New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!

I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.

P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!

!rant

Customer: What's the difference between an antivirus and an antimalware?

Me: *thinks for a second* So an antimalware program is like if you're on a beach with a metal detector. You're looking around for metal that's already buried in the sand. An antivirus is like actively watching people for if they drop metal on the ground.

Customer: That's an interesting analogy.

Coworker: *quietly* That's a actually a really good analogy...

Yesterday's JR web dev interview:
👨🏻‍💻: Experience?
👶: Well JS, pyhton, UX Design and bit of Sass.
👨🏻‍💻: Feel like you'll have a hard time learning PHP?
👶: Well if it needs to be PHP, I can learn it.. Are you using a certain CMS?
👨🏻‍💻: Cool, good. Yeah we're using WordPress and need to support our sites for IE8.
👶:... Well.. ehm.. *runs away and screams in panic 💨*

So I maintain a open source PHP app that wraps youtube-dl, providing an UI for it basically. Some guy on a forum DMd me saying it's not working for him. I asked him what php version he used and if the file permissions are correct (the script makes and switches directories, so the permissions can't be root but need to be www-data).

He answers with PHP 7.2 (the newest that's rare) and says the file permissions are correct.

After 2 weeks the problem still persists and ofc I am doubting my code here. We finally get online together and I can use anydesk to work on his machine.

I discovered 2 things.

1) File permissions were just completely wrong.

2) PHP WASN'T EVEN INSTALLED

So what did I learn?

Never trust the user and I am glad that I work as a dev, not as a tech support.

Please kindly fuck off. I don't need your genderbiased bullshit. I couldn't care less about a programmer's gender.
I'm also aware about the margin between the numbers of female and male dev who want to study CS, but if you seriously think that a learning algorithm is biased on gender and ethnic it's creator, I will have to kindly remind you that math doesn't support an output based on your gender.

Now please get the fuck off my sacred newsfeed...

Another funny Linux encounter from my study that I suddenly remembered.

This guy said he didn't want to work with things/services that use Linux because he wanted to support software devs by buying software. I get the idea but yah...

Linux teacher: well then why don't you start with disconnecting from the WiFi. After that drop services like fb and WhatsApp which you use a lot. Also, good luck in the dev world as you're mooost probably going to encounter Linux and for being able to finish this study you'll need to succeed on Linux classes as well!

He just sat there like 'help'. A lot of fellow students were giggling as well.

Really though, my Linux teacher was an awesome young guy!

Today I realized that I hit a total burnout. Last 3 years were extremely stressful for me (4 jobs in 3 different countries, exhausting and toxic relationship, bad habits). Last 7 months are the worst. I became lonely isolated and miserable. I learned to rely purely on stress, determination and validation to get through my days. Was supressing my emotions for a long time just to focus on making the money. Its time to break the cycle.

Im done with this. Next week Im quitting my fulltime job. Saved enough money for starting capital of my own dev services company. Built three projects that generate stable income to cover my living costs. Now finally I can take a long break to recover from this burnout and to heal myself. That poor persons mentality that I had from my poor family has been shattered. I achieved what I wanted in terms of having the money and gathered enough experience necessary to survive anywhere.

I managed to get through all this shit on my own with barely any support. People around me were draining me more than actually helping me. But I managed to do it and now its time to focus on myself, to heal and restore love for living. Im safe now.

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

My brother just called me asking for help in some MS server thing and I'm like "I don't know that!" (I really don't), and he replied "Yeah, you know, mom told me to call you to ask for help.". Jesus Christ. Just because I'm in CS it doesn't mean I know everything informatics-related.
I now know your pain, devRanters. I usually don't mind being the IT support (so much that my parents call me to help them when their computers decide to randomly die or do something weird because of something they've done, but I live like 300km away because of uni so I can't just go there and help them. Sometimes I say "Ask your son" (he's taking a tech course in high school), but my brother cuts out of it like "I don't know how to fix it" without even looking at it sometimes. Well duh, me neither at times, but google is your friend damn it. Sometimes I search for the answers. Other times I just poke around in the program until I find what's wrong. Either way, when I say I don't know and/or I can't really do much about it they give me the usual "We're paying your uni fees for what?" (in a joking tone but. I'M NOT STUDYING FOR THAT, I WANNA BE A GAME DEV DAMN IT)), but goddamn it I don't know everything just because I am a CS student. I wanna help but sometimes I can't. Deal with that >:V

Manager: So great news, we will also be building a new app this year!!

Dev: We only have 2 devs and we already struggling to maintain/build our current portfolio of applications. I don’t think we have the resources to support another.

Manager: Nonsense, this is a very small project management app that was requested by the CEO himself!

Dev: …We already have MS project, why can’t they just use that?

Manager: The executive team isn’t interested in learning MS Project, it’s way too complicated. They want us to build an internal version of MS Project one feature at a time so they can pick it up over time instead of getting overwhelmed with learning MS Project all at once. It also needs to have loads of customizable automation features so leadership doesn’t ever have to get “in the weeds” having to work with it. It needs to basically run itself!

Dev: …What about this is small?

Manager: Well that is the requirement.

Dev: …

I had to explain to a customer's head of IT what a public IP is! He is (still) convinced all addresses in the world have to start with 192.168...

How do people like this get/keep their jobs?!

Manager: Everyone will be required to switch to Mac in the next couple of months.

Dev: Um, why?

Manager: Macs are more professional and developer focused than windows machines, I read it in an article. Plus they look way nicer.

Dev: Half of the applications we use don’t have a version that works on iOS.

Manager: What? How do you know?

Dev: I have a Mac for occasionally doing some work on the iOS app we support. I ran into that when I was setting it up as a development environment.

Manager: You have a Mac?

Dev: Yes

Manager: Why? How come you don’t use it for development?

Dev: …

!!good news
!!great news
!!linux dev lappy recommendations?

So, @Root might finally have a job! Woo!
(Pending a background check, drug test, cavity search, ...)

I'm excited, and kind of giddy. It's an open-office setup, but the devs are chill, the boss is chill (reminds me a bit of myself thus far, just... nice), pay is decent too. Drive is hell, but everything else feels kinda cushy. The parent company is super-stuffy corporate and has an HR and red tape fetish, but supposedly I won't have to interact with them at all. I start as soon as all of the background check nonsense comes through. (Don't get me started on that, please.)

One of the questions that came up, however, is what type of system I wanted to use. I requested a Linux lappy, and that's sadly a bit beyond the parent company's nontechnical IT department. They asked me for links to a few specific machines on amazon for options. (MacBook Pro or equivalent)

That's where this question comes in: Which lappys make great dev machines and also have decent linux (Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) support? The role is backend Rails development + some devops, so I don't need super-fancy graphics, though I will be attaching a 4k (hopefully IPS) display because space and pretty colors.

Recommendations welcome, as I should get back to them today!

This isn't my week I guess 😅

After my study (application development) I wanted to get a job but wasn't sure about a dev position. Everyone recommended me to go for a Linux one since I've been a Linuxer for 8 years now (7 years then)

Applied to numerous jobs and was invited to an interview with a hosting company for a Linux (support) engineer position.

CEO asked good questions, didn't need to see my diploma and we basically had a good time talking.

15 months later I'm still working here!

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

My dream is to build a shopping cart for web stores that doesn't fucking suck.

Seriously Bigcommerce, Shopify, Magneto, etc. All of you can eat bag of dicks and burn in hell for ever.

I don't care what languages you fancy, all of their stacks are a pile of shit, monkey patched together with popsicle sticks and duct tape and it all falls apart with high concurrency.

All their greasy haired sales teams will throw all manners of horse shit at the poor bastards who are trying to run a business so they can pad their commission checks... "High availability", "scalable", "reliable", "Increased conversation rate"... Lying dick fucks, all of them! I am calling them the fuck out on that snake oil they're all peddling.

The only thing worse than their shit APIs is the shit documentation and the shit support that accompanies them.

Support of these platforms are pretty much all the same, sure mayhaps one has 24*7 phone support and another closes at 9 or some shit like that, either way the only people they put on the phone are monkeys that will freeze up and say "I'm not a developer so I can't help you"... Guess what, "Eric"! I didn't ask if you're a fucking dev! I'm calling because one of your devs fucked up and I need you to tell him to unfuck it so I can get the fuck on with my day!

Their app/plugin market places are shameful to say the least. The overall quality of software is somewhat dire and it's mostly dominated by oversees developers who speak English about as well as the language they're developing with (not very well usually).

I could go on until I hit the character limit but I'm gonna end it here by saying, all shopping carts suck and they should burn for eternity in the depths of hell so that a savior can free all developers from this agonizing torment.

My team handles infrastructure deployment and automation in the cloud for our company, so we don't exactly develop applications ourselves, but we're responsible for building deployment pipelines, provisioning cloud resources, automating their deployments, etc.

I've ranted about this before, but it fits the weekly rant so I'll do it again.

Someone deployed an autoscaling application into our production AWS account, but they set the maximum instance count to 300. The account limit was less than that. So, of course, their application gets stuck and starts scaling out infinitely. Two hundred new servers spun up in an hour before hitting the limit and then throwing errors all over the place. They send me a ticket and I login to AWS to investigate. Not only have they broken their own application, but they've also made it impossible to deploy anything else into prod. Every other autoscaling group is now unable to scale out at all. We had to submit an emergency limit increase request to AWS, spent thousands of dollars on those stupidly-large instances, and yelled at the dev team responsible. Two weeks later, THEY INCREASED THE MAX COUNT TO 500 AND IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

And the whole thing happened because a database filled up the hard drive, so it would spin up a new server, whose hard drive would be full already and thus spin up a new server, and so on into infinity.

