Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.

Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".

That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.

And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.

So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.

Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.

So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.

So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.

Life is to short to work with something you hate.

Be more passive

I always get involved in everything, at every company. Not to further my career through ass-kissing and overperforming.

I regularly piss off people. When C-level has a discussion about strategy, I'm usually ahead of them, ask too many questions, criticize every detail they've missed, cause frustration by making them look incompetent.

Can't help it, when I see retards destroy a great product I have to intervene.

Some people appreciate it. I often defend both devs and end users, when others don't dare speak up.

But fuck it, I'm getting older. I'm gonna coast a bit more. Sit back, relax.

If a product manager doesn't prepare enough tasks — that's cool, I still have a Factorio savegame to work on.

If another team designs an incredibly stupid feature — they'll discover the issues eventually by themselves. Maybe I'll warn once, just to be nice.

*Pours another chocolate milk*

Also gonna spend at least 4h/d with my daughter. She's a better human than most of my coworkers, and the work we do using her Legos is honestly more important for humanity than the Jira backlog.

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.

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

Today the CEO asked us to create KPIs to follow a junior tasks, daily.
The problem it's he wants KPIs to foretell problems or delays in his tasks.

The junior is analyzing 14 years old C++ code, made by an electrical engineer who had all worsts practices possible when coding.

We explained that we couldn't make real, true KPI that would foretell the advancement due to complexity of the legacy and the fact that the junior had NEVER USED C++.

SO.... He asked to know how many code lines he made daily and an estimate of how many lines he'll have to do to complete the task.... So he could foretell advancement.

....
....

It was the 5th time in less than 60 days, that the CEO bypass totally the CTO to ask some stupid useless shit. So now all developpers have resign, complaining about the CEO actions/stupidity.

I remember opening an old script file on our server for scheduled tasks, and thinking to myself; What idiot wrote this mess? It's unnecessarily complex, solving the problem in a convoluted way. And of course, not a single line of comments.

After reading it through and through many times to understand what each line did I kept repeating to myself; What an imbecile... Being this stupid should be illegal... Coding should require some sort of license to prevent idiots from doing this!

Then of course, it slowly dawned on me. I had written this crap one year before. I'm the idiot... 😐

I've commented every line religiously since then.

Tl;Dr: Client-side validated online test

Some stupid questions in an online test.
Not all of them were coding questions, but all (yes ALL) were client-side validated and to solve the tasks all I had to do was to copy one array into another and set the time I needed for that task to a legit number.

Well at least it was an online test that doesn't required 3hours.

Newly hired developer who calls himself ”senior” on linkedin has not contributed for 6 months. At least. I have been very helpful on many pair programming sessions. Directing him. Being extremely precise how things works and are working together. Small and big picture. He calls me and ask questions and I answer. Explain. Again and again. But it does not stick.

Nothing.

Extremely precise tasks. Written specifically for him.

Nothing.

He has like 10 commits in one year. It’s the worst I’ve seen in a developer role.

The other day in a zoom meeting he failed to declare a variable correctly. He copy/pasted a line instead and renamed the variable.

I saw this early. But I need not to work with him for a long time. It is now very clear that he will never contribute but in fact decrease the velocity of the team.

One year is a long time.

He is stupid. He can’t learn. Did he not tell the truth about himself when management hired him?

It so sad they hired him.

Hacktoberfest time, and I usually try to contribute by creating some trivial issues and labelling them as such - ones that I could fix in 2 seconds, just to help those starting out get a pull request and get used to how the process works. Like, we're talking *really* trivial - remove superfluous import statements, that sort of thing. In most of these I list exactly what needs to be changed.

This guy picks, what's probably the *easiest* of these tasks going, and then comes back saying he's got some questions. Dude, seriously?! It's right there in the damn issue description.

Whatever, I decide to be nice and I say he's welcome to ask. Brace myself for answering some stupid crap, but fine, we were all new once.

THE GUY COMES BACK AND SAYS HE NEEDS A CALL. A call, seriously? What is this crap? I do you a favour by letting you create a trivial PR, and you want me to literally burn my time & jump on a call to take you through step by step what to do?! Pff, and people wonder why I'm grumpy most of the time.

WHY DO WE HAVE TO BUY THE PROFESSOR'S BOOK JUST TO BE ABLE TO PASS THE COURSE?

It's so stupid, I'm currently attending a Operating Systems course at university and the professor NEEDS us to buy his book because all of the tasks and seminars are based on his book. It is stupid! There are thousands of books out there on Operating Systems programming! Free ones too! But instead we have to spend 800SEK (100USD) on his book.

And guess what? There is literally one task based on his book... To summarize the chapters about Fixed Priority scheduling and Dynamic Priority scheduling. Which is 15 pages out of 200+.

All the students attending the course are going to the director of studies and complaining next week. This is unacceptable. If it was a good book, sure. But the book has the same exact information as multiple free e-books we've found.

Ridiculous.

You stupid shit jerk fucks.

Your request to disable the coming soon mode was hours ago. Of course google will show you coming soon text when you searched for it. It is not like google is under my arse or something.

And what do you mean it is not showing up on YAHOO!
Who the hell is still using YAHOO! ?
And that YAHOO! showed me that coming soon text result just like GOOGLE when I tried. So why is it not showing that to you? Oh right, maybe because you are old and stupid.

Today is already busy enough with packing our stuffs, stop giving us stupid tasks to fix.

At one of my former jobs, we devs had to do all sorts of non-dev work, such as writing quotes and even contracts!

The CEO of that company had this naughty habit to contact devs directly without delegating through the CIO. Sure, if it's really urgent like when some system is down because of a bug, go ahead and disturb a dev. But interrupting coders to write some freaking quote? Come on!...

