Thursday
PM: Hey why is A delayed? It should be top priority.
me: I just completed B, and C which were also top priority but got scheduled earlier, so I thought they..
PM: Agh, yes. But can you then finish A by the end of week? it would be very important!
me: No, I unfortunately don't think I'd have enough time by the end of wee..
PM: Why? This should be *the* top priority task. You should not start other tickets before A is done.
me: Exactly. But I *just* started. And. I. don't. have. enough. free. hours. left. this. week.
PM: But why?!
me: So just on Friday I have these 5 meetings here..
*shows calendar*
PM: Ok... OK! Then don't attend those before you are done. This should be more important.
me: Ugh, oh-key...are you sure?
PM: Yea, just let who invited you know that you can't attend and feel free to cc me in, I'll explain A is most important atm.
me: Ok, thanks, but that won't be necessary.
PM: What? Why?
me: You invited me to the Friday meetings.

Obviously I had to attend all 5 meetings today and A is pushed back to next week. :)

That moment when you realise:
money != Happiness
Stickers === Happiness

Some dude's sitting next to me on the train pushing his code. Looks like he's on Arch with pure i3.

I like this guy already.

50 euros just TO BE ABLE TO WIPE MY FUCKING ASS

FUCK YOU, PIECE OF SHIT HOARDERS, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU BUYING SO MUCH TOILET PAPER

Manager: I'm so sorry to say but your collegue A has passed away yesterday afternoon. There will obviously be flowers etc and we'll try to support her family as much as we can..

Me: Oh, no. My deepest condolences. (I'm always bad at saying much in situations like this, but)

B: My gosh! So does this mean A's family also caught it??!? (Corona)

Manager: She died in a car accident.

...
Also how unfortunate. Due to the lockdown, a ton of the people use the roads as a racing track around here...

I managed to re-negotiate my offer to reach the (accidentally) advertised range exceeding my original (realistic) expectations and this is in huge part thanks to the helpful bunch of you here.

So: Thank you!!

And I can't belive that in a single fucking day I benefitted more from posting to devrant than all the time spent on toxic subreddits, calling useless recruiters, forums and others. Here, even those comments that I disagreed with were phrased in a reasonable manner and they also helped me formulate an apparently very strong argument in the compensation meeting.

Handing in my resignation letter on April 1st, but then actually leaving.

Not really a prank, that's something I genuinely feel like doing nowadays.

Moral of the day -

Thus spake the Master Programmer:

"When a program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes."

- The Tao of programming

High school. The teacher in IT made some learning platform for the school in PHP. There was a module where you could upload files.

You could just upload a PHP file, and get it to run by accessing it through a direct link.

What the fuck, I got a raise last December, which should be reflected in today's paycheck, but it ain't.

Fucking dickheads, let's see what's going on here.

Introducing my new best friend!
The start of a great collection of devDucks :D

Fuck our new project manager.

Literally all she does in her time is schedule meetings for others and send us emails stating that X needs to be done by date or why are we delayed with Y. Then she even manages to completely screw us with the meetings she schedules.

Today I woke up to seeing a beautiful gapless column of colorful rectangles in my dairy.... for today. And last time I saw this Monday it only had 2.5 hours of meetings!!

Now a lot of us from our team had the Friday afternoon off so it may be that she did this beautiful piece of artwork during that time, in which case she could somewhat rightfully say that we should have taken a look at it. But we actually have a convention to only schedule planning meetings for Mondays which these fucking aren't and even if she hadn't known this, who the fuck schedules a ton of meetings to Monday?! from a Friday afternoon?!?!

By the way the new pretty pink and orange meetings I have today are about actually important topics in between which I would normally appreciate to grab a tea or at least use the fucking restroom. Officially I only have a 45 minute lunch break all day.

Oh and naturally she sets up the meetings as organiser so that we can only suggest her new times and can't change it on our own.

But naturally PM lady never actually attends the meetings because she wouldn't understand shit. So when my fav female colleague, Sammy and I joined our 11am meeting, the first thing Sammy said - well after I greeted her by "wtf" - is to just leave the call on while we grab brunch.

