picky and just sent her everything again. Then she requests online psychometric tests, sends a shitload of formats to fill, like personal references, their company-custom resume format, privacy policies, and many more stupid and irrellevant paperwork nobody should need when a person has been working for you for a year and you want him to stay. I really tried to be patient and do everything the HR girl wanted me to do, but for one reason or other, she kept rejecting the formats I was sending (I had to download, print, sign, scan and resend many of them). We've been wrestling for an entire fucking week over this shit via email and she can't just write a new contract, make me sign it and leave me the fuck alone. The last thing she compained about was a stupid personal reference format I didnt scan with my signature on. This other company wants me to start next monday. I guess the next document I'll be sending her will be my resignation letter.

Biggest challenge was to accept that no matter where you go, what you do, you will have to deal with stupid people.

They come in all ranges, starting from hr, interns, juniors, coworkers, code reviewers, seniors, managers, boss, clients.

And in order to grow in life, you have to learn to deal with them. Better even if you could make them a little less stupid.

Fuck you sideways stupid ass clowns of HR people.

If you don't want to hire me, it's okay. What is not okay it's to steal several days of my life with your idiotic multi-step interviews, telling me I did awesome and you'd like to hire me as soon as possible, then actively avoid any contact for three whole fucking weeks, just to finally tell me you've chosen someone else with a more prestigious degree but way less actual experience in the field. You'll come to me begging soon and I'll laugh in your faces.

"not sure if we can meet those salary requirements, but I'll get back to you"

JK they just send me the code challenge, no idea of what salary to expect. scratch that one off the list.

meanwhile in another prospect i have had not just multiple interviews, but then add on two additional 'prep' and 'post' interviews for each of the ORIGINAL interviews i have to do with the recruiting company REEEEEEEEEEEEE

honestly it's not a good reflection of what is really valued at these companies - paper pushing over getting to work... ok

WEVE ALREADY TALKED FOR HOURS JUST MAKE A DESICION: GIVE ME AND OFFER, OR DON'T AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Everything about the company is a mess. The only thing that is decent is the people. And by that I mean they aren't shit.
Workflows are fucked.
Clients are fucked. You're pressuring me to get this shit production ready before new year's eve and you still don't know what the text should say and want to make changes to the UI? The fuck?!
Design is a complete shit show. There is a design team. They only make a fucking psd to show clients how an interface would look like. No mobile version (but it's still expected to work!), no markup. Resolution is fucking inconsistent and whenever a change is requested, they are nowhere to be seen so I have to actually do designing on top of having to use this worthless fucking framework I hate it so much.
Codebases are turbo-fucked because of said framework.
Databases are an inconsistent, fucked up mess. No foreign key constraints because every single fucking table is using the MyISAM engine.

And the thing that really makes me incredibly angry is all the "custom systems" look the fucking same at the database level. Like 30 fucking useless tables made for stupid HR workflows that make no fucking sense.

HR people on LinkedIn. What the fuck? Do you seriously believe you can attract qualified developers by telling them you’re looking for ninjas, jedis or life savers? I for one am still fairly new to the job so I don’t consider myself to be by any means a coding wizard, and I don’t think any strong senior developer is gonna be seduced by your catchy terminology (I may be wrong about that). Come on, talk to us like any recruiter would in any other line of business. No need to replace the words "qualified" or "experienced" with your stupid magic words, unless you want to sound like you’re desperate

4 roles in 1 job... is being a dev getting to an era of slavery?

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

There's little irritations that happen when working with clients over time that let you know that they're stuck in the past and definitely not the kind of client you want to have long term.

My personal favorite example:

"Can we put an icon that shows the weather on the banner of the website?"

Note: I don't make "websites," information portals, content pieces, etc.

It doesn't to matter what type of application it is; time tracking, HR, mortgage application, industrial control system, etc. I don't know why, but every single client I've ever had where I've been saddled with one or more people who have no business being anywhere near the term "stakeholder" asked for this stupid, banal, 1995 web portal fuckery. Their shitty little mushroom stamp contribution wasting everyone's time.

What's worse, they want it be prominent in the screen real estate. It can't just be a responsibly sized waste of space like the screenshot's top example (from a company whose entire business is weather, nonetheless). No, it has to be the busiest fucking thing in the control space, as in the example inferior.

Or maybe I'm just wrong and people desperately want to know if the sky is going to piss on them if they leave the cave.

Anyone else have a pet peeve in regards to recurrent, pointless functionality?