Once, that CEO asked me to stop everything I was doing to write a quote to a customer ASAP, as this was really urgent.

I spent several hours writing that quote. It had to be done right as any specifications in our quotes were used in our agreeements and were referred to in the case of any dispute. So not only were we devs and salesmen in the same time; we also needed to be lawyers.

When I was done and delivered the quote to the CEO, he told me he had no intention to take on that customer in the first place. Instead, he wrote a polite we-are-not-interested e-mail to the customer and cc:d it to me just so that I could read for myself how very sleek a businessman he was.

Me: why did I have to write that quote when you knew all along that you were not going to use it anyway?
Him: It's for your own personal development.

Another naughty habit of that same CEO is that he made "jokes" and remarks that I found inappropriate, such as "You walk like a drunken sailor".

Later, he decided to discontinue our team/product because "it isn't proftable". Well, what do you expect when devs are forced to waste half day completing pointless tasks?!

It was for the better anyway, and I was actually relieved when I left the company. I'm still thinking though, that the real reason he sacked me is that I am too honest and not the docile kind of employee that would be ideal for him. I did question some of my tasks, and worst of all: I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes.

I was struggling with a task on a project and decided to call the colleague, who's working on this project as well (he built it, I am just on-boarding) to get some advice.

Literally the first thing he asked me was: "have you seen whom this task is assigned to?"

Fuck! So I spent about 1.5 hours on not finishing a task that I shouldn't have worked on in the first place. Great.

So my company hired this very old guy. The oldest developer I have worked with. I feel they took him just because of diversity.

Because he was absolutely incompetent.

Nothing he wrote ever worked, he got in conflict with everyone, made stupid jokes at meetings, asked the dumbest questions. His stories would hang for weeks, hopping sprint over sprint. Once he delivered something, his code had to be re-written from scratch. A code review couldn't even be applied as the code was worthless, so it just made sense to reassign his tasks to someone else and move on.

So after much drama he was let go. It was maybe two years ago and I recently connected with him on LinkedIn. He's changed four or more jobs since then. Prior to coming to our company he also job-hopped all the time (but most likely he was actually fired every time). His average job duration was like 6 months. Apart from that, he had a 20+ year stay with some government agency.

I fail to grasp how he ever gets hired anywhere with all the red flags. Over two decades with some govt agency (in my country they are all crap). Then change jobs every half an year or so. Then the asshole attitude. And finally, they probably never asked him any technical questions, because he knew nothing. Our interns who were just one month into the job were better by a WIDE margin.

When i worked for a large, international bank (whose name rhymes with shitty), I always had to use the following formula to estimate projects.

1. Take estimate of actual work
2. Multiply by 2 to cover project manager status reports
3. Multiply by 4 to cover time spent in useless meetings.
4. Multiply by 2 to cover user support and bug fix tasks.
5. Multiply by 2 to cover my team lead tasks.
6. Multiply by 3 to cover useless paperwork and obtaining idiotic necessary approvals to do anything
7. Finally, multiply by 3.14159 to cover all the other stupid shit that the idiots that run that company come up with.

It's only a slight exaggeration. Tasks that required less than a day of actual coding would routinely require two weeks to accomplish and get implemented.

this was about office politics. for context, a lot of non tech people think they can borrow our time willy nilly and our boss agrees, so we're often pulled out of our tasks to do random shit.

these girls asked for my consultation on a simple problem, because another team wasn't fixing an issue for them and they said it wasn't possible. i said it was possible and simple to solve, i spoke to the other team, showed them how to do it and thought that was done. they kept asking me to produce proof that it was possible, excessively, like i had nothing to do.

that went on for a week, lots of back and forth, i was getting tired, so i told this girl fine, I'll do this stupid thing IF you send me an email making this a formal exchange, she says fine. the next day i find out they went after another guy in my team, who's much busier than i, and he stopped everything to coddle them.

i told him to be careful about that stuff, because he's setting himself up for this shit, he's making the rest of the team look bad and he's stopping his work to do something that was already done, because they couldn't bother to send an email. had a huge discussion about this, he was super condescending and overall, he was an asshole.

next time, I'll just send the girls his way

The Return of Mr. Gitmaster:
So there is this colleague I already ranted about several times. After my previous team lead had confronted him about not doing much work, there was some irritation because he showed not up at work, but it turned out the external training he did was just a week earlier. Then he was ill a week, another week vacation so we didn't see him much. Not that his pre- or absence makes much difference to our repo: When his and my team lead looked at his commits of the past three months they found like the one copy-pasted HTML-form that wouldn't even show.
Fast forward to now, where we have a new team lead and we were going to lunch with Mr. gitmaster. So we got some more hero stories from the great work he was doing in the previous company. How he was graphically monitoring the heap fragmentation that stupid glibc was causing to their search engine, and how much better it became with tcmalloc.
I still don't understand how he bridges that cognitive dissonance from all the superior tech knowledge he displays to not actually writing any code at all. Not that I would not have experienced some states of feeling low, in paralysis unable to write a single line of code... but he seems so full of confidence, always commenting how trivial and easy all these tasks would be, as if it's all so lightyears below his abilities. Maybe he should just become a manager - but not mine.

"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.

Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.

During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.

I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.

It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.

I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.

After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.

We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.

I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.

I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.

I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.

I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.

I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.

This is what burnout looks like.

I was checking out this wk139 rants & thinking to myself how does one have a dev enemy.. o.O Well TIL that maaaaybe I have one too..

Not sure if ex coworker was a bit 'weird & unskillful' or wanted to intentionally harm us and thank god failed miserably..

