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Search - "that's it now get back to work"
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I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.
The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.
The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."
I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.
I email the woman (paraphrased):
Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?
Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).
And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.44 -
Boss: "Could you join the new DevOps team for a week or two, for some coaching?"
Me: "I'd rather watch you masturbate furiously in a corner of the office while you cry over your ex boyfriend"
Boss: "Yeah... that's why I ask you. You are the only one brave enough to watch"
Me: *Sigh* "But I don't know shit about what DevOps does, I'm a DBA. I've told you the difference a million times. Can't we just douse it in gasoline and set it on fire?"
Boss: "What?"
Me: "Not the team, the servers..."
Boss, imitating Gimli: "And my ex!"
Me: "I get why he left you"
Boss: "It's funny, he was actually better with computers than me, maybe even better than you. He hated me for starting this company, told me I was just chasing money instead of ideals. He just isn't grown up enough to see that there is more to the world than computer games, brewing beer, maker festivals and gay bars, that you need to take responsibility... Maybe it just never works out between managers and geeks..."
Me: "Indeed. The difference in competence is too large"
Boss: "Ugh. You are like straight version of him... but will you at least take a look?"
Me: "Fine, unzip your pants..."
Boss: "No, not that... you need to teach DevOps this docking thing, with the parallel stuff, and the horizontal growth"
Me: "Damn I really hope we're talking about servers now... Do you mean Docker?"
Boss: "That's it. They want to learn how to dock on the Windows servers. They reserved two 4xlarge on AWS. Is that enough for docking?"
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: "You know what. I'm going back to hug my DB designs, and wash my brain with some queries. Then I'll return here to burn everything to the ground. There is no hope for you left"
Boss: "That's what he said"
Me: "You're using that meme wrong"
Boss: "OK. So what if you just stay on DB management, and I'll just give you the budget to recruit a new DevOps lead and pay for training?"
Me: "That would work"
Boss: "Why are you grinning?"
Me: "Because I have your ex's phone number"18 -
Oh my god... Storytime.
A customer comes in with I assume is his father or grandfather.
Customer: I need a computer, but without all the internals
Me: So a case?
Customer: Yes, I need a Dell computer outsides, but without the internal components.
Me: Well, we don't have Dell cases, but we sell custom build cases and they come with a power supply.
Customer: *says nothing, but looks interested*
Me: *walks over to the cases to show him* So this is what the cases look like and we have two types, one for a ATX and one for a micro-ATX.
Customer: *still says nothing, but looks at them*
Me: What motherboard do you have at the moment?
Customer: Well, I don't have anything right now, but I'm replacing another computer that didn't work very well. I'm going to be getting some Dell parts to put in here.
Me: O-okay. So this other computer, I'd like to see it in shop to see what's going on with it.
Customer: Oh, you do NOT want to do that. I hooked it up to another computer and it blew it up.
Me: Huh, that's weird. I'd still like to look at it if possible.
Customer: Oh no, it's all wired wrong and... *some bullshit, but stay with me*
Customer: I am the best at technology. My hand has computer parts in it--government funded. *some more bullshit*
Me: Okay... *I try to bring it back around* Well, I'd still like to see the other computer for myself. So you don't have parts for this new build yet, right? You don't know what type of motherboard you have?
Customer: No.
Me: Well, I would get the internals first, so you know what size of case to get, and then get the case.
Customer: Okay. Thank you for your time.
He shook my hand with his "cyborg" hand and I was tempted to say something about "try not to crush my hand," but elected not to. Also during this entire exchange, the old man continuously farted in the background.22 -
I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.
I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.
We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW
He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.
I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.
Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.
I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.
There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.
And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.
And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"
Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.
You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:
EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.27 -
My most awkward recruiter interaction?
Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.
About two months later I get a phone call:
<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>
About a week later..
Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."5 -
"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.
~Record scratch.mp3
~Freeze frame.mp4
"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"
~reverseRecordSound.wav
A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office.
"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely
"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."
"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.
We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting.
Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.
We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.
"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.
"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."
"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly.
He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.
"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.
"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.
"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."
"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.
"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.
"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."
"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed
"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here," he said, as he displays to me my old code.
"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.
"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code.
"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously.
"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."
"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said.
"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.
He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."
He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment
"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.
"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."
...
After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."
Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.
I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.16 -
A while ago (few months) I was on the train back home when I ran into an old classmate. I know that he's a designer/frontend/wordpress guy and I know that he'll bring anyone down in order to feel good. I also know that he knows jack shit about security/backend.
The convo went like this:
Me: gotta say though, wordpress and its security...
Him: yeah ikr it's bad. (me thinking 'dude you hardly know what the word cyber security means)
Me: yeah, I work at a hosting company now, most sites that get hacked are the wordpress ones.
Him: yeah man, same at my company. I made a security thing for wordpress though so we can't get hacked anymore.
Me; *he doesn't know any backend NOR security..... Let's ask him difficult stuff*
Oh! What language did you use?
Him: yeah it works great, we don't get hacked sites anymore now!
Me: ah yeah but what language did you use?
Him: oh it's not about what language you use, it's about whether it works or not! My system works great!
Me: *yeah.....right.* oh yeah but I'd like to know so I can learn something. What techniques did you use?
Him: well obviously firewalls and shit. It's not about what techniques/technology you use, it's about whether it works or not!
That's the moment I was done with it and steered the convo another way.
You don't know shit about backend or security, cocksucker.16 -
I go to unlock my car, but the button I usually use is gone. Instead now it unlocks by long-pressing the car handle.
Ok, got it.
Then my ignition isn't there? Oh, it's in the middle of the steering wheel now? Ok.. but it doesn't work? Oh I have to sign in with Google or Facebook, alright...
Wait, where's my odometer? Oh this is "card" view, and I guess I want "compact" view, huh. Is there a dark theme? Guess not.
Why can't I shift? Oh the stick is a hamburger button now, weird. Um, and reverse is in a sub-menu? That's going to get annoying.
Alright just need to look in the mirror to see if.. wtf? You call this "responsive" or something? I can't see out that tiny window.
I'm very disappointed in all this, I wonder if I can roll back. Oh WHERE ARE THE BRAKES OH GOD
UX DESIGNERS
HAVE
FUCKING
KILLED ME
WHY DID WE TRUST THEM AND THEIR GODFORSAKEN UPDATES10 -
I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.
1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.
2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.
When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.
3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...
4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.
5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.
6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.
This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.
7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.
8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.
When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.
Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.
9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.
Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.
10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.
So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.
To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.11 -
This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.
Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.
He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.
What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!
Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'
He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.
Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.
So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.
So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!
Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.
Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.
You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.
Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.8 -
Where do I even start?
Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.
Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.
Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.
Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.
I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.
The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.
I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.
The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.
The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.8 -
Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...
1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.
2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.
3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.
4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.
5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.
6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.
7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.
8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.
9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.
10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE
11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.
12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)
13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.
14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.
Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!20 -
So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"
First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.
Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.
PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer
PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"
FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"
Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"
End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok
Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"
15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"
And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project
WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!
I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...
Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...undefined govt contracts why i'm so gullible promise promises written in butter wtf start dates fucking delays never refuse another assignment again13 -
That's it. I fucking quit.
Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.
First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.
An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?
"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.
2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.
🖕17 -
Man, we have a snake in our company.
This snake is responsible for terrible code. They oversee a offshore team, but hold them to no coding practices. They don't do code reviews or checks. They let them be lazy and get away with sloppy work every time.
And if you critize their team - they will defend them and get angry at you. You can't adress the problem because said snake is always around. He's in a senior position for giving our company cheap workers, doing years of damage to our product while the non-code savvy managers remain blissfully unaware of their product being ruined in the background.
This snake is the senior product office. He has a share in the company now. He is from the overshore team's country. That team now has their claws so dug into our companies roots and are just pumping lsd's into it constantly. Feels good untill you die from an overdose.
Here I am, the new junior software developer, trying to tear out the claws that have sunk into these roots. Im up against the snake. The snake hates me. I hate the snake. I am trying to open the eyes of the managers. They hate that. They want to silence me so I don't expose the awful, unprofessional level of work they do.
Well, that's too bad. I won't back down from this, snake.14 -
Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.
I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.
The second day after vacation:
Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.
Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.
And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.
So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<
but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!rant idk shifting priorities but why is all the rum gone? past accomplishments don't matter atrocity against rationality sobriety in the face of adversity16 -
Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.
Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]
Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev
Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]
Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].
Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.
The fuse is lit.
Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*
Sizzle.
Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]
Bang.
Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]
Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."19 -
Root encounters HR at her new job.
So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.
Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)
But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.
The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.
I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.
But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.13 -
"We have another major incident spinning up. QueenMorgana, are you free?" NO, I'M FINISHING UP THE NOTES FROM MY LAST TWO CALLS THAT JUST ENDED, WHY DON'T YOU CALL IN, LAZY FUCKWAD.
Why is it so damn difficult for my boss to cover a call when we're all busy DOING ALL THE LITTLE POINTLESS SHIT HE GIVES UP. He had me follow up from my coworker's call yesterday, not seeing the logic in, IF IT WERE STILL A FUCKING ISSUE, THEY WOULD HAVE CALLED US BACK THIS MORNING.
So now, I have to sit on the line AGAIN and take notes for shit that's not even a major issue BECAUSE IT'S BEEN DOWN FOR A WEEK. IF IT'S DOWN THAT LONG AND YOU DON'T SUBMIT A TICKET TO ME OR CALL OUR MAJOR INCIDENT LINE, I DON'T GET PAID ENOUGH TO RESPOND LIKE IT'S AN EMERGENCY.
Also, fucking lazy asswipe of a "teammate" bitching about being on a call for over 8 hours, while the rest of us are on back to back calls. He's never been on a long call and has been here a year longer than I have. I've been on a 14 hour and a 16 hour, and my other teammate has handled a 26 hour call. 8 HOURS IS FUCKING NOTHING AND YOU WORK FROM HOME SO DON'T EVEN HAVE TO WEAR PANTS.
**spilled 3 cups of coffee this morning, and have an expensive maintenance on my car today, likely to explode on just about everyone**24 -
> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job
I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.
My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.
Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.
I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.
On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄
I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.
I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.
I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.
I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.
But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.
I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.
But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.
So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.
So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.7 -
tl;dr; I've worked 117.5h/week for a month because of a project lead that doesn't understand what I do despite countless attempts at explaining
So, once a year I do this large project for a voluntary organization, it takes me about 80h (and this is of course on top of my normal work and voluntary engagement (60-80h/week))
This year, I realized I don't have as much spare time as I used to, so I emailed the project lead several months in advance like "hey, you know that I do all my work on this before the rest of you start working on it, and you know I need you to sit down for about an hour and put together the list of things I need to know to get this done properly. Could you please do that a bit earlier than usual, a week or two extra would make a big difference", they replied "absolutely, no problem!"
Time went by, and about two weeks before I wanted that info I emailed a small reminder. Shit me not, a month later, after a countless amount of reminders I finally get a half finnished version of the list I need, note that this is two weeks before I'm supposed to be done. Which is fine, it's the usual timespan, not what I hoped for as I hoped for an extra two weeks, but not too late either.
Then shit starts to happen
I reply to the list I've gotten with some requests for the project lead to complete some of the information, to which I receive multiple replies with different answers to the same questions, okay, that's fine, I'll just use the last answer.(?)
So, I finnish the thing on time, clocking out on a total of 117.5h of work per week, two weeks in a row. Still fine, it's just two weeks.
Release day!
I arrive at the release meeting, and is greeted by the project lead handing me two papers with the words "we haven't been able to look through your work yet to make sure it's like we want it, but we sat down yesterday and here's a list of how we want things to be". So I remind them that the thing is supposed to be done that day, and that it takes me 80h to redo, and those papers will require me to redo everything from scratch. To which the project lead responds "but it doesn't have to be finnished until December, right?"
That is not true, not at all, in any way.
See, there are 600 people that depend on this project, and they need, yes, need to be able to access it from the day it's launched every year. That is an absolute requirement.
So after trying to tell this project lead, for multiple years, how much time I devote to this project (for free) every year, during a short period of time, and after trying countless times to explain why it has to be done when the project is released, I became quite irritated.
So, during the two weeks that have passed since, I've been receiving about 200 emails from people wondering why the thing isn't finished yet and why they can't use it. (forwarded every single one of them to the project lead) and have been redoing it all during the past two weeks, from scratch.
I'm finally done, I released it yesterday, finally! I accompanied it with a bitter email to the project lead.
Because seriously, this is the worst respect for both my time and the people that should use the project's time in all of those years I've been doing this. This year, I've been ignored multiple times; they've shat on my work because it didn't live up to their expectations, even tough they never told me their expectations; I've been misinformed etc.
And now it's starting to get to me, this is the first weekend in a month when I've been able to shut down my laptop, sit down, drink a cup of tea, read a fricking book, chat with some friends etc, and most importantly, sleep. Signs of the stress I've had for a month now is starting to remind themselves.
And there's this little though nagging me in the back of my head: if the project lead would've worked for an hour in September I would've had to do half the job I ended up doing, on double the time. I hate realizing that they don't give a shit about my part of this, even tough I do half the work.
Then why do I continue, year after year? Because I feel that those 600 people that benefit from this really deserve it! But why does there have to be a dick project lead in the middle that makes me feel sick working on the thing I love the most!
So, as I'm not really used to ranting like this, i have to add that I really have no point with this rant. Just had to get it off my chest!13 -
I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.
So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..
So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.
In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.
Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.
At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.
Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.
As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.
Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.
This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.
My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.
During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.
For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;
He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.
I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.
Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.
The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.
Fuck customers.6 -
In my current work, I have two systems to work on (let's name em Systems A and B). Both basically do the same thing; both allow users to book facilities available to them.
System A is already in production. My job is to fix any bugs that come up on said system. System B is an improved version that they wanted me to develop. This would follow a different framework etc. I am already halfway through this system.
Now, here's the fucked up part. The code for system A is a massive clusterfuck. It has unused commented code dated back to ancient times where men had the brain of an ape.
And don't get me started on the fucking logic. One part of the code was to retrieve and display the timeslots available for a chosen facility. The code to do that alone takes up 500++ fucking lines, filled with ajax commands, html manipulation and commented, unused codes..AND THAT'S JUST THE FRONTEND!
The fucking backend was not a problem of smelly code anymore. Nope. It was like a programmer had code diarrhea and shat his backend code all over the project. If I had a pin board, I would have made a crazy wall just to understand what some fucknut was trying to achieve.
Anyway, my supervisor told me to fix some bugs on System A. Knowing how the code was, I told her that I could refactor the code. Since I've already achieved that function on System B, with a shorter and cleaner code, I could just copy that and use on System A. But nope. She SPECIFICALLY told me to just "do whatever to fix the bugs. I don't want to waste time on System A." Okay. Makes sense to me. Whatever. I didn't wanna fuck my head up looking through that mess of a cesspool. So, I came up with a few hacks, not thinking of clean code and fixed whatever bugs there was. I then just pushed to the repo (after testing of course).
This bloody morning, supervisor came in and gave me more bugs to fix. When I thought she was done, she said "Hey. I saw the fix you made to the system. The bugs are fixed but the retrieval of the timeslots is now pretty slow. Could you see what is the problem?"
Slow.. She said that it was slow. And asked if I could fix it. I already told her what the problem was and she did not want me to waste time on it. But she wants me to fix it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG IN HER BLOODY HEAD! I SWEAR TO GOD... UGHHHHH I swear I was already waterboarding her in my head. YOU WANT FAST?? How bout fucking allowing me to refactor the code?? Fucking shit head. I think I should take up yoga.1 -
I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.
As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.
In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.
There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.
I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.
The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.
And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.
Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.
And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!
The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!
It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.
I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.
Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.
Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.
This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.
Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!10 -
WHY THE FUCK DOES IT HAVE TO END?
WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYTHING HAVE TO EVER END?
When I left my previous employer, I was so connected to people there. In fact my entire direct team was just few months old.
I ended up crying like a baby on my farewell call in front of everyone. I just couldn't stop.
Definitely not the brightest or smartest people, but surely great at heart. I did hate them at times and we had our ups and downs but they made the place tolerable.
The work culture is created by colleagues at any organisation and not the leadership/management. And work culture was one of the major reasons why I stayed back for 7.25 years even when a rat was earning more than me.
I joined new organisation with a big smile on my face that, I will learn and earn more. And as I was buckling up, my lead quit.
She was one of the smartest person I met. She inspired me so fucking much. Our entire team is geographically located in multiple time zones. Still she never hesitated to jump on calls as early as 07:00 AM or as late as 12:00 AM. Yet she pinged me every time on Slack to check on me and made sure I was doing well. Kept pushing me to get enough sleep, take care and not burnout myself. Always handling her daughter while on calls with us without impacting the discussions.
She taught me like her own child. So patient with a retard like me. Gave me good feedback and insights on how can I grow as a person and what all to look for in the organisation.
She bids her final goodbye early next week and with every meeting we have, I get more emotional. Doesn't feel like we are in different continents but just in same room, talking like we have known each other for years.
And you know what, after joining this org, I came to know that they hired me for a level below what I was in previous org (because how the job titles were structured here and I don't really care for titles). The product I am working on is highly ambitious and everyone is keen to make it live.
And now everything falls on me. Kickass opportunity to get a promotion, relocation, good hike, and all that I desire. And my employer is known to be quite employee friendly to actually fullfil all my wishes.
But that's not what I want. I want my people with me. It would have been so fucking awesome if she wouldn't have quit and together we would have built the product and have had so much fun doing so.
I am sure, the reason of my death will be empathy. I am next to tears while I type this.