So here I am sitting in the close by park with my brunch and thought I could use the now extended lunch break time efficiently by ranting my ass of and asking you guys why the fuck such people like our PM get paid.

I just applied for a job in Australia.
I live in Europe....

interview today

me: and can you tell me a little bit more about your development process? e.g. an example dev cycle from reqs to testing and review...?

senior dev interviewing me:
*gives frustrated/annoyed "why tf are you asking these?" look*
So, uh, we don't really use testing for these projects cuz it would make it harder to refactor later.
(and responded nothing else on the topic)

I left shortly after that.

Worst dev experience was when I was asked to "take a look at" a propriatery Windows app built by a now non-existent team at the company.

The code base resembled the quality of legacy code where about every hour I felt like I needed to vomit. But that wasn't even the worst part for me.

This was the first time I had to develop on Windows and was sent a separate dedicated laptop for this. Now I started to have a bad feeling about this because as far as I had known every single dev at the company used company Macs for development (including me for other projects). It turned out the Windows laptop was indeed configured for a non-dev team :)

Having liased with IT admins for a day I finally got my environment set up and hit install on the dependencies and in 10 minutes it got to less than 10%. The laptop was pretty powerful so I couldn't belive wtf was going on, fans were ramping. Checked task manager and the company Anti-Malware was hogging the whole CPU.

I was so mad that I managed to get the IT admins to completely disable it and then it was only the pain of working with shitty code on Windows which would have been more than enough from the start. Thankfully it only lasted a week.

So I've announced my leaving today and my dear line manager responded with asking if they could make me change my mind.
Like what makes you think this is up for debate? I literally noted I signed for another place. Maybe you should have thought of this when I a million times before said that I might leave if x or y doesn't change.

She also scheduled an "emergency meeting" with me for today. I'm eager to hear what she has to came up with..

Mastering Tao!!

Start a cheese factory in a similar fashion to Willie Wonka. The most exquisite cheeses will be produced, incomparably tasty to anything on the market right now.

age++

My back hurts

Junior engineer asking managers on Slack about prioritisation..

Junior eng: Hey managers, I have these tasks A & B lined up and some other type of work... Is it ok if I finish A by Weds and B by the end of week or should it be done sooner? Also, is the order fine or should I prio B first?

*silence for hours*

Random dev feeling bad for junior getting no response chips in: Hey, you are doing great, that order makes sense to me and let me know if you need any guidance or have questions!

Junior dev: Thaanks and will do!

*another hour goes by*

Manager: Hi team. I have asked other engineer X to do task B tomorrow.

what the fuck. at least answer the fucking question and say it needs to be done sooner. felt bad for poor junior here. :/

More wisdom from The Tao of Programming

Haven't been here for a long time, kinda amazed I still had an account to be honest. There used to be a bunch of people I chatted with regularly on here, but my mentally ill self decided at some point to self sabotage (surprise surprise) and cut contact with almost everyone.

That said I've gone through quite a bit of therapy, which has definitely improved my outlook on life and allowed me to do some much needed self reflection. Has that made life better? Hard to say, but I like to think I've got a grasp on my mental health now, with the occasional relapse, because shit's a 🌈process🌈.

I'd like to apologize for the hurt I've caused some people here, you know who you are. My behaviour at times has been inexcusable. There's no sugarcoating it.

The past years have been a rollercoaster to say the least. Switched jobs multiple times. Went from doing frontend exclusively, to fullstack, then backend, and now engineering lead responsible for all architecture and infrastructure, learning a lot about myself and people around me along the way. Somehow I managed to get into a somewhat stable relationship, which is still a big WTF from time to time. The company I currently work for has had a metric fuckton of layoffs, just like the company I worked for before that. I can tell the lack of stability in work still affects my mental health a lot, but seeing how I've been growing a lot personally while the market seemingly has gone to shit gives me some level of confidence. I'll be alright.