I decided to finally cleanup his workspace today: he had a bad habit of having almost all files in solution checked out to himself, most of them containing no changes whatsoever... I reminded him on many occasions that this is bad practice & to only have checked out files he was currently working on. And never checkin files without changes.. Ofc didn't listen.. managed to checkin over 100 files one time, most of which had no changes & some even had alerts for debugging in them.. which ofc made it to the client server.. :/

On one or two occasions I already logged in and wanted to check if files have any real changes that I'd actually want to keep, but gave up after 40 or so files in a batch that were either same or full of sh..

Anyhow today I decided I will discard everything, as the codebase changed a lot since he left an I know I already fixed a lot of his tasks.. I logged in, did the undo pending changes and then proceed to open source control explorer.

While I was cleaning up his workspace, I figured I could test what will happen if I request changeset xy and shelveset yy, will it be ok, or do I have to modify something else & merge code.. Figured using his workspace that was already set up for testing would be easier, faster & less 'stressful' than creating another one on my computer, change IIS settings and all just, to test this merge..

Boy was I wrong.. upon opening source control explorer, I was greeted by a lot of little red Xes staring back at me... more than half the folders on TFS were marked for deletion.. o.O

Now I'm not sure if he wanted to fuck me up when he left or was just 'stupid' when it comes to TFS. O.O

So...maybe I do have a dev enemy after all.. or I don't.. Can't decide.. all I know for sure is tomorrow I'm creating another workspace to test this and I'm not touching his computer ever again.. O.O

This is stupid but i think is my best idea yet.

So i have an old orange pi, with only 256m memory. Its running a few tasks i need but i wanted to use it for controlling a few things from my phone (lights and powering on my pc) so i thought i would make a server for that. Now mind you, my shirt doesnt say "lightweight backend language", so there was no way the pi couldve handled a struts server. I was digging around and found that php has a shell_exec command. Then it clicked, and i wrote the whole system like
shell_exec("java -jar someprocess.jar"). Now this sounds really stupid but it works and php is really light so it doesnt even slow it down that much.

Thinking about making this into some kinda server/framework/something just for fun.

I wish my boss would stop revoking my permissions. He's always saying how these slew of things need to be accomplished, yet, everytime I go to do them I'm at a wall because, despite having permissions for a very long time he decided to revoke them entirely.

It's not like I can't be trusted with them, it's been over 2 years with them, so why the sudden revoke?

I finally sent some snot mail to him informing him I'm unable to complete my tasks without the permissions granted to me (I'm a sysadmin, sec guy, boss is vp of tech), and instead of him granting them yet again he's going to run around and try to hack around the permission requirement so he can avoid giving me them.

Seriously? This is stupid. I was the one who wrote the security design and implementation document, and put all that work in. Now I'm being locked out of the system I designed, built and implemented?

Well, time to look for a new job. If you're a manager, please don't revoke your employees permissions without notice, at random, and try to hack around well-documented security policies. It won't end well!

Tl:dr Guy acts like a moron and is useless in group tasks.

In my class there is this one guy, that I'll just call carl. Now Carl do some stuff that irritates me, but is harmless. Things like repeat the answer he get's every time he asks a question. I fucking hate it, but it's okay. He also says some pretty stupid stuff. Like today when he asked why Ubuntu started when he turned on a computer, the guy next to him simply said because it's installed while I facepalmed.
Carl does even worse things than that. I was asked to work with Carl on a group task.
Now I hate talking in front of people, so we decided that I would do the writing and he would speak to the rest of the class.
I made a word document containing what he had to say, but we also wanted a PowerPoint presentation to make it look better and so the other could get read the basics on what we we were presenting.
Carl decided that he could create the PowerPoint presentation, and I thought why not. The thing I didn't expect was that Carl would install Ubuntu on his laptop, without saving the presentation somewhere else. In other words HE FUCKING DELETED IT.
But it's fine he could just create it using a program that isn't PowerPoint. OH WAIT OF COURSE CARL FOUND A WAY TO TO FUCK THIS. The next time we had that subject he came without his laptop (we use our laptops in all our courses) because he managed to make it unusable, although he fixed it a few days later.
At that point I said fuck it and created the presentation myself.
At this point I didn't trust Carl with anything sharper than a spoon and decided, against our previous, plans to present it with him. Now I sent him the Word and PowerPoint documents so he would now what to say and what the class was going to see.
THIS GUY DECIDED TO JUST READ WORD FOR WORD OF THE POWERPOINT AKA NOT THE THING I ASKED HIM TO DO. So half the the time it was me going into slight detail about advertisement on the net and how people finding your company on google helps to sell products, AND THE OTHER WAS HIM SAYING A FEW WORDS. JESUS CHRIST, Carl basically didn't do shit yet he acted like he did. That's something that really makes me mad.

In today's episode, I did all programming tasks before 10 AM roles around while sitting on the toilet. The rest of the day, I shall just sit in my bed and try to edit this stupid video.

I should also look for more jobs, but hell, I studied so much to do what I like but there's literally no market for it... I kinda feel the liberal arts students now. Lol.

Hey you!

Yes you!

You think you can finish those 3 tasks this evening?

WELL PREPARE TO BE STUCK FOREVER AT TASK 1 BECAUSE OF A FUCKING STUPID BUG THAT YOU COULD'VE FOUND IN 2 MINUTES HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR YOUR DROWSINESS

And obviously after doing that you don't have any energy for task 2 and 3, so you decide to do that in the train ride over

Week 1 of the new job, and it seems I have some pretty low expectations to meet.