Thats probably the only WTF moment that resulted in me actually saying "WTF?!" out loud to the person responsible, but I've had others. One dev team had their code logging to a location they couldn't access, so we got daily requests for two weeks to download and email log files to them. Another dev team refused to believe their server was crashing due to their bad code even after we showed them the logs that demonstrated their application had a massive memory leak. Another team arbitrarily decided that they were going to deploy their code at 4 AM on a Saturday and they wanted a member of my team to be available in case something went wrong. We aren't 24/7 support. We aren't even weekend support. Or any support, technically. Another team told us we had one day to do three weeks' worth of work to deploy their application because they had set a hard deadline and then didn't tell us about it until the day before. We gave them a flat "No" for that request.

I could probably keep going, but you get the gist of it.

CIO: what kind of web server do you want for your dev environment? WordPress?
Me: Uhm, Linux centos running apa-
CIO: whoa that's dangerous you need to think of the people who are going to support this.
Me: right...
CIO: we're going to pick something and stick with it.

FML company is just starting to do in house dev. CIO is heavily involved and knows more than I do... My life is a Dilbert comic strip

Ranting time;

Yeah so OK this ancient legacy clusterfuck we've been maintaining and keeping alive finally broke. And even though I'm very pleased with both being right, and the well deserved right to say I TOLD YOU SO, SO MANY MANY FUCKING TIMES to all in management, it's the definition of hate to work 18 hours a day to fix the shit someone else built, that they refused us to refactor. Ah, but wait; there's more! Everyone thinks it's our fault (R&D), because historically it was our department that built the system. Ten years ago. So sales and support are now all over us, those responsible for us being in this mess are either gone or so high up in management that they refuse to take part.

Taking the fall and blame and workload, for something we warned repeatedly about, but were refused to do something with, because shiny features and new apps is what is important!

I'd understand it if the numbers were red, but they arent!! We are growing so fast it was inevitable!

I fucking hate companies who dont listen to their devs..... also companies who places ops on dev shoulders.

Yaaaargh! Also; two developers means twice as fast? No? Fuuuuuck!!!

IBM

I have replied to them with scripts, curl commands, and Swagger docs (PROVIDED TO SUPPORT THEIR API), everything that could possibly indicate there's a bug. Regardless, they refuse to escalate me to level 1 support because "We cant reproduce the issue in a dev environment"

Well of course you can't reproduce it in a dev environment otherwise you'd have caught this in your unit tests. We have a genuine issue on our hands and you couldnt give less of a shit about it, or even understand less than half of it. I literally gave them a script to use and they replied back with this:

"I cannot replicate the error, but for a resource ID that doesnt exist it throws an HTTP 500 error"

YOUR APP... throws a 500... for a resource NOT FOUND?????????!!!!!!!!!! That is the exact OPPOSITE of spec, in fact some might call it a MISUSE OF RESTFUL APIs... maybe even HTTP PROTOCOL ITSELF.

I'm done with IBM, I'm done with their support, I'm done with their product, and I'm DONE playing TELEPHONE with FIRST TIER SUPPORT while we pay $250,000/year for SHITTY, UNRELENTING RAPE OF MY INTELLECT.

I am building a mobile site using flexbox. A senior dev came running to tell me that we need to support IE. Looked at him and said, "IT'S MOBILE!"

My ex-boyfriend once saw my post on the devRant and he said something, in a demeaning way, that don't screw up your brain with all this. Till now this community has given me support that he couldn't give me in his time. Instead he created problems. That's why he is my ex. :)

Thanks to dev Rant. :)

Yesterday I had my performance review discussion with my manager after about 6 months into the job, which is my first dev job. Before this, I had spent about 2 years in a support role after graduation, but always yearned to build something cool and be a full time developer. Hence I had made the lunge in spite of a pay cut into a development role.

For the past 6 months I was asked to develop a bunch of features on top of legacy code which is ~15 years old. I did my best and brought in the best ideas and practices onto the table and delivered on time. The features turned out great. I enjoyed working with the team and the team loved me back!

But at the back of my mind, I was hoping that I would get to work on something new and relevant. To quench this thirst, I used to spend my personal time on side projects.

The managers and the leads who have been observing me all along, told me yesterday that my manager got AMAZINGLY positive feedback from the leads and my teammates (who are like 10 years senior to me). Going forward, I get to work on any CRAZY idea and pick up any technology I like with the goal of revamping our product. Essentially I get to work on my side projects full time as long as it adds value to the company.

Ohhhhhh YEAH!

Wish me luck. 😎

All web developers should support up to IE9 without any problems.

Why? Because in Korea, it is normal.

Every person uses that damn Win7, which has either IE9 or IE10. Without IE support, no one will browse your webpage.

Now you would ask us, why don't you use other modern browsers?

We would then ask you, why would you install a new browser that is
1. Buggy
2. Heavy
3. Takes up ram
4. Has so many features
when you have an awesome minimalistic browser that is preinstalled, and works in all Windows? No thanks.

So, if you put a message saying you will soon drop support of IE, it means that you won't target Korea. Just after the support drop, there won't be traffic to your web site.

So what is the point of this rant?
1. We love IE. Lol
2. IE is lightweight, minimalistic, and the fastest browser in the world.
3. All websites should NOT drop support for IE.
4. We don't care whether web devs will have a hard time. We just think websites are built with Wix and Wordpress, and they work in IE, meaning, IE support is the number one priority.
5. If you ever start a business in Korea, and has a website, make sure to hire an senior Korean web dev who has worked with IE for a long time.
6. Here is the tl;dr
Hate us. Period.

Support: A customer complained about a nasty bug.
Senior Dev: There are no bugs in our software, just challenges that need to be solved.

Day 1:

Me: 'Hi'

Middleware guy: 'Raise a Jira. We have always been so accommodating. Contact your manager.'

*Jeez*

===

Day 2:

Me: 'Could you please start the server in dev environment? I am a new joiner. I don't have access. Here is a jira.'

Middleware guy: 'Deadlines may be for you. It is not for me. Wait until tomorrow.'

*Damn, did he get a divorce recently?*

===

Day 5: *An urgent delivery asap* 'Hi, could you please do the configuration of the new app in staging?'

Middleware guy: 'So, here is the split up...
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5 & 6
Your app will be configured by tomorrow first half hopefully.. Oh and you can escalate if it is too late..
'
*What a b...*

===

Day 8:

Me: *Doing late sit for pushing a task* 'Hi, we have an issue. The server is not starting. Could it be due to..'

MW guy in 'second' shift: 'Oh, we don't extend support on unusual hours'

Me: 'But this is second shift.'

MW guy: 'Yeah, but I have to go home early now...'

====

Day 10:

Team Lead: 'Any innovative solutions?'

Me: 'Let's go SERVERLESS!' :D

-Dev support group-

Me: Hello, my name is div.
Other Devs: Hello, div.
Me: Its been 3 days since I last coded...
Other Devs: 😲

Guys, I think it's time to fight back!

Whenever a client ask you about IE9 support, tell him to find someone else, because noone the fuck uses IE9 and if someone somehow does, then it's his fault!

Then he will search for other dev, but if we all do so, we can forget about supporting stupid old shit again!

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

My first Dev job involved password resets. Quickly created a GUI for that shit and passed it off to IT support.

“Fullstack dev continues to be consistent”

We’d an enhancement request where we needed to support Ionic apps. Our manager didn’t know anything about Ionic so she asks us what it was instead of asking Google.

Manager: so what’s this Ionic thingy?

Me: Ionic issss.... (gets interrupted by Fullstack dev)

Fullstack dev: so the thing is ... it’s like... (consistent with his opening lines as always) it’s a third party plugin which converts react app and html pages to native code.

Me: (thinking of sacrificing him at the altar of Lucifer)

Manager: Nice!

More to come.

When I left university I got a Graduate Developer role at a local start-up. For the first year there i did html and css, second year I was in the support team.

Not a problem because sometimes you have to eat some shit to get where you want to be. But third year I got moved into the Dev team properly.

A month in, the Support team, without someone with a devs brain and a "devs" knowledge of the product, started falling really far behind and struggling and the MD told me I'd be going back into Support for another 6-12 months. So I told him to fuck off, and if he did I'd just leave. They never did and I stayed. 👍

At a former job, the company decided to replatform to Salesforce. The entire dev team was laid off. But it would take an outside agency a year to build the Salesforce site. The company wanted the devs to stay for an additional year.

The only severance was something they called a stay bonus. It was 30% of our gross income but it was still contingent on performance. And if they decide to let you go earlier, it gets prorated if you still qualify for the bonus. Not a good deal.

Each month a dev left. By the time I secured a new job and left, all that remained of the dev team was a junior frontend dev and two team leads (one FE and one BE) with no team to lead. Well, there were contractors, but they were only brought on after the Salesforce replatform announcement. I’m pretty sure the company had to hire even more contractors. No idea how much that cost them.

For me, I think it was serendipitous that I gave notice during their busiest time of year. They actually tried asking me to extend my notice. Karma was coming back to bite them. Not just for the Salesforce thing. But also for their lack of support when I was blindly accused of being both insubordinate and incompetent.

Manager: "We can't have new releases breaking older versions of the mobile app!!!!! We'll lose all our customers!!!!"

fullStackChris: "That's fine, we can do API versioning, but it will take some time to implement, I'll have to be quite careful and write some tests to implement it. Probably 2-3 weeks..."

Manager: "NO WAY, THAT TIME ESTIMATE IS WAY TOO LONG, WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT!!!"

fullStackChris: "So how do you wanna support multiple versions of the app without doing any sort of versioning?"