Personal update:
So i have been to psychiatrist few days ago. I got a prescription for anti depression drugs and today is the 4th day of my therapy. I feel a bit better. At least i can sleep can focus on things. Unfourtanetly mentaly i dont feel better. That rant that i wrote before didnt help me neither (i deleted it). That drug that im taking has a shit ton of possible side effects uncluding anger. My massive untrust to people dosent help neither.

To anybody who didnt read the previous rant. I have meet a classmate that had a idea for a android app. I have fought he is one of that bad, stupid kind. I was wrong i said bad things to him but eventualy i helped him by showing where he can get help with the app.

I shouldnt have responded to him in the first place. Now i feel bad. I have no idea how you are going to respond im scared. I prejudged him but im now sorry. I have no idea how my life is going to go.

I also have tried applying for a awesome C# internship, perfect for a student: paid and might get experience in C#. I have send them 2 emails on the address that they gave me during open days (where i had talked with HR and devs personaly about their job) and i got no responce since last month...

Finals for the first semester are closing in as well. I dont know if im going to pass or not. And that is the worst thing i have to worry about now.

I dedicate this to all of those hr gurus from top tech companies that rejected me cause they think I won’t fit their culture despite me crushing all their technical interviews, fuck them and their soft skills stupid questions.
I won’t fit there anyways cause I can express my own thoughts using sarcasm and irony and I’m not scared of doing it cause I don’t care about your amazing company culture that prefer robots not people with a little sense of humor. I don’t care about my failures cause there was so many I don’t give a fuck. And by the way if you ask me why I want to work in your amazing company I would always say cause you asked me to work for you and now you treat me like shit. Then 10 years later you blame everyone for toxic culture lol.

How do u recover from bad reputation at work? Like, false accusations and wrong perceptions about you which you have no control over? Should you guard your reputation or should you just stop caring what other people think?

god... why is the stupid "tAbS oR sPaCeS?" still around, it's like some stupid ass HR person got it long ago and it's never gone away. nobody has used tabs to write or format code since like the 1950s when there were mechanical fucking typewriters! and if you use them today in your editor, you're WRONG

I will die on this hill.

During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.

Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."

ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);

Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."

At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?

Hey guys, so i got my first job, but there's this stupid problem there that i am having...there's this guy who makes fun of everybody and there are other two guys who laugh at his every joke whenever he makes fun of someone. He made fun of me too a few times, fun of my age, fun of my nose, fun of certain things i said, and those other guys laugh , and this is really frustrating and annoying. I am thinking of quitting..but i am not sure...should i quit for such a small reason? I dont like such people...i dont know what to do...i dont wanna complain to the HR for such a small thing and create more drama...kindly tell me what to do...i really get sad when he indirectly mocks me because of my age. I am a bit old, 31...and the others are in their twenties...please help, thanks

After reaching the pinnacle of my latent burnout and mental overload lately I quit and managed to get paid leave for the rest of the notice period through hr as I told them I'm not able to work for them anymore and else had to go on sick leave. My brain just had to have a clean cut and blocked me from
getting into their overcomplex and shitty, unplanned projects as I see no value in doing anything for them anymore. I gave them all my access keys and a small handover, but it was clear that they would run into problems without me, cause I've been doing like 5 jobs there due to developer shortage. Now I still get requests from my manager even though I had an operation and spent last week in the hospital and am still recovering for the next two weeks. He's still trying to build pressure as if it was my fault that we never got time to document stuff properly and automate things that have to be automated. He ignored every recommendation I made in past to ensure that things keep running when I leave, as I always knew that I wouldn't do this shit for long. It was always more important to please bosses ever-changing requests and stupid whims as fast as possible at the cost of quality, pressuring us into putting projects live at 80% to meet random deadlines we had no say on. What a fucking asshole trying to put the responsibility on me now. Not my problem anymore. Have fun finding someone else taking over that shithole of an underengineered software-architecture. I'm out!

HAHA FUCK YOU HR RECRUITER!!
This fucking lady tries to steal my devs while i spent a lot of blood sweat and tears raising them.
Thankfully my devs are happy with their work type, salary, and conditions. So they showed me a screenshot of her phishing attempts.

There is so much damage I can do to her, and her company as i got all the information, its very tempting.

Since its a "common" dirty and distasteful move, the most sensible course of action I can think of is public shaming. That too is common, dirty and distasteful. But im not that kind of guy.

What do you guys think, should i suck it in and let it slide or public shame her for her actions?

Are HR always a blocker to work and productivity?

Things I love today.

Totally love. Like kick in the balls with testicle torsion love. Picking my eyeballs out with a spoon... I think you got the idea.

Getting updates of other managers, as I'm busy with other stuff.