Seriously, I just did the math. Let's say one works an average of 48 hours per week, 50 weeks per year. Just as an average. That's 2400 hours in a year.
In the Micro-scale, a manager would mess up their team once every 2.4 hours (2h24m) or about 4 times per day (assuming 5 working days per week).
That is a pretty low bar to clear. It easy not to be an antsy brat that are-we-there-yet's a professional dev four fucking times a day.

And yet... that is what the complete moron who previously sat on my chair used to do.
Seriously, apparently he used to remote access the team's dev envs *while they were working* and even mess up some of their code. Just as a "monitoring measure". He logged their "keystroke time" in a day (using a primitive windowing method, I must add).
At least 7 requests for updates per person per day. I have his slack history, I checked. Dude literally did nothing else but be an annoying anxiety death pit.

And then there is his bulshit planning...
He created tasks out of his stupid whims, no team review or brainstorming, not even a fucking requisites tallying interview.
He prioritized those out-of-nowhere tasks using panic-driven-development practices and assigned them by availability heuristics.
No sizing method, just arbitrary deadlines for tasks.

I think I will need to have daily standup meetings and an open door policy (that is to say, do no actual work) for a couple months until I can instill some sense of autonomy on my new team. Shit.

Someone has another idea? How do I bring some confidence&autonomy back to devs that are used to be treated like dogs?!?

Fuck pep8 in general. Fuck harder anything to do with line limits. Fuck with a rusty spatula those who tie it into their git precommits or CI tests.

What's that, it's 2018 and even the shittiest walmart-tier computers have 1080p OR BETTER at a 16:9 aspect ratio?

"lol, 80 character line limit."

Eat a bucket of rancid dicks.

Oh, and since we're forcing you to be so economical with your characters, we're going to force four space tabs. Yknow, rather than simple single tab characters, which could mean everyone can set their preferred level of spacing without bloating the code with whitespace.

Because, yknow, it's entirely reasonable to chew up 1/8 of a line because you're editing a function inside a class definition. God Almighty forbid you try to do a for loop inside that function! Fuck you!

"Oh but you can't have two editors or terminals open side by side without that limit!"

BULL FUCKING SHIT. Here's my shitty 1280x1024 display on my shitty computer with two Sublime editors open side by side. You'll notice the break is at 100 characters. You'll notice I don't have to scroll horizontally to do two things at once. You'll notice I even have room for COMMENTS!

If your code standards require you to make your code *less* readable and *less* clear and take up *more* space to accomplish the same tasks, YOUR CODE STANDARDS SUCK!

Enough with this stupid meme. We're not in the 80s anymore and it's high time to start fucking acting like it.

I'm pissed off as fuck. By far these were the worst fucking 2 weeks in a very long time.

My grandma died. At work I had to do shitty tasks and IT support for stupid end users, like an overpayed PC technician. I couldn't find any time to write a single line of code on any of my personal projects.

And I still can't find a fucking developer job. I feel like I'm stuck in this IT hell forever.

Kill me

I remember the time when netbooks were a thing. An affordable device for easy tasks like web browsing. It’s in the name!
Excuse me, what? The web? It’s heavier than some games now! All thanks to React.js and stupid frontend framework boom of 2016.
Frontend people, wake up. Modern JS has everything you need. It’s time to switch to Web Components.

After reading some rants abut stupid project managers I remembered this situation that happened to me a decade ago.
One of the tasks was to move some html component to different place on the page. The whole page was a mix trs and tds and to achieve that I had to rewrite the whole page structure. I estimated around half a day to complete that task. It was my first job and I was not great back then, but still it was reasonable amount for this task.

Now lets introduce my PM : the guy was a complete tool. He was a former hardware store manager ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and had no idea what we were doing.
He started ranting how on earth such simple task can takes so much time. I started explaining myself, but he wasn't listening. Instead he started sharing his screen, he made a screenshot of the page, pasted it to the ms paint, cut the component, and moved it to desired place. Then he said : It took me like 10 sec to complete the task and I have no experience, maybe I will replace you?
I was speechless. I had no words and I just kept silence.
Then he said he would reassign this task to X, because he is competent.
X spend more then 4 hours and I heard no apologies.

Dear Oracle,
why do I have to have an X server running for your stupid Oracle Database to install?
Why are you sometimes capable of writing good software like VirtualBox, and then fuck up simple tasks like creating a docker image for your fucking Database? (Seriously, try it, you will not be able to set up a simple Oracle Database using their official Dockerfiles)
Also, what makes you think that -4 is the "most appropriate exit status"?!
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Fuck you really hard you proprietary piece of shit!

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

I fucking hate the process of setting up IDEs and compilers! All the build files, cmake files, tasks, all that shit.

I undrerstand it's integral part of coding, but fuck, why does it always take so long to set up a stupid project. Just let me start coding ffs.

Sometimes I get so frustrated that I rather write a bash script or run the compiler commands in the shell instead of going through the hassle of setting all this up.

In every company, there are those non-tech people who try to come up with creative ways to make us not do any work: useless meetings, stupid company activities, "initiatives" cause,
"Gohd! you have to take ann iniitiative".

Okay, I get it. You have a lot of free time on your hand and wanna seem busy. I, on the other hand, want to finish my tasks, get paid, and get on with my life.

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!

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.

Hello,
I just quit my job at a big market research company. It was disturbing how much processes there depended on excel and obscure visual basic scripts.

They load data from a database, do typical database tasks with excel and upload it back into the database.

PhDs run complex statical computations through an excel interface that passes the request to R.

Instead of an hour Python they execute stupid tasks with excel by hand. Day after day, month after month.

WHY? My colleagues were not dumb but instead of learning SQL and some python they build insane excel tables.

Maybe it's time pressure. But this excel insanity costs much more time in the end.