Manager: "...we'll think of something!"

Dev: "..."

And with 99% certainty, I expect to hear this in a week or two:

Manager: "fullStackChris, we'd like to introduce you to the highly technical concept, API versioning. It's a way to version the API so we can support multiple versions of the application our customers use! It's amazing! Please implement this immediately so we can support multiple versions of the application!"

Sigh... each day managers learn a bit more how physical reality works... you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

Every year my team runs an award ceremony during which people win “awards” for mistakes throughout the year. This years was quite good.

The integration partner award- one of our sysAdmins was talking with a partner from another company over Skype and was having some issues with azure. He intended to send me a small rant but instead sent “fucking azure can go fuck itself, won’t let me update to managed disks from a vhd built on unmanaged” to our jv partner.

Sysadmin wannabe award (mine)- ran “Sudo chmod -R 700 /“ on one of our dev systems then had to spend the next day trying to fix it 😓

The ain’t no sanity clause award - someone ran a massive update query on a prod database without a where clause

The dba wannabe award - one of our support guys was clearing out a prod dB server to make some disk space and accidentally deleted one of the databases devices bringing it down.

The open source community award - one of the devs had been messing about with an apache proxy on a prod web server and it ended up as part of a botnet

There were others but I can’t remember them all

Me passing time on the weekend

Random call from unknown number

Turns out it's the manager

M: hey , how is your weekend going ...

Me: nothing much ... Whatsup ?

M : yeah well , we wanted to push some minor adhoc fixes as some clients wanted it urgently

The Devops folks need developer support . Can you pitch in and monitor

Me : I'm not aware of what changes are going , i don't think i can provide support

M : don't worry it's minor changes , it's already tested in pre prod , you just need to be on call for 30 mins

Me : ugh okay .. guess 1 hr won't hurt

M: thanks 👍🏽

Me: *logs in

*Notices the last merged PR
+ 400 lines , implemented by junior dev and merged by manager

*Wait , how is this a *minor* release...

*Release got triggered already and the CI CD pipeline is in progress

*5 mins later

*Pipeline fails , devops sends email - test coverage below 50%

Manager immediately pitches in ...

M: hey , i see test coverage is down , can you increase it ?

Me: and how do u suppose I do that ?

M : well it's simple just write UTC for the missing lines ... Will it take time ?

Me : * ah shit here we go again

Yeah it will take time , there are around 400 lines , I am not aware of this component all together

Can you ask junior dev to pitch in and write the UTC for this

*Actually junior dev is out on a vacation with his girlfriend

M : well he's out for the weekend , but
as a senior dev , i expect you to have holistic understanding of the codebase and not give excuses ,
this is a priority fix which client are demanding we need this released ASAP

Me : * wait wat ?

---

I ended up being online for next 3 hours figuring out the code change and bumping up the UTC 🤦🏾

99% of our server-side code is Python and PHP (legacy applications).

Asked a junior dev to make a small update to a PHP site so we could have it run some cleanup server side. Plenty of existing PHP code to look at and piece something together. Should be 50 lines max.

Did he use the existing PHP code to do this task? Nope. Did he at least use Python? Nope.

Node.js

His response?

"I couldn't figure it out and Node.js seemed to have good support for mongo so I used that instead."

We have 0 lines of server side javascript. Never had node installed. Literally none of the devs use node here. Not only is this completely outside of our tech stack, but he had to take the time to learn Node and JS just because he thought it was easier.

Much would of rather he put in twice as much time to learn the tools of our stack.

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

> be me
> spend 0.02 Ether (about €5) on one of those old-school MUD-style games
> send to the same Ethereum wallet from a previous purchase
> realize that the destination wallet changes for each purchase (probably to mitigate the fact that transaction history and contents in Ethereum wallets is entirely public)

> send an email to the game dev asking to return the transaction or pass it on to my player account
> *cricket noises*

About a week later, i.e. now:
*checks that Ethereum account that I accidentally sent that transaction to*
> $0 on it, transaction has been withdrawn

Now I couldn't care less about the €5 - it's only 2 beers worth - but what I do care about is honesty. Dear Chat Wars admin, that money wasn't yours. Also, I am one of those players that plays very few games but tends to commit to those I do play. The last one I played, I spent several hundreds of euros on over the couple of years I played it. I could've probably paid for your servers, spare time development and then some. But obviously not anymore. Choosing a quick grab of €5 over a relatively steady source of income from someone that tends to financially support what he likes... Re-evaluate your life choices.

Just like that incident with the stolen flash drive that was worth only €10... I couldn't care less about the raw value of them, but I do feel very disappointed in humanity when people go for a quick grab of such worthless things.

I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.

*My morning so far, 2 hours in*

Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?

Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.

Remote dev: cool thanks.

Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.

Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.

==========

Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.

Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?

Remote dev: Correct!

*debugging for 5 mins*

Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.

Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.

Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.

Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.

Me: ... and BE team.

Remote dev: why?

Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.

Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.

==========

Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?

Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?

Product: correct.

Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X

Product: What do you mean the screen?

Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature

Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.

Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.

Product: No this is a must have.

Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.

Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.

==========

Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.

==========

... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere

This is not an interview test just an awkward experience in general regarding interview.

This happened two years ago when I was a fresh university graduate looking for a job in UK as an immigrant (Im EU national).

Went to an interview for a web dev+tech support position. Two fat guys with tshirts met me and started interviewing me for a sysadmin position. Started asking me about disaster recovery and stuff.

Turns out recruiter messed up not only companies but positions as well. Also these two guys didnt bother to check anything.

I pulled out the job ad for which I applied originally, interviewers had a look at it and still proceeded questioning me while knowing that I prepared for completely different position interview.

Needless to say, it went terrible and I didnt get the job. I dont know if its just me or Im unlucky, but I had a lot of encounters in UK with so many incompetent recruiters.

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Switches to working on it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Switches team member to it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Gets dev team to help with it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Asks CEO to help on ticket.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Cries.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Prays to Mecca.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* ...

I then find out two more urgent support tickets are about to come in.

And then another one.

Help.

Today I noticed that my first name on my Apple Developer Account was totally wrong, even though the name on my Apple ID account was correct. Trying to fix the wrong name sent me to the Apple ID Account page with the already correct name. I contacted support.

It turns out the developer accounts pull info from your Apple ID at creation time, AND NEVER AGAIN. WTF? So you can not make changes to your dev account, because they are non-updateable..

The fix? Sending a copy of a photo ID to the supporter BY FAX?!?!? This is Apple we are talking about.. in 2017.. I don't know anything anymore

MAINTENANCE OF STACKOVERFLOW PLANNED
SHARE TO YOUR NEAREST DEV FRIENDS

Stackoverflow and its relative partners will be closed for two days due to maintenance, new design, and moving server infrastructure from United States to 1km below the Switzerland Alps for extra layers of security. This decision was made by the recent CloudFlare data leak.
Now our servers will be able to handle data leaks because even though the data was leaked, it will fill the empty places in the rocks resulting inaccessible from attackers.
Stackoverflow and its relative partners' maintenance estimated time is February 29 - 30. We will try to finish as fast as possible and bring you guys the best experience. If the maintenance delayes, we will tweet via @StackStatus or post details in our status blog.
Thank you for your support and have a happy day.
Best regards,
Stack Exchange team

Nowhere near my worst co-worker, but still funny.

The Dev team were all in a separate glass walled room with the business & support staff out in a bigger room outside. As is our wont, we wore headphones while working a lot.

One of the non technical folks asked me why and I said it helps me focus by keeping out distracting noises.

"Oh, I thought you were listening to code or something"

😮

It was kind of an eye-opener as to how little clue a person sitting just 4 meters away had of what I did or how I did it. And actually it helped explain some confusing interactions...

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

Me:
Totally riffing to my new playlist....
the ideas are just flowing.....
Code flying...
changing in my brain....
I think I've got I might have it.....
...... RING RING ITS THE MOTHERFUCKING BOSS,
Boss:
Why is the whole website down?

Me: WTF, looks fine here, all logs are clear.

Boss: I just got an email saying the whole thing is fucked. Stop everything and fix it now.

Me: but we just agreed dev is taking priority over any support issues within sla and I've checked from everywhere there are no issues, just data issues probably from user error.

Boss: Just get it back and figure it out!!!!! Why are you being difficult?

Me: okay whatever, let's patch each of these shits.

COULDVE SENT THIS ANYWHERE BUT NOW MY IDEA IS GOOOONEEE!!!!!! NULL FUCKING DATA FIELD ON A SINGLE FUCKING EMAIL....FRAAAAACKKK THIS

I resigned yesterday to focus on my business full time. After 5 years and 1 previous failed attempt to leave the company, its finally done.

My boss threw his toys out of the pram and was borderline abusive about the whole thing. "it's like a kick in the balls" "you've clearly been planning this (said in an accusatory tone)" "you've said you were leaving before which is why you have 3 months notice now (to which my response was, and that is why I am giving you 3 months notice?!)"

Along with many other comments and general angry tone.

Honestly, I couldn't sleep the night before as I was so nervous. We're a small company and to some degree, a kind of family so I didn't want to break that. The more he spoke though, the easier it got. It simply cemented by decision to leave. They made no attempt to keep me. Showed no support. No gratitude for my 5 years of service. Nothing.

Well, you will be down your only dev in 3 months so good luck, I suspect you'll need it more than I will.

"I can't replicate it therefore your hotfix for the customer shouting at you is unnecessary"

WTF?! I had to lead this guy to the records where I'd replicated it myself in both the customer system and the demo one! There's a real sense that the core dev team in this place automatically disregards what the rest of us say (support had already mentioned it was replicable but clearly hadn't realised that they needed to spoon-feed this guy).