I suck at goodbyes. Even though, with the help of technology, people are and will be connected, but still goodbyes are the shittiest things to ever exist.11 -
In electronics there's 3 options.
1. You pay a small fortune to get something decent.
2. You pay a smaller fortune to get crap.
3. You build it yourself and it'll be nicely priced AND decent.
Why is that? I have no idea. Profiteering gluttons perhaps.
Case in point: my watch. A waterproof one, so you'd expect to be able to take it in the shower, which I often did.
But then, le wild drop from 50cm height occurred and the whole thing just popped open, with soapy water rushing in. Luckily it didn't short out, and I quickly evacuated it out of the shower and dipped it with my towel.
Then already I thought.. what the fuck is wrong with the designers of this thing?! I'm all for keeping the inner parts of electronics accessible for self-servicing. But in a waterproof watch you wouldn't expect the backside to pop right off and expose the bloody internals, would you? So that's one thing. While evacuating it I quickly figured that I'd want to remove the battery immediately.. except that fucking thing was screwed in place?! WHAT THE FUCK?!! Use those screws to keep the fucking backside of the watch in place you certified pieces of shit that designed this craptacular piece of garbage!!!
Finished showering, went ahead and troubleshooted the thing. Miraculously it still worked. Except that now the UI of the fucking thing is biting me in the ass. A single button on the watch is used to operate the whole thing, and get it to set itself to the correct time, get radio signal, go in sleep mode (where the watch stops ticking, for storage purposes) and activate itself again. So I dived into the manual.. and still couldn't get it to work properly. So it's got one button just like an iPhone, it craps itself when it's dropped just like an iPhone, its design is shit just like an iPhone, and it's completely unusable when it craps itself just like an iPhone.
And the manual... Oh fucking shit. It specifies that the watch is 3 bar water resistant, yet apparently you can't take it into the shower. 3 FUCKING BAR!!! That's supposed to enable you to take a fucking dive with it! And apparently you can't drop it either.. who would've thought, when they lock it with no more than outwards pressure from the back plate into the main body! How difficult can it be to use fucking screws, and to make it watertight put some rubber bands or whatever?!
CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!!
And the watch, it's in the garbage can right now. Right where it belongs!!21 -
From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece
INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-
- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.
13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00
- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.
You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.
You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.8 -
!code
I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.
I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.
I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.
Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.
After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.
So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.
what the crap? why?
So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.
Windows greets me.
Again.
What the hell?
At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.
But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.
If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.
Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/16 -
What's the difference between a wasp and single loose hair?
Apparently none till the wasp stings :/
Yesterday I thought I had a loose hair on my neck.. ok, I shrug it off.. later again the creepy feeling.. shrugs off..
I continue to work, sumberged in code, wanting to find the fucker (bug, not the wasp/hair).. lean in to the monitor... 10 cents away from the screen... Ok, maybe that's it! Feels the hair on my back, near shoulderblades again... shrugging again more violently to get it further down to fall out.. nothing.. ok, got the bug, threw myslef back in the chair with substential force & BAAAAM!!! Motherfucking hair bit me!! O.o
I scream in horror & on top of the lungs (it was late, after work hours so I didn't expect anyone else still at the office) PROKLETA PRASICA (roughly translated to goddamn female swine).. I previously saw some green bug flying around the office and I thought that nasty thing bit me (didn't know they bite soo, much more horror for me).. O.o
Anyhow, I jump up from the computer and see my coworker looking at me all baffled.. I proceed to franticly take of my headphones and hoodie..thinking about wtf should I do now, I cannot get undressed in front of him (not for my sake, bra is the same as top of the bathing suit for me, but still..I don't want anyone suing me for impropper behaviour of undreasing in front of coworkers..), how the fuck should I get to the toilet?! O.o
C: Are you ok?!
M: Um.. sth bit me..wtf?!
C: There was a wasp flying around somewhere some time ago.. are you alergic?!
M: um..not sure, I don't think so..we'll see soon..
I proceed to the WC, to take off tshirt & check/kill off the fucker.. on my way there (walking funny to not press the hair to my body again) I got another surprise, another coworker was working late..
C2: Are you ok?! O.o
M: yeah, sth bit me, probably a wasp..
Ok, finally on the loo..ok, do not lock self in in case it escapes and you need help.. don't even shut the door. Check.. standing between the doors I contemplate on how the fuck should I take my tshirt off without angering the fucker even more and getting bitten again.. O.O
I lifted the tshirt up my back to let it out.. nope, not there..the creepy felling of buzzing around between my shoulder blades continues.. crap.. what to do?!
I stood there & contemplated the task.. ok, roll up the tshirt to the shoulder blades, not against the body (duh) to prevent further stings..tighten the fabric, so it cannot escape, quickly remove the band from the body.. done..reversed the tshirt and straightened it.. bzzz... Fucker fell somewhere.. Dafaq?! Was it really just a wasp?! If yes, no problem...but what if coworker was wrong and I got bitten by that nasty green whateveritsname bug?! Eeeeewwww! Is it poisonous? Gotta find it & kill it for good.. waited a bit, than saw a goddamn wasp crawl from under the toilet.. wasp!! Yess!! Stopm stomp fucker!!
I get dressed & go back to my desk..
C: Did you terminate it?!
M: Yup, fucker went on a toilet paper trip down the drain!!
I sit down, starting to get my headphones back on and proceed to work.., but before I could, one last gem:
C: CTO would say, thank god it didn't sting you in your finger cuz you wouldn't be able to type anymore..
M: O.O so true hahhahahaaa
Disclaimer - I like animals, but I freakking hate wasps..especially if they get under my tshirt to sting.. :/7 -
So I've had my "emergency meeting" with my manager about me leaving.
(Re https://devrant.com/rants/4896068 )
As some of you advised I prepared to try my best to stay exceptionally calm for this.
First my line manager just casually asked if I could stay. I politely explained "no. :)"
Then she said it's a catastrophe, they would be in a chaos, etc etc and then she personally assures I would have less bs meetings mid-sprints (one of the things I had requested a while back).
I responded that's kind but I also was far from what I should be earning.
Then she explained that suddenly now that I am leaving it would not be a problem to raise my salary as appropriate.
So I asked why could they not do this when I had brought this up a ton of times earlier and why I got peanuts as a raise in summer.
The response was that "they unfortunately could not get a higher budget authorised from higher up" and that " sadly that affected the whole team".
So I asked since when can they get this authorised and the response was "recently". Then she quickly switched back to the question whether I'd stay with higher salary and other earlier requests met.
I was pretty salty at this point so I just sarcastically said "unfortunately I've already signed".
She then switched back to "ok, ok, but we really need your help! you know it, the x project will be a nightmare to keep in one piece without me".
I literally just didn't respond so then she continued "ok so then can you then help us out for just a few hours a month for x/hour? please"
Now the thing is that this last offer actually would have been super compelling but given everything else I would not want to rejoin this environment. Thankfully I had to say anyways that my new contract doesn't allow that.
So then belive it or not, she asked me if I could ask my new employer to change the contract to permit me to still work a few hours a month for them.
What. the. fuck.
After this I was super done so just kept responsing a few words to everything and shortly after that we called the meeting. I feel dumb to have stayed here so long and am glad that my new contract doesn't allow working for others as maybe my stupid ass would have considered the offer on the spot.9 -
College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.
I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.
This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.
Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.
Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.
The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.
Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.
Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.
And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.
And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!
But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.
My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.
If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.
Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.15 -
Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.
Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.
You know.
"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.
In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?
I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?
The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.
What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.
Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.
But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.
Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.
Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!
Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?
Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?8 -
My older brother just moved out today. For 18 years I've shared a room with him, and now he's gone. I have a ~30x10 foot room all to myself (it's the entire second floor of my house).
I do love that now I'm able to play music anytime, and with his stuff gone, it'll be less space taken up in general, that type of thing.
I've been in this room with him for over 8 years now, after my oldest brother moved out, and I've always had this feeling that one portion of the room was mine and the other portion was his. Now it's just...weird. I have both portions now. I have this whole big room to maintain myself. I don't have to worry about my stuff conflicting with his for whatever reason.
The past few weeks, when he's talked about moving out, I've always told him that I was looking forward to it, to having the whole room to myself. Now that he's gone, I just...can't. I can't bring myself to move his stuff that he hasn't taken over to the new house yet, or clean his part of the room.
When we were kids we didn't really get along, and I HATED sharing a room with him. But over time, as we grew up, we started to get along better, and for the past couple years, we've always just talked in the middle of the night when we were both awake. And now he's gone (the new house is maybe a 10 minute drive away), and I know he's not coming back. I know that this whole space is mine now.
I'm gonna miss the talks in the middle of the night, and us keeping each other in check (whenever one of us isn't home in the middle of the night we tend to text each other like "bruh where the fuck you at"), and waking up in the middle of the night (when I'm able to actually fall asleep kinda early) to see him playing Skyrim or Fallout. Hell, even coming home from work or wherever to see him passed the fuck out.
I know that I'm gonna have to clean the whole room soon, and that I'll just have to get over it. I've always been the one in my family that doesn't really show emotion very often, unless I get angry, so when people were crying earlier, I just sat there with an emotionless look on my face. But that's also because I wasn't really feeling much at the time, it didn't really hit until I got home and came upstairs to my room. Hell, right now I'm sitting here just expecting to hear his car alarm as he locks his car like I normally hear every night.5 -
OK I can't deal with this user anymore.
This morning I get a text. "My laptop isn't getting emails anymore I'm not sure if this is why?" And attached is a screenshot of an email purporting to be from "The <company name> Team". Which isn't even close to the sort of language our small business uses in emails. This email says that his O365 password will soon be expiring and he needs to download the attached (.htm) file so he can keep his password. Never mind the fact that the grammar is awful, the "from" address is cheesy and our O365 passwords don't expire. He went ahead and, in his words, "Tried several of his passwords but none of them worked." This is the second time in less than a year that he's done this and I thought we were very clear that these emails are never real, but I'll deal with that later.
I quickly log into the O365 admin portal and reset his password to a randomly-generated one. I set this to be permanent since this isn't actually a password he should ever be needing to type. I call him up and explain to him that it was a phishing email and he essentially just gave some random people his credentials so I needed to reset them. I then help him log into Outlook on his PC with the new password. Once he's in, he says "so how do I reset this temporary password?" I tell him that no, this is his permanent password now and he doesn't need to remember it because he shouldn't ever need to be typing it anyway. He says "No no no that won't work I can't remember this." (I smile and nod to myself at this point -- THAT'S THE IDEA). But I tell him when he is in the office we will store the password in a password manager in case he ever needs to get to it. Long pause follows. "Can't I just set it back to what it was so I can remember it?"10 -
I was getting a freelancer job to do some backend work for a company in India that is working for a huge company in Saudi Arabia.
The customer in india was my primary contact, I wasn't allowed to talk to the guys in Saudi Arabia. My contact, we'll call him Aman, asks if i can do frontend too. I decline. Now what follows were 4 weeks of backend work during which Aman called me 10-15 times per day via skype to ask me how I was progressing, and if "insert spec here" was already done. He even called me in the middle of the night, well aware of the different time zones.
But in the end all the work is done, Aman is happy. I request payment.
Aman: We can't pay you yet, you didn't do the frontend!
Me: I'm not doing frontend.
Aman: It's just a few simple changes and then we're done.
Me: Gnnn, fuck it, what do you need?
Aman: Our customer would like the frontend to look better.
Me: Ok, so what exactly should look better?
Aman: All of it.
Me: Do you have any specs?
Aman: No just make it look more modern.
Me: So you want me to rework the whole frontend? That's not just a few simple changes...
Aman: How long would you need?
Me: I actually don't do that kind of work.
Aman: We pay you double your hourly rate if you do this and finish it fast.
(This is were I should have just said no... but the greed...)
Me: Ok, but it will take me about 3 weeks to do that.
Aman: OK.
Me: Do you have any preferences as to how it should look?
Aman: No, just surprise us.
(After this sentence I really should have gotten the hell out of Dodge)
After working 3 weeks changing over 20.000 lines of CSS and most of the HTML I present Aman with the changes.
Aman: No our customer doesn't like the changes. Can you make a different version?
Me: What doesn't he like, any specifics, coloring, styling of lists or the buttons?
Aman: He doesn't like the whole thing. Please make us another version.
Me: Ok, you are the customer, but it would really help if you give me some pointers as to how it should look like.
Aman: Just do your best.
Me: ..., ok, that's helpful.
2 weeks later...
Aman: No our customer liked the version before better. But could you make it look more modern.
Me: *Bangs head against wall repeatedly*
Me: What do you mean by modern?
Aman: It should look more modern, as a whole.
Me: Ok, I get that, but could you give me an example?
Aman: Sends me a screenshot of the overview screen with all the elements encircled and modern written beside them.
1 week later...
Aman: The customer has decided, he likes the original version best. Can you undo all the changes?
Me: Sure but that'll take like 1 hour.
Aman: Oh by the way we were asked by accounting why the price for this project was so high?
Me: *hugh* *gnn* what?
Aman: Well at the beginning, you estimated the backend and frontend work to be done in 4 weeks.
Me: The frontend was never part of the original estimate.
Aman: Can you do anything concerning your hourly rate, so that we can get back to the original pricing.
Me: *make a mental note to never work with an intermediary company in india again and cancels the job requesting the due payment*
Luckily I got paid the full amount but not before having another 10 Skype call with Aman...17 -
Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.
I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.
Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.
Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.
Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.
Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.
Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.
If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:
if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.
That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!
Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.
The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.
The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!
It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.
But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.
I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.
The whole thing is a fail.8 -
[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"
........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND4 -
That's actually something that happened fairly recently.. just that I didn't have the energy left at the time to write it down. That, or I got my ass too drunk to properly write anything.. not sure actually.
So on paper I'm unemployed, but I do spend some time still on pretty much voluntary work for HackingVision, along with a handful of other people.
At the time, we were just doing the usual chit-chat in the admin channel, me still sick in my bed (actually that means that I wasn't drunk but really tired for once.. amazing!) and catching up to what happened, but unable to do any useful work in this sick state. So, tablet, typing on glass, right. I didn't have any keyboard attached at the time.
One of the staff members (a wanketeer from India) apparently had an assignment in a few hours for which he needed to write a server application in Java. Now, performance issues aside, I figured.. well I've got quite a bit of experience with servers, as well as some with client-server protocols. So I got thinking.. mail servers, way too overengineered. Web servers.. well that could work, I've done some basic netcat webservers that just sent an HTTP 200 OK and the file, those worked fine.. although super basic of course. And then there's IRC, which I've actually talked to an InspIRCd server through telnet before (which by the way is pretty much the only thing that telnet is still useful for, something that was never its purpose, lol) and realized that that protocol is actually quite easy to develop around. That's why I like it so much over modern chat protocols like XMPP, MQTT and whatnot. So I recommended that he'd write a little IRC server in Java. Or even just a chatbot like I attempted to at the time, considering that that's - with a stretch of course - a sort-of server too.
His fucking response however, so goddamn fucking infuriating. "If the protocol is so easy, then please write me down how to implement it in Java."
Essentially do his fucking work for him. I don't know Java, but as a fucking HackingVision admin, YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW THAT HACKERS CAN'T STAND LAZY CUNTS THAT CAN'T EVEN BE ASSED TO GOOGLE SHIT!!! If I wanted to deal with cunts like that, I'd have opened the page inbox with all its Fb h4xx0ring questions, not the fucking admin chat!
And type it on a goddamn fucking piece of glass, while fucking sick?! Get your ass fucked by a bobs and vegana horny fuck from the untouchable caste, because that's where you fucking belong for expecting THAT from me, you fucking bhenchod.
But at least I didn't get my ass enraged like that to say that to him in the admin chat. Although that probably wouldn't have been a bad thing, to get his feet right back on the ground again.1 -
This is something that happened 2 years ago.
1st year at uni, comp sci.
Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server
I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)
Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.
We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.
No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.
2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes
we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.
1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree
we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"
Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.
Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.
The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.
Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.
And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.
Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:
1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed
2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.
3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.
4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.
Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.3 -
I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.
Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.
However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.
The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.
I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.
Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.
What a fucking asshole.
So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.4 -
Okay guys, this is it!
Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.
So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)
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So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?
1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.
2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.
3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁
4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!
5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.
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For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?
1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...
2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/
3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...
4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/
5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...
6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/
7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/
8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...
9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/
10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...
Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?
1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/
4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/
5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/
8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/
That's it, folks.
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No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.
But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?7 -
Never EVER buy a Mac as your primary PC if you're a developer.
Back in 2014 I bought an iMac because I already had an iPhone, and being able to code on xCode and also have a Windows partition seemed perfect. It wasn't.
Soon enough, I started encountering issues. My storage was randomly filling up, my computer started getting slow despite me having a small number of start apps and still a lot of storage available, it was all a mess.
So - I installed Windows 10 using Bootcamp to use it as my main OS. All was great until I wanted a new partition of Windows so I can test some things out without damaging my stuff. I try multiple methods, none of which work because my disk is not in the right partition format, and I don't want to change it because I'd have to format the whole thing.
Whatever - I give up, and try going back to my normal partition, disappointed. Guess fucking what?! My Windows Boot was damaged! Yes, I shit you not!
So - not only was this absolute piece of shit not able to add just one more fucking partition with an OS on it, but it BROKE my main partition, and now I'm trying to recover it.
I've said it once and I'll say it again: Never EVER get a Mac as your primary computer, unless you only work on Mac/iPhone apps.
For paying 1300$, I was expecting a seamless experience with little to no issues - yet all I got is a computer that's fucking broken from it's very core.
Fuck you, Apple.13 -
So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.
First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)
It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.
Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.
But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.
After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.
I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.
I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.
Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.
I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.
I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.
I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.
Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.
No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.
No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!
So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!
I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.
Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.
Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.
Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf
Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.
Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.
I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.
I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.
Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!
I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.
Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.
I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!
What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.rant just like always eep; 1 character left! first day back from vacation miscommunication is the norm endless problems ruby6 -
I messed up. We have a senior executive that loves this phrase... "It's going to require all of us to make some sacrifices". 100% of the time he's talking about working 10, 12, or 14 hour days.
So after a few months of this I just chimed in with "this isn't church I don't give sacrifices to my employer. I get PAID for my work."
Honestly I can't say it slipped. I've been telling my wife the exact same phrase for a couple months now. Initially I wanted to discuss it with him directly. Maybe I could explain how making everyone work 14 hour days is not going to end well for us, short or long term. We already know the results short term. We got 50+ defects reported back in our first day of testing for a new project (I'm not on the project but we had a sort of "all hands on deck" meeting to talk about how we can "improve our process so that we don't make so many mistakes". I politely suggested move some people onto this project while we interview candidates. I volunteered to take some of the work items even. But that advice went ignored.
So that's why I asked to meet with the senior exec. He refused to even meet with me. Okay fine you're busy. I emailed him my concerns and suggested solutions. Never heard back. I knew he was going to pipe up with the sacrifice thing so I just blurted it out. It went ignored... So I guess we'll see if I have a job tomorrow or not.15 -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.rant code application bad project management annoying as hell bad code c++ bad client bad design application development16 -
I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.
In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.
Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."
In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.
We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.
As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.
Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.
It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.
But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?6 -
I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.
A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.
But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.
I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.
I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.
I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.
Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?
I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.
Maybe I should just start my own company.6 -
OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻♂️
OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.
OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.
In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.
Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.
But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!
I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...
Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.
I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)9 -
I was working at a mid size software company as an intern. Initially I wasn't going to get paid as it was organised through Uni. But then after some discussions with HR, they had agreed to pay me (sweet!). After 6 months of interning (and being paid) I talked with the CEO and he offered me a full time job after Uni. "We'll pay you now" he joked. I told him that the company was already paying me and I was very happy. "Well that's a mistake. You'll have to pay that back" So he wrote up a contract where I would work for them, but my salary would be reduced $15k over the year as "payment".
On that day I was pretty pissed, and I got an email from my current employer saying they were looking for grads. I applied and got the job! I ran away from my old job. I sent one email asking them if they wanted the money (as I wanted to be honest), but they didn't respond. I didn't try again and have kept the money, and am very happy at my current job!2 -
Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...
Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...
Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...
Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...
Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...
Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...
Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!
Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!
Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(
Talk about your highs and your lows.6 -
A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).
Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.
"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.
...
"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.
A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.
What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.
I did not get the job.2 -
!dev
This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.
I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...
Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...31 -
My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.
Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.
Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.
- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.
- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)
- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.
- Feedback is consistently ignored.
- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.
- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.
- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.
This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:
- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.
- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.
- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)1 -
Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.
So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.
So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.
First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.
Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).
This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.
So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).
And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).
They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.5 -
FUUUU!!!!!! 3h of colleagues work gone in sconds.. & yes, actually it is all my fault, even though I was not aware of being a totall ass at that time..
What happened?! You know the ctrl+s shortcut?! Yes? Weeeell...doesn't go well with oracle sql developer and packages.. o.O
I was totally unavare that I was typing in ctrl+s ctrl+s all the time. I know I do that with c# code.. Anyhow, when I first moved to sql developer from other tool I noticed that compile thingy.. Oooops, ok, let's remove that shortcut to not stab yourself absentmindenly and overwrite other peoples work.. OK that's taken care of, shortcuts removed and I go back to work..
It's been almost 6 months since the move & first incident and today I guess I did the same.. ctrl+s.. But this time I wasn't so lucky.
Coworker pissed off, that is not my procedure. When did you compile?! Someone overwrote my code..
Wasn't me.. Then I started thinking about ctrl+s.. OMFG!! I check this on another package, it compiled. O.o I almost died. I check the shortcuts. They are back! And even after removing them the package still compiled.. FML!! 😭😭😭😭
I removed them again & closed the tool. Reopended.. BACK!! We're back to fuck your life up!! Fuuuuuuu!!
Now I worry wtf else I fucked up without notice.. o.O hopefully not much.. I hope.. O.O boss will kill me...
BTW anyone knows how to really get rid of this feature?! Cuz for me its a bug (since I am buggy and press ctrl+s all the time.. )6 -
Partner of ours claimed they are going to update their api. No breakage. My hopes were low and they did not disappoint.
Soon after the new version of their api went live, of course, loads of breakage. And the email contact with them is really fun.
Me: "Hello, since your update we get the issue A. Here's the complete communication."
Them: "We did not change the existing behavior. You are doing X wrong. Repeat that one call during the step and you should be fine."
Me: "Thank you, if I repeat the call, it does indeed work, albeit slower, since we are now repeating calls. Furthermore, our application was consuming your api for years and we did not change anything. So why is that step necessary now? Only after your update do our logs show errors from your API. And by the way, we now also have a issue with B. Why is that?"
Them: "Oh that's because your query the endpoint with "Fnord", try "Baz".
Me: "Yes, I do know that we query it with "Fnord" as that is what a previous endpoint of yours is responding to us. Why are we getting "Fnord"? What request do I have to make to get a "Baz" back?"
It feels like a game of wackamole. Squash one issue, ten more will pop up. I am one step away from becoming active-aggressive.3 -
Best code performance incr. I made?
Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)
Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.
Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.
Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.
With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.
Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."
After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.
At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.
VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>
A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"9 -
> Worst work culture you've experienced?
It's a tie between my first to employers.
First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".
And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.
And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.
Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.
The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.
Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!
You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.3 -
Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".
It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.
13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."
It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).
Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.
Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.
More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.
We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.
A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.
We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.
Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.
Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.
Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.
After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.
More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.
After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.
In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.
About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.
...fuck that's a long read.5 -
How come it is so hard to find good developers. Have been doing interviews for a couple of weeks now (for a senior PHP developer role).
First round is me talking about the function and company, asking questions about candidates experience, wishes and we usually end in some tech conversations. Most of the resumes I got are pretty fucking good. I mean, experience with low-level languages, experience with the problems we need to solve here, contributions to open-source, experience in R and MathLab etc etc. On paper they look perfect.
For the second round I give them an assessment which they can do at home on their own machine in their own time. It's not a hard one, just some mathmatical problems they need to solve. A quick google GIVES the answer (no joke!!). But that's OK, I look at their code cleanliness, proper use of commenting so I can determine if they are solo-developers or fit good in a team and if they abstract repeated functions and make sure that they take their work seriously, you know the drill.
It pisses me off that I get BROKEN FUCKING CODE WHICH DOES NOT EVEN RUN and that I get code back which I look at and makes me vomit instantly, I mean, DO YOU EVEN TAKE YOUR PROFESSION SERIOUS? How dare you to ask for 50k the year, a lease-car, extra bonusses AND YOUR FUCKING CODE SPITS OUT COMPLETLY WRONG ANSWERS OR DOES NOT EVEN RUN WHAT THE FUCK DUDE GO BACK TO FROM WHICH EVER HOLE YOU CRAWLED OUT AND STOP WASTING OTHER PEOPLES TIME WITH YOUR FUCKING INCOMPENTENCE...19 -
TLDR: Read the post.
Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.
I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.
I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.
I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.
Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.
As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.
At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.
its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.
The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.
One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...
I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.5 -
The story of how I got my dream job.
I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.
--A few weeks pass--
It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!
I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)
The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.
--D-day--
I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!
Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.
We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.
I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.
--Two days later--
I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.
--A few months later--
I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.
I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).3 -
Soooo it's Monday........ 🤯
@C0D4 started the day fixing current projects defects (4 tickets smashed before coffee 💪)
Then after coffee, run a test coverage report and see a significant decline over the past few months, so spends a couple hours adding more tests to get some areas filled in - meh, nothing like 50+ lines per test... to test a if() statement but whatever - complex scenarios will be complex to get too, but no my tests break and I'm missing data I didn't know about🤦♂️
So let's comment all that out, and go to lunch ... mmmm lunch.
Get back, start working on those again, and then get handed a new issue, so comment that all back out again, ( ok I know what you're thinking, but I'm working in an environment that does not use git for deployments - don't ask, real pain in the ass I haven't had time to invest into yet - but as code versioning only) anywho, starts to workout this new issue but don't figure it out, enter a 30 minute meeting.................. yea that was 2 hours later but was a very practical whiteboard session only to work out I have something like 16-20 weeks of work over 4-5 projects to get out in like 6 weeks... hahahahahahaha fml..... oh and that's excluding another project which had a 6 weeks of work in the pipeline to get to somehow.... I'm not seeing this one happening, and probably conflicting projects needed on top of that down the track... but we'll leave those out for now!
Whoot is fucking home time!!!
🤷♂️I'm starting to think I'm like a team of 5-10 devs right now, maybe I should start asking for 5-10x more 😏
#letsBringOnTuesday!!!!4 -
So I'm writing some multithreaded shit in C that is supposed to work cross-platform. MingW has Posix threads for Windows, so that saved already half of the platform dependency. The other half was that these threads need to run external programs.
Well, there's system(), right? Uhm yes, but it sucks. It's incredibly slow on Windows, and it looks like you can have only one system() call ongoing at the same time. Which kinda defeats the multithreaded driver. Ok, but there's CreateProcessA(), and that doesn't suck.
Fine, now for Linux. The fork/exec hack is quite ugly, but it works and is even fast. Just never use fork() without immediate exec(). First try under Cygwin... crap I fork bombed my system! What is this shit? Ah I fucked up the path names so that the external executable couldn't be run.
Lesson learnt: put an exit() right after the exec() in the path for child process. Should never be reached, but if it goes there, the exit() at least prevents a fork bomb.
Well yeah, sort of works under Cygwin, but only with up to 3 threads. Beyond that, it seems like fork() at some point gives two processes the same PID, and then shit hangs.
Even slapping a mutex around the fork and releasing it only in the parent process didn't help. Fork in Cygwin is like a fork in the ass. posix_spawn() should work better because it can be mapped more easily to the Windows model, but still no dice.
OK, testing under real Linux. Yeah, no issues with that one! But instead, I get some obscure "free(): invalid size" abort. What the fuck would that even mean?! Checking my free() calls: all fine.
Time to fire up GDB in the terminal! Put a catch on the abort signal, mh got just hex data. Shit I forgot to compile with -O0 and -g. Next try. Backtrace shows the full call trace, back to the originating line in my program - which is fclose() on a file.
Ahhh I remember! Under Linux, fclosing a file that is already closed makes the program crash. So probably I was closing it twice. Checking back.. yeah that's where it was.
Shit runs fast on several cores now!8 -
Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.
After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.
While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.
I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.
I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.
I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.
There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.3 -
Me, the only iOS dev at work one day, and colleague (who we'll call AndroidBoy), the only Android dev at work that same day (he's been working with us for less than two months). There was a change in one of the jsons we received from the server: instead of receiving a list, we now received a dictionary with strings as keys and lists as values. My iOS colleague had already made this modification on our parse function the day before.
AndroidBoy: "Hey what happened with the json?"
Me: "Oh, well instead of parsing a list, we'll parse a dictionary and get the list from each key. You basically have to do the same thing, only this time the lists are organized into categories."
AndroidBoy: "Oh, ok. But I don't know how to parse a dictionary while using Retrofit." (Context: Retrofit is a framework for request handling - correct me if I am mistaken, that's just what I've been told)
Me: "Sucks, dude, can't help ya. I've never worked with that and don't have that much exp. with Android."
I go out for a cigarette break. When I return, AndroidBoy is nowhere to be seen and suddenly I can't seem to get that data in my app. AndroidBoy comes in from the room where the backend colleagues work.
AndroidBoy: "Solved it!"
Me: "Solved what?"
AndroidBoy: "I told them to change back to a list and just put the key inside the objects of the list."
... he used the precious time of the backend colleagues to change the thing back hust because he was too lazy to search how to parse a dictionary. I was so amazed by his answer, that I didn't know whether to laugh, scream at him or punch him in the face. Not to mention the fact that now I had to revert just so he could avoid that extra work.5 -
I dropped my kid off at preschool and went my way home.
She's 2 so I transport her on a stroller.
While coming back, I came across an old lady sweeping the sidewalk of her house, and it got narrow to pass through because there was a tree next to her.
I carefully slowed down as to not collide with her, and while going through, we noticed each other.
I did a tiny smile as a way of saying "hi" like I usually do to people on the street.
To which she gave back the most innocent and sweet smile I've ever seen a stranger give on the street.
I could honestly feel my heart crack as it happened.
I guess the stroller must have caused her sympathy thus that reaction.
(which is why I like going around with the stroller, because people tend to treat you nicely which feels nice, like butterflies)
I know it might seem like an ordinary story without a punchline, but let me explain that I walk this city everyday.
And even though the people here is very nice compared to other cities I've lived in, it is very rare to get smiled at with such joy.
You might still think that is not a good story. But I can explain its relevance.
As some of you know, I post triggering content on this account, closeted parts of me that I normally hide,
Such as sexual stuff, some people think I'm a degenerate but I like to think I just have normal sexual thoughts that don't affect others in real life AT ALL.
And I'm also very argumentative, again, some people might see it as troll behaviour. On my side though, I just don't like bullshit and call it out when I see it.
But with this post, I'm not trying to be more likable or negate all the weird shit I said. This post is just another closeted part of me, being emotional.
And the reason I hide that is because it is not generally well accepted when a man is sensitive, at least where I'm from.
For example, if a female friend at work had a nice haircut, sometimes I feel the urge to be like "omg girl you look so prettyyyy!!!!".
But if I did that I know what will happen based on DIRECT experience: people will assume I'm gay or weak, and will make fun of that.
Or the actual friend will think I'm hitting on her.
No, fucking thank you, not having that shit.
But even if people accepted that, they just can't conceive I'm also very direct and honest, so when they do get to know me better, they get shocked.
So what do I do? I just hide that. That might change in the future, but I don't have the energy right now to deal with some people's simplemindedness.
I'm not making any sort of political statement, like "people should be treat me correctly or else get fired because of offending my gender".
But I'm not gonna lie, it would feel very nice if I was around more progressive people. I wished I had just just standard male behaviour and thoughts.
I guess some people in progressive cities are more accepting of the whole gender fluid thing, so I wished I lived in one (let me clarify though, I'm not a mindless gender fanatic).
I'm also not perfect and sometimes the line between "I love your haircut" and "I'm into you" blurs the fuck out, so that's on me... I don't know if it's something I can change though...
Hopefully all this shit I'm saying doesn't make me look like a lunatic. Veeeery hopefully.
Though, If you think for real I'm a lunatic or bad person, you can suck donkey dick.14 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
Look, I get that it's really tricky to assess whether someone is or isn't skilled going solely by their profile.
That's alright.
What isn't center of the cosmic rectum alright with the fucking buttsauce infested state of interviews is that you give me the most far fetched and convoluted nonsense to solve and then put me on a fucking timer.
And since there isn't a human being on the other side, I can't even ask for clarification nor walk them through my reasoning. No, eat shit you cunt juice swallowing mother fucker, anal annhilation on your whole family with a black cock stretching from Zimbabwe to Singapore, we don't care about this "reasoning" you speak of. Fuck that shit! We just hang out here, handing out tricks in the back alley and smoking opium with vietnamese prostitutes, up your fucking ass with reason.
Let me tell you something mister, I'm gonna shove a LITERAL TON of putrid gorilla SHIT down your whore mouth then cum all over your face and tits, let's see how you like THAT.
Cherry on top: by the time I began figuring out where my initial approach was wrong, it was too late. Get that? L'esprit d'escalier, bitch. I began to understand the problem AFTER the timer was up. I could solve it now, except it wouldn't do me any fucking good.
The problem? Locate the topmost 2x2 block inside a matrix whose values fall within a particular range. It's easy! But if you don't explain it properly, I have to sit down re-reading the description and think about what the actual fuck is this cancerous liquid queef that just got forcefully injected into my eyes.
But since I can't spend too much time trying to comperfukenhend this two dollar handjob of a task, which I'd rather swap for teabagging a hairy ass herpes testicle sack, there's rushing in to try and make sense of this shit as I type.
So I'm about 10 minutes down or so already, 35 to go. I finally decipher that I should get the XY coords of each element within the specified range, then we'll walk an array of those coordinates and check for adjacency. Easy! Done, and done.
Another 10 minutes down, all checks in place. TEST. Wait, wat? Where's the output? WHERE. THE FUCK. IS. THE OUTPUT?! BITCH GIMME AN ANSWER. I COUT'D THE RETURN AND CAN SEE THE TERMINAL BUT ITS NOT SHOWING ME ANYTHINGGG?! UUUGHHH FUCKKFKFKFKFKFKFKFUFUFUFFKFK (...)
Alright, we have about 20 minutes left to finish this motorsaw colonoscopy, and I can't see what my code is outputting so I'm walking through the code myself trying to figure out if this will work. Oh, look at that I have to MANUALLY click this fucking misaligned text that says "clear" in order for any new output to register. Lovely, 10/10 web design, I will violate your armpits with an octopus soaked in rabid bear piss.
Mmmh, looks like I got this wrong. Figures. I'm building the array of coordinates sequentially, as a one dimentional list, which is very inconvenient for finding adjacent elements. No problem, let's try and fix that aaaaaand... SHIT IM ALMOST OUT OF TIME.