This is mostly a sign of life to whom it may concern. I'm alive, existence is dreadful but manageable, shit's hard, but it's all gonna be okay in the end. I may or may not post a rant from time to time, as management loves unrealistic deadlines, and the PM can't say no to the CEO for some reason so her work ends up on my plate most of the time as well. Oh and of course the primary product of the company had a codebase which made me want to gorge my eyes out. So yeah, plenty to rant about.

So I've opened myself to new software engineering positions and was recommended one where the first *benefit* stated:

- High engagement opportunities across our global client base

Am I the only one for whom this is a gigantic red flag and con rather than a benefit? wtf

Absolutely the best quote from Tao Of Programming...

A novice asked the Master: "Here is a programmer that never designs, documents or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of the best programmers in the world. Why is this?"

The Master replied: "That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has entered the mystery of Tao."

Ok, I am actually losing my mind at this bad excuse of a work place.

This guy, that I had only briefly talked to in email twice before, never met or even had a video chat, opened a ticket like this:

"Hi Alt-Tab,

I hope you enjoyed the end of last week, the weekend, and the beginning of this one! All well here. I ventured to [random place in London] for the first time on Saturday – liked it."

Now. I already can't fucking stand when colleagues that are not at all close start emails with "how was your weekend?" shit because then I have to waste another minute addressing that. But this guy took it to such another level that I literally had to read his email 3 times to believe what I just witnessed.

And of course he then went on and described the issue as folows:

"Just a quick note about the issue I have - could you let me know why the calendars are not syncing?"

Maybe if you fucking spent half of the energy of you writing a polite bullshit "hello" and instead used that to actually describe the issue I could help.

Fuck off.

Using your phone in Dutch trains is like trying to have sex during an earthquake.

Yes, I did have trouble typing this.

Ayy it's time to move! About fucking time. Been wanting to move for a year or two now.

wait until everyone else is fucking asleep

I'm fucking done.

I honestly can't see how developers like to work for years on a single project. Nothing on the side, just the one project. Fuck I'm a year in and I've already been pushing my patience.

After working on something for half a year I want some diversity, but every time I ask for it I get the "we need you doing this" card. I've asked plenty of times for my manager to find someone else to do part of my work, and every time I get the same thing. "We're looking for someone, don't worry". Yeah my ass you've been saying that for months and I still haven't seen a job opening.

Honestly, in a month or so I'm gonna tell my manager that I'm quitting soon, so he has some time to actually go look for someone. If he doesn't, not my problem.

For real though, the company is nice, people are chill, I'm just lacking challenge, and no matter how many times I bring it up, nothing's being done with it.

What will I do when I quit? I have no fucking clue, but anything's better than doing the same repetitive shit day in day out. Fuck it I'll probably go balls deep on my own projects for a few months, see if I can generate an income there.
If that doesn't work out I'll just go back to the life of sucking someone's dick for a monthly salary.

I hate having to deal with our IT service desk. Every time it takes enormous energy to get to the right people and make them understand that no, you are not an idiot, but you actually have a technical issue.

Sure thing they do have a few competent nice folks there too I've gotten to know over time and they indeed have to deal with a ton of dumb non-tech savvy idiots on a daily basis. However, if my job title mentions "software" and "engineer" they should at least assume I'm an idiot in tech. Or something. Every single time I need to open a ticket, even for the simplest "add x to env y", I need to quadruple check that the subject line is moron-friendly because otherwise they would take every chance to respond "nah we can't do that", "that's not us", or "sry that's not allowed". And then I would need to respond, "yes you do:) your slightly more competent colleague just did this for us 2 weeks ago".

Now you might imagine this is on even another level when the problem is complex.