More or less goes like this:

Flaky tests. Since weeks...
Ain't nobody got time for that.
🤬

I don't wanna upgrade that version to the next major version, cause then I'd have to do tests... And the tests are flaky.

🤬🤬

I wanna have shiny new thing XY, but NOONE wants to upgrade to next major version so we cannot have that

🤬🤬🤬

Oh we just crushed the live cluster cause there's this PR everyone constantly ignores cause the tests are flaky....

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Good thing I'm busy and just getting all the updates via the gossip mill...

I'm just prolonging my current tasks as I really don't wanna have to fix that mess.

My fix would be probably eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

...

Problem is.... I'm slowly getting into trouble because some of these fixes would be much needed for my task...

Why do I have always to be the bad cop in the company -.

I think I'm gonna ask HR what applying electro shocks would cost me, cause I think that would solve a lot of problems.

10 kV for every stupid answer.

Smells like bacon!

So I finished 6-month long frontend studies and the school proposed internship in one of the best local coding companies. I got their test, basically to write 'API-based internet app with any of JS frameworks'.

Me: 'Hooray!!!'. Couple of days later, app delivered. Made with jQuery (because this is the only js framework the fucking coding school taught me). Very long, very personal cover letter sent along with it.

They: ' We are sorry, but we will not consider anything written with jQuery'.

Me: 'OK'. Learning ReactJS alone by myself for two weeks, 8-10 hours daily. Another two weeks - another project delivered. News agregator, fetching from 3 APIs and merging news based on publication time. News categories, news search - all the bells and whistles. Made 100% myself - not some clone from Udemy workshop or youtube.

They: 'Sorry, your project isn't good enough'.

Me (silently): Fuck you too, stupid HR manager. If you aren't able to see the motivation and dedication in a person, shove a dildo up your ass.

Unemployment week one.
Tired of unsuccessful HR and engineering talks with people who don’t know what they want.

When you answer their questions they got pissed because they had something else in mind. Sorry I don’t read in people’s minds asshole.

Others try to be smart and give you some fancy acronyms. Yeah because that’s most important in coding - to memorize useless acronyms.
I responded with acronyms I know and they got pissed more cause my are more funny and cover all of theirs. Thanks KISS 💋

Some of them are like I am fucking smartest asshole on this video chat and you can’t have been working with all of those technologies, yeah I just typed hello world for 15 years in one language and stupid /REST shitty software like you do it in your one job in your lifetime.

Others are asking for cv, talking about this fancy great project that in fact you know how it will look like cause you’re experienced motherfucker who can pick up nuisance but still lets get hired first and then think what to do next with this shitty crap. So they respond after two weeks that client changed their mind and if you want to fill some quiz about your hiring process.

There are also ones that got impressed so much they’re talking 1 hour that you will be our next cto and then ending process with email that there were better candidates and also post same offer on job board next day 🤦‍♂️

I think I just skip this shitty nightmare and concentrate on some personal project until I spend all my savings.

I just need to concentrate on one thing and not get distracted with 1000s of voices shouting “pick me” in my head.

Fuuuuuuck
If you got offended fuck you unless you like it.

After working in one project in a big happy days bubble without distraction for couple of years I underestimated how fucked up people are in real world.
We’re making hell by ourselves on this planet we don’t need much help.

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?

Recruiter from last week told me she will contact me next week with further HR interviews

No contact for the whole week until right now

---

RECRUITER: Hello, colleagues from ShitStain company have provided feedback, and unfortunately, they won't be proceeding with the further process. They mentioned they need someone with more experience and asked me to thank you for your patience and interest. Personally, I've had only positive experiences from our conversation, so if a similar position opens up with another client in the future, I'll be free to reach out to you. I hope we have the opportunity to collaborate again.

ME: Thank you for the response. If me having 5+ years of experience is not enough for them, what exactly are they looking for? I'd like to know more about what they think I'm missing, and if it's indeed a gap, I'll work on improving that aspect.

RECRUITER: Your experience is certainly valuable to offer employers. However, for this position, they specifically need experience in Java, and they're looking for someone who has been focused on that technology for 5+ years. I believe new opportunities will arise soon that I can offer you if you're still interested in making a change. 😊

---

Is she FUCKING STUPID?

I JUST SAID i have 5+ years of experience and she rejects me because they need someone with 5+ years of experience????? (we're both talking about the same thing -- java)

Even if someone has 5+ years of experience THAT IS NOT ENOUGH? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT FROM ME 96+ YEARS OF EXPERIENCE?

Are you Fucking mental?

Am i being fucking gaslighted right now?