I have never understood why there is so much animosity from seasoned devs in the community.

I see it in a lot of places. Stackoverflow, reddit, even devRant. In so many cases, an inexperienced dev will post to the web, only to be shot down by things like "this question is stupid" or "you all have it too easy and its apparent you never learned basic CS principles" or things of that nature. In a lot of cases, these are generally unhelpful replies and often teach new devs to be wary of seeking help.

Please help me to understand, why this is.

Is it because the community is angry at these devs trying to get a high paying job by going to a bootcamp and shortcutting the hard work it takes to understand core CS principles to become a decent developer? Then why not take a moment to provide resources or insight to these folks so they can learn to be better?

Is it because the community feels that devs from bootcamps are just watering down the pool of talent making our worth decrease? I feel this isnt really valid because seasoned, experienced architects will always be needed to build good software. And at that, why are we not ensuring that the next wave of developers is equipped to handle tasks like that?

There are a lot of good people in this community who want to help and make the net a better place for all developers (after all, many of us consider it home), but there's a lot more people out there with really shitty attitudes, and it frustrates the hell out of me that my juniors now equate arrogant, self-entitled responses and attitudes with "seasoned devs" and discourages them from even bothering to get involved in the community.

Trying to re-type a massive essay I lost because the app refreshed for some reason. I'll try to keep it short (spoiler: I lied).

Recently, I had a conversation with a couple of non-tech people about AI and the fear of computers making humans obsolete. I have some strong (borderline ranty) opinions about this, and thought I'd post here to see what reaction is get.

This is not a "machines will destroy us" post, it's more about the very legitimate great of losing jobs.

- AI is a tool. It's main use would to be help optimise the more complex routine tasks and free up people's time to be more creative in their jobs. Basically, it's the next step of automation.
- Human intuition can never be replaced. Sometimes, things just seem a bit off. Sure, an AI would avoid ever getting in that situation, but only if it had learnt it in the past. A human will always have to be at the helm of any such system.
- Achieving true intelligence and sentience is like trying to travel at the speed of light. The closer you get, the more challenges you face.
- Getting hyped by sensationalist news that claims the end is nigh because two computers optimised the language they used to communicate when trying to reach a goal is stupid. All this shows is that the tech is working as expected and the systems can optimise on the fly. To me, this was a pretty awesome moment.

Now, I'm not saying dystopia is impossible, neither am I saying that it is inevitable. Just like any tool presented to us, if we use it responsibly, we can make life and society a lot better.

*sends email to ops manager to explain nuget & git (yes, he is THAT guy)

*his reply "what's nuget?"

Ooooooooh! Why don't you open Google and do a fucking search you amazingly stupid twat!!! In what fucking era do you live in? What the fuck are you doing at work everyday, besides complaining about how time consuming your useless mundane tasks are? Take some of your undeserved salary and go educate yourself, you useless sack of shit! FUCK!

*meanwhile... Little grin on my face. *Shift+delete email.

being physically disabled is such a nightmare. i have experienced a whole different personality of being dependent on others , being incapable of basic tasks and feeling incomplete all the times. it's very humbling, and i have found a whole new respect for human body and social conduct.

just want to get whole again. don't know how long its going to take a humerus arm fracture to join back on is own, now that i got a plate screwed to the broken parts to keep them together.
the doctors will probably ask me to remove the external brace after a few months followed by exercises for next more months the complete bends/stretch will probably take 6-9 months and bone will join enough in 1-2 year after which i could get the plate removed (this is the happy case, not considering the high risk of my bones getting permanently twisted or plate getting envolped by bone mass )

everything simply sucks till then. imagine getting pushed back in your life by 2+ yrs in your prime age of 25.
farewell to my dreams of adventure sports, senior goals and gappy marriage .

folks, don't do stupid stuff that can get your body into trouble, you WILL regret.

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

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.

Is there a limitation of how much I can commit in git each day in a separate 'feature-branch'?

Cause, I had to explain to a team member (somewhat senior than me) why I committed 9 times in a single 8 hours task(s) (according to him where it was two separate tasks done in a single day).

When I said, I prefer to save my progress in a small commit (at least try my best to write meaningful commit)", I turned out to be a stupid team member. 😔

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.

!rant
is pre-debugging a good thing?
I have a habit of implementing a project(for e.g. a mobile app) like this: See the project, break the tasks to be done into small parts(Like UI layouts- setting, listeners to implement , graphics involved, background threads required, databases necessary, etc.)and then code each of them step by step , while simultaneously testing their working (For all possible test cases I could think of ) side - by side. this results in my project getting developed in far more time than other people, but I always have something good and working all times to show to my bosses.But I really feel stupid when I spend 2 hours handling the animations and ui while I have yet to look into databases and other more important stuff

I guess that's a habit from my good old python days(its IDLE was a playstation for me) but I wish to know better approaches,if any?