One of our internal apps has been failing because one of the internal APIs managed by a service desk team responds a 500 status code randomly but only when called with a specific internal account managed by another service desk team.
(when I say "managed by", that doesn't mean they maintain it, it just mean they are the only ones who would have access to change something)

Yesterday I spent over a fucking hour writing a super precise essay detailing the issue, proving a million times it's not on our end and that they need to fix it. Now here is an insight to what beautiful "IT service" our service desk provides:

1) ticket gets assigned to a "Connectivity Engineer" lady

2) few hours later she responds and asks me to give her the app and environment IDs and grant her access to those
(naturally everything in my email was ignored including these two IDs)

3) since the app needs to be in prod for the issue, I make a copy isolating the failing part and grant her access to the original "for reference" and the copy to play with

4) few hours later I get an email from the env that some guy called P made changes to the actual app, no changes to the copy
(maybe they immediately fixed the app even though I asked them to only touch the copy)
I also check the env and the live app had been shared with another 2 people giving them editing rights:)

5) another few hours pass and the lady responds that she had been chatting with P (no mention of who tf that guy is) and that P has a suggestion that might work and I should test it, "please see screen shot" for details:

These motherfuckers sent me a fucking screenshot of the env config file where "P has edited a few parameters" that might help. The screenshot had a 16 line part of the config json with a bunch of IDs and Base64 params which HE EDITED LOCALLY.

Again, because I needed a few iterations to realise what I've just witnessed:
These idiots modified some things in the main app (not the copy) for hours. Then came to the conclusion that the config needs some IDs and params updated. They downloaded the config json. Edited it locally. Did not fucking upload it back to the main or test app. Did not test it live. Did not CC in or direct the guy with changes to me. Did not send me the modified config file. Did not even paste the new IDs into the email. But TOOK A FUCKING SCREENSHOT OF THE MODIFIED FILE AND SENT THAT SHIT TO ME. And then had the audacity to ask me to test it when they had access to it and that's literally their fucking job.

I had to compare the fucking screenshot to the live config file and manually type in the changes.

And no, it still doesn't work. And Now I have to get back to them showing it still fails the same way but I just can't deal with these people. Fuck. Was hoping by the time I write it all down it'd be better, and it does feel a bit better, but I still need to get this app fixed. And I can only do it through these... monkeys. I just can't. Talking to these people drains my life energy... I'm just sad.

LinkedIn recruiter:
- messages me about a fantastic job opportunity
- waits exactly 3 days
- messages me asking about the cool company I work at and how I find the engineering department here
- again 3 days
- messages me saying that he has heard some amazing recent news (there were none) about the fast growing company I work at and asks how I feel about the changes caused by our headcount growth
- 3 more days go by
- today, I get a notification that this recruiter has given me random LinkedIn endorsements for some skills that I had put on my profile back in college and since then forgot about even the existence of the endorsements feature

My favorite part is that the job they had originally sent expects a few languages and other tech skills most of which I actually have listed on my profile, but naturally, he only endorsed me for skills not required for said job spec.

What kind of weird sorcery is this?

Ok... Now the fun stuff can begin :)

I heard Google has prepared an AI for solving competitive programming questions by training models based on problems and solutions from GitHub.
*devil smile*...on my way to flood GitHub with wrong solutions. Ciao!

What is it with this sudden surge in shitty memes? Is it normal around this time?

Might just filter out the random category completely if this holds on. Ironic.

"Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted" - Tao Te Ching

Happy new year from Shibuya!
Fucking antifa communists came and ruined it right after new year though..

PM: Heyy team x, could we have a suuper quick 90 sec tops call?

B*tch, if the call is actually 1.5m there is no way we need that call. We can actually respond to your question in text quicker.

But I know you. You can't fool me that it would actually be 90 seconds.

It's also fucking Friday afternoon.

fml

I just ate a kilo of spaghetti and now I feel sick

I am fucking drunk

"Deal with the difficult while it is yet easy;
Deal with the great while it is yet small." - Tao Te Ching

Prequel to my previous post:

I received an offer from a startup that did not meet the originally advertised salary range. In every other aspect this place seemed like where I'd enjoy working the most and each previous interaction made a very good impression on me. So needless to say this was quite a shock.

They immediately apologised and explained the situation. They only now started to expand to and hire from my location (which can be verified) and I would be the very first person from this location (seems true too but I could only really verify this after joining). They explained the salary range I had seen was for their main hub location (accurate too) and said that the recruiter who posted the ad did not adjust it to mine. I asked why tf they didn't notify me of this earlier and they said they are super busy with everything, are new to location based salaries and normally don't check the recruiters posts as it should be her work.