This place has a huge silo problem, glad I'm not staying much longer...

edit: these tags shouldn't be reordering themselves, not cool

!dev but definitely rant

Here's a fucking thought:
How is holding women over different standards at events and (non-physical) competitions (hackathons especially, somehow) NOT widely considered sexist? I don't even mean towards men - yes, of course.
But also towards women: By preferring their results in some competitions in order to "support them", you implicitly degrade them to be small children in need for praise. You imply that you expect them to perform worse. By "women-first" PR bullshit, you do what you claim to be against. Fuck you.

Why can't we just hold everyone to the same fucking standards? Women can be just as good in tech as men, when interested. I would even make a point that these different standards hold back women from trying to get into any tech-related career.

"Family support you got becoming a dev"

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

Ahem.
No.

!rant !dev
True story. Some years ago I worked, for a network manufacturer in the support department. One of me jobs was to help end-customer (private people) over the phone, who could not get online.

One day a 60+ year old woman called the support line, because se could not get on the Internet. And because our name was on the router, she called our support.

A colleague of mine took the call, and we could quickly see by his expression the it was "One of those calls". The minutes went by and they had gotten no closer to a solution after 45 min.

That was when I herd my colleague say "Well from what you tell, all the settings here are fine. Can you please close all the windows, so we can look at other settings". My colleague the looked weird and said, "She just told me it takes some minutes to close all the windows, so please hang on.".

After 2 min time the woman came back to the phone and said "I have now closed all the windows in the house, except one ceiling window that only my husband can reach. Hope it doesn't matter".

Just received a support request that the lift is broken and requesting I fix it... Their reasoning? It has buttons and lights up (I'm dev/IT at small company)

when you are a 19yo trying to build a portfolio and you have a mother bashing everyday that you only spend time "at the computer" and I should get "a real job" and that "your dream will never come true" really is the biggest disappointment of my dev life.
It just builds pressure and sads me. She doesn't support me cuz I'm not "doing any money".
I feel like I should just quit everything or even disappear from this shitrock that is called earth....

Became an uncle to two beautiful girls the other week. But the plan to make them the future tech support of the family is already in play! Hopefully they will exceed me in about 10 years, I'm a front-end dev so it shouldn't be that hard...

Yeah yeah, good ol' DropBox.
Which fucking piss-wanker has made the decision to NOT SUPPORT encrypted ext4 starting in november???
You think I'm going to reformat my SSD just for you, you little stinky cunt, huh?
CrapBox has hearned itself a place in /dev/null
Go fuck yourself, you hobo-raped STD host!

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

So my department is "integrating CI/CD"

Right now, there's a very anti-automation culture in the deployment process, and out of our many applications, almost none have automated testing. And my groups is the only one that uses feature branching - one of the few groups that uses branching at all beyond "master, dev"

So yeah... You could see how this is already ENTIRELY fucked from the very beginning.

First thing they want to do is add better support for a process... Which goes directly against CI/CD.

The process is that to deploy to production (even after it is manually approved by manager), someone in another department needs to press a button to manually deploy. This, as far as I can tell, is for business rule reasons rather than technical ones.

They want us to improve that (the system will stay exactly the same with some streamlined options for said button pressers)

I'm absolutely astounded at the way our management wants to do something but goes in exactly the opposite direction. It's like the found an article of what CI/CD was and then took notes on exactly what not to do.

Worst things about being a dev? Boy, this will be a long one!
- Whatever I do, be it hard work or smart work, I feel I am always underpaid.

- Most people who don't know tech feel my job shouldn't take that long. "Oh, a website that should be easy." "Oh, REST services, that's cute!"

- Most people who know a little tech will be like, "Here is the code for this on Google, then why are you charging this much"

- Companies like Microsoft and Apple who are too cool to follow standards.

- Always underpaid!

- The friggin compilers and random environment vars. Sometimes you make no change and the code works on a restart. I mean wtf!

- Having to give/meet deadlines, when we know most of the times things get out of control.

- Having to work for jerks mostly who don't know squat, and can't tell the difference between a CPU and a Wooden box.

- Sometimes I wanna take a break from my laptop(traveling and stuff) , those are the times I get the maximum work load!

- Did I mention we are always underpaid?

- Because of the kind of work I do, finding a girl has been challenging. Where the heck are they!

- We have to stay always updated. Often we deploy something using a framework and the next day we see an update.

- Speaking of updates, I hate having to support for OSes like Microsoft.

- Speaking of OSes, I hate Apple!

- Speaking of Apple, I feel we are underpaid, de javu?
...
How much would you hate me if I wrote "just kidding" ?

After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).

Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.

At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).

My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.

Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).

All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.

But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.

After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.

That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.

Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.

Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.

As IT, I hate being too accessible to users (I'm a software dev, not help desk support). One particular user...let's call him Fred (even though his real name is Joe)...sits close to me.

---

Fred: Bobby, fix my Outlook (he says it jokingly but serious). It keeps saying it needs to be repaired.

Me: Yeah had the same issue last week. I just reinstalled it.

Fred: So...you can't fix it?

---

Fred: Bobby, I need access to X.

Me: Ok go to this link to request access and a manager will approve it.

Fred: Whaaat? That's too much work. You are IT and should just give me access.

---

Fred: Youtube isn't working.

Me: Ok...and?

Fred: It means my internet isn't working!

Me: *sigh*

I'm a bit tired of dev and applying for a customer support job for half my current income. During interview I already got promoted to technical support. Even dev job was possible, but I'm done. I've seen the wheel reinvented too much. Also, the looks of software became more important than ever and that's not something I do.

But I'm very positive now. I know the company already, they're great! Super culture! Always hired the right people and me once before as a py dev

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

My first job. Hired as a designer. It was me and a backend dev (PHP). Company wanted us to build their e-commerce website, but the backend dev had no eye for design or front end chops, fell onto me, so I learned it on the spot.

I also did the mistake of trying to prove myself too hard and ended up doing IT, network and user support, user training, phone sales and helping the print team on designs, on top of my already taxing responsibilities, for 18k/year.

In the end, the company moved offices and I was tasked with finding and installing a new server, IP phone system, and organising the desks following a carefully crafted and approved plan. Spent the weekend doing that (had some friends that didn't even work for the company join as they knew of my struggle) only for the bosses to arrive on Monday, decide they didn't like it, and just said "change it", ignoring the plan entirely. I then left without having another job lined up and never looked back.

So, I'm a Jr. Webdev started one year ago to work on a €200mln. retail platform. Our development team consists out of my Sr. dev who designed the whole platform and it's basically his baby. Now he's leaving and it's expected from me to do new developments, support, meetings with managers from all over Europe, roll-outs in new countries, deal with all the issues SAP has, eat their bullshit when they can't upload a .csv file because they are too stupid to check for missing leading zeros. Listen to important their new functions are that they want because 120% of the salespeople needs it. How stupid can this company be to take the financial risk? I'm done.

Hey from Ireland folks. Currently trying to get myself into Dev. Ten years of customer services. 7 in technical support. Now supporting developers for 5 languages. Nice to meet ya'll

I'm actually a Dev, mostly just a shell scripter who needs to support 500 servers which run our applications. I install the new versions and check whatever is wrong if there are customer issues.
One release weekend everything went wrong, Development had to make new builds on the fly with hardly any time for testing.
It took 18 hours with no break.
It was extremely hard to concentrate, but being in the Skype group with everyone and finally getting everything fixed was quite rewarding.
Everyone just opened a beer and we stayed on the call for about 30 more minutes just to relax.

I like our Dev team way better than I like my actual colleagues, who merely mess things up and call me for the smallest thing without even thinking.

I once had to deal with GoDaddy customer support telling me their servers only support putty for SSH.
Well, fuck you! I use Linux and I SSH with a single command in terminal, no doubt putty is great but get your senses straight that putty is not the only way to SSH when you are being customer support for a tech company, don't just fucking recite a phrase list. Besides, they should understand Windows with putty is not the only way to SSH into servers, juicessh via Android, openssh via Linux, etc...

*btw, before you all rant about me buying from GoDaddy, I was lead dev for a startup few years back and they had already bought it from GoDaddy. Ofcourse they also provide free offers along with an order, which often includes email addresses, annoying support, gut-wrenching quality of service access...

Today is a stark reminder of why i want to leave here. First we couldn't do anything because production was down which blocks dev login. Then support tells me I need to work harder because my bug count keeps going up. But what is in my bugs? Feature requests, global changes, and work that isn't mine. Gee thanks :( Why does support get to comment on my performance anyway by something as dumb as a bug count? Grrr.

Product Manager: We’re assigning you to the Guest Checkout project.

I look at the Guest Checkout epic in JIRA and see it only includes frontend scope. Nothing about backend implementation.

I also find an older ticket about guest checkout. It was written by the former Product Manager. It explicitly says our admin switch for guest checkout no longer works because rebuilt checkout to use react. Why does no one bother to check the backlog??? I found this just by searching “guest checkout.”

Me: Um, our website doesn’t support guest checkout.

PM: What?! But the admin has a guest checkout option that can be turned on and off.

Me: Those admin options only apply if you’re still using the out-of-the-box solution for the e-commerce platform. Remember how we rebuilt checkout using React? We didn’t build it to support guest checkout. That admin switch doesn’t work anymore. We can ask a backend dev to confirm.

I check the code. The code that relates to the admin switch for guest checkout no longer exists. It’s a dead switch.

BE Dev: We made a lot of customizations since we purchased the e-commerce solution. So yeah, that guest checkout switch doesn’t work.

PM: [to me] …Our BE devs are busy with other projects. Can you do the backend for guest checkout?