Hello ranters, I'm looking for advice in regards to a freelancing job which I haven't been paid.
In summary, I got a freelancing job in like March 2018, I had to do a simple platform with an administrator section, simple but "long", it had to be fully customizable, so I did it. I then got another project, which I also finished, both by December. I added some functionality not on the requirements and also some other asked by them, I also deployed both of them, tasks not included on the "contract". The problem is that I didn't sign a contract (my fault), it was all verbal. Since I was "friends" with them, I asked them to pay me with a motorbike (of around 2300 USD) and they agreed. Then they gave me another project which started wrong, they asked me to finish it within two weeks with a language I didn't know and other tools I also didn't know, I told them about this and agreed that could be a delay, besides, the requirements weren't totally clear and they were clarified three days after the project "started". After this, we had a discussion about how I later realized I was totally underpriced, that I hadn't been paid yet and how the dude that was like my main contact for the project told me that "my code was all nice and cool but was useless" because he clearly thought that an excel could be used as a database and din't know that I had to parse it and upload it to Firebase, which in total were about 4 million documents and this obviously took time. To not make it longer, I delivered the project 1 week later and they told me that they had to "assign" a full team of 7 members to do it from zero because I didn't deliver it on time and because when he asked me to "help them" I laughed. I first delivered like the 90%~95% of the project and he was been condescendent, he also blocked me from everywhere (hangouts, slack) and told me to "deliver what I had" to at least have something to prove that I did work. His team of "7 members" was stupid enough to not be able to at least run an npm install and npm run, they were also stupid enought to not understand what a GET request was an all and when he realized this, he asked me for the database dump and for the 100% of the project, so I also delivered it. We agreed that we were not going to work together anymore, so I asked him to pay me at least what had to be paid of the other two projects and he agreed, he also purchased a computer for me which I was paying him and was going to be discounted from the total payment. In the end, I was going to be paid 1430 USD. He asked me for my bank account and like my tax ID, for whatever he needed it. Since then, almost two weeks, he hasn't paid me, replied or even seen my messages. He also had a "partner" which was also "my friend", the huge motherfucker isn't even replying my mails or anything, so, since it was all verbal and they are being such motherfuckers, I don't know what to do. They are being such motherfuckers and I think I can't proceed legally, since there is no written contract. So what should I do? I was planning on going tomorrow but I pretty sure they won't even open the door or will tell me to wait or whatever. I seriously wanna cry, I don't get how people can be such dicks and unfair fuckers. I believe in karma but I don't think karma will give me that money and time back. :(

I finally have a vServer again, now I need to fill it with 'life': secure it, build a small website and mailserver.

The main idea is to have some basics to look more professionell. I'd love any tip and idea how idk, save work before I run into stupid beginner mistakes, or things you had good experiences working with when you had similar tasks? :)

This is a rant about the passion of programming and building in the business world (AKA corporate/startup world)

I speak for myself and I believe many programmers out there who set out on their journey into the world of programming by a certain interest kindled some time when they first wrote their first line of code. We innocently eager, and dream of working for large fancy companies and start making money while doing the thing we love doing the most.

And then... reality hits. We find that most companies are basically just the same thing. Our supposedly creative and mind-challenging passion is now turned into mundane boring repetitive tasks and dealing with all kinds of bazaar demands and requirements. You suddenly go from wanting to change the world to "please move this to left by 10 px". And from experience that drives people to the extent of hating their jobs, and hating the very thing they were once so very infatuated with.

One narrative I see being pushed down the throats of developers (especially fresh young eager developers with no experience) mostly by business people/owners is "WORK FOR PASSION!". I personally heard one CEO say things like "It's not just about a salary at the end of the month. IT IS ABOUT A MISSION. IT IS ABOUT A VISION"...bla...bla...bla. Or "We don't work for money we work for passion". Yeah good luck keeping your business afloat on passion.

What irritates me the most about this, is that it is working. People today are convinced that doing shit jobs for these people are all about passion. But no one wants to stop for a second and think that maybe if people are passionate about something, even if that thing is in the field in which they work, they're not passionate about working for someone else doing something they hate? If I am really working for "passion" why don't I just quit and go work on something that I am ACTUALLY passionate about? Something that brings me joy not dread? It's a simple question but it's baffling to me why no one thinks about it. To me personally, jobs are just that; jobs. It's something to make a living and that's it. I don't give a fuck if you think you're building the next "innovative", "disruptive", "shitluptive" thing :D. Unfortunately that is viewed as "negative limited mentality".

I am quite passionate about programming and making things, but I am not so passionate about building your stupid app/website with a glue code everywhere!

- Finish "Introduction to algorithms"
- Learn some genetic algorithms
- Get my hands dirty on reinforcement learning
- Learn more about data streaming application (My currently app is still using plain stupid REST to transport image). I don't know, maybe Kafka and RabbitMQ.
- Learn to implement some distributed system prototypes to get fitter at this topic. There must be more than REST for communicating between components.
- Implementing a searching module for my app with elastic search.
- Employ redis at sometime for background tasks.
- Get my handy dirty on some operating system concepts (Interprocess Communication, I am looking at you)
- Take a look at Assembly (I dont want to do much with Assembly, maybe just want to implement one or two programs to know how things work)
- Learn a bit of parallel computing with CUDA to know what the hell Tensorflow is doing with my graphic card.
- Maybe finishing my first research paper
- Pass my electrical engineering exam (I suck at EE)

Thought I'd post this for my friend in QA, because she's been having a horrible week at work.

So we were supposed to have production deployments last night (Tuesday) and tonight (Wednesday). We were told these dates a week ago, which is fine. The QA support cleared their after-office schedules on those dates to accommodate, since the deployments would be happening at 10pm.

Last Monday they moved the deployments to Thursday and Friday, because our "project managers" want to cram as many fixes and resolutions as possible. So of course, we devs are being rushed to speed these additional tasks through to being included (bypassing a LOT of quality checks).

Of course, the QA team finds defects (we devs were expecting that, so no big) and the PMs start blaming them for the delays. Which is just stupid. And my QA friend? They're trying to make her a scapegoat by throwing her under the bus with business.

Fortunately, she's a smart cookie and not only has all communications with the PMs documented, she also has the other QAs backing her up by running the same tests.

tldr; Fuck those project managers who suck up to business and don't give a shit about the people who do the actual work. May they burn in hell and their souls rot in a cesspool of acidic farts for all eternity.

Hello, I have a question for anyone familiar with multithreading!