Now, even if this is totally true, it was an awful sudden shock and felt a bit like a scam - totally contradicting my previous impressions.

Here are a couple of other points that I'll just sum to save time:
- before seeing the job ad I had a *reasonable* salary expectation even lower than their actual offering
- on the ad, the bottom end of their salary range far exceeded my reasonable exp.
- the relative level of my position would be even higher up the range that I have seen realised would be top 5%
- having had seen the ad, I started to have an *ideal* expectation being the bottom of the range
- in first interview I told them my exp. is the bottom end of their range +- a bit
- I told this to a dev guy who has no fucking idea about this stuff and I don't blame him but he noted this down to higher management
- generally I have not been very precise of my expectation as previously I only had lower class dev jobs, this would be the first decent.
- Hence I have seen an enormously high variation in salaries offered to me so this advertised range whilst high seemed possible

Now, with all this in mind I posted here a question about what some of you would do in my position.

I received the following group of responses:

- it's a scam, bad place, run
- it's an intentional (common) trick
- people make mistakes like this esp. startups so find out if this is intentional or not
- just decide if their current offering is reasonable for the position and location, ignore the rest
- just decide if the amount is enough
- location based salaries are retarded, don't work there (I kinda agree and also don't)
- if they can afford the higher pay in another place they should have no prob. meeting the range
- it's more important that you'd enjoy it there if the pay is sufficient for general needs
- company culture is generally more important these days
- fuck recruiters and hr people (amen to that btw)

Here is what I did:

Regardless of whether I believe them or not I hyperfocused on the potential scam/trick aspect.
I told them that every other interaction with them was positive and would love to join them but this was a really bad impression and feels like they are playing with me. I made up some bullshit previous examples of companies trying the same trick on me (which obv. never happened).

Then I said that I think to resolve this they should invite me to their main office for a day (all interviews had been online) and if after that they are still not ok to offer me at least the bottom of the adv. range then we can part ways. Otherwise this should ensure both of us that we are a good match, etc.

They seemed to love the idea and said that I should go there for x till y (3 days) and if we don't hate each other by the end I'll get the amount at the bottom of the range and they apologised again about it looking like a scam, etc.

So thanks a bunch again to those of you who provided valuable input.

**Sees a different error after hours of debugging the previous one**

ME (crying inside) - What type of sorcery is this?

Ran an app release yesterday, adding some new stuff and fixing a few bugs. Was scared this morning because APM didn't have any errors and the app was already in use by half of the userbase.

Turns out it's the most stable release so far! Day's all good again :D

"The thing I want to change is very simple.."

Day starts off great again by manager saying the above - which is already problem with her limited technical knowledge - and then she proceeds by wanting to change multiple properties of a primary key in our live db.

I really hope my interviews go well this week and I can leave this place soon..

Apparently the Schiphol (dutch airport) WiFi has a nice "feature" which makes the user think they need to accept terms, instead it's a checkbox saying "I want to do a survey for a free iPad". Talk about shitty UX...

Yesterday at my career progression chat my manager told me that to showcase more seniority I would need to "stop moving the needle by myself and become a multiplier".

So in order to progress I need to change from being a sewing machine to a mathematical operator??!!?!?
Thanks, that's very fucking helpful.

The past two years since I've started working, I've never taken a holiday. Today, I was forced to go on paid leave for 3 weeks. Feels weird but kinda exciting at the same time :D

In the end I'll probably be programming half the time anyway...

Can someone please tell my why the fuck Windows would need 1.2 gigs of video memory? For fucks sake this is in a VM there's nothing on here but RDR2

Weekly summary: 1 of your workflows have failed

- shit

The below workflow had an unusual number of failures:
Workflow X
Failed 1 times

- oh so it is failing since yesterday?

*swaty click*

8 h ago - Succeeded
1 d ago - Succeeded
[...]
6 d ago - Succeeded
1 wk ago - Failed

- Oh. Great. Perfect time and way to notify me.