😳

Me: You realize I’m just a frontend dev with only some backend knowledge, right? I’m not even close to fullstack. And you want me to architect an entire guest checkout flow? That will work with our current checkout experience? And that is HIPPA compliant? On top of doing the frontend?

Who else has to hear the nagging from family members, significant others, friends etc... when you say your planning to get another laptop, desktop, or even a new monitor?

I swear I hear the nagging every week almost.

Passionate programmer attends one of the toughest interviews ever and solves lot of algorithmic problems coding in different programming languages. Impresses the interview panel providing solutions with as much as efficiency as possible. Gets selected, completes induction and gets a nice Dev machine allocated.

Manager walks in and says we got to work with the production support team on fixing a UI bug.

A bit of backstory...

I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.

Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.

1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.

2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)

3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)

4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.

5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.

Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄

Apparently Chrome will no longer support installing add-ons outside of the official store by the end of this year. Not even in dev mode...

Hello everyone.

I'm switching phones from Android to iPhone. Mostly because of stronger security policies, longer support for security updates and whatnot.

I would like to know what useful iOS apps you use. Does not have to be dev related. Just hit me with your best shot.

I know that there will be people screaming MUH ANDROID. I don't really care. You do you.

I was asked to fix a critical issue which had high visibility among the higher ups and were blocking QA from testing.

My dev lead (who was more like a dev manager) was having one of his insecure moments of “I need to get credit for helping fix this”, probably because he steals the oxygen from those who actually deserve to be alive and he knows he should be fired, slowly...over a BBQ.

For the next few days, I was bombarded with requests for status updates. Idea after idea of what I could do to fix the issue was hurled at me when all I needed was time to make the fix.

Dev Lead: “Dev X says he knows what the problem is and it’s a simple code fix and should be quick.” (Dev X is in the room as well)

Me: “Tell me, have you actually looked into the issue? Then you know that there are several race conditions causing this issue and the error only manifests itself during a Jenkins build and not locally. In order to know if you’ve fixed it, you have to run the Jenkins job each time which is a lengthy process.”

Dev X: “I don’t know how to access Jenkins.”

And so it continued. Just so you know, I’ve worked at controlling my anger over the years, usually triggered by asinine comments and decisions. I trained for many years with Buddhist monks atop remote mountain ranges, meditated for days under waterfalls, contemplated life in solitude as I crossed the desert, and spent many phone calls talking to Microsoft enterprise support while smiling.

But the next day, I lost my shit.

I had been working out quite a bit too so I could have probably flipped around ten large tables before I got tired. And I’m talking long tables you’d need two people to move.

For context, unresolved comments in our pull request process block the ability to merge. My code was ready and I had two other devs review and approve my code already, but my dev lead, who has never seen the code base, gave up trying to learn how to build the app, and hasn’t coded in years, decided to comment on my pull request that upper management has been waiting on and that he himself has been hounding me about.

Two stood out to me. I read them slowly.

“I think you should name this unit test better” (That unit test existed before my PR)

“This function was deleted and moved to this other file, just so people know”

A devil greeted me when I entered hell. He was quite understanding. It turns out he was also a dev.

CTO: We'll use epochs for any time related fields in our services.

After service integration...

Dev from producer team: Hey the time field is showing up as 1970 and not null in your table. That seems to be a bug.

Me: Code looks fine. We are converting epochs to timestamps here. Null is taken care by the library function itself.

The same dev: Actually we are sending zero instead of null values in that time field. But we'd want the end table to treat that as null.

Me: Why can't you send null then?

The dev: Actually avro doesn't support nulls. Hence the zero.

Me: WTF??????

Manager to me: Actually you need to convert them as null. Anyways, this is not a blocker and we can live with it for now.

END OF RANT

Why can't they fucking send it as null? And when I asked about the details, that particular event type doesn't require that field. Still the manager insists on sending that field for it.

Making my own game console.

I work with FPGAs and have access to a bunch of pretty nice dev boards, so building a workable CPU and GPU is definitely possible. I even have architectures for both in mind, and have planned ways to get compiler support (i.e. just use RISC-V as the ISA as much as possible so that I can reuse an existing RISC-V compiler with minimal changes) so that I don't need to write assembly.

But, lack of time. Sigh.

When I told my mother I wanted to become a software dev, she went surprised but supported me to reach my goals. That's what family does. I'll always be thankful to her. (My family is quite short actually).

One year later, with my first salary I bought her a brand new iPad. 💕

If you don't have your family support, just do it. Do whatever makes you happy and complete!

I have a new boss who was hired today. Well, I guess he's supposed to be a 2nd in command to my current supervisor, but I still have to report to him too I guess.

This dude is a high-sodium seasoned dev, and the kind who thinks anyone who's been in the industry less than 15 years should be at best a test engineer or thrown into the 7th ring of Customer Support.

Ugh. I'm now out of gin, which was my backup to my scotch. And this prick expects me to have a PR ready for him to review on a whole new application I've been working on for the last 2 weeks by midday tomorrow. And today was his first day.

Me: We have a new research project for you. We need you to test these 2 new services, see how they will fit into the new application, look at alternatives if necessary etc. At the end we need you to write a report with your findings, showing how you would integrate them to achieve X, Y and Z, and how much it would cost each month.

Dev: sounds good, I'll come back to you when I have it.

*2 and a half weeks later*

Document paragraph 1: The new language translation service doesn't support the languages we need.

Document paragraph 2: Here's my proposal for integrating the new language translation service.

*review*

Me: So I had a look at the doc and it says it doesn't support the languages.

Dev: yeah unfortunately not.

Me: Ok, so when you discovered that, why didn't you look for an alternative? Or come back to me and say it's not going to work.

Dev: I dunno, I thought you'd want to see the rest of the research first.

Me: ... not if we know for 100% undeniable fact that it will never function.

Dev: Ah ok, I didn't think of that. I'll do that next time, don't worry.

... aw how sweet, he thinks there will be a next time. Poor guy.

ComputerToucher: *opens Jira ticket* Dev team needs tokens for the APM for a new app with multiple tenants. Ezpz. Hey, developer. Do you want one golden token for all of your app tenants or would you like us to generate one token for each?

Developer: Let’s have a meeting to discuss it.

CT: It’s…an exceedingly simple question. One token or 4? Which does your app support?

Dev: Yeah I think we should discuss with this with the platform team, can you set up the call?

CT: (Internally) I am the platform team? Do you not know how your applica-never mind I’ll just ask the PM directly.

CT (in chat): I’ll ask PM to schedule the call.

*Goes back to Jira ticket, changes priority to 4, removes ticket from sprint entirely, picks something else to work on*

Clown manager put three juniors (and ”senior” dev on work visa) on new project.

They will never finish it.

It’s too hard for them with some legacy dynamically created complex database queries which will spook the hell out of them!

But managers like, ”it’s going to be good” and ”making good progress”.

Fuck no! Putting juniors together? With little support? It such a waste. They spent weeks just to get even the slightest progress.

No best practise. No tests. Just hacking away.

It’s a failure of the management! We fail our juniors and they will quit as soon as they get the chance and they feel like they have some wind under their wings.

”It’s going to be good”

Pff. Clowns leading this company.

This morning, I felt pretty good. I had a healthy breakfast and I took the longer U-bahn journey into work so as to enjoy the Autumn scenery. I get to my desk after greeting my colleagues with the customary "Guten Morgen" and I began to plan my work for the day. I see there is a new ticket assigned to me which relates to a HTML issue. The customer support team are able to use a HTML editor to made changes to a section of a user's dashboard and from time to time, I get asked to fix their mistakes. Usually, it is something small, but it makes me cringe every time I see the markup. "Tables...tables everywhere!!!", sighed the once happy dev.

Time for a coffee break and a sit-down with the support team

Start raising tickets/bugs like you were going to the doctors and things would get fixed a lot faster.

X page doesn't work.

Great information there what about the page isn't working?

Doesn't answer the question and gets pissy when you have to ask them again.

If this was a doctor's appointment all you would've done is walked into my office and yelled it hurts over and over.

Then proceeded to shit on my floor as you're leaving because I didn't diagnose the problem fast enough.

What were you trying to do when the system took a crap?
What did the red text say?
Can you take a screenshot? because the old saying a picture paints a thousand words holds some truth.

If you can go to the doctor and give them a full run down of when you got sick and what symptoms you got in the same order they happened why do you struggle to do the same when reporting a bug.

rant!

As a web dev i really hate half assed solutions

Especially when I'm forced to spend time making them because some stupid sales person sold certain features that our current product doesn't support.

At the end of the day that sales guy gets a commission and I build something that will inevitably break somewhere in the future.

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

Not been a good day so far:
1. Woke up to my Synology in a 'Volume crashed' state. Tried to contact support via web page; support web page not loading.
2. Ancient software at work stops working. As the last remaining C++ dev, I gotta troubleshoot. Original developer wrote test program...in VB6.
3. Server config file changed, but all the admins swear up and down nobody's made any changes.
4. Client calls account rep and wants to know about our security policies, so he schedules a meeting with me and client and forgets to mention until he's emailing me asking where the hell I am. From the tone of the conversation between the rep and the client, it's clear that somehow I'm to blame for being late.

Sigh.

Well, hey, at least it's Friday, right? Right?

!rant

How I think the process for designing a hardware-driver is like

CEO: "Alright everyone, we have designed and created this great product, now let's write a driver for it!"

PM: "Great then! We just code for Windows, create an eye-catching UI but leave the actual at the worst possible case that could work!"

Dev: "B-But isn't there other OSes, like Linux and Android that people use on their computers too?"