QUICK LYEB, QUICK!! REMEMBER WHAT FISCELLA TAUGHT YOU, IN BETWEEN MOLESTING YOUR SOUL WITH 16-BIT I/O CONSOLE PROBLEMS, LIKE THAT BITCH SNOWFALL THING YOU HAD TO SOLVE FOR A FRIEND USING TURBO C ON A FUCKING TOASTER IN COMPUTER LAB! RUN MOTHERFUCKER RUN!!!
I'm SWEATING. HEAVILY. I'm STEAMING, NON-EROTICALLY. Less than 10 minutes left. I'm trying to correct the code I have, but I start making MORE dumbfuck mistakes because I'm in a hurry!
5 minutes left. As I hit this point of no return, I realize exactly where my initial reasoning went wrong, and how I could fix it, but I can't because I don't have enough time. Sadface.
So I hastily put together skeleton of the correct implementation, and as the clock is nearly up, I write a comment explaining the bits I can't get to write. Page up, top of file, type "the editor was shit LMAO" and comment it out. SUBMIT.
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Also hi ;>5 -
Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".
We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.
It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]
It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.
It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.
And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.
What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.
Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.
1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.5 -
This day I have received the most glorious news in e-pistolary form. For some years, I was suffering in support of a client who was, well, insufferable. My presence there paralleled the divine comedy in both essence and fact.
I opened the missive, expecting another plea to bail them out of whatever clusterfuck they found themselves in. Instead, what I found was something truly magical.
"Hey Human,
I hope this finds you well. I'm not sure if you remember a few years back, we were trying to decide between IBM Cloud and AWS. Well, after years of battling FF*, we're finally moving ahead with AWS. He failed one too many times to deliver anything visibly. After you left, there was no one left he could use to steal credit, ideas, and work.
FF is still pushing to have them use IBM cloud as a "warm backup" in the event "AWS fails." We will see where that goes.
I figured you'd like to know; you were the void in the wilderness for a long time. I don't want to think about how much time we could have saved if we had just listened.
PeeEm**"
This event represents a personal victory, albeit belated, over a few peoples' absurd amount of privilege. Towards the end, I was vicious about my contestation to the insanity of adopting a desperate hedge attempt-as-cloud offering from a failing company. Some examples:
// cloud 'strategy meeting'
Moi: What cloud platform are we looking at using?
FF: We're looking at IBM cloud and AWS as a second.
Moi: Why is that? I understand you're obligated to rep your offering first, but that decision doesn't seem to have the customer's best interest at heart.
FF: IBM cloud is a market leader; AWS isn't as good.
Moi: I see. I mean, that's the tech equivalent of the company's fleet management considering monkeys on tricycles as a strong competitor to service trucks, but I get what you mean.
// steering meeting
Director: Who can we look to as an example? Who is currently using the IBM cloud?
Moi: No one; they account for a single-digit portion of the actual cloud market. Their long game to sell you a "Hybrid Cloud," which means put some front end payload in a CDN, and buy n-frame units of IBM z servers for the DC with IBM gateway appliances acting as connective tissue. So it's not the cloud at all, really.
Director: How does it compare in cost?
Moi: It's generally 40% more expensive than other clouds, and it only goes higher as you option their software.
Director: What about Watson? I hear Watson is good?
Moi: It's a brand name. Most of the "Watson" product is just a facade on top of FOSS products like Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc.
Director: Those were words. They sounded good. FF say it's good tho so we'll believe him because we're from the same city.
Moi: *deletes Director from LinkedIn*
Moral of the story: Never trust a vendor that only recommends their products.
*FF = FatFuck - an embarrassingly rotund individual whose girth is roughly equivalent to his height. He shit his way into an IBM architect position in his mid-20s purely due to winning the visa lottery. He had fake hair glued to his head for his wedding to hide his male pattern baldness; his arrange-married wife undoubtedly cries herself to sleep after sex.
**PeeEm - the then project manager, now portfolio manager of some satellite projects. An overall decent human being, capable.9 -
So, it's time to fucking rant!
Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.
A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.
He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.
In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.
So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.
- a week later
The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/
He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"
This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."
The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.
After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.
In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.
- 2 Weeks later
This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"
This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...
1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.
So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.
- 2 weeks later
Customer leaves. Good riddance.
- sometime later
I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.
It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.
To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS
I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.2 -
Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.
Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.
I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.
Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.
Anyway, coming to the update part.
I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).
Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.
I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.
I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.
I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.
I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.
I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.
Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'
He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.
Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.
For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.
Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.
Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.
I have two observations I want to share with you all.
1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.
2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.
I now await for the feedback.
In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.
Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.
It went 1000x better than Facebook.
I await the feedback from them as well.
I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.
180° was for Booking.com
Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.
Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.
2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.30 -
Most upsetting interview rejection?
Back when I graduated college, I did the usual rounds of interviews with insurance companies, banks, various other institutional businesses set up by the college's career center.
One local insurance company interview I thought went great. Usual 'Where do you see yourself in 5 years?' type questions, told her about my job history, very high level type stuff.
Couple of weeks later I get a letter in the mail and after the usual 'It was great to meet you blah blah blah', it ended with
'State Farm will never consider you for a position with our company.'
Never?! My then fiance (now wife) yelled "WHAT DID YOU DO?!!!" and I racked my brain for anything I might have said or done. The HR lady was attractive, but I didn't stare at any body parts and I didn't make any weird sexual advances (I was nervous enough without *that* going thru my mind).
The college career center floods the local companies with graduates and I was #5 in the waiting room that day. My only guess was they got me confused with someone else.
My fiance wanted me to call them immediately to straighten out any misunderstanding, but I knew what was done, was done. It's not like they would realize "Oh, that's right, it was Bob that kept looking at Karen's breasts, not you...come work for us!" Besides, why would I want to work someplace that didn't know/care who I was?6 -
When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.
It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.
The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.
I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.
Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.
I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.2 -
Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.
Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?
Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.
So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.
The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.
Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?
Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.
At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.
And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.
So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!
Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!8 -
How do you guys/girls explain to potential new customers that you can perfectly work in a structured business environment and follow the rules, but also that you're assertive enough to oppose desicions being made based on bias, misunderstanding, fanboyism, or grave stupidity.
I just got informed from a freelance position that they would have hired me if it were not for my 'rebellious nature towards customers'
I don't oppose customers, i oppose stupidity unfounded.
Example from experience
> me working in a helodesk support position, all windows computer.
> new mgr comes into office, is a douche and complete mac fanboy
> wants all computers that are FINALLY working decent for some time in the entire department replaced with mac's... Back at 2010.
> whole team, even disliking microsoft themselves, are telling mgr that's a bad, dangerously dumb idea, expensive too, different OS, different software mgmt making, back then integration microsoft and apple was beyond diarhea... Several other issues the senior devs and admins pointed out
>mgr: 'but aple is soh much better, like a billion times better, hurrduurrrrr'
His decision passed somehow to the board..
> All stations from our customers get changed...we don't get a single machine to try out problems because overspending
> we are most of the time unable to help out customers because we still have pc's...
> mgr asks team why performance drops after 1 month
> we compared performance graph with his starting date of mgr, see clear drop after mgr's plan implemented...
> board stilll stands by mgr, gets praise for 'bold changes in the company', but appears to be some associate's son
> two main seniors leave after 15 years of employment, in three months, 80% of staff leaves.
> we canr fix the problems, we are not dev's , we get shit from all sides, i was still a junior in the industry so i worked as a slave inside that job.
> eventually get fired due to 'bad performance'
> mgr loses entire team... 'Hey why don't we outsource this dept to south africa, it's a lot cheaper! '
now that company is an it hellhouse where everyone get clinically depressed from sitting atbtheir station...
This is what i wish to oppose!
How to make that clear!4 -
I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.
At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!
It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.
One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!
Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!
Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.
Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.
Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.
Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.
Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?
DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!
Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?
Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.
After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.
Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)3 -
So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.
Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.
This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.
She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".
You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.
A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.
The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.
That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.
She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.
After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.
Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...
At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.
After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.
Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.
FUCK!2 -
this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.
2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.
The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:
1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck
3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/
4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it" -
Fuck Homestead.
For the fortune of you not to know, Homestead is a sad attempt at a Wix-like build your own website platform.
However, Homestead is the most unusable piece of shit platform that humans have ever had the misery of interacting with
Lets start off with the login page. The login page is small, unresponsive and half the time just deletes your input whenever you press submit.
It's important to note that unless you're running MacOS or Windows, Homestead will send to an error page on which there's a link to contact support, but pressing that link requires MacOS or Windows.
Fine, I'll fiddle around with my user-agent, and we'll be in soon enough. But now we come to the joy that is the website editor itself.
The website editor is clunky, hard to use, and has enough menus and submenus and sidebars to make the Jira UI shake with fear. Each interface option label is either ridiculously ambiguous or just straight up wrong. The built-in HTML editor doesn't support HTML5, in the name of "browser compatibility".
CSS? Pah! Who needs it! Our psuedo-90s skeuomorphic ugly-as-shit prebuilt styles will work just fine. Responsive design? Bullshit! Nobody uses a smartphone to browse the web, so why do we need to handle it?
Uploading a file? Good fucking luck buddy. There's a complicated dance among the minefield of pop-ups that ask you to confirm some shit or modify some shit and you gotta click the right option each time or else the file won't upload.
Wanna use https like 86% of the entire web and all modern websites? That's a premium feature. Fork over an extra $10 a month
Ok ok, I made it through all that. Dig through the thousands of menus to find the 'publish changes' button, and sigh with relief.
Open up a private browser tab to check my work, and nope. The site looks like shit, even by Homestead's standards. That's because Homestead claims to be a WYSIWYG editor, but it's a damn lie. The site looks like shit, so it's time do dive back into the hellhole that is this damn site editor.
And rinse and repeat. Deal with the shitty editor, publish, and pray it doesn't look like garbage. Be too scared to test on other devices because this flaming pile of dog shit pretending to be a website is bad enough on my device.
Two more months, then I'm done with this client. Someone get me a drink4 -
developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.
manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).
spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.
... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )
finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code
get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.
we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"
PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )
WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.
This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?
I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )
Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏11 -
IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.
You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).
Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.
Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.
At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).
People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".
Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.
I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.
Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.
The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.
Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).
I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.8 -
*cracks knuckles*
Boy was I happy to see this when I opened devRant up.
So for starters, more group projects are necessary. Many reasons why. To begin with, it allows for more complex programs than getting some input and printing some shit out. It also develops interpersonal skills (I hate people too, but when you go out to look for work you'll be with them, so better get used to it soon). If a platform like GitHub is used, it's easy to track who did what, and see what each person in the group did, so it should be fairly easy to discourage lazy asses.
Beyond that, stop giving us half completed assignments and asking us to fill in a function/method. Yes, it will take longer. But one doesn't learn to program by doing the minimum required work, you've got to crash and burn a lot in order to git gud. So ffs, let us do all the work. We're like AI, we learn through reinforcement learning.
Stop giving us a spec to follow. We'll do plenty of that in the future, right now we need to make mistakes, not be held by the hand all the way. Let us do dumb shit so you can fail us and tell us our code is repulsive, and this other way was better. Explain why. That's how people learn, not by telling us what each function should return, what can and can't be used, etc. And if you can't come up with a scenario in which what you're teaching is useful, then maybe you're not teaching us the right material.
I'll leave it at that for today... But I'll be back 😈 -
A few months ago I bought an e scooter to get from home to work.
The backstory to this:
My car broke down on the highway, my sister's car broke down on the highway and we didn't have another car apart of my dad's anymore.
Which means I had to look for another car. The cars between 1k-5k € are dogshit and when you want to register the car you have to have an appointment at a government building which happens to be closed when I'm getting out of my 8-5 job.
I had enough and bought an e scooter.
Now back to now:
In the beginning it was cool.
Could get anywhere I wanted to in combination with the Germany ticket. Except for the Netherlands where my beautiful girlfriend is.
There I can legally not use it but that's ok lol.
The German government is hyping e mobility and public transportation up, but for what?
E mobility currently sucks ass with all the shit laws for e.g. e scooters and when you want to transport it in public transport, people give you weird looks, the bus driver wants you to buy a bicycle ticket even if I can fold the e scooter and more. The scanners in the bus of the German buses cannot read my German ticket for some reason and every bus driver in my city knows that and they just look at it and are like "Ok, you're cool. Continue moving", but this old grandma looking ass bitch is like "No, according to the law you need to show it to the scanner and not to me". I fucking know. I've been doing this shit for a year and you know that but it doesn't work. It says to me that I need to show it to you instead of to the scanner bc this machine is fucking dumb and apparently I'm holding the people because I started a discussion with her. This driver ... ugh. The buses in my city come whenever they want as well.
Like sometimes 5 minutes earlier, sometimes up to 30 minutes later.
Inconsistent motherfuckers and I am the one making everyone wait? Suck my donkey kong balls.
German trains... well you know how that goes. It doesn't. It sucks ass.
Every single fucking train line has a problem. Either a previous train has something, or staff is missing, or a technical error or the train driver's ass is itchy and needs scratches from his assistant. There's always something.
When I want to travelled home from my gf I spent not lying 8 fucking hours on the trains on Sunday.
Normally it takes max. 5 hours with a train and 3-4 hours with a car.
I can also go on a rant because of the Dutch train system because it also sucks, BUT they are reliable. They are there when they say they are gonna be there. 99% of the times.
In Germany it is somewhere at 10%.
Now I realized that e scooters are uncomfortable and expensive toys who need maintenance just like a car but nonetheless they are reliable unlike the public transport.
In the winter it will be even worse.
Electrical cars are way expensive and affordable electrical cars you need to keep charging every few baby steps.
I also looked at 125ccm motorcycles which you can drive if you upgrade your existing car driver's license, but ngl that's a scam. Not worth it at all.
And that's why I am looking for a traditional car now. E mobility is not there yet in Germany and public transport is not doable at this moment.15 -
I would like to rant one more time about my internship.
I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.
To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.
The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.
We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.
Here began the troubles.
We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.
She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.
The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.
To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.
Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.
Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.
Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.
Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.
They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.
Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.
Fucking this shit.
I'm in France.
EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...7 -
I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:
I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'
Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.
I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.
But it ended and I let it go.
In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.
I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.
And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*
And that's how I got my current job.
*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.) -
I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.
So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.
So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...
I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.
There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?
Hmm...
So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?
So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.
What?
I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.
Deep breath.
Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.
Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.
It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...
When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.
It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?
Ahem...
I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.
Blaaargh!
Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.
But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!
FFS!
I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.
Oh no, that would have been too easy.
I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.
I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!
The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.
0/10, would not recommend.11 -
A /thread.
I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.
This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.
START:
As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.
The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.
These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.
These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.
And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????
While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.
500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.
A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH
In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.
EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.
This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.
ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???
are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???
Fuck You.
This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.
Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???
Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?
Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.
1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.
2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.
????
This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.
Will post part 2 later.8 -
So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.
That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.
I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.
My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.
To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.
I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.
Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.
I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.
I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?
I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.
Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.5 -
This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!
So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.
I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.
I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!
IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!
In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.
I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!
When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.
In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL
In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!
IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.
Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.
I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.
Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.
If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.
Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.
For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!
Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!5 -
Story Time!
Tittle: About Larry.
Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.
Setting: Years ago, non coding job.
I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.
Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.
Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.
So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.
My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.
Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.
The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).
Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).
Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.
I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."
Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.
-Plot Twist Incoming-
Long story short, my manager says:
"Laura IS Larry..."
O
M
G
I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).
Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.
Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??
Thank god I didn't send that email...
I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.
After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.
Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...
One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.
HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).
Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).
HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.27 -
Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit
Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.
I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.
I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:
- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10
uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.
So here's where the story becomes a rant.
In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.
And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.
So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.
The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?
gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3
(:1 -
A Rant that took my attention on MacRhumors forum.
.
I pre-calculated projected actual overall cost of owning my i5/5/256 Haswell Air, which I got for $1500.
After calculations, this machine would cost me about $3000 for 3 years of use.
(Apple Care, MS Office Business, Parallels, Thunderbolt adapter to HDMI, Case... and so on).
Yea... A lot of people think it's all about the laptop with Apple. nah... not at all. There's a reason Apple is gradually dropping the price of their laptops.
They are slowly moving to a razor and blade business model... which basically is exactly what it sounds like - you buy the razor which isn't too expensive, but you've got no choice but to buy expensive additional blades.
I doubt Apple is making much money from laptop sales alone... well definitely not as much as they were making 5 years or so ago (remember the original air was about $1800 for base model, and if i remember correctly - $1000 additional dollars to upgrade to 64GB SSD from the base HDD.
Yes, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR 64GB SSD!
Well, anyways, the point is that Apple no longer makes them BIG bucks from the laptop alone, but they still make good profits from upgrades. $300 to go to 512GB SSD from 256, $100 for 4GB extra ram, and $150 for a small bump in processor. They make good profits from these as well.
But that's not where they make mo money. It's once you buy the Macbook, they've got you trapped in their walled garden for life. Every single apple accessory is ridiculously overpriced (compared to market standards of similar-same products).
And Apple makes their own cables and ports. So you have to buy exclusively for Apple products. Every now and then they will change even their own ports and cables, so you have to buy more.
Software is exclusive. You have no choice but to buy what apple offers... or run windows/linux on your Mac.
This is a douche level move comparable to say Mircrosoft kept changing the usb port every 2-3 years, and have exclusive rights to sell the devices that plug in.
No, instead, Intel-Microsoft and them guys make ports and cables as universal as possible.
Can you imagine if USB3.0 was thinner and not backwards compatible with usb2.0 devices?
Well, if it belonged to Apple that's how it would be.
This is why I held out so long before buying an apple laptop. Sure, I had the ipod classic, ipod touch, and more recently iPad Retina... but never a laptop.