Can you fucking believe what kind of retards contact me?

NO ONE even gives a SHIT about the fact that i have a computer science degree from a VERY hard university?

My 5+ years of experience and 25+ years of school is worth between $0 and $500 ?????

I am disgusted

I am absolutely tired and exhausted from interviews

Had to turn down a job offer today because of a BUNCH of red flags in their hiring process that hinted that their corporate culture was absolute trash. HR people are trash when they do whatever they want to with your time just because you’re in need. If they had been more ethical and professional, I’d have a job and they’d have a position filled. But, no, they had to play stupid games and win stupid prizes.

So since starting my new role I have had nothing to rant about. That changed today.

HR waited til one day past payroll cut off to issue my paperwork. Meaning I get paid at my old rate this month and then get back pay in my November pay slip.

Those mother cunting bastards waited one day extra to screw me for the whole month.

I've been waiting since the end of September for these twat monkeys to get off their rotting arses and sort this and they do it one day late.

It's a good job that I don't know where they are located, nothing good would be waiting for them if I did.

Edit:

As this got cut from the tags:

HR please kindly go find a rotting puss filled dick and shove it up your lazy fucking arse you pitiful wastes of human meat bags.

After going through the regular process of talking to HR/Recruitment and passing the casual interview with a team-mate for cultural compatibility, I got the task of grilling a candidate on some technical matters. This being a PHP job, we got to talking about PSRs (PHP Standards Recommendations).

As he seemed to take pride in his knowledge of PSRs, I decided to focus more closely on that.

So we got to a recomendation regarding dependency injection containers. Nothing special, and he seemed to know his stuff. At that point, he made a statement that parts of that recommendation were a bit stupid.

Now, I hate to put people in their place, but his statement did not match what that specific PSR stated. So I gently tried to correct him. The candidate, being on fire thus far, pointed out that I should trust him on this, as he clearly knew his stuff.

Again, I didn't like having to do this, but I also did not like him having a misconception about a topic he was, otherwise, really on top of...

So I asked him to trust *me*, as I was one of the writers who contributed to the standard.

The true test here, of course, wasn't if he knew all the minutia of every standard but how he would react to being corrected.

We, as developers, are wrong all the time. Its how we learn and evolve. So being able to accept that is vital.

Sadly, he did not respond too well and sunk into a bit of a sullen silence. At first I though maybe I'd scared him or that he was afraid of having made a gaff but it soon turned out he genuinly did not like being wrong.

Sadly, I had to advise against hiring him.

Jesus christ I need my VP and CIO to get their hands out of Azure and GCP and just let me work.

Yes, governance and security and IAM are big deals. That's why you have infraops people like me to deal with that.

I'm literally working with one hand tied behind my back because just about every button press or CLI command I need to do my damn job as a professional cloud fluffer requires me to go bother an executive and ask permission to pretty please can I deploy a new container, can you go press the shiny button? No not that one, move your mouse up...up..now UP..ok over lef-no..can I have mouse control? Sigh fine, do you see where it says "Approvers", no that says "Release Pipeline"

Look I actually kinda like this job, I do, in as much as when I have something to do I get left the fuck alone to do it. Meetings are minimal, aside from the odd days when one of our app services decides to yeet itself into the river Styx, there's little distractions.

Yeah, developers do dumb shit but that's probably best left to the notion of job security and never talked about again less they go to HR and complain that the ops guy was very stern and direct and made the developer take some accountability for their work product.

AND YET

It's so intergalactically stupid that I have to go ask permission just to do ops tasks by the same people barging down my goddamn door asking why the ops task isn't done yet.

"Because you won't give me permissions in GCP to actually DO anything".

Okay. Rant over. Time for lunch. Good meeting, see you all at the holiday party.

so... either its justified and i should be reporting for harassment or i am overreacting to a water cooler talk, please help me decide next action:

we are in morning standup zoom call. boss (AVP) comes, jokes about who's birthday is coming next month, no one says a thing, then i joked Gandhiji's. his reaction : "ugh bro why do you always have to ruin the friday mood?" and I also laugh "well..." topic changes.