PM: "Shut up! We are going to JUST support Windows and f*** no absolutely other OSes!

Dev: "But what if they are also developers, and want to control and use this great product by programming it themselves? We should make the driver open-source, or at least give them some APIs!"

PM: "Nonsense! They are only going to use this product on M$ Windows, and with the program we provide to them, even if it's crappy and crashes most of the time!"

Dev: "But-but..."

PM: "No buts! That's our final decision!"

And some other consumer devs are like, "F*** it, we just reverse-engineer the codes and write a new driver ourselves!"

:|

Best dev experience of 2017:

Being able to support my family with my work.

Knowing that all of us have health, vision, and dental insurance solely because of me.

Finally being able to give back to those who have helped me over the years.

My biggest dev regret was that I've followed other people's dream.
I lost precious time into trying being the "good kid" for my family and support them in their time of need.
Now I'm considered old for a starter and getting a dev job becomes harder with each passing day.

Around a week ago I asked my mentor(lecturers friendly sidekick buddy 'o pal) if in iOS dev(the very next subject) I could virtualize, rent in cloud or run a hackintosh instead of buying a Mac. My mentor sounded enthusiastic and asked the lecturer of the next subject, who promptly said no, he did not support or recommend students who tried any of these approaches because in the past he had encountered students who have run into performance issues and we're unable to compile some things. Most likely those students were unable to setup GPU passthrough and whatnot.

However this is the exact point of a VM. It's exactly the same as if you had a real Mac. I believe this is just them being lazy. Tbh, this is an IT course they should be writing guides on how to do virtualisation, not preventing it.

Looks like I'm headed to the Apple store :(

So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.

A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.

But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.

He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).

So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.

That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.

As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.

Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...

I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.

Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.

#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.

This is NOT what I signed up for.

When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.

He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.

Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.

Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.

I've worked in a lot of customer service jobs and the more i have to deal with client, the more story starting to pile up. But something always come back and it's frustrating. The entitlement people have. I work as a Technical Support agent and for the most part i'm actually happy to help people with fixing their problems. But once in a while i always get that idiot that doesn't do anything i told him, blame me because "my fixes" don't work or just straight up don't listen to me and think they know better. Why the fuck do you call me if you need help if you're going to ignore everything i say and act like a fucking children. I'm not the one that call for technical support.

I know this place is more for Dev, but i'm sure those kind of things happen all the time when a client think he know more than the dev themselves...

TL;DR Dear boss, firstly, you always get someone to review anything important done by a fucking intern.
Secondly, you do not give access to your fucking client's production server to an intern.
Thirdly, you don't ask your fucking intern to test the intern's work that has not been reviewed by anyone directly on your client's fucking production server.

Last week, the boss and one of the lead devs (the only guy with some serious knowledge about systems and networking) decided to give me (an intern who barely has any work experience) the task of fixing or finding an alternate solution to allowing their support team access to their client machines. Currently they used a reverse SSH tunnel and an intermediary VH but for some reason, that was very unreliable in terms of availability. I suggested using OpenVPN and explained how it would work. Seemed to be a far better idea and they accepted. After several days of working through documentations and guides and everything, I figured out how OpenVPN works and managed to deploy a TEST server and successfully test remote access using two VMs. On seeing my tests, the boss told me that he wanted to test it on the client network. I agreed. Today he comes to me and he tells me to prepare testing for tomorrow and that the client technician is going to give me access to one of their boxes. And then he adds, "It's a working prod server. We'll see if we can make it work on that" and left. I gaped at him for a while and asked another dev guy in the room if what I heard was right. He confirmed. Turns out, the lead dev and the boss's son (who also works here) had had a huge argument since morning on the same issue and finally the dev guy had washed it off his hands and declared that if anything goes wrong from testing it on production, it's entirely the boss's own fault. That's when the boss stepped in and approached me. I ran back to his office and began to explain why prod servers don't top the list of things you can fuck around with. But he simply silenced me saying, "What can go wrong?" and added, "You shouldn't stay still. You should keep moving". Okay, like firstly what the fuck and secondly, what the fuck?.
Even though OpenVPN client is not the scariest thing to install, tomorrow's going to be fun.

PM : Develop this new feature. Client needs it tomorrow. And be sure it works perfectly well.
Dev : haha how can it work without bug if it's developed in a day ?

Poor dev got transferred to support department :(

!dev

>Send a mail to a company making sure the version of a keyboard I'd be getting was hotswappable.
>Support told me that indeed, I'd be getting the hotswap version.
>Places order
>Keyboard comes in
>...
>It's not the hotswappable version >:(

motherfuckers...

Our best dev/arch just quit.
C dev lead & a dev staying late chatting.

Lead: am building, takes long
Dev: unit testing, time taking

Ask them y they r building on their latitudes when we got them linux precision with xeons/64gb workstation 1 each ?
Both: I code on latitude.

Build/test times. (pure Java/maven)
Latitudes=an hr or more
Precision=2m to 11m
Jenkins Infra we have =10 mins with test & push. Parallel builds support.

Am suposed to help with an open mind. They now want Mac pro

That's it. I'm inventing a new position :

"Dev support".

Why do people ask me "Hey, visual studio has a pop up saying I'm missing a .net4.6 framework. What should I do ?"

Or "Hey powershell says script execution is disabled, what should I do ?"

Google motherfucker, do you use it ?!

My dad just thought I'd grow out of my "gaming and PC 24/7" phase and didn't really care about the Tech. But when I started studying to be a dev he gave full support. "Do anything you like except ride motorbikes, do drugs or be a sailor, so long as you can sustain yourself" was the message carried across generally.

(sing this in the "If I were a boy" melody from Beyoncé)

If I had a job,
I think I'd want to support,
this awesome platform we call devRant,
but right now sadly just can't...
[oooh]

If I had a job (again),
I think I would buy CodePeeen (amen),
by buy I mean I would buy plan pro,
but I ain't got no fixed income, no
[I ain't]

If I had no school,
I'd be game dev or web noob,
I would design like in the 90ies,
pink website showing panties, oh yes...
[that'd be cool!]

If I were adult,
I wouldn't laugh at these jokes,
I would know the hard and real life,
and maybe even have a loved wife...
[maybeeee]

Our team talking with a Mr. KnowItAll...

Mr. KIA: What concerns me about this huge system transference is that the devs won't give us the JS scripts files decompiled.
Mr. KIA again: I'm also concerned about Win XP end of support...

Us seeing each other: WTF is going on?!? Where are the hidden funny cameras...

A tip:
If you wanna pretend you know it all...you'll fail...

A humble dev never get humilliated

This is the last time Microsoft! I'm getting my old Arch image out and removing you from my life forever! Never again will my linux distro randomly uninstall itself without telling me in the middle of implementing new components and crash my development server. Never again will I have to deal with an update that refuses to STFU and go away until I, ME NOT YOU MICROSOFT, decides it's a good time to run the update. No more lack of customization and poor support of common dev tools. I'M DONE WITH YOU, WE NEED TO SEE OTHER PEOPLE.

"try harder and smarter, we will do a training if needed"... A coworker replying to another coworker (non dev tech support guy who never used postman in his life) in public chat... And I can't help but think that he is implying that the tech support guy is stupid.
KNOWING POSTMAN DOESN'T MAKE YOU SMART!!! AND YOU NEED TO SHOW SOME RESPECT AND LEARN HOW TO SPEAK!!

Lying recruiters really make my shit itch.

A couple of months ago a recruiter got in touch on linked in as he’d seen my cv on Indeed or somewhere.

He asks what I’m looking for and I tell him I want to move to a more development focused role rather than mosh mash of support, admin and Dev that I do at the moment.

He’s says he’s got just the role at a fairly local software company, and that the role would be at least 90% development blah blah blah.

So I set up a video call, and it immediately becomes clear that they want someone to do support/admin who might get to do a tiny bit of dev (they mainly asked about my experience with HTML) and I could tell they lost interest when I said I was more interested in backend development etc.

They didn’t want to progress the application as I wasn’t what they were looking for, which is fair enough they weren’t what I was looking for either.

But, do recruiters intentionally set out to lie to applicants about what a job is/entails or do they either get duff info from clients, or just not understand the job specs they are given?

I mean it wasted my lunch break (not including calls with the recruiter) and an hour of time for the CEO and Dev from the company.

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

!rant

Coworker: I've been working on this computer for an entire day now and it's still having issues

Boss: Well, we can give the client an option to get another SSD and clone to it before reinstalling the OS.

Coworker: But he doens't have an SSD...

Boss: Yes he does

Coworker: *opens computer* let's see, two 1TB hard drives... but no SSD... Oh, there it is. It's hidden. But it's booting too slow to be....

*epiphany*

Coworker: Oh my god. I've been telling the computer to boot to the wrong hard drive. That explains everything!

FUCKING IE!
Anyone please remember to ask if the project|s that you're going to work on do|es need Internet Explorer support.
If it's the case just expect any resemblance of modern frontend development skills go backwards into the backward compatibility territory and never going forward.

I'll start looking for another job, can't be bothered for this payment and regressing my dev skills for client needs.
Again FUCK YOU IE!

Has your character and level of patience changed since the beginning of your dev career?

I have a feeling that stress mixed with a constant exposure to shitty code, hacky web stuff and abysmal stylesheets have been eroding my immense pillars of patience.
10 years ago I was able to try stuff out for hours with full motivation. I've started a habit of low level swearing recently and sometimes gain a strong urge to punch through a monitor.
I don't have it every day, but it seems worrying...

... or maybe it's just all due to having to HACK the shit out of everything to support fucking IE11.
This complete fuckery of a browser is still in use by about 0.5%... absolute braindamaged imbeciles if you ask me!