I was always against apple.
But I factored in the pros and cons, and I realized I needed to go OS X. I've been fudged by one virus or another during my years of Windows usage. Trojans, spywares. meh.
I needed a top-notch device that I can carry with me around the world and use for any task which is work related. I figured $3000 was a fair price to pay for it.
No, not $1500... but $3000. Also I 'm dead happy I don't have to worry about heat issues anymore. This is a masterpiece. $3000 for 3 years equals $1000 a year, fair price to pay for security, comfort, and most importantly - reliability. (of course awesome battery is superawesome).
Okay I'm going to stop ranting. I just wish people factored in additional costs from owning an a mac. Expenses don't end when you bring the machine home.
I'm not even going to mention how they utilize technology-push to get you to buy a Thunderbolt display, or now with the new Air - to get a time capsule (AC compatible).
It's all about the blades, with Apple. And once you go Mac, you likely won't go back... hence all the student discounts and benefits. They're baiting you to be a Mac user for life!
Apple Marketing is the ultimate.
source: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...3 -
I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.
MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).
- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.
Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.
- 2 app info pages?
Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.
The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.
Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.
- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app
It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.
- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken
Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?
They really, REALLY want to be Apple.
Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.
Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.
They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card
If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:
- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM
What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.
So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.11 -
Wordpress.....
God, why..
Okay, so my company has deep roots with wordpress websites, which is, well fine, and at some point they needed portal that would do something but I was bussy doing other project for our child company, so our frontend slapped together "portal" in wordpress. So I dont even know if I understand that properly whats going on, but today buddy came with help request to wordpress.
I had to look through wordpress database and was like.... FML hard.
Okay, fuck it, let's try to make it work. So, I needed to get random category (using get_terms), check it's ->count and if its greater than X show it on page. I came to done halfway, the random part wasn't working.
Okay, made it work after initial struggle with "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?! AND THAT?? AND THAT?!?!??! ;-;" and now comes the kicker. It has ACF installed and it has additional category in ACF. And it should check count of posts within the category that have certain ACF value.
After awhile I just said "this shouldn't be done on wordpress, no idea how to make it work".
What I seen is like... it hurts me on so many levels... My head wants to explode...
Can I get back to writing normal code now? ;-; Im fed up patching logic in frontend (I dont even know if that's `the wordpress way` but that's what they did) -
How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts
Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.
About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.
Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?
Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.
What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.
So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.
Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???
Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.
So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.
So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.
But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.
Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.
Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.
Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.
so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.
So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.
I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.3 -
So, just pulled another all-nighter..
On our platform I switched a quite big customer to another stock keeping system to pull them into automatic FEFO handling etc. Just a better stock keeping system overall.. I made it.. *self hi-5*
Evidently the crons caught that change, and CLEARED ALL THE STOCK LEVELS as they're now managed by said system...
Had to pull the counts, locations, expiry dates and lot numbers from the history table and old database fields, add them to an Excel sheet and then add all gathered locations by hand back into the new system, whilst also setting the new settings for them.
39 unique products that were gathered over 190+ sku objects... (Somebody didn't get object oriented, or was trying to KISS themselves, clearly...)
That's 6 hours of extra work for a stupid fuck up.. Oops? (:rant warehouse fuck up fuck dedication suspense stock keeping all nighter accident fulfillment dangit don't worry we'll test in production5 -
I can't decide on a linux distro because all I've tried are great. Seriously.
I'd call myself a novice-to-intermediate linux user (heavy on the novice part) and since I work as a web developer it's been a great learning experience to use the same OS on my workstation as the webservers my projects run on. (Ie I started out with Ubuntu and a LAMP setup).
The thing is I distrohop ad infinitum... Feels like I've tried out every desktop environment known to mankind (I just can't stop myself when I see a new one or a new take on an old one) and I've dipped my toes in Arch territory to. Loved Antergos when that still was a thing. Found EndeavourOS this weekend, kernel panic ensued. I'm a noob with sudo and that's never a good thing. 😆 (Try out in a virtual machine first you say? Bah. Where's the fun in that?!)
So now I'm on Linux Mint w Cinnamon because why not. (Because it's sluggish and boring, that's why...) I had to just get something up and running quickly so I could get back to work. 😬
But one day in and I'm realising I actually miss GNOME. And Ubuntu feels like home. I would feel much cooler using Arch but honestly I don't think I can be trusted with it. I love tinkering with settings, look and feel and whatnot but I can honestly do that just as well in an Ubuntu/GNOME environment.
Maybe Pop!_OS... could be something for me. 😏20 -
Modern technology is absolutely bullshit
I can't even
Now my keyboard on my phone is even too broken to complain about it
I wanted to look at someone's post history on a forum
To do so the forum wants an account. Ok. So I gave it my old junk Hotmail account during sign up for it to send me an email confirm so I can make the account so I can search. Well I'm refreshing this account for this confirm account email through the Gmail app on my phone because who even checks emails on computers anymore
Turns out, aside from this Hotmail spam email account having a lot of junk emails (it is my junk email account), there's this little pop-up that happens SOMETIMES claiming that it can't sync. I checked inbox and spam and the email isn't in there. So 1 out of 10 times I refresh there's this little "cannot sync" message that pops up and I click it. It claims my storage on my phone is too full to sync. Ok.
So I go try to find storage through the settings in my phone. It doesn't exist as a category anymore apparently. Thankfully phones have a search feature now -- because we can't have sane settings anymore so here's a search feature. First result it gives me is just device info. That's useless. It's just the hardware specs for my phone
Second it shows storage. 90% full apparently. That's odd. I have 132 gb. Thankfully it subdivided it by what's taking up space but it doesn't make much sense and a bunch of the categories don't open to anything
Apparently the fucking android operating system is 32 GB now? Well you're fucked if you wanna remove that. Apparently years of photos and videos is 20 gb, I can back those up and delete them. Similarly I have downloads in folders, and that's about 20 gb
Why are there 20 GB of apps? I literally have no apps!
Part of apps? Wtf is Gboard and why is it a gig
Why is my WEATHER APP using a gig of storage?
And none of the apps can I remove the storage they're using. The cache is like 600kb, and I can delete all data and it's using like 60 MB. So the fucking weather app executable itself is a gig of space? Wtf?
I deleted the data for Gboard and turns out that's the keyboard. So now all my keyboard settings are fucked.
Thankfully I wrote syncing scripts ages ago to sync various folders from my phone to my external HDD. I just had to connect it to the laptop and run the script on the external HDD. Problem? Well turns out no matter what I do I can't get the laptop to connect to the phone if it's USB file transfer mode. I can do photos. But this is gonna be more than photos.
So I do my sync backup script from the laptop to the external HDD. This will sync the camera, since I have sync thing sync my laptop and phone all the time, so I can just sync the laptop to the external HDD and then delete the older photos and get 20gb. Quick fix for now
Why do I need this quick fix?
Well
Get this
I've been having issues with my Gmail client for ages. It just won't display new email notifications which is really annoying because I need to know when emails get sent to me.
Now I'm thinking, maybe I can de-sync older emails and have more storage space maybe? But that's not an option anywhere. Actually, I can't even unconnect an email address from my phone. Gmail doesn't even let you do that
What the flying fuck is the state of modern technology
Now I have to go figure out what my fucking settings were for my stupid phone keyboard
The 90s were much fucking saner than this garbage. I don't need a 32 GB operating system on a phone. Is this fucking windows 8? And let me fucking tell YOU how many fucking emails you should sync to my phone. Holy shit what the fuck is all this
At least my Linux scripts fucking work like I wrote them9 -
Below is a transcript from work Slack today. Only the names and some code are changed. It ended up causing a bit of drama. DevRanters, what do you take from this?
---
Delivery Lead:
Hey Gang. What's the blocker for FEATURE-123?
Dev1:
FEATURE-122 crashed on iOS app when viewing Feature Introduction page.
Teach Lead:
I've talked about this with Dev1 on a side channel.
And diagnosed the stack trace.
It looks like there is/was some bad handling of a List in the Feature Introduction view logic.
But this is confined to changes that Dev2 is still working on.
(It's not present in master)
Dev2, what's your current position on this?
Dev2:
I have tested at my end with Dev1 but it seems to be working fine
Tech Lead:
There is a race condition related to the use of someList.first()
My guess is that theres a Flow of those lists defined, with an initial value of emptyList
And that on your machine, that Flow is updating with a new value quickly enough that it doesn't matter.
But on Dev1's, for whatever reason, it doesn't get there in time, hits the empty list and falls over.
The logic that's performing the first() needs to gracefully handle empty lists as well.
Dev2:
Where is that logic called?
Tech Lead:
Here's the stack trace Dev1 provided in our conversation earlier:
Caused by: kotlin.NoSuchElementException: List is empty.
...
at 3 iosApp 0x00000000 kfun:kotlin.NoSuchElementException#<init>(kotlin.String?){} + 00
at 4 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>(){0§<kotlin.Any?>}0:0 + 000
...
at 9 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.coroutines.native.internal.BaseContinuationImpl#resumeWith(kotlin.Result<kotlin.Any?>){} + 0000
This line:
kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>()
...says that it's first() being called on an empty list.
Dev1:
FYI: Dev3/Dev4/myself are seeing the same issue with the same stack-trace above.
Tech Lead:
So Dev2, have you introduced such a call?
Because I checked master branch and there isn't one, in that version of the file.
Ok, I'll check your working branch Dev2
...
Yes you have here:
var processed1 = someList.first()
var processed2 = someList.first()
...
Lines 123, 124.
Solution looks really straightforward guys.
Dev2:
Okay, I will fix that and push the change
Tech Lead:
Check if someList is empty and allow for generating / handling null processedValues in the view.
Now; I'm going to be straight with you here.
This issue has been discussed over several hours today.
I expect that either one of you could have gone through the process I did in the last 10 minutes above, and resolved it in the same way :point_up:
Dev2:
I went on a break and it's not reproducible on my machine
Tech Lead:
I didn't reproduce it on mine either.
Dev1:
Dev2 and myself are now on sharing screen to sort this issue out. Hope to update back later.
Tech Lead:
<Screen shot of diff with changed code>
:point_up: That change should do it.
Dev2:
Already have pushed the change.
Tech Lead:
...just seen it, is good - same approach :ok_hand:
Dev1 please let us know when tested on your machine.
Dev1:
That does it. It fixes the issues. Thank you, Dev2. I will pick it off from here.
Tech Lead:
Glad to hear it guys.
Dev1:
I have to say this that it is not because we are not working on the issue - Dev2 and myself (together with Dev3/Dev4) have been on this issue all this morning. It just difficult to connect the dot when it wasn't reproducable on Dev2's machine. I brought the issue up because I wanted to switch to working on other tickets while waiting for this to resolve. Still thank you largely for Dev2's work and your keen eyes that spot and resolve the issue quickly.
Tech Lead:
Noted Dev1.
I think the take-away has to be to read the stack-trace carefully... don't worry - we've all been guilty of not reading the error in full, at some point.
The stack trace said that the 'first' element is being referenced from an empty list - that's just logically impossible, right?
Looking for that call to first, we saw it wasn't in the code before, and is after (two of them, in fact).
So then we ask ourselves, how can we deal with an empty list - and then solution almost presents itself.
It didn't really take reproduction of the error to resolve.
Maybe working with a new tech stack creates an anxiety that every issue faced will have a complex solution related to that stack; but I think you'll agree, this particular issue really just required a deep breath and your trusty 'debugging skills 101'... don't lose them! :smiling_face:4 -
Just moved this weekend into the first home I've ever actually owned. Bought a scotch older than myself to mark the occasion, but I want to save it to share with my brother sometime during Yule (that's an agonizing abstinence for me). But at least someone gifted me with a Macallan 12 yr for housewarming that has been hitting the spot quite nicely.
Got my PC set up already to unfortunately go back to work tomorrow. Speaking of which, is it like "Recruiting Season" or something? I have been hit up like crazy about other opportunities, at a time when my company that i've been with almost 4 years seems to be floundering to get its shit together.
I guess I haven't paid much attention in the past to whether I get hit up with "opportunities" more at the end of the year or not. But its something I'm seriously considering right now. 2020 was mostly stagnant for me, and ending the year with moving is a high note. Would not mind continuing this trend of change whilst I still have to wait for the world to be able to resume "normalcy" a while longer.2 -
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. -
So I get to work this morning and find one of my monitors has been moved and my HDMI cable and Display Port adapter are missing...
I've since found the cable, it had made its way onto another desk. When I asked if anyone had seen anything one of the guys said he found an HDMI that's not his on his desk. Still no sign of my adapter though...
So for now I'm back to one monitor like some kind of peasant1 -
Didn't think I had material for a rant but... Oh boy (at least at the level I'm at, I'm sure worse is to come)
I'm a Java programmer, lets get that out of the way. I like Java, it feels warm and fuzzy, and I'm still a n00b so I'm allowed to not code everything in assembly or whatever.
So I saw this video about compilers and how they optimize and move and do stuff with the machine code while generating the executable files. And the guy was using this cool terminal that had color, autocomplete past commands and just looked cool. So I was like "I'll make that for my next project!"
In Java.
So I Google around and find a code snipped that gives me "raw" input (vs "cooked" input) and returns codes and I'm like 😎. Pressing "a" returns 97 (I think that's the ASCII value) and I think this is all golden now.
No point in ranting if everything goes as planned so here is the *but*
Tabs, backspaces and other codes like that returned appropriate ASCII codes in Unix. But in windows, no such thing. And since I though I'd go multiplatform (WORA amarite) now I had to do extra work so that it worked cross platform.
Then I saw arrow keys have no ASCII codes... So I pressed a arrow key and THREE SEPARATE VALUES WERE REGISTERED. Let me reiterate. Unix was pretending I had pressed three keys instead of one, for arrow keys. So on Unix, I had to work some magic to get accurate readings on what the user was actually doing (not too bad but still...). Windows actually behaved better, just spit out some high values and all was good. So two more systems I had to set up for dealing with arrow keys.
Now I got to ANSI codes (to display color, move around the terminal window and do other stuff). Unix supports them and Windows did but doesn't but does with some Win 10 patch...? But when tested it doesn't (at least from what I've seen). So now, all that work I put into making one Unix key and arrow key reader, and same for Windows, flies out the window. Windows needs a UI (I will force Win users, screw compatibility).
So after all the fiddling and messing, trying to make the bloody thing work on all systems, I now have to toss half the input system and rework it to support UI. And make a UI, which I absolutely despise (why I want to do back end work and thought this would be good, since terminal is not too front end).2 -
Any other IT company is like:
* Task -> Designer -> Markup coder -> Backend -> Finish
Our IT company:
Act I: "Art of setting up contact with idiots".
------
Items:
*Cave scripts (aka "typical task")
Designer: -- "DAFUQ?"
Customer: *gives another interpretation*
Designer: -- "Erm... really? White text on white background?"
Customer: -- "Make a decision by yourself. I was expecting much more independence from you. You are an expert after all."
Designer: -- "Well. I'm making decision by myself. The text will be placed *here* and will be gray-colored, because *bla-bla-bla*"
Customer: -- "I disagree."
Designer: *1 hour of silence later* -- "Well...k."
Act II: "Design meets ar(u)tist"
----
Items:
*Something, that was drawn by dumb kid while smashing his own head against desk. (PSD layout)
* Salt (to pour it on open wounds)
Designer: -- "I'm seeing this task *this way*"
Markup: -- "And how do u think i should get this done? Have you even seen what you made?? This is bullshit!"
Designer: -- "It's not bullshit! It's a sci-fi themed layout!"
Markup: -- "With gameplay elements and graphics from Alien Shooter??"
Designer: -- "Well, I don't care." *brings new edits and changes*
Markup: -- "????"
Designer: *smug face* -- "!!!"
Act III (7 days later, 9 hours till deadline): "Short story about boy, who was trying to hang himself, but instead fell out from window."
----
Items:
*Markup, smelling like it went through hell and back (x1)
* Markup coder with fried butt (x1)
Backend: -- "What. Is. THAT?"
Markup: -- "It's a work we should complete in 9 hours."
Backend: -- "WE?? I know u mean me, but that's a nightmare. What the f*ck were you doing all this time?"
Markup: -- "Well..." *finds out that he was only watching films and sleeping* "I was making this thing up..."
Backend: -- "You mean "f*cking" *this* thing "up"?"
Markup: -- "Not without it"
(*3 hours of edits and changes of color from white to white later*)
Backend: -- "Well, let's do this."
*Picks PHP and tries to bundle it up with MongoDB. After some time tries to rewrite everything to JS and starts shouting something like "F***CK" and looking for window to walk through. Figures out that he is on first floor. And that he is too lazy to go upstairs*
Act IV (3 days after deadline): "Pain and misery":
-----
Items:
*Something covered with insul(t)ating tape. (Final product)
Customer: -- "Really?"
Team: -- "Kinda."
Customer: -- "Well, thanks for your work anyway. It feels like it's going to disassemble right in my hands but it just works. Oh, also, you didnt made this in time, so your payment will be over9000 times lower. That's all"
Backend, on fluids: -- "Well...yeah..."
Markup: -- "Don't look at me like that. I really was doing my job."
Designer, with twitching eye: -- "Huh, I see. You worked so hard that we have nothing to eat now. Thanks for that."
Backend: ...1 -
So a co-worker of mine contacted me for help in her project. I was in no mood to help as I hadn't slept properly the previous day. But she begged me to help, so I obliged just so I could get her off my back and catch some rest after 2 hours, or at least that's what I thought it would be. But here I am, 10 hours later, having just finished helping her in her project, and now I have a really bad headache, just waiting to go to sleep, but my brain is betraying me.