^--- this part is all good. he is AVP, He rarely joins the call and is a cool fun (but strict) guy. the problem happens in a side teams chat room

so we have an "emotional support android" group. we just named it that to prevent scrutiny, its really just a group where everyone is usually ranting and bitching. however it just includes us android devs.

so while i am making this joke in teams, one guy messages there about what a stupid statement that was + 2 abuses (hindi abuses, there translation would loose the impact)

i am all in for bitching and everything , but i felt bad for this. this group does include the word "android" and android folks, some of which are not even here. if this was a personal chat, i had ignored it, but i am trying to make a name as a dev and this undermines my statements in general.

furthermore this guy is 6 months old in team and i have been here for more than 1.5 years. he is 2 years older than me, but we are always cool and we often help each other in tasks

I am angry for the public humiliation and feel like reporting to my TL, HR or even the AVP. he is not even realising that he hurt me. actually the office environment has gone so toxic that the tl is herself threatening and scolding for every basic things and we are all but bitching to each other about it. he is mostly my guy, always taking my side and i take his, but i feel like my dignity is being impacted

or am i stupid to get hurt at this?

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.

😑

I’ve been working at my company for about 3 years now and under 2 managers. In my time I’ve grown to be a technical anchor and SME in multiple facets of our architecture. First manager was cool and I could really see my development under him. Then he gets promoted and I get a new manager. New manager just rides me and bleeds me dry, all while telling me “you’re just a couple months away from Senior” for like 2 years. Every time I meet with him he still says I’m not ready even though I step up and do more and more and more. He’s never satisfied. Then we recently had a shift in the roles in the company where there’s a new intermediate role in between my role and Senior which I was gunning for. After a few more months he says to me “Congratulations, we finally opened up a position to promote you… to this other role that you didn’t want”.

Naturally, I’m pissed. So I start looking at open reqs for the Senior role I’m looking for. I applied for a job and interviewed for it. I “aced” the Senior interview. The new team wants to bring me on. They tell HR that they want to hire me. Now HR is pushing back saying “hey now, you can’t just SKIP roles like that” even though it was an open requisition that I applied to, not even an in-line promotion and also they just opened this intermediate position I’m skipping like 3 months ago and again I’ve been here for 3 years. So even after crushing the interview and the other team loving me I still won’t get the job because of stupid corporate bureaucratic bullshit.

I fucking hate sleep destroying on-call. I'd rather you just euthanize me and put me out of my fucking misery.

This idiocy of comparing most dev. on calls it to doctors to on call is fucking stupid unless maybe you're in health care and lives actually might be on the line. Pretty sure a fair number of doctors wouldn't wanna be on call and would rather sleep.

It also doesn't helps that it's not in my contract, I'm not getting paid for it, and I stupidly believed HR when they said I wouldn't need to. Should've trusted the dev.s when interviewing said there is. No way I'm getting out of on call without being fired when we're all on rotation.

I'm getting kicked out during probation period and I'm about to have interview in a new place in the next week or two. During interview, should I be honest tell them or just cover it up? What should I tell them if they are prying?

The problem underlined was communication problem. I'm in charge to maintain old project made by other engineer now an "upper dude". Upper dude and I have different views and at some point he start being unreasonable getting heated up looking down on me provoking me. I took the bait and it doesn't end well. The next day after lunch I'm scheduled with HR and well, fired.

I know he's provoking and I took the bait. At that point I don't know how to improve the situation other than saying yes to him so I just wing it. But if I did say yes, it would slowly cause problem which I'm not willing to handle. Its damn near stupid reason to do it his way and I don't want to do it.

My track record in 2 previous place was great. My concern is what if an HR person be like "Eww this man fail probation. He must be suck". How screwed am I?

6 weeks of doing nothing except dealing with nightmares from the past in my mind I think I left all that crap behind and I am ready to jump back.
I don’t feel much anger and disappointment anymore, even some excitement for new crap to come by on my desk.
I started to write some code and practice puzzles for getting some decent job or project (again)

Puzzles are usually not a problem but I fail with HR.
When they’re asking me stupid questions I answer with stupid answers to piss them off.

But now time to get some money so I’d try to be gentle.

My vague naive extreme understanding of interview questions are on a spectrum from situation a to situation b.

But what should the industry be doing? Is the industry just going wrong blindly copying big N companies hiring process without the same rationale? (e.g. they need computer scientists able to deal with problems specific to them at their size and that often means creating new tech, unreal problem solving abilities and cuh-rayzee knowledge)

a) stupid fucking theoretical shit that some people argue you won't ever need to be doing in practice for most companies, while giving you no ability to google, leetcode hard problems kind of stuff

b) practical work similar to what you'd be doing on the job, small bugs, tasks, pair programming on site with your potential future coworkers

Lots of people hate option a because it's puzzle/problem solving that isn't always closely related to what's on the job. Whiteboarding is arguably very much a separate skill. (Arguably unless it's like a big N company where you want computer scientists to deal with specific problems that aren't seen elsewhere, and you're making new tech to deal with your specific problems.)