Working with a new team and I don't understand how this is normal or ok.

Me: Does anyone need help troubleshooting the broken build or can I revert this change that broke it so I can push my change out?

Dev: Stop build shaming me, I wouldn't leave the build in a failing state.

Me: Well, I wasn't sure how long to wait, before asking.... it's been broken for 4 hours.

Dev: It's the development environment, you should expect development to be going on.

Me: Yes and appears that this project architecture doesn't support any sort of isolation for development. So nobody can deploy anything except through the development branch.

Dev: That's what development is for IMO, so it doesn't bother me.

When I became a dev my parents said: "it's not rocket science, or chemistry or anything good, but at least it's not stressful, or dangerous and we can get free tech support. I hope you are able to pay your own bills and find rent"

A few years, a degree and finding a supportive woman who is now my wife and and I make 4 time as much as my parents make now they want me to move back so they can get their tech support and see my wife I guess she is more social than I am

Several years ago I joined the company I currently work for, as a software support person, with the intention of eventually moving toward the development team.

After a few years doing that, I gradually realised that working in the development team for our products didn't seem that appealing after all, so I went for a more technical support role (essentially debugging all the really complicated problems and reporting the bugs to the devs) which I find fascinating - trying to solve these puzzles is an interesting challenge. It can take days, sometimes weeks to get to the bottom of something really inexplicably weird.

As part of this I get to do some internal dev work on the teams projects (nothing that gets used directly by external users though) and have learned loads of things from my boss over the years (even before I joined this team).

It has its frustrating moments of course but I am definitely glad I didn't follow my original intentions of just being a developer on our main products.

Sometimes what you think you want isn't actually what's ideal for you :)

What is this 'cutting edge dev tech' y'all talking about? Does it count if I somehow manage to add support for MS Edge?? 🤔
Hell.. I'm stuck with COM+ & activex, so if anyone who gets to use fancy pants new techs would be so kind to ping me and let me know how it even feels to code like it's 21st century, that'd be great..

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

Current workload as dev lead:
- 1% actual development
- 2,5% waiting for SaaS to load
- 2,5% cursing company server network connectivity issues
- 5% switching VPNs
- 7,5% pkg management & deploys
- 10% writing JIRA and support tickets
- 12,5% filling in timesheets
- 15% coaching & reviewing a bot coworker
- 19% doing 2FA, refreshing expired passwords
- give up and spend the remaining 25% doing something meaningful

We use a third party paid company to produce a service and give ongoing support for it, which all our revenue streams depend upon. They are shit and their service is shit. Here's how my conversation about testing went today.

Me: 'hey X wrote an integration test project for the service. It shows the service is broken 50% of the time. We should give their team access to it and have them run it as part of CI'

Colleague: 'They are too shit to setup CI'

PM: 'we are stuck with them so there is no point. It is what it is'

Boss: just ignores me. Not even a reply.

Some days later

Head of QA: 'Hey Dev and QA are broken'

Me: 'because their service is broken. I made so and so suggestion before but it was rejected. We will just have to accept Dev and QA are broken 50% of the time'

Head of QA: 'no we cant'

Me: 'ok so we should setup the tests to run by giving them access'

Head of QA: 'No we shouldn't. The tests can only be used by us and if they break it tells us so we can act on it, or choose not to'

Me: 'We would not want to act immediately on all our revenue streams breaking? Yes we can reverse engineer their client and fix errors as they occur, or we could just have them run the tests and a team our company pays for can stop adding breaking changes to their own API every other day. Right now it has been broken for 2 weeks.'

Head of QA: 'in an ideal world we would have an internal team so you're wrong'

Me: :)

I really don't understand how they can come to such a conclusion. Am I missing something or am I surrounded by total fucking idiots?

Do not touch Salesforce.

Especially Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

It is a fucking joke this product even exists. Buy Hubspot instead. Marketing Cloud is the single worst piece of software I have had to implement out of 4 years working in software and a lifetime working in tech.

Literally nothing works. You click a button and bam, nothing. The UI actively lies to the user. Nothing is guaranteed to work and support is some guy in India who shrugs his shoulders and walks away. Things will randomly break and warning messages are tiny, indecipherable babble that mean nothing.

If you are dev, walk away. If you are a potential customer, walk away. This company DESERVES a bad reputation for the absolute heap of dogshit that is Marketing Cloud.

The worst part is that it's likely going to affect my job and my career because of how fucking dogshit it is.

Fuck Salesforce in case the messaging isn't clear.

My biggest problem with Visual Studio Code is that every fucking piece of shit dev thinks it's their duty to introduce it to me. STOP. Just stop this shit, alright? Wanna use vscode? Fine, just don't tell me it's the best tool and I MUST use it instead of the tools I'm used to. I'm tired of this bullshit.
Every new project, every new team. Starting from js/java/.net monke and ending with PMs, I must hear this bullshit about god blessed IDE that I must use, because "why you need intellij/webstorm/rider? just install vscode and some plugins. we all use it in our project and it's ok".
FUCK YOU! Refactoring is not just renaming variables and extracting blocks of code into functions. If you want terminal integrated into your text editor with highlighting and LSP support, so be it. I want an IDE with rich refactoring tools, code analysis and good completion, database viewing/modeling support, good build tools support, good UI for git and git-diff, good test and code coverage support. I don't want your semi-IDE, bloated with hundreds of bugged third-party plugins, which I must spend a week on to configure and merry with each other before using.
JUST STOP this crap and let people use the tools they are proficient/comfortable/productive with.

var _self = Object.create(Rant);

Hello devs I'm back

A few months ago I joined a software development company and I was pretty specific that I wasn't going to do support or maintenance only feature development, well, this past 3 months I've been doing dev helping stablish good practices and a better architecture for the app, but guess who is joining a support team tomorrow, they sold me the idea of a refactor team, I was trilled and accepted, now they tell me it's a legacy bug fixing team, damn I hate this crap, hope y'all doing better

INTERVIEWER: Let’s say client wants a gif in the EDM design but older outlooks don’t support it. How do you solve it?
ME: Maybe we can try using iframes if outlook supports them and host gif somewhere and use iframes to show it.
INTERVIEWER: Any other solution?
ME: We can probably also detect the email client and just show gif for all other email clients but a picture for outlook.
INTERVIEWER: No but the client wants the gif to show on all email clients
ME: But outlook doesn’t support gifs!!!
INTERVIEWER: yeah
ME: …..
INTERVIEWER: …..

I thought maybe I missed something having been a junior dev and never developing edms. So jumped on the internet after the interview and my second answer is literally how everyone does it. What even was the point of that question? At no point she said yeah that’s a good solution and that’s how we do it in the industry. If outlook doesn’t fucking support gifs then what the fuck kind of solution am I supposed to bring to the fucking table in 5 fucking minutes.

While I'm not a dev, I do love computers and I do know my way around them, so friends/family often ask me for tech support.

Friend: Please fix my computer!

Me: what's wrong with it?

Friend: *sends me pic of blue screen of death*

Me: ...

Me: I don't think you understand

!dev but tech related...

Got a device configured in a location that is fairly far away from me. It operates only through a cloud service specifically for these devices, with one of the most unreliable web interfaces and smartphone apps I have ever used.

I email my issues to the tech support who don't seem to understand the problems and can't fathom the difference between "reset settings" and "restart device".

Eventually they need to log in to my account to find out whats wrong. I explicitly state that under no circumstances should any settings be changed.

Today I find that the device has been removed from the cloud account. I physically must be near it to register it on the account again. Tech support don't seem to know what happened and the best explanation is that it is "a glitch". They have no way to add it back themselves. I have to travel to the device.

Funny how this happened after I let them access the account...

I was a Project Manager, studied my a$$ off at 38 to become a mobile developer. Built production apps in Java, React Native. I've studied Kotlin and Flutter. Then my company almost went belly up and I had to scramble to find a job to support my family. Back to being a PM which I hate. Started with Swift because my son is old enough to play with Swift Playgrounds and thinking about making a break back into dev. Every post I see on Twitter is about Flutter, maybe RN, but not much Native iOS. Is it wrong that I'm loving it thus far? What's the future for Native iOS and Android developers?

Why would some companies advertise a job post as Software Engineer, and only to find out deep in the process after doing multiple interviews, that it’s actually a support job??

Seriously why the fuck do that? That’s disingenuous and misleading as fuck?
And why would a dev be dropping a dev job and experience to do tech support ? Is it even worth it?

Even if it is, can you easily switch back to an actual dev job afterwards?
Wow the things some of these companies do 😶🙄😑🤦🏾‍♂️

Database is being slow AF again. Team lead is investigating. This is happening more often lately and affects both production and dev because everything is just in one gigantic database. So clients are calling support being angry about the speed they get and us devs get to twiddle our thumbs while waiting for our own data to load.

Frustration at its peak !!

So the CTO of the company I recently joined, whom I considered to be cool personality of all the open culture in the office and open communication, seems to be all wrong.

Few days back he suddenly dropped a mail to all the tech team members mentioning that we need more streamlined process in the company and many more blah blah stuffs... to which all of us agreed.

But. But. But. The last line(small font size) mentioning that from now onwards we need to come on Saturdays too until further notice. I mean WTF !!? Seriously.

But today in stand-up when one of the guy asked the agenda, he just tossed the question saying that we need to be more active attending "client tickets". Goddammit. We are devs, not tech support.
To this one of the other dev, said the exact same thing that was going in everyone's mind. Call the team that are required on Saturdays. To which his reply was, " Come on Saturday, we will speak then".