It was a project that uses Tryton framework (based on Python), which I sometimes feel is fucking inconsistent. Things won't work as expected most of the time. Her boss (my ex-boss) is a piece of shit, and he wanted the work by the next day (i.e. today). And nobody else (not even the boss, who would have gotten this work done in less than half the time had he helped her even a little bit) was ready to help, because they all hate her for being a slow learner. All I had to do was get some data in a particular format in a text file using the framework. But the amount of tries it took just to get the data in the text files cost around 2 hours due to shitty internet speeds that caused tons of lag on Anydesk. Then we had to take breaks in between for reasons. But due to my agitated state of mind, I couldn't sleep in those breaks. Then I had to spend time tinkering around with ljust and rjust to get the right amount of padding for the data, which took hours due to shitty internet speeds that caused tons of lag on Anydesk. And then Tryton kept throwing errors in between which took some time to fix. But we finally completed half the task, and I am off to sleep.
As I write, my co-worker is still awake completing the work her boss gave her. It's around 1:46am IST. HER BOSS IS A PIECE OF SHIT.2 -
When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.
Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?
Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.
You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.
You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.
They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.
Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.
I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.6 -
I FUCKING GIVE UP!
Yep I'm pissed of :D I spend the last two months waiting like a idiot some business to answer about their job offers (more or less 3 in my area..)
Well I failed the last test of the first one, it was expected I guess. Lot of things happened but let's say I didn't use the approach that they were hoping me to use (you could have tell me you know...).
So... There is even one of the job offer, I called them already twice. Asking when they will call back. Each time it was : this week or the week after. Yeah I think that makes 5/6 weeks since the first time I called now...
But the thing which really piss me of. Is that I was waiting like a idiot, doing mostly nothing. Like if I couldn't focus on my projects before that I get a job... Well I guess when everyone is asking about when you will have a job or a girlfriend, that's not the atmosphere that I love to work with T. T
Oh yeah, no dev related. But I fall in love with a Russian girl (I'm a French guy btw). I completely messed up the relationship though xD well no way that I'm giving up anyway. And that's mostly thanks to her that I just woke up of that shitty period ^^
Sooo I started to gather people from all over the world on LinkedIn. Checking job offers on StackOverflow. And Monday I'll start writing some post on LinkedIn searching for a job in the whole fucking world. I hope there will have a business who wants a junior C++ dev :P Remote probably, I'd like to travel easily (yeah, I probably want to go to Russia a little too xP)
That's all :D I FUCKING GIVE UP ABOUT WAITING DOING NOTHING LIKE A IDIOT!!!9 -
So just babbling my shit down here.
(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)
Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.
I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).
I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.
But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.
I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!
I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.
It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .
Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).
Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!
I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)
I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!
When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.
But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !
I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )5 -
1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.
"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."
"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."
"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "
"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"
"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)
Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.
2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.
But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.
3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.
4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.
5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.
6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)
7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.
8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.
9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.3 -
Shit bathed and stack smashing ass loads of fuck.
I wrote a virtual machine, and just to fuck myself harder, I make the decision of applying some fancy dumbass theories of mine. This translates to a piece of shit modular design that works exactly as intended, but constantly gives me vietnam flashbacks to the horrifying, multiple concurrent instances of my younger mind being incessantly turbo-raped by the dozen object-obsessed pedophiles that I initially studied under.
Now, were they *actual* pedophiles? No, of course not. But I have to make fun of the acronym somehow and that's what came to mind, leaking horse dung all over the walls, floor, curtains and carpets.
Anyway, I feel so smart after this traumatic experience I just have to keep doing it to relive the terror once again. Find me in the corner, laying down in the fetal position, sobbing until the tears build up and drown me in this well of despair, or rather this finely shit painted portrait of a toilet in a lonely and stinking unisex public bathroom stall.
But let me squeeze these fucking tits a little bit harder, because that's my actual day job. That's right. I get PAID for slapping around mammary glands, it's not much but it's an honest living.
So where was I? Ah, yes, absolute degeneration. I'm truly the Max Wright of programming, mostly for smoking crack and having unprotected sex with homeless people, but also for keeping alien life forms in my basement that go out at night to hunt for sweet feline delight.
But as I keep going, I decide I want a language for the machine so I don't have to punch bits by hand all fucking day like an idiot, so alright let's make a small assembler for this shit... oh, right, except it's not small, because gently suckle the bile out the lips of my fucking butthole.
I may redefine a load of shit two months down the line, so I have to make everything perfectly encapsulated and easily fucked with -- which in my licking vomit off the floor of a porn theater travesty of a case means I'm generating half the code and scrambling as hard as I can to glue everything together.
Does it work? Of course it works, I'm Max Wright bitch. I can redefine the ISA all I want, anytime I want without breaking anything because of my pristine crackhead encapsulation. And to credit the scrambled eggs I have for fucking brains, it's not even *that* complex.
The problem is I keep forgetting shit, not how it works, just that it's there. So I forget that I have a virtual machine, and I forget that I have an assembler, and so I spend an entire day trying to figure out how the fuck I'm going to handle a loop inside an unrelated interpreter.
By the time I manage to remind the drooling undead jackass that is this husk that my irredeemably demonic self inhabits, that we can easily solve this by using the tools we've already built, it's so late and we're so tired there's not much we can do. All this time, WASTED.
Which circles back to crack. Are you tired of blowing your babysitter for cash? Have you considered suicide by a thousand used trojan condoms? Is your roommate possesed by the forces of Avernum, and now seeking all-destructive vengeance against your rectum?
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:~%4 -
Part of the problem, So many dev's here know the real problem with OS's governments and 3ed party apps happly spying on you and making there EULA to so called make it right for them to do it.
I want to know why so many dev's are portending this is not happen or why they not caring, you become part of the problem if your willing to work with the problem and there rules and guide lines.
WE dictate the future of tech not one company or another the people that create the software are the ones can make a difference, the users need to be educated and the dev need to take action now.
I loved this site at first but now I hate it I really do as so many posts are just blind or follow evil companies/software so on this is not how it should be, I wont accept this bull shit anymore and I not going to say quite to show the mass I going to follow them.
Step up and do something about it or stop calling yourself's dev's your part of the problem, you have the a gift and know how to help everyone do it and prove your worth.
I am really sorry I know some here do research and try and help but I rarely seeing it at the moment, things need to change, its not going to be easy but only the dev's can change this and soon, soon all OS's/software companies will get the feeling governments are on there side and governments what this so they have a back door in to WHO you are. FK the or if you have nothing to hide, EVERYONE has something to hide, compaines have already used Facebook Data to fire people working for them as they feel they shouldn't have to have someone working for them who likes or does XYZ,
Open your eyes people, small time dev's are not really included in this but big time dev's that do know how to work around these problems should be working on this to stop these problems, hardware venders are also a big problem but that's not something we can do anything about yet.
I know this rant will go on death ears to some, others will think I am over the top nut but if you really want to make a differences let's here it, lets get this world back on track, its not going to be easy but it we can do it.28 -
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.4 -
I'm sure this has been ranted about before because I can hardly be the only one.
Android development and the upgrade dance.
Things were worse in the bad old days of eclipse but it's not like they're peachy now, either. Android is one of many platforms I'm developing for - c++ back-end, running on lots of different platforms through a thin bit of platform specific glue.
That's all I care about - that this thin bit of glue just works. I want to write this stuff, forget about it and get on with solving what I feel are real problems, for me, in my code.
The trouble is, I'm never finished writing this and android is one of the worst. With every revision change, google changes *something*. New build system? Why not, you indie developers have *loads* of time and resources to waste on that, don't you? Some weird thing just stops working for no apparent reason? You guys love to drop whatever it was you were working on to figure out what the hell ' android.app.Instrumentation' does and why it can't talk to my main class any more, or why I even need it but nothing in that error message about what I might do to fix this arcane random error.
Google have all the resources in the world, I do not. Yet I have to dance for them, every time I upgrade.
Can you guys please funnel some of your practically infinite resources in to making this stuff 'just work'? -
The datepicker saga
Part one
So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page
Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.
Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.
Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.
CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...
... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.
Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.
Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work
Fucking...
... Bailing on that.
Part 2
Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.
At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.
For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:
[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...
But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.
So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.
Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.
But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.
Part 3
Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great
Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!
Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.1 -
Jesus christ I need my VP and CIO to get their hands out of Azure and GCP and just let me work.
Yes, governance and security and IAM are big deals. That's why you have infraops people like me to deal with that.
I'm literally working with one hand tied behind my back because just about every button press or CLI command I need to do my damn job as a professional cloud fluffer requires me to go bother an executive and ask permission to pretty please can I deploy a new container, can you go press the shiny button? No not that one, move your mouse up...up..now UP..ok over lef-no..can I have mouse control? Sigh fine, do you see where it says "Approvers", no that says "Release Pipeline"
Look I actually kinda like this job, I do, in as much as when I have something to do I get left the fuck alone to do it. Meetings are minimal, aside from the odd days when one of our app services decides to yeet itself into the river Styx, there's little distractions.
Yeah, developers do dumb shit but that's probably best left to the notion of job security and never talked about again less they go to HR and complain that the ops guy was very stern and direct and made the developer take some accountability for their work product.
AND YET
It's so intergalactically stupid that I have to go ask permission just to do ops tasks by the same people barging down my goddamn door asking why the ops task isn't done yet.
"Because you won't give me permissions in GCP to actually DO anything".
Okay. Rant over. Time for lunch. Good meeting, see you all at the holiday party.2 -
there is no way YouTube isn't dead as a product
last night I had to switch from matrix voice chat to discord voice chat to talk to somebody (because their phone suddenly doesn't do matrix well, keeps cutting out their mic if their screen is turned off or they switch to a different app wtf). they misinterpreted something I said as talking about "shock value". I think that's a demeaning term that doesn't capture why "bad" content is good. now I'm just chilling trying not to workaholic and first recommendation on YouTube I have is about "what happened to shock value websites". oh I'm sure that's a coincidence
this has been happening increasingly and I fucking hate it. it keeps recommending videos that have absolutely nothing to do with what I'm watching or have ever watched or would even be in the interest of in the past, but I mention it somewhere and it creepily suggests the content to me, always with videos claiming to have 2-3 million views. bullshit. I tried some of these and there's no way anybody cares about this content in such numbers. it's so lukewarm and dumb. and how the hell do they have "opinion" vlogs about every topic? since when did that become the #1 type of content on YouTube? cuz it's 50% of my recommendations and I've never given a shit
I have like 500 subscriptions on YouTube. I've had an account a long time. a lot of them are old channels that stopped being active as YouTube evolved, which I think was a shame. a lot of them had to do with ad revenue or YouTube algorithm just not suggesting their content to new people. they were wholesome, honest channels with really good content I think -- really good game analysis, compilations of unique or weird viral content and the guy was just a funny dude in his basement, etc. but fair I guess. shame, but fair
Then there was the quiet era, where your front page just didn't suggest the good channels and just the stupid channels. it didn't suggest your subscriptions but in your interest area or something. what's the point of subscriptions if you're not showing me them? this is also about the time if I left a comment on a video I ceased receiving replies so I assume I was shadow banned. I have not received a single reply in years now, even on small channels. some content creators noticed if they post on their own channels and accidentally logged out and looked for their comment their own comments don't show up. just weird annoying nonsense that's inappropriate for them to be doing. bruh, please
and then the next wave came, it wasn't just YouTube won't recommend your channel, in the COVID era what came was if you mentioned something then channels with previously millions of views, still currently millions of subscribers, suddenly went down to 5k-50k views per video. bitch please, you expect anyone to believe this nonsense?
then they fucked up the search. I KNOW videos exist and I can't find them. I type in half the video's title, you can't find it. thankfully if you type in every single word exactly you can still find them. bruh that's too much. also just search plain doesn't work. if I'm looking for a specific topic I get 5-10 max videos on that topic and the rest are irrelevant recommendations. this is entirely ridiculous. there's videos I KNOW exist on YouTube and nobody gave a shit about them, like 5 view Benny benassi music clips with a scene from a video game. I can't even meme anymore
this morning a friend on discord sent me a... weird clip, of like an anime skit. problem? well discord embeds YouTube videos. I pressed play. I get... an ad. lol what. I browse away and back to the video. try again. ad. yeah I'm not playing this. I have to refresh the page 20-30 times sometimes just until the ads stop fucking up every time my adblocker ceases working (and then I have to go update it again lol -- by going to the developer page for the ad block because it was banned from the app store so you can't auto update it and have to manually update it every time)
my friend links me a discord plugin to... remove ads... from YouTube embeds... bruh
I used to mod discord but it's annoying, because every time discord updates you have to go re-apply the hack to be able to mod your discord
I think we should just plain move away from YouTube. during COVID era a lot of people got banned in subreddits on reddit. I noticed when you get banned, the subreddit still has you listed as a subscriber. the r/Canada subreddit for example has 3 million subscribers but the activity of a subreddit that's maybe 1k people. increasingly subreddits just became ghost towns after that like that. reddit is a dead website, with fake numbers. I think YouTube is now a dead website, with fake numbers. no fucking way stupid lukewarm opinion videos with absolutely nothing to add are getting 2-3 million views and people are just clamouring for these takes they didn't ask for
also stop listening in on my private conversations. fucking disgusting. idc if an AI is transcribing. ew.11 -
So I am on a vacation for a month and a few days before it ends. My boss calls me and tells me "why don't you take one more week" then he told me that's when he will be back to work as well because he is traveling. When I told him why he said he wants to talk to be before getting back to work.
When he found me sounding worried, he said don't worry there is nothing you are missing we just want to align our plans and give you updates on the period you were gone for.
When I asked him what if I wanted to get back to work sooner, he said I prefer if you wait till I come back
And now I am super worried and paranoid, advice please 😥5 -
I actually do have something to rant about!
The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.
The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.
So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.
The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?
Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).
He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.
So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.
What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...
I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.
Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.
Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!1 -
Today I have fixed an issue in 300k usd servers that have been sitting there for almost 6 months... Even the vendor (which is a major company) did not wanna touch them. Nobody knows about it yet but I'm proud of myself but at the same time I feel a big resentment because despite my hard work I will not get to spend the next holiday which is a month from now with my family because all coworker went behind my back to the manager and took a vacation and manager will not even allow a work from home day... 1 single day. That's the only working day that week. But without it I can't go back home because home is 20 hours away... More if I take a connecting flight5
-
Well my last job was nothing but a call center with AT&T, but I will tell the story of how I got my current job which is also my first job as a developer.
I was living in Texas. I just moved out of a house I was renting and my girlfriend at the time moved back to Missouri and she was about 5 months pregnant.
She wanted us to all be in Missouri because that's where her family is. No big deal for me, but we didn't have a place to stay yet in Missouri and it was difficult to find a job in a city that has very little to offer in what I do, and of course, wants experienced people despite what said they were looking for.
For 5 months I kept looking for a job while I stayed with my parents and worked at the call center and she with her mom and stepdad so I could save up to not only make the trip to Missouri but to be able to make a payment on a place which we were also having trouble finding.
Even if I didn't have a job or if we didn't find a place, I was not going to miss the birth of my child. So, within about 3 weeks of her due date, it was time for me to make the trip to Missouri. I still haven't found a job but at least we were going to have a place ready for my child within the week. With all the money I saved, we could get through a couple of months of rent, bills and necessities, but still needed to find work.
After only a week after we got the place, I almost gave up so I started to apply at restaurants as a backup after I found a couple more places. The restaurants were quick to respond and I had interviews scheduled for the week that I applied. I knew I was going to be miserable working at a restaurant, but I needed a job, any job. As a last attempt, the day before my first interview with one restaurant, I found a new posting for an entry level position early in the morning. I quickly sent in my resume but didn't expect anything until weeks later. It only took a few hours for a reply and he wondered if we could do a phone interview. I said yes, of course. After the interview, he said that he had one more person to interview but he would let me know. I thought, great, there goes my chance. After only an hour of waiting, while I was looking for more places to apply, he calls me back saying that he wants to hire me. Immediately after I got the job I cancel my other interviews and I started the next day.
It was great I got the job, but it was a far drive. However, they did offer telecommuting, but I had to come in every day until they felt I understood their work flow. I did inform my boss that my son would be born really soon but he was okay with letting me take off when it was time.
I started on a Wednesday in May of 2014 and made the 1.5 hour drive every day. After only working 10 days, my girlfriend calls me at work saying that it's time for the baby to come but it would be a while so I could finish my shift and then come straight to the hospital.
I get there but still no baby. It was a long labor which ended up in C-section at 4 in the morning the next day. My son was finally born on a Wednesday and it was the greatest thing in my life.
But now, I am a single dad(about a year now and it was mutual) and I am the only developer as of a couple of weeks ago. Despite how they handle things and my annoying coworker that sits next to me which I have ranted about in a previous posts, I do enjoy working there trying to improve and move the company forward. After all, I work from home 3 days out of the week now. The rants will still come lol.
Sorry for the mood kill at the end but that's my story. 😁 -
I feel so lost all the time Everytime I think about the future. How are you all going forward?
- What should i be doing ? I used to like computer science when it was taught with lots of simplification and abstraction (in the school level). Now i know there are a 100+ research areas/work areas/branches in it, and i am an average in all of them.
I like most of them more or less, and won't mind giving away my years of life working/learning them. But for what and why?
-- Money? Every profile turns into a decent salary after a certain time. This means i can ride any boat i want.
-- Passion/interest? Now what exactly is this?as i said everything feels doable, given enough time to get a hang of it.