More people getting fired yaaaaay /s

Job requirement:

> Have been on a career break for a minimum of 6 months

???
What kind of fuckery is this?

Everyone now works from home.. We don't even have a choice we need to work from home now.

Why does a flu during flu season scare people so much?? Honestly..

Lol wtf

This is for a medior position

Worst: job insecurity, i. e. "due to Covid, unfortunately we can only renew you for 1 month for now" which kept on going from March till October and during which all sensible colleagues left.

Best: finally leaving this piece of shit management in October for a better position.

On Facebook open day:

Graduate dev lady telling a story about how much responsibility they are given and how she broke the password reset button for hours when her task was to instruct old users with weak passwords to update them...

//my first post, so not sure if it's appropriate, but surely did this come as a shock

Hand sanitizers, wet wipes, basic hygiene standards. Nothing much yet.

Trains here are eerily silent though.

Mmmm new screen protector and case for foon 😁

Old screen protector was burnt and nasty in general, new one has a matte finish. The case has the same colour as the back, but doesn't show how I let my phone drop and crack the glass, huehue

Yes I'm happy now my foon looks good again

What do you do when you're physically tired, but unable to sleep?

I'm starting to relate to the brain keeping you up meme..

Automate this!

I'm an aspiring coder working some chappy administrator job just to pay the bills for now. My boss found out that I may actually be more computer literate than I let on.

Boss: "I want you to make X happen automatically if I click here on this spreadsheet"

Me "X!? That means processing data from 4 different spreadsheets that aren't consistently named and scraping comparison info from the fronted of the Web cms we're using"

Boss: "if you say so.. Can you do it?"

Me: "maybe.. Can I install python?"

Boss: "No..."

Me: "what about node.js or ruby?"

Boss: "no.. I don't know what you're talking about but you're not installing anything, just get it done"

Me: "Errm Ok.."

So here I am now, way over my head loving the fact that I'm unofficially a Dev and coding my first something in Powershell and vb that will be used in business :)

Sucks that I still have to keep my regular work on target whilst doing this though!

Thought I'd be nice and open one of those railway gates for a lady (it was broken, so everyone had to in order to get to the trains). Did that, lady thanked me, and dropped the gate on my head....

Great morning so far!

Working in a team for first time. Spent 8 hours just setting up the project locally - happy Friday!

Say you'd have a dev apply for a job after only 6 months into his previous job, what would be your thoughts on that?

Would you outright reject the applicant? If not, wwyd?

Thought i'd try using VSCode.. initialized folder for git... and then proceeded to delete all my nodeschool work that i'd done over the past year... ARAGH!

Tries to automate login with vb using I.E...

Gets stuck because login page is a hive of nested iframes with deep nested tags without defined names

FML

Arrived half an hr too early at an onsen, so now I'm just reading up random stuff regarding design systems.

On another note, I have no idea if I'm able to communicate with the people here 🙃

Pro tip:

Don't make stateful singletons. Just spent an entire fucking morning debugging because one of those fuckers was trying to use prod, and not the demo environment.

And now I find some students talking about Java and Python in the train...

Why the fuck is MQL C++ based? Why not make a simple scripting language which gets interpreted by your application? I don't want to write headers and definitions constantly, I'm just trying to write a trading indicator ffs

Have a look at the attched image first and spot something fishy.

**(Spoilers)**

To make sure the user does not read the terms and conditions, I found two dirty tactics used by companies.(Specially on this one)

1. Use of **complex** legal words, to make it incomprehensible to the reader/user.
2. This one is special- They repeated the same words without changing para multiple times, to make it look like a big set of terms and conditions. Yes in the 11th line after [Jurisdiction]. The para is repeated, again multiple times.

Instead of focusing on spending thousands of dollars on making websites look more presentable, if the company really wants to stand out, they shall improve the way their terms and conditions page looks like. Atleast they can ditch the para system, use some less technically jarring words, and be concise and don't repeat the same things again.