I just started working with threading for the first time, I mostly write powershell scripts 😅, I found that certain conditions make using multithreading an absolute time saver. And of course in some tasks it's not such a big deal.

I am currently working on a project that runs multiple threads and each thread might invoke one of my functions that also threads the work.

I'm a total newbhat when it comes to this stuff, but if my main process is 4 threads, and I can spin up, up-to 4 more threads to run one of my functions, does the math equate to a possible total number of threads of 16 or is it possible to have the threading go ape-shit bananas and utterly thrash the cpu with rampant threads getting created?

I've looked online and based on some of the info that I've managed to come across on my own, the answers elude towards being safe because I'm creating pools for running the threads first and the pool is responsible for maintaining min/max threads, but I can't seem to find good info on running a pool+threads inside another thread.

Just to let you in on what the function does that requires threading in the first place, I need to basically query CloudTrail based on ARN's to find events, but I can only pass a single ARN to the find-ctevent cmdlet. So I'm essentially making 1500-ish really really small calls to AWS just to get back event data for the ARN.

Serially, this takes like almost 20 mins, on my laptop using stupid settings like 24 threads, it completes in about 95seconds. On the actual server that will be running this code, I'm going to limit it to 4 threads and try to figure out a way to cache the info locally and update the info on a cron or schedule so only the initial scrape takes forever and then the updates can be done nightly or something.

thank you in advance for your help, I'm not too sure if the question is dumb but please let me know either way!

I don't think I wanna be a dev anymore

Just a year ago, I was doing many side projects for fun, aching for proper coding tasks at work.

Now, I got a senior title but I don't want to do ANYTHING, I don't want to learn this new service or learn how to develop new stuff, I've lost all desire to learn something new. I just want a simple af simple low needs job, but also want good pay XD I know, it's stupid, but I really don't care what tech I use or how exciting the product is, I just want a simple repetitive job with little stress and deadlines and good pay

How do you motivate yourselves to get through the day and do your tasks? Honestly every PR review I'm shocked other engineers care so much about the code, they're obv right, I just wonder where that desire to maintain good coding practices comes from

Haproxy.

Backlog.

30_000.

Nooooo.... Why on earth do you do that.

And yeah....

Looking at the sysctl settings someone took a road trip to Google and stackoverflow and just copy pasted every mother fucking stupid bullshit bingo inside it.

Half of this doesn't apply as the kernel version doesn't even support it anymore (for good reasons) or makes sense as these settings have NOTHING not even REMOTELY to do with the servers hw setup.

If you have no fucking clue what you do, ram the keyboard up your arse till you enjoy it.

But stay the fuck away from administration and the fuck away from anything that carries responsibilities.

Joyful task today: unclogging old failing Haproxy setups while being busy with 3 other tasks.

And if you wanna know why they're failing and it needed to happen today... Weeeell....

They restarted. And today they decided to restart so fast people finally noticed it.

Cause yeah. They did that the last fucking years every few hours. Now every 5 minutes.

:@ :@ :@ :@ :@ :@

I have a great chemistry with this coworker.

He lacks some depth of android knowledge but is always very interested in adding new google libs to the project, so we often discuss and come up with the safest, scalable solutions.

He is SE2 and I am SE1.

But one thing that is interesting about him is the way he gives estimations for the tasks. He takes usually that much amount of time that i would take, for a task, but he would quote half the time estimates.

the bosses usually come on the last days to check the feature demo, but QAs gets the first build when a task is completed. I have seen his first builds that goes to QA and most of the time, boy it has some amazingly stupid bugs.

dude would just put a util function, then run the build, if everything compiled, he would just give the build to QA directly. he wouldn't even check that the util function gave an expected output or not.

He is simply wasting QA time n efforts, and risking product quality by not testing enough, but he almost always gets a clean chit for this behavior just because he did the work super fast.

Dude is super cool and i don't envy him for his good luck, but rather think of him as an inferior dev. However bosses think of him as a better dev and my TL even once told me to "be like him"

So i guess this is how corporate works. I will try to apply this in my next role in current/next organisation.

Every idea that I suggest to my cto, he turns it down, giving some stupid reason like nobody will use it, other tasks are more important than this. I hate this guy so much for not doing things when they can be done. I have no idea why he procrastinates and will he ever consider my suggestions in the future.

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 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.

I cant believe the project I'm working on does not use kubernetes or terraform. Not even docker. How is this multi trillion dollar project even in business?

I feel so sad for not having the opportunity to work with one of the most fundamental and most important technologies to know as a devops engineer... So sad

I cant advance or improve. Im just stuck in their ecosystem like Apple

This corporation is probably ran by 90 year old grandpa men from world war 1. However considering they are so large and still in business this gives me hope that anyone can make it even if you're stupid

Think about it

They are proof that you can run a giant business with hundreds of employees, not use k8s and the most modern devops technologies, and still operate just fine.

The devops code i have to maintain is older than the amount of years i exist. Its very messy and most of this shit is not even devops related. Its more of some kind of linux administrative tasks mixed with 3 drops of actual devops (bash scripts, ansible scripts, ci/cd pipeline)

And yet im paid more than i have ever been paid in any job so far

What should i do. Stay due to "high" money or..ask for a project with k8s. I put "high" in quotes because it is extreme luxury in my shithole country, im now among top 1% earners of the country, and yet i make less than 30k a year. With less than 30k a year i cant buy a good car but i can live very comfortably in my country. I cant complain about this salary since i think its finally enough to invest to get a chance to earn more and still have enough left to live comfortably.

Before i was just working to survive. Now im working to live. Its an upgrade.