-- Fame? Its rare the developes, testers or other individuals in computer science ever gets a solo credit. Most of the time its either the ceos, the researchers or the company itself. So i guess getting a fame is equal to burning your neighbors by flaunting your cash for most ppl
-- Happy life? Meh, this point is affected by a lot of other factors. Would come back to this point later
- everyday in my feed, there are people showing 6, 7 sometimes even 8 figure salaries. Other people would get inspired with those, but i feel very weird about these.
I never see myself earning those, idk why. Why would someone give me those huge amounts?
How do you find yourself deserving for ythat big ass money? At what point you hit that realisation? Here is a small story :
I did an Android dev course around 2.5 years ago. There was a guy there an year older than me. He was very bad in this, i tell you. Most of the time, i was explaining the concepts to him after class.so last year he graduated, and took a job, We both used to expect a decent salary amount, say x (with me having a little ego that i expect certainly more than him, say x+20% ), but he took a job for half that number , say x/2.
After 1 increment and 1 job shift in 1.5 years, he has now successfully achieved package greater than x. I on the other hand, being still at college and with a lot of bad internship experiences now feel that i won't be getting even x/3 at my start no matter what.
- There is also this thing about people going into more of a management and other non tech roles once they start growing in this field. Why? What did they realized? I am sure not everyone of them would have hit this realization that tech is not what they want to do (which i can't understand why). Maybe its the money and/or happy life expectations?
i have started to feel dumb for not being able to think innovative new ideas and being an average mind :/
And about the happy life, so far its not much happiness for me, and am confused.
I am grateful about the usual things i have (healthy middle class parents, working body, roof , food,etc) , unhappy about the things i don't and see with others (more money, materialistic assets, confidence, siblings, social life, love life, etc) and that's it.
From what i understood of 21 years on this earth is that everyone is running to achieve that list of their desires and wants to move them from todo to done, like trello task. If you can't then keep fighting to achieve or grudgingly accept the fact that you couldn't and be happy about it.
So is that it? That's your happy life goals?2 -
So... Portugal already have CS classes for almost 20 years. Don't know what they teach now but everyone would know how to use windows, word and excel (specially kids without computers). My course was computers (what was called back then) and we spend half an year doing logic programming in paper and algorithms...
Any class that teaches programming should always start with logic programming, because you can apply it to any language...
Example: my latest programming class was 3 years ago, I did a CNC course (to work with machines that make molds... Think a 3d printer that cuts steel instead of pushing polimers) and my first question was :don't we start with logic programming or algorithms? The teacher first teased me... Then asked what is logic programming....
Resuming... At the end I was the only one who could use functions and variables... (check g-code and heidenhein, you'll get it).
Other then that I was the only one who got a job working cnc machines, everyone else that also got a job whent for the manual labor part (the molds are finished by hand)...
So... My thoughts... Any CS class that teaches programing should start with logic programming and algorithms... That's the foundation to learn any programming language.7 -
Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.
Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.
I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.
After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!
After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.
So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.
Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.2 -
Whelp, I made the switch to android about a week ago. Didn't go two days without getting malware on it. I only browse hacker news and used devRant, standard messaging app, no root, so no shady things, just fairly standard things besides devRant. When I called Samsung support, they said it was a known issue and sent me some links to some forums where people were having the same issues. After digging through those threads, there was an official answer from Samsung saying they weren't going to fix the issue (at least in any foreseeable future). That's unacceptable for a phone that was released less than a year ago.
I'm done with Samsung phones for good. I might come back to Android on a google phone.
I hate how Android is distributed and the manufacturers don't take ownership of their issues. They just work on the new phone without caring for anything older than 6 months. If I had to get a new phone every time a major security issue was found and the company refused to fix it, I'd spend more money than on an iPhone.
It seems like Google keeps their devices up to date better, presumably because they have better control of OS releases. But non-google Android devices are dead to me.
Back to my iPhone for now...
🎵sad Charlie Brown music🎵9 -
Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.
So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.
I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).
2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.
Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.
Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.
I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*
So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).
Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.
Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.
Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla
---
Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*
--
Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.
Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.2 -
!dev
Sorry about another non-dev rant, but I can't help it :p
I have seen a post here on devRant a few minutes ago talking about being a millionaire, so I thought I'd write a lil something for people thinking of chasing that.
As I said in a comment on that rant: as Jordan Peterson (aka Lord of the Lobsters) said, in order to be successful you need to be an industrious person, i.e. you gotta work hard, very hard. Most success stories are from people that worked very very hard (Elon Musk is one I can remember off the top of my head) and had to put their life, friends, family in second place. To this day I remember watching a video on a 30 year old millionaire, he said he didn't have friends for about 6-10 years, he just worked, worked and worked. If that's what you wanna do with your life do your thing, I'm just saying that's not it for me.
A few years back I wanted huge success (being famous, being rich), but I've come to realize that's not what I want. Being famous must suck, people recognizing you everywhere you go and shit, and being rich comes with a price (pun intended?), which is working every minute of your time for 10 years. That's not gonna make me happy, I have realized that I want to get married in my early 30's at max, have kids, buy a comfortable house somewhere in europe, have enough money to be able to give my family a good life and be able to buy and tune a few cars (that's a dream of mine btw), and maybe even try to start a company of my own (I don't like the idea of having a boss). And I think that to achieve these goals, all I need to do is be a bit smart right now: invest in fixed income, don't buy expensive shit, live with my parents at least until I get out of college and get a relatively decent job.
Anyway I might've steered off-course for a bit there, the point is: before you decide you want to be a millionaire, think what you actually want in life. If you want to be rich and are sure you have the willpower to work a 100 hours per week, do your thing, whatever makes you happy. But if you are going to work 60 hours a week and you're looking to be rich you're just going to be disappointed. You'll be chasing money all your life, sacrifice the (IMO) important things in life (friends, family, health, fun) and you won't get anywhere.
It's all or nothing, make up your mind before you waste your time.21 -
TIL indians live on the "satisfaction" plane hence saying yes to things they can't do to satisfy you, but also dissatisfy people as a form of attritional warfare, which is their specialty.
I was watching the trump v Kamala debate and was reminded of a bunch of tactics I've had used against me by an Indian lead dev, who I ignored the behaviour of and didn't think she was actually hostile to me until it was too late. but it made me feel so bad for him and I got an epiphany. it seems like the tactics are the same, so I got curious if there was an Indian art of war
Interestingly the AI said yes but directed me to the wrong book. I did find the right book eventually. it exists. the Chinese stole ideas from it to write their sun tzu art of war, but it's basically a Machiavellian manual before Machiavelli was alive. very cool
also turns out China is behind everything. I remember ages ago I got in a fight with a schizoid programmer friend of mine because he knew China was taking over everything and he wanted them to win, and I was rooting for team India because they were far less miserable than the Chinese. don't make a deal with the Chinese. guy was stupid. they treat people like irrelevant meat
China seems to be connected to everything that's going on right now.
- they're infiltrating Canadian politics, get international students to change Canadian election outcomes (200k/30m people who weren't citizens but got bussed to voting centers and just used proof of address to vote. they changed outcomes of 4 elected officials in one province, and local Chinese people are saying they get threats about their family back in China if they don't do what China tells them to -- but our elected government just keeps quiet on it and then goes to China for new orders during "climate conferences" and uselessly gives them a bunch of our fucking money)
- there was issues with the Chinese buying up real estate in Canada and just leaving them empty. it's probably still happening even though Canada eventually imposed a tax on leaving empty real estate around that you're not renting out. they're still buying up properties, and we have an increasing housing shortage as a result. one of my old apartments a white guy, who was suspicious and shifty, bought the unit and forced us to move out citing code violations (you can't kick someone out otherwise here because of very strong renter's protections). they never introduced who bought the place, but they did have 7 ALL CHINESE SPEAKING IN CHINESE people come in and measure everything at the apartment. so they're definitely still buying up real estate
- are behind the green agenda (our politicians seem to take orders from them under this guise)
- seem to strangely have had camps where they let migrants pass through the South Americas to get into united states, were very closed off and hostile to anyone snooping so it was up in the air what they were doing there. after people came to snoop the camps up and disappeared
- are who USA is competing with in the AI race, the whole AI narrative is literally a fight between the west and China
and there's a super smart systems guy who thinks they were behind the world economic forum and I'm increasingly starting to believe it
all electronics coming from China should be a concern. it isn't
there's tons of Chinese trying to enter open source software to install backdoors. they're nearly successful or successful often. same with that DDoS on DNS years ago
there's rumours they've been running Canada since the 80s, via infiltrating Canadian tech companies to steal their software and are the gatekeepers for a lot of underground stuff
I'm starting to believe even the COVID virus was on purpose. I didn't before. there was a number of labs that had that virus, a lab leak happened around Ukraine 6 months prior to the "Olympics outbreak" (seriously that was PERFECT timing for a lab leak if you wanted to do a bioweapon on purpose -- you would hit every country at once!), but there was also a lab in Canada that had it and some reporters were upset about it because the lab didn't seem to care about our national security and was letting suspicious Chinese nationals work at it, and for some reason there's been discovered a BUNCH of illegal makeshift Chinese labs in California with super vile stuff in them
and what the fuck was that Chinese spy balloon fiasco anyway. you can't shoot it down? I think that was a test to see how fast and readily the west would defend itself. or maybe they wanted to see the response procedures
and then on top of it many people think the opioid epidemic is all china. china makes the drugs. it would also fit perfectly, because in the 1800s or whatever the British empire had entirely decimated china for decades by getting them addicted to the opioid trade. eventually the British empire merged with USA and now USA is basically the head of the new British empire
I think we're at war with China and literally don't fucking know it13 -
I have just slept for a minimum of 5 hours. It is 7:47 PM atm.
Why?
We have had a damn stressful day today.
We have had a programming test, but it really was rather an exam.
Normally, you get 30 minutes for a test and 45 minutes for an exam.
In this "test" we have had to explain what 'extends' does and name a few advantages of why one should use it.
Check.
Read 3 separate texts and write the program code on paper. It was about 1 super class and 1 sub class with a test class in Java.
Check.
Task 3: Create the UML diagram of the code from above. *internally: From above? He probably means my code since there is no other code there. *Checks time*. I have about 3 minutes left. Fuck my life.*
Draws the boxes. Put the class names in each of them. A private attribute for the super class.
Teacher: Last minute!
Draw the arrow starting starting from the sub class to the super class.
Put my name on each written paper. And mentally done for the day. Couldn't finish the last task. Task 3.
During this "test", I heard the frustrations of my classmates. Seemed like everyone was pretty much pissed.
After a short discussion with the teacher who also happens to be the physics professor of a university nearby.
[If you are reading this, I hope that something bad happens to you]
The next course was about computer systems. Remember my recent rant about DNS, dhcp, ftp, web server and samba on ubuntu?
We have had the task to do the screenshots of the consoles where you proof that you have dhcp activated on win7 machine etc. Seemed ok to me. I would have been done in 10 minutes, if I would be doing this relaxed. Now the teacher tells us to change the domain names to <surnameOfEachStudent>.edu.
I was like: That's fine.
Create a new user for the samba server. Read and write directories. Change the config.
Me: That should be easy.
Create new DNS entries in the configs.
Change the IPv6 address area to 192.168.x.100-200/24 only for the dhcp server.
Change the web server's default page. Write your own text into it.
You will have 1 hour and 30 minutes of time for it.
Dumbo -ANGRY-CLIENT-: Aye. Let us first start screenshotting the default page. Oh, it says that we should access it with the domain name. I don't have that much time. Let us be creative and fake it, legally.
Changes the title element so that it looks like it has been accessed via domain name. Deletes the url and writes the domain name without pressing Enter. Screenshot. Done. Ok, let us move to the next target.
Dhcp: Change lease time. Change IP address area. Subnet mask. Router. DNS. Broadcast. Optional domain name. Save.
Switches to win7.
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
Holy shit it does not work!
After changing the configs on ubuntu for a legit 30 minutes: Maybe I should change the ip of the ubuntu virtual machine itself. *me asking my old self: why did not you do that in the first place, ass hole?!*
Same previous commands on win7 console. Does not work. Hmmm...
Where could be the problem?
Check the IP of the ubuntu server once again. Fml. Ubuntu did not save when I clicked on the save button the first time I have changed it. Click on save button 10 times to make sure it really is saved now lol.
Same old procedure on win7.
Alright. Dhcp works. Screenshot.
Checks time. 40 minutes left.
DNS:It is your turn. Checks bind9 configs. sudo nano db.reverse.edu.
sudo nano db.<mysurname>.edu.
Alright. All set. It should work now.
Ping win7 from ubuntu and vice versa. Works. Ping domain name on windows 7 vm. Does not work.
Oh, I forgot to restart the bind9 server on ubuntu.
sudo service bind stop
" " " start
Check DNS server IP on win7. It looks fine.
It still doesn't work. Fuck it. I have only 20 minutes left. Samba. Let us do this!
10 minutes in. No result. I don't remember why. I already forgot why I have done for it. It was a very stressful day.
Let us try DNS again.
Oh shit. I forgot the resolver!
sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf
The previous edits are gone. Dumb me. It says it in the comments. Why did not I care about it. Fuck it.6 minutes left. Open a yt video real quick. Changes the config file. Saves it. Restarts DNS and dhcp. Closes the terminal and opens a new one. The changes do not affect them until you reopen them. That's why.
Change to win7.
Ping works. How about nsloopup.
Does not work.
Teacher: 2 minutes left!
Fuck it.
Saves the word document with the images in it. Export as pdf. Tries to access the directories of the school samba server. Does not work. It was not my fault tho. Our school server is in general very slow. It feels like they are not maintained and left alone like this in the dust from the 90s.
Friend gets the permission to put his document on a USB and give the USB to the teacher.
Sneaky me: Hey xyz, can you give me your USB real quick?
Him: sure.
Gets bombed with "do you want to format the USB?" pop-ups 10 times. Fml. Skips in a fast way.
Transfers the pdf. Plug it out. Give it back.
After this we have had to give a presentation in politics. I am done.6 -
I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.
How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life
Kevin H. made a huge mistake.
The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.
And he knew it immediately.
It was, he said, "instant regret."
Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."
Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.
On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.
It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.
Time to die, those voices still said.
And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.
"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."
But nobody did, so he jumped.
It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.
He didn't want to die.
But now, he was sure, it was too late.
From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.
Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.
Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.
He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.
When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.
The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.
From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.
While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.
Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.
He also met a woman.
Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.
And he tours the country, sharing his story.
So why re-tell it here?
Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.
Just the same...
We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.
My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.
You need intense curiosity...
You need a killer work ethic...
And you must, MUST have... resilience.
Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.
Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.
It is also, though, a metaphor.
See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...
And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.
Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.
Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.
And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...
For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.
To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.
Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.
The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...
" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."
Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.
And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.
As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."
Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."
Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde -
I have a few side project ideas. I started one of them a few months ago (project setup, dependencies, git repo, index page, very basic API and client functionality). But I cannot get myself to work on it or even think about it (for months now). The reason? I do not want to work on the client/frontend! I do not want to deal with React or Vue or Svelte or fuckjs or even jquery. It's a fucking mess.
For the backend, the requests are stateless: you get a request, handle it, and respond back. Need to update state? Database. That's it!
For the frontend, there's just tooo many states I can't keep up with! When the user checks or unchecks this checkbox, I need to maintain the state of the checkbox and maintain the all effects of changing the checkbox while syncing with the backend and making sure the elements are still styled correctly with the applied effects. Multiply that with all the expected interactive elements on the page. It's exhausting!4 -
Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:
Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?15 -
I don't know if someone has noticed but I haven't been on DevRant lately. It's not that the community is awesome. In the last month or two, I've had a blast of an experience here. I've just been avoiding screens, specifically texts in screens. I think something snapped on my head last week. Here's why:
As I've said in other rants/comments, I study history, and at the moment, I haven't found any career that has to read more than this one. Sometimes I've had to read about 1200 pages in less than three days. Last week I had to read 6 books which accounted for about 3500 pages. I was actively reading more than 600 pages a day. Now, this was for an investigation, and each of these reads had to be properly summarised with their respective arguments, thesis, etc. So I intensely read everything before Thursday, the day in which I had to present my work, in which I referenced about 10 books.
Apart from that, daily, I spent 4 hours coding. That's been the minimum I've done daily since I started learning.
I wasn't too tired. I'm used to read a lot, and coding is always fun. But the problem came in Friday when I woke up with a strange headache that spanned from my eyes to the back of my ears. Hurting especially on the sides of my forehead.
It eventually dissipated, but whenever I read something, the ache slowly came back. Loud noises and bright lights also brought it back. So you could imagine, everytime I tried to read a Rant, comment, etc, the headache came back. The same for coding and reading. For fucks sake I feel like I'm fucking crippled.
And no, the pain isn't the worst. Pain is pain and you can't do anything about it. The worst is that I'm developing some anxiety here. In all this time I have been learning daily nonstop. Coding was something I craved for everyday. Now I'm fucking wasting entire days in non-productive activities. I'm losing my fucking time here guys!
I'm afraid I have some anxiety problem with time. I've already fucking wasted entire years, now I don't want to continue wasting them and push my goals further away, I want to get to my goals as soon as I can because time and life can't be stopped and once time is lost, you can't fucking get it back. And, considering I'm still 21, I do notice this feeling is somehow irrational, but for fucks sake, I'm wasting fucking LIFE :( -
rent / question (there is a question at the end and I'd appreciate your opinion)
8 months ago, I agreed to help a not too distant relative of mine to do his master thesis at the company where I work. He was supposed to build something really MVP, but useful for us and I'd help him get some scientific questions out of it, and provide him with (computing) resources to test his theories / implementations under simulated and much heavier load.