We could go to the extreme of Option b, but it tends to trigger people into shitfits of "NO, HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME DO REAL WORK, BUT NOT PAY ME FOR IT AT THE INTERVIEW STAGE"

That's before we get into how to execute option b whether or not it's being given as a take home assignment (which is a huge pain in the ass and time sink, among other issues) vs a few hours at the potential workplace working with some of the future potential coworkers and soaking in the work environment (you have to figure out how to take the time off then)

Is it really just poor execution overall for the wrong use cases for the majority of the industry? What should the industry be doing in which cases.

Then this is all before HR screening with shit like where they might ask for more years of swift experience than its existed.

The decision making freedom of my current job. But with a team of tech people rather than just my stupid self managing all tech. And with a competent boss who isn't also the CEO and HR person for the company

I’m at my last hair with this job; I report to 3 (two mid-level; one senior) project managers. The senior PM decided not to fix up the company’s jira and has encouraged “I’ll tell you what to do by mail, text, call. Even outside office productivity apps,” and I didn’t mind it but it’s become unbearable. Each of these PMs manage at least one client that I have to work with — in essence, any given day I’m reporting to these PMs, for multiple tasks for at least 2 clients, especially for MVPs. One of the mid-level PM (let’s call her T) has taken it upon herself to make me look bad. I’m the only developer at the company; when I joined the only two developers had already left a week prior, so I was their replacement (no one mentioned this to me during any of the 3 interviews).

T reports to the senior PM and senior PM, who is friends with T from outside the job, would also give T instructions to provide me in regard to Senior PM’s clients. To made this clearer, Senior PM’s client would request for a feature or whatever, Senior PM would prepare a lousy document and send to T to send to me, just so, T can have things to say in standup daily like “I reached out to the Dev to fix xyz’s something something,” so this means I have had to tolerate T twice as much as the other PMs. (She’s new to the job, a week after me — Senior PM brought her in — they both do not have technical experience relating to work tools for programming but I can say Senior PM knows how to manage clients; talk shop).

Anyhow, T gets off by making me look bad and occasionally would “pity” me for my workload but almost in a patronizing way. T would say I don’t try to reply messages in 5 minutes time after I receive them (T sends these messages on WhatsApp and not slack, which is open during work hours). T would say, “I can’t quite get a read of this Engineer — you(me) are wired differently,” whenever one of T’s requests is yet to be completed because I’m handling other requests including T’s, even though T had marked the completed ones as Done on her excel sheet (no jira).

In all of this, I still have to help her create slides for our clients on all completed tasks for the week/month, as senior PM would tell me because “T is new to this.” We’ve been at the job for roughly 4 months now.

I have helped recruit a new developer, someone the company recommended — I was only told to go through their résumé and respond if they are a good fit and I helped with the interview task (a take-home project — I requested that the applicant be compensated as it’s somewhat a dense project and would take their time — HR refused). The company agreed with the developer’s choice of full WFH but would have me come in twice a week, because “we have plenty live clients so we need to have you here to ensure every requests are handled,” as if I don’t handle requests on my WFH days.

Yesterday, T tried making me look bad, and I asked, “why is it that you like making me look bad?” in front of HR and T smiled. HR didn’t say anything (T is friends with HR and T would occasionally spill nonsense about me to HR, in fact they sit together to gossip and their noise would always crawl to my corner; they both don’t do much. T would sleep off during work hours and not get a word for it — the first time I took a 10 minutes break to relax, T said, “you look too comfortable. I don’t like that,” and HR laughed at T’s comment. While it was somewhat a joke, there was seriousness attached to it). As soon as HR left, I asked T again, “why is it that most of the things you say are stupid?”, T took offense and went to her gossip crew of 4, telling them what I had just said, then T informed senior PM (which I’m fine with as it’s ideal to report me to her superior in any circumstance). Then I told those who cared to listen, T’s fellow gossipers, that I only said that in response to T’s remark to me in front of them, a while back, that I talked like I’m high on drugs.

I’ve lost my mind compiling this and it feels like I’m going off track, I’m just pissed.

I loved the work challenges as I’ve had to take on new responsibilities and projects, even outside my programming language, but I’m looking for a job elsewhere. My salary doesn’t not reflect my contributions and my mental health is not looking good to maintain this work style. I recall taking a day off as I was feeling down and had anxiety towards work, only to find out HR showed T my request mail and they were laughing at me the next day I showed up, “everybody’s mental health is bad too but we still show up,” and I responded to T, “maybe you ought to take a break too”.