Due to not working with difficult stuff like k8s i cant demand for more money. It wouldnt feel justified. I'm stuck here

What would u do

Thinking very VERY seriously about pushing the button on this.

iMac 10-core Xeon W, 64GB DDR4, Radeon Pro Vega 64X, 2TB SSD

$6,727 plus tax $403.62 and then another hundred for shipping before fucking December in 'rona.

Could sign up for Apple Pay and do $600 payments for 12 months 0 APR... shouldn't be too bad of a problem provided the world holds together that long... And if it doesn't, then this is my last computer... and I guess it'd be nice to go into the afterworld with a freshly upgraded rig.

IDK, Please talk some sense into me about how stupid this would be.

Also to factor in... I need to buy a new machine one way or another SOON. Or else I need to wipe my main and be out of commission for at least 3-4 days which could cost me a few grand on its own... and then also still buy a lesser mac for my daughter.

Why an iMac and not a cheese grater similarly priced? If I get the iMac I can give my current iMac to my daughter for school. My old 2015 iMac isn't holding up to my use anymore, but should be fine for a few more years for a high schooler to work on. If I get a cheese grader fine, but factor in at least another $300 for a minimum 27" 2K monitor.

Any reason to even think of a refurb trash can design? Are they too old now?

General thoughts on why this entire rant is retarded? Like. I too dislike Apple, but I need them. It's love/hate. But god if I do this I'm buckling in for the next 5 years... tax write off would be nice I guess.

Can't really back down the specs any because I dual boot windows and do some gaming. Need 2TB so I can give Windows and Mac a TB each (and I still have 8TB external).

Don't really want to go lower than the Vega 64X because even that benchmarks poorly against many cheaper cards... for gaming (but does do better for some other tasks)...

Ugh... talk me into or out of buying another god awful expensive mac.

Did a backup.

Did a bulk import to a service (netbox, great tool for network documentation by the way).

Fucked it up.

Back to backup.

Fixed bug.

Fucking gerbils on ecstasy (devs) annoying the fuck out of me.

Lobotomizing meetings.

Yuck coffee. Cold, stale and over extracted.

Gerbils planning a mutiny. Killed them with a big cheese wheel (lots of stupid boring tasks as they seem to be completely missing stuff to do).

Deleted backup.

Redid import.

Small typo.

Find the mistake...

I just love it when a small task becomes a huge fuckup due to too many disturbances.

Luckily SQL UPDATE went well....

Nothing's more fun than to patch a live database.

Yeah. I didn't wanna do a new backup. :)

The "I don't give a crap mood" is sometimes a great way to accelerate tasks...

Guys I need to deploy a very simple authentication API service.

You register with a username (actually an ID with a determined format), a password and uuid. You login with your username and password and if credentials are correct you get back the uuid as a response (JSON or whatever the fuck).

If you forget your password, you can use your uuid (which is confidential, very long string) in some POST request to set a new password. If you forget your username, you use the uuid again in a GET request to get back your username.

I've been looking at a bunch of solutions online and I don't think they suit my purpose exactly and all require emails (Like Firebase, AUth0, etc.) So, let me get this straight: NO FUCKING EMAILS INVOLVED PLEASE.

The above are the EXACT requirements I need for my work (for a good cause too). I fucking hate 0-requirement exploratory research tasks and I'm plagued with those. Those requirements are the only way it should work. So again, NO EMAILS INVOLVED PLEASE.

Also, please note that I have never developed an API in my life. I feel like StackOverflow will be assholes about this so I am asking this here.

I know it is very easy to do and there are probably dozens of ways to do this. I just do not know how, documentations are vague and overwhelming (or I'm just a little stupid lately). Another thing is that I am not sure of how can I do this in the most secure way. Bonus if this can be dockerized.

I know I sound a little rude,so I am sorry. It is just my frustration and depressing times I am going through that's preventing from thinking straight.

Well I'm back on this stupid project with this stupid Product Owner and I really hate this, it really demotivates me.

I was assigned to this project (data analytics) for like 6 months, working alone with this stupid PO that knows nothing about team management or project management.

The guy had a "methodology" where he established all task to be done daily and would not tell me what we have to do in the entire project but instead would tell me day by day all the tasks to be done in each day. This means that HE was the one making the time estimation which is plain wrong!.

Anyways, I talked to him and told him that I need to have a wide overview of the project in order to be able to make a good time estimation, and it kind of worked.

But the guy is a pain in the ass, calls me every 4 hours to "talk" about the project and texts me every hour to check "how are we doing?".

This project was killing me, I had no motivation to work on it, I hated every minute of it, I didn't like it at all to the point my boss (not him) talked to me and asked me what was wrong with me. I told him: This is not the project for me. He told me: Ok let's try to move you to another project.

After six months of agony, the project was stale (customer approval, paperwork, blah, blah) I was assigned to two other projects that I liked, more software architecture and development, not data analytics.

And last week my boss came back to me with "well, the project was approved so we need you back at it".

WHAT PART OF I'M NOT THE RIGHT GUY FOR THIS PROJECT DIDN'T YOU GET?

Now I'm again with this dude, calling me, texting me, sending me infinite emails, asking for minutely updates...

I really don't want to be working on this project.

An assistant manager asked to SOMEUNREALISTICEXPECTATION, and said it had to be done within SOMESTUPIDLYCLOSEDAY.

I said, of course, I would not do it.

He answered "no problem, we can go with SOMEPARTOFTHEUNREALISTICEXPECTATION before SOMEEVENCLOSERDAY (ie: tomorrow).

I have already said a "no" before, didn't feel like saying no again.

After all, I said, what could possibly go wrong?

The time I left office, Friday night, it everybody's guess.