I was like 👏👏👏

P.S. Not that we are not ready to come on Saturdays, but at least take consent of all the members in the team, if you all babble so much about open culture and shit. We have friends and family too to have fun with, and need to take little rest on weekends.
And most importantly, tell us some firm reasons to be there on weekends, not just "You have to come, because we said so!"
Period.

One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.

Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.

Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.

A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.

After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.

Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)

As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.

However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports

They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.

After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...

The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.

In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs.

Every year, the worst dev experience comes right at the holidays, when website owners with big egos want to launch right on (U.S.) Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, or New Year’s Eve/Day because they think they’re that popular and important. It never occurs to them that this is the WORST time because any third party support you need for hosting, APIs, plugins, etc. is either backlogged or out of office. And because NOBODY is eagerly awaiting the redesign of ANY website on those particular dates since they are stuffing their faces and getting s&&&faced at bars and parties. Nobody will even notice that your website has changed until January 15th at the earliest.

Not specifically a Dev job, but I did do a bit of development at this wifi startup. It was a wifi shop where we set up wifi for hotel clients all over the US. Anyways, they said I would make great money doing "on call" support, and me being an intern and naive I said absolutely I'd do it. Well 3 months later I was put on call essentially every day and one weekend I was with my mother and it was her birthday. At her party at this nice restaurant, with all of our close friends/family, I got a call. It took me 45 minutes to solve because of how idiotic the clients were, and after that I got 4 more calls equally as frustrating and long throughout that night. I asked for help from employees, the owner, ANYONE. Nobody helped. Needless to say I emailed the owner and said farewell that following Monday.

Applied for a new job today! It's in a different city, but it's with a company I'm familiar with, doing tech I'm familiar with. They provided my current employer with managed hosting and occasional bugfix and upgrade support before we completely changed our tech stack last year.

I've been feeling sort of stuck in a hole for a while. I'm unsure about moving, but it's partly of my own making and I was unsure about starting here when all the tech was new to me. I've been here 3.5 years, my first actual dev job, and I do think I've done what I came here for.

After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.

During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.

After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.

After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...

Being support Dev is like cleaning up someone else's shit.

Google cloud platform.

1. Great documentation and support
2. Good free tier & dev freebies
3. Cloud console + SDK rock
4. Did I mention the great documentation?
5. Seriously the documentation ❤

actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)

So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.

I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.

My first freelance dev job thing, turned out alright. For the first year though, the dev job thing became a tech support thing. Oh the horror.

First dev job is my current one.

I'm a software engineer in test, writing automated UI tests for web and mobile apps.

Its pretty great. I work from home with flexible hours. I have a boss but he doesnt manage my dev team, he just checks in to make sure I'm getting support, training and have all my questions answered. My dev team is myself and 2 other people, both of which are cool, and all the work is dev-driven.

Might just stay here until retirement, that sounds easy.

Company makes you doing end user support additionally to your (dev) job, so you have no time to do the latter.

Proud to finally be another supporter of devRant. I've made myself a promise (no pun intended) to support devRant as soon as I begin to earn some money as a dev. So here I am...
Thank you dfox and trogus for your work!

So, we (I'm the backend guy and work with a UI dev) are building this product portfolio management tool for our client and they have a set of 250 users. The team has two point of contacts for the 250 users who maintain the master data, help users with data quality, tool guidance, reporting and other stuff. So one day one of these two support users come to me and say : Hey I'm not able to add new transactions coz a customer is missing.

We have the provision to create / maintain customers.

I check the production DB, application code, try creating the customer and then the transaction, everything works perfectly fine.

I ask the user for a screen sharing session, the user starts reproducing the error like this :

We have a 3 system landscape - Dev / Test and Prod

U : Logs into the test system url, creates the customer.

U : Points out the toast saying customer creation is successful.

U : opens a new tab, opens the production system, tries creating the transaction, searches for the customer and says " see !! cant find the customer here ! the master data management apps never work !! "

FML?.

Microsoft.Graph has filtering capabilities for dates, which is great.

Format is: "2018-04-12T12:00:00Z"

Doesn't natively support string conversion of a DateTime to match the pattern... Nor does Graph accept any date formats such as the "s" parameter for sortable dates, which goes into milliseconds, etc.

DateTime.ToString("derp");

Sometimes I wish I was a Java Dev.

Obligatory subjective view from inexperienced eyes of a highschooler

I think it's evolving to be more beginner-friendly and more easily accessible. I'm seeing ppl roughly my age can program pretty well (ignoring the mandatory programming classes in highschool that stuff is just no (I know, we had this convo before but do hear me out, although it teaches fundamental programming in Pascal, the execution sucks ball because "mandatory")). I'm not saying we are on par with the in-industry devs, it's just we can code well enough to at least make decent small program/script.

With newer scripting languages that are easy to pick up and syntactically similar to English which is obviously Python, both objectively and subjectively, and its ability to be OOP without scaring first-timers of the what-the-blyn-is-this blank program (looking at you C#) people can be introduced to programming and programming concepts fairly easily and they can switch from Py to other languages with little to some hiccups, from my personal exp at least.

But then there's the "too much kiddies in the field" arguments I saw on dR (I think) a while back then when SO decided to better support newbies. To that, I can only say "Please give us a chance". We're completely oblivious to how the dev world work nor how you guys do your work so before you scold us on this, at least tell us how to work like you before you go on a 2-A4-page rant on how the industry is not as good as before and how it has degraded.

That leads to the problems of politics invading programming. We have it, I hate it, goddammit I wanna murder them. Linux CoC controversy is just...no. And then there's forced diversity in hiring (also ranted on dR a while back) and corporations pissing devs off to satisfy a minor group. I'll just shut up on this. No no no no no no no NO I'm not gonna. Not gonna.

Do correct me if I'm wrong though. I'm a less than a junior dev.

group policy prevents me from installing browser plugins at work. For crying out loud, I'm a dev! Any set of permissions that enables me to do my job would include an escape hatch for this! I can just rebuild Firefox without group policy support! What the fuck is this meant to achieve besides waste company resources!?

*Me on the phone with a client*

Me: Alright, is your computer connected to wifi? If not, you will need to get it connected to your wifi.

Client: Is that Chrome?

Me: No...

I'll post a rant (will be long) soon-ish on the root of the asinine problem...

TL;DR
Anyone got a better suggestion of killing a WLAN router signal than a Faraday Cage?
-----------------------
As to the point as I can manage atm...
My ISP forces a proprietary router/modem for them to script my static IPv4 block (/28, aka 13 usable). Modifying this equipment in any way or using the vast majority of tactics to modify its behaviour = Federal Felony... with my history, it couldn't be construed as mistake/ignorance of this fact, so I'd likely end up working for some branch of the gov to mitigate the costs of standard prison (on both ends... handicapped af = expensive af to comply with base human rights laws... plus I'd be a dangerous prisoner from what I've been told).

I NEED the ipv6 functionality TOTALLY off... I've written this into every kernel and every container config at kernel level.

The issue is, I don't trust their shit device (which "should" also be set to no ipv6 via gui... non-GUI = fed felony).

This horrid device, they apparently made them for home use initially (to be fair it has decent specs and tolerable RAM), so included WiFi... that comes on by itself.
Disable the WiFi!... except I cant (at least not without 'tampering').
Why? Well acc to the GUI it's not enabled in the first place. Acc to the 'tech support' it's apparently a paid feature (yes, nonsense) that I have not paid for (nor would I), meaning on their end's GUI and DBs I also don't have WiFi ability from that dev.

So... Not trusting the other settings and the dev, being something im not allowed to directly config outside of their GUI that doesn't realise it's putting out a usable signal despite registering DHCP on behalf of that non-existent signal. I NEED to kill those signals.

I realise it likely sounds extreme to make and use a Faraday Cage for a router/modem (secondary modem, it parses the initial modem's output, via script, to allow the static block to be accessed). I really dont know any other way that's legal to restrict it.

Oh, in case unclear, I have tried so many ways to get them to just allow me to use any device (pref. mine, but even their's) that i can simply script myself... it's a no-go.

rant, !dev...

NEVER BUY ANYTHING THAT COST MORE THEN $5 FROM ALIEXPRESS....

I CANCELLED AN ORDER LIKE 1HR AFTER I PLACED IT, 3 DAYS AGO... I JUST GOT NOTIFIED THE ORDER IS NOW SHIPPED....

ALSO SEEMS MOST THINGS ON THERE A CHINESE RIPOFFS... BEING MARKETED AS QUALITY GOODS....

Oh and their customer support is really sketchy... they said they'll try to get me a refund... But as I was taking to her, I also placed a dispute on my credit card "just in case"

Previous company turned from Web Dev E-Mail Marketing into a Service company with more than 50% phone support so I left.
New company, Product focused on web and mobile. 2 months in: Well yeah guys, new strategy. We'll stop feature dev on the web and go into maintenance mode.

That's just great. Thank you very much.

Now I'm too lazy to go through hiring again and just feed my inner rage.

It's hard to keep it in sometimes =__=

One of our servers had a disk fail this week. Luckily it's 1 of 3 in a RAID5 array. And, luckily, it was our mostly-dev box and didn't have any production stuff on it, except for some support things. We scheduled a disk replacement with the hosting company, took everything down, waited. Somebody at the hosting company apparently didn't know we'd scheduled the replacement, saw the machine was down, and brought it up again. Sigh. Finally they did the replacement, got it back up, but now we're seeing an ethernet port flapping, suggested they have someone go in and make sure all the jacks are fully seated, maybe one got loose when they were doing the disk switch. Bureacracy reared up again and we got the boilerplate "if there's a hardware issue suspected please boot into rescue mode and run the tests"... sigh...

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.