My problem now is:

- I want my linkedin profile to be public
- I don't want to be bored every day by spam from recruiters that claim to offer me "A NEW JOB OPPORTUNITY!!!" but don't put any other details about.

I am 100% sure that most of them are searching monkeys for stupid jobs in body rental companies.

At the moment i put a warning on my profile for recruiters to not contact me. I hope this will work.

i need some advice on how to deal with office culture. i am a covid graduate and this is my first wfo job. it is technically hybrid but quickly turning into full time office, and there are several examples of scenarios, where i am not only feeling just frustrated, but hurt and retaliation.

my whole team is in a different city except 4 of us : pm, sr ios dev, me(android dev) and a sr android dev. in our office, there are 50 more people , but i rarely need to contact anyone except my team from another city or these 3 folks. also, we 4 are new joinees like just joined in last 2 months.

so let's discuss the problems.

1. there have been very shitty decisions that are leading to loss of everyone just because a few are unlucky. here's an example. on may 1, international labor day, we 4 had a leave showing. but it was not showing for other people. maybe because ourbleave calender was aligned to other city or maybe coz we are new, idk. but someone told the boss of manager, and he mailed to us that there is no leave :/ wtf

2. another news: our is shifting from we work to another co-working space. it is being heard that office will be now 3/5 days instead of 2/5 . when we joined, it was showing 3/5 days in our hr portal, but hr assured that it is 2/5 days. and we would still go 2/5 days only. but like that holiday scenario, people are buzzing and talking, and they might end up getting our 2/5 culture tonget fucked too. this is very stupid, since i am wasting 4 hrs everyday travelling.

3. let's talk about the snakes in the 4 ppl group. the ios dev and manager are sweet looking girl snakes. ios girl is the meek snake and pm is the wicked snake. once i discussed with ios girl about how we need to rush every morning at 8 am to reach office as our standup is at 10. i told her that i would raise this matter in standup and when i did, she was just mum as fuck. didn't even voted a fucking yes when the boss said "ok let's have a vote on it" . i mean man what the fuck are your scared of? the boss won't kill you bitch for clocking 30 mins late

4. the other snake is pm. i am pretty sure she was one of the people for which that leave was not showing and she informed the boss's boss. day before that i told her jokingly that once i leave the office, I won't be opening my laptop and since today it was decided that tomorrow is the holiday, I am unreachable and therefore enjoying the vacay due to lack of latest info.
the bitch fucking whatsapped me to say that she got a call from boss that tomorrow's a working day. it would have been the perfect fucking leave.
I am pretty sure a lot of people are hating me for leaving so early too. i oeave at 5pm , as i have to be at gym by 7. also 1 minute past 5 and i would be travelling in a jam packed metro, so yeah, no thanks. but this bitch is definitely telling my boss about this.

5 finally the biggest snake is this *cough-cough* "sr" android guy. dude's code is so shittu and hacky, i can sense that he didn't tried to understand the class and just added a function at any place he felt fit. he also is a schemy bitch, as he has somehow convinced noss to let him wotk just 1/5 days in wfo.

but i didn't cared about him much until now. yesterday i sent a link regarding latest Android dev update in the official channel as a fun read, and his reply was "probably should have seen theeynote yesterday" bitch it wasn't even mentioned in that keynote! i just checked its summary after his message, but then it was too late to retaliate.

and now that i see, he always tries to be smug and cool. not that i care, roast me all you want in front of your crush, I won't mind, but if you're trying to show people that am not an able dev, then buckle up bitch, either you or me are counting last breaths.

hr- "so why are looking to switch from X"
me- "well i currently work in b2b domain amd i really want to work on B2C product where millions of users are being impacted"

hr- "yeah we also have premium companies as users and b2b work is not much different than b2c. what else?"

me- "uh umm, also i saw the opening for a journalism company , so i was very tempted to apply as i always
wanted to work for jo-"

hr- "the opening is for p, a subdomain of our company which is a music player"

me- "umm that's okay. i guess i like listening to music as well 😅 . also i wanted to work nearby to my home"

hr- "yeah that's the real reason. your current company is asking you to come to their city"

me- "no they are still remote!" (they aren't)

hr- "i will connect you with another person. please be negotiable"

🥺😭 mann i am so much out of the game i am embarrassing myself over a phone call. can't even answer a stupid why question

No matter how much i think i am sorted out regarding my career, one small shit happens and i am again confused.

I previously interned for 2 months in a company as an Android dev(it was a 4 month internship, but i got it reduced to 2 because of my college exams)

It was a nice ad based company. Their main focus was on their web products and had no Android product or team( they just had a thought for expanding in Android) . So clearly i was their first recruit/intern

I worked their, all alone, at my pace, without any external help. It was a picnic for me as nobody bossed me around or gave me deadlines as nobody knew my work, and i got paid. They would just wait me to report my daily work, i would write my stuff honestly, but i know they understood jack shit

I was told that once the alpha product is liked by the investors we will recruit a team, but i made the product in 1st month and never got info about any recruitment going on. I was just told to fix the bugs and work more on it.

When my internship ended , i was already bored out getting stuck at a place without any senior help . Plus they damaged relations with me on other reasons( halted my stipend for last month for 60 days, that's another rant, but it was mostly the stupidity of hr dept)

So now i started applying for other companies. My original company called me afterwards but i made an excuse to be out of state and talk after new year(it was honest)

Other companies are now showing interest with a lower pay , but now am feeling like a stupid person going from a decent pay and comfortable environment to a lesser pay but aggressive environment .

Should i contact my original company again? I feel guilty leaving them this way, but to be fair i was wasting my time there (quite literally, i was making my assignments and writing blogs there when stuck)

i am so fucking conflicted right now. seeing my fiture getting ruined in front of my present eyes. Life always gives me a chance to jump out of a ship that's about to fucking blow , i took it the first time, but this time i missed it for bravery ( and stupidity), and now am sinking alongside this fucking ship

my first job was amazing. decent work, sometimes a lot and sometimes too less. i would learn new things ,interact with people, handle a lot of fuckups . at one point i felt like looking for another opportunity , got one giving 50% hike , so i jumped the ship and sent a resignation letter. the noitice peripd was less, so i enjoyed my days applying to other ships. got even a better offer with 100% hike, so from one boat to another to now a literal cruise.

later i got to know that my original company got bankrupt and fired 85% staff. the next month the company that gave me the first offer layed off 30% staff.

now the waters are tough and my cruise is also getting impacted. but instead of firing, they are asking us to come to the office permanently. their office is in a fucked up place: you need 8$ just to breath the fucking air there. its the city of blood and money. and you will be giving away both things there.

my brain got split into 2 parts after this announcement: my stupid self was still considering this while my sensible self started applying for jobs. my stupid self was thinking that this is a great opportunity to leave my fucking nest of a home , where i am liv8ng woth my parents for last 25 years, and learn to live alone. clean utensils, cook food , wash clothes... i wanted to live the life the harsh way.

but life still took a pity on the fool that j am and gave me an opportunity. an opportunity to work with a big brand who hasn't done any layoffs in their 40+ yrs of existence (but also known for giving shit increments)
the offer was just a 40% hike but it was near my home. i could be in office in 1 hr in less than a dollar a day and still earn more than what am earning now.

plus my notice period is now 60 days , so who knows what other offer i could have got in those 60 days ( when i would keep my profile with a big green "immediately available to hire" circle on me.

however this time i didn't jump the boat. i asked them for a bigger raisez they declined and my stupid self was more than happy.
now the company has started to send mails regarding relocation and yepp the cruise is sinking , atleast for me. if i was savingsx in this company, my savings would become x/8 if i go to that city. in the new offer it would have at worst remained x.

and that's not even half of what's bothering me. i had accepted the money loss in exchange of what that city and my company had to offer : a chance to experience WFO, a chance to live life like a mature man and not a kid in his mom's house ,and a life full of hurdles and strangers.

however i always like to keep an emergency fallback mechanism on me , for if things don't work out. I don't wanna go depressed and cut my wrists there, I don't want people to hurt me so much that I can't recover. i want to run away from that wreched city the moment i start to loose the battles there and the city starts taking over me.

but what the holy fuck? my company's notice period is 60 days, and my rented room's security deposit is 6 fucking months? i will be giving 6 months of deposit + 1 month of brokerage + 1month of rent on the first day i put my steps on that wretched land after travelling in a 100 dollar flight! where am i supposed to get this much money?!
and okay, somehow i manage this. say i did an 11 months agreement, paid the fucking 8 months of rent at one go and simply started living a shitty life there. in month 2 i break down and wanted to implement my escape mechanism. it would go like this : i will suck up and try to live for rent free for next 6 months. but wait, THAT'S NOT FUCKING ALLOWED!! iam supposed to get my security AFTER 11+1 MONTHS!! why not freaking adjust it in my rent?

I can't think straight . 6 months of security deposit has blown my brain. i am regretting anything and everything. I can't think of my roommates situation, home safety, room location, whatever the fucks we think while looking for a room . all i can think is ...WHY SO MUCH MONEY NEEDS TO GO AT ONCE!?

FUCK