Since then, he didn't get done anything even remotely useful, always just stuck on very rudimentary issues, claimed things are almost ready, I wrote a quick smoke test to prove that the whole application blows up when you touch it, in short - a disaster and went over to radio silence.
In the meanwhile, we didn't need it anymore, so 1.5 months ago, I got in touch with him again, with an even more technical proposal, something, at least I'd think, that's even cooler to do. He asked me some question about hypothetical load, the system should be able to handle eventually, to come up with alternative implementations to compare them against each other. He said that his exam period is going to be over soon and he'll get back to me with some initial version.
2 weeks ago, I got back in touch with him, trying to urge him, to get finally started and get something done. If he'd actually sit down and do it during the holidays as a "full time job", he'd be probably done in 2 weeks. Last week, he came back to me and said he has an initial PR ready to review.
I was excited about it, but basically froze when I realized what he did. He deleted all his previous work - some infrastructure stuff which took us basically 3 months of back and forth to get running - and as far as I could see, all the new code were only auto generated clients based on a swagger specification. In short - I could do it in less then an hour. If you really have no idea what you're doing, it might take you half a day, but definitely nowhere near to a week.
His brother, which a good friend of mine, thinks I'm being too hard on him. His argument was, that it's too hard, and he has to do it in C#, but he only knows Java (I gave him access to some of our repositories to copy paste code together, he didn't need to invent anything. I also prefer C# but wrote my master thesis in Java) Personally, I'm just pissed because he promises stuff that he never does. I totally understand him - I was like that as a student as well, I guess karma is a ... but still, he's wasting my time.
Right now I'm thinking how to get out of this, without having even more time wasted. I doubt he'd ever deliver anything useful. He got plenty of input from me about what he could consider for his scientific question, how to measure performance, ... He can keep his credentials to access our test environment with the test data, but I won't give him access to any additional computing resources, to compare how his solutions might scale on our company's cost. (mainly it's not the money, but I'd have to provide that stuff, and probably help him set it up)
does it sound like a fair deal (saying, I'm done with you. You can finish your topic on your own, but don't expect any help from me)? or am I being a dick about it and too demanding?1 -
So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.
UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.
A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.
After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.
A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.
I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?2 -
I have a guy that will come in a few hours to discuss about an e-commerce website he wants to start his business. I've accepted to do it freelance.
Things are a little quick for my taste, but I know myself enough to know that if I don't jump head first, I'll back out and miss on an opportunity to add something valuable to my resume (and get a bit of money).
The thing is : I have nearly zero experience in 1) e-commerce websites and 2) client relationship and managing. So that will be a great challenge to me, but that's precisely what I need right now.
Anyway, I'm coming to you to ask a few questions : assuming his requirements are simple and common for an online shop, should I create it from scratch or would it be wiser to use a dedicated framework (Prestashop, Wix, etc.). If the latter, which one would you recommend, cost and efficiency-wise.
Still assuming simple and common requirements, how much time would it likely take, for an average developper (I'm no Linus Torvalds) working on average 8h a day ? More like 2-3 months, or more like 5-6 months ? I'm leaning more towards 2-3, but since I don't have experience in these kind of websites, I find a lot of user stories that might take me time to figure out.
Last but not least, what would be approximately an honest price, technical costs aside (domain, host, potential framework, etc.) for that kind of work. And for maintenance ?2 -
Another on workflow:
When the IT department thinks it's a good idea to limit the snooze function in windows update to ten minutes, and of course, you think about that half a day you'd need just restoring the workspace and get back into the groove, so you decide to postpone and remember to do so again.
Then like clockwork (literally and figuratively): within twenty minutes the machine reboots because you were too focused to notice the notification again.. And all is lost.
Ok, so windows does a good job restoring everything now, but that's Windows 10 while work uses 7. The conclusion is the same: IT department should focus on their tangled cables, things they know. -
Hey guys, it's been a while since the last time I saw devRant... I cannot believe that just a couple of years ago when I finished my System Engineering Technician, also was on that time I started to use devRant. Those times I was learning as much as I could and try to find a job while I was starting the university and I wanted to be iOS dev but because of the money, I had never thought that would be possible soon, but 6 months ago I had the opportunity to take a trainee program, but that meant going to live in another city, and leave the university for a while, but believe me, it was the best decision I took, now I'm an iOS dev and I'm Working on that company, and the next year I'm going to retake the university.... I was a difficult decision at the beginning, but I learned a lot, and I'm learning more things while I'm getting a lot of experience and now I'm just back here where I started, I took a look to my old rants, I cannot believe what I have done and I'm excited because of all the incoming things to do and I hope you are achieving your dreams and work hard to get more. Never give up that's the key 👌🏻3
-
So I am working in this startup at Stockholm for 6 months and 1 week ago decided to leave.
I am still under probation period(5 days left until probation period is over), so I should have actually given 1 months notice. However we had many meetings about this and we decided that I will give 2 months notice.
Like we decided, previous week I gave founders a notice of 2 months and they agreed to it. I sent them e-mail and they confirmed it so I have proof.
This week all of a sudden they are saying that their plans have changed and there won't be much work to do for me so they are are forcing me to leave after 3-4 weeks.
I understand their point of view. Since my salary is 41k, they are spending totally 53k sek on me monthly. So their idea is to save extra 53k sek by forcing me to leave 1 month earlier. Also I've heard that they plan to hire another person 2-3 months later after I leave, so essentially they will save 150-200k sek and that's fine, I get it, it's business as usual right?
What I don't understand is how can they be so inhumane?
We agreed that notice is 2 months. I informed all my relatives (since I will be leaving Sweden). I gave notice to my landlord (deposit is 10k sek) and etc. I wanted to have 8 more weeks to plan what I'm going to do when I leave.
When asked wether I can leave by the end of this month I didn't know what to answer. I said that I will need to think about it and now I'm "thinking" about it. First of all I mentioned to them that I am risking to loose my deposit. Instead of offering any compensation, they keep asking me how they can help me to leave as soon as I can?
Situation is really messed up.
Since according to the contract I am still under probation(even though I started working earlier than stated in contract, so technically I shouldn't be under probation) I have no idea what they can do if I don't agree to their terms.
As far as I know they are obligated to give me 1 months notice if they are firing me while I'm under probation, so it doesn't seem that I would have much power in this situation.
If I would try to force them to keep me around for total 8 weeks, they can just officially fire me while I'm under probation and I will have to leave in 4 weeks. However after one week I will become a permanent employee and then they will have to give me 2 months notice if they want to fire me. So it seems that they are trying to save their face by trying to force me to leave earlier on my own will.
My current plan is to agree with them and actually leave at the end of this month. But with conditions.
First I need to get in touch with my landlord, explain the situation and hope that he would give back my deposit even if I'm leaving 1 month earlier than I've told him before.
Also, since these guys decided to mess up my plans by trying to save some money, I think I should demand for some compensation? Like 10-15k? I had plans goddamit and we agreed that notice will be 2 months via e-mail after all.3 -
(imagine all of this said in Undoomed's "hey moron" tone)
Hey, moron, fuckin moron! How about if you're a noob with no actual programmer on your side, you just tell me so we can work it out together, instead of sending a moronic 4page "acceptance criteria" that pretend you know what you're talking about, and then bury me under loads of moronic noob questions that reveal you as thenmoron you are, all of that for a fuckin 50 quid?! I thought it's me being an idiot, not being able to do the task within two days timeframe, but now I see you're just too much of a moron to have any idea how much these things take. And now you nonchalantly mention a one-line one point from the four page document full of drivel, which (loads of moronism credit for me here) i didn't notice amongst all of that other mundane drivel, which actually like doubles the whole workload on the task, but your moronic document, which makes 3 parts of the same algorithm into three separate MILESTONES, makes this whole thing that nearly DOUBLES the workload into a shitty SEVENTH SUBPOINT of the completely unrelated first "milestone"?
FUCK YOU, YOU STUPID ROBBERY CHEAPFUCK, and fuck me for letting myself be tricked by all your fancy wordings that pretend you actually know what the fuck you are asking for, so i assumed you did, so I missed THE POINT, WHICH ACCORDING TO THE SEGMENTATION LOGIC OF THE WHOLE REST OF THE DOCUMENT SHOULD BE 3 SEPARATE FULL-SIZED MILESTONES, NOT A SINGLE SUBPOINT, YOU FUCKING FUCK!
... so much for still trying to at least a bit trust people.
FUCKING DISGUSTING MORONIC CHEAPSKATE FUCK.
and I can't even tell him to fuck off through the rectum he came here because he's all nice and polite so I would be the asshole!
"hey, please, can you build me a house?"
*house is basically finished*
"oh, great job, i love it, but i think you might have missed the fineprint in our contract that says that the house is supposed to stand inside an entry hall of a multibillionaire-sized mansion, so could we please sort that out and add it to the building real quick before i pay you the toolshed's worth we agreed on based on the contract? "
FUCK. HIM.
FUCK
FUCKFUCKFUCKSHITFUCKERYFUCKDISGUSTINGIDIOTICFUCKINGFUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!
i thought i can be a shitty liar and a con man, but this is some next level shit that would be totally beyond my abilities to pull off...
YES I KNOW IT'S MY FAULT I DIDN'T COMB THROUGH THAT BULLSIT "SPECS" OF HIS LETTER BY LETTER TO MAKE SURE THERE'S NO CON BULLSHIT LIKE THIS HIDDEN AMONGST ALL OF THAT MUNDANE SELF-EVIDENT PSEUDO-TECHNICAL DRIVEL, SHUT THE FUCK UP.
fucking disgusting moron, pretending all nice and innocent probably even to himself because he HAS NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT HE EVEN ASKS FOR.
i bet it's one of those pukefucks who get an overpriced contract for 50k without even knowing or caring what programming is, because "i'll just outsource the core functionality of the app for 50 quid to some naiive idiot who lives in the illusion that people are not diarrhorea-worthy pieces of feces, and this other third of the app to some other moron for hundred quid and then i somehow outsource gluing it together to some third poor sod, and that's 49.8k quid of pure profit for me, yay"
and now i'm torn between three options, just cancelling the "contract" with a comment saying "fuck off, you con man", or cancelling it with a lengthy explanation why he's a know-nothing piece of shit who conned me already into having done something worth about 5x more than his shitty "acceptance criteria" requests, or just start conning and bulshitting him back, which won't net me any money, and waste my time, but at least will also waste HIS time, which might be nice because he seems to be on a tight schedule so if i play this right i might have the chance to sink his whole contract which might be mighty nice satisfying...
FUCK THIS, ALL OF THIS, FUCK HIM, FUCK ME, FUCK ALL OF YOU, I SHOULD HAVE STARTED FUCKING OVER EVERYONE RUTHLESSLY A LONG TIME AGO BECAUSE FUCK THE WHOLE WORLD, WHY SHOULD I CARE WHEN NOBODY ELSE DOES, WHY SHOULD I BE DECENT WHEN NOBODY ELSE IS, AND IT ONLY ROYALLY BITES ME IN THE ASS.
stupid fucking lobotomized fuck, IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO SOMETHING, DON'T OFFER YOURSELF TO DO IT FOR MONEY AND THEN CON-SOURCE IT TO OTHERS YOU SHITTY BARFPILE!
FUCK. -
i am feeling angry and frustrated. not sure if it's a person ,or codebase or this bloody job. i have been into the company for 8 months and i feel like someone taking a lot of load while not getting enough team support to do it or any appreciation if i do it right.
i am not a senior by designation, but i do think my manager and my seniors have got their work easy when they see my work . like for eg, if on first release, they told me that i have to update unit tests and documentation, then on every subsequent release i did them by default and mentioning that with a small tick .
but they sure as hell don't make my work easy for me. their codebase is shitty and they don't give me KT, rather expect me to read everything on my own, understand on my own and then do everything on my own, then raise a pr , then merge that pr (once reviewed) , then create a release, then update the docs and finally publish the release and send the notification to the team
well fine, as a beginner dev, i think that's a good exercise, but if not in the coding step, their intervention would be needed in other steps like reviewing merging and releasing. but for those steps they again cause unnecessary delay. my senior is so shitty guy, he will just reply to any of my message after 2-3 hours
and his pr review process is also frustrating. he will keep me on call while reviewing each and every file of my pr and then suggest changes. that's good i guess, but why tf do you need to suggest something every fucking time? if i am doing such a shitty coding that you want me to redo some approach that i thought was correct , why don't you intervene beforehand? when i was messaging you for advice and when you ignored me for 3 hours? another eg : check my comment on root's rant https://devrant.com/rants/5845126/ (am talking about my tl there but he's also similar)
the tasks they give are also very frustrating. i am an android dev by profession, my previous company was a b2c edtech app that used kotlin, java11, a proper hierarchy and other latest Android advancements.
this company's main Android product is a java sdk that other android apps uses. the java code is verbose , repetitive and with a messed up architecture. for one api, the client is able to attach a listener to some service that is 4 layers down the hierarchy , while got other api, the client provides a listener which is kept as a weak reference while internal listeners come back with the values and update this weak reference . neither my team lead nor my seniors have been able to answer about logic for seperation among various files/classes/internal classes and unnecessary division of code makes me puke.
so by now you might have an idea of my situation: ugly codebase, unavailable/ignorant codeowners (my sr and TL) and tight deadlines.
but i haven't told you about the tasks, coz they get even more shittier
- in addition to adding features/ maintaining this horrible codebase , i would sometimes get task to fix queries by client . note that we have tons of customer representatives that would easily get those stupid queries resolced if they did their job correctly
- we also have hybrid and 3rd party sdks like react, flutter etc in total 7 hybrid sdks which uses this Android library as a dependency and have a wrapper written on its public facing apis in an equally horrible code style. that i have to maintain. i did not got much time/kt to learn these techs, but once my sr. half heartedly explained the code and now every thing about those awful sdls is my responsibility. thank god they don't give me the ios and web SDK too
- the worst is the shitty user side docs. I don't know what shit is going there, but we got like 4 people in the docs team and they are supposed to maintain the documentation of sdk, client side. however they have rasied 20 tickets about 20 pages for me to add more stuff there. like what are you guys supposed to do? we create the changelog, release notes , comments in pr , comments in codebase , test cases, test scenarios, fucking working sample apps and their code bases... then why tf are we supposed to do the documentation on an html based website too?? can't you just have a basic knowledge of running the sample, reading the docs and understand what is going around? do i need to be a master of english too in addition to being a frustrated coder?
just.... fml -
i can see a very thin line between me remaining the same good natured person as i am right now, and me turning into completely chaotic no remorse psychopath , in upcoming future.
the universe follows the rules. planets revolve in a pre defined manner, day and night comes as expected. however being a human for last 24 years, i have come to experience 2 different phenomenons : being rule bounded and being random.
randomness is fun. randomness is guilt free, randomness is a wonderful feeling for someone . but at the same time its worse for everyone else. try slapping a random kid in park or eating food at a restaurant amd running away, assuming there will be no consequences against you whatsoever. such a nice evil feeling
at the same time, rules are boring , unrewarding, guilt filled words of hope.
- "do not eat pizzas or you will get fat" :boring + guilt
- "go to gym, you will become appealing and get a good sex " : boring + hope
- "if you perform well, you will get appraisal and you will earn enough to afford your family a home" : hope + guilt
see how these rules are full of hope/guilt/boredom for you while being good+rewarding for others? that's how you are categorised as being civil , as being part of a society of semi evolved apes.
and as if those rules weren't enough , there came this unnecessary concept of faith, religion and spirituality.l, with its own set of rules and hopes.
and it seems like such a great capitalist idea , since the hopes provided via these are not even realistic : keep on doing good stuff, following the rules and you will get a better afterlive/next birth!
i have tried being a good person for my whole life. my parents are religious and i try to be one, I don't drink , smoke, eat other animals, or randomly start slapping kids in the park. i have been a boring personality, i studied , ran in various races od educational life, failed most of them, landed in a decent paying job , and now trying to even gain back a decent body to look respectful and worthy of a future family. feels like i did so much for so many hopes and am still doing it. we all do , no?
but i have seen companies laying off people and leaving them in turmoil, marriages getting ruined, and some person never getting the love, respect and rewards they deserve for all these shitty rules they kept up with
my life book is somewhat even-steven. i did get a few rewards and respect for some of my hard work, but my overall portfolio is negetive : a lot of investment on just the hopes of a better return
let's see if i can keep up with my sanity for next 50-60 years before i am dust again.
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ps : try playing bitlife : life simulator mobile game ( download the cracked version from the web though, original one is full of ads) . it just have a single big button and shows text about how an imaginary child(you) os growing every year on click. so far i tried to play the life of kid like a criminal, a heavily educated person, a politician and a job worker. almost all of them recieved "miserable" and "unsuccessful" as the final result. very fun game to play without being evil1 -
1.2 years ago, I was an intern, In letter they've written that 4 hours to work but I was working 12 hours daily cause I was curious and my boss appreciate for this. so one day while testing our app at 3 am in the night, he said, u r working too hard, so u can take a Smart Phone from my side of worth ~$250. I was so happy. He said it is a gift for ur dedication. Also, they've given ~$250 on my initial day while joining to upgrade my PC. But now, I've provided my resignation letter. So they've asking me to give back the Phone cause its a company asset and also give back the money. But later they said don't give the money but deliver the Phone before 15 Jan. So, idk am I an idiot or what but I was working more harder and helping more people in company so that they're provide more stuff and get impressed. But now I think i should not do anything and do my work as a duty. Idk, should I return the phone, should I ask my boss again that u have given it as a gift or should I return another $250? I'm a student, I don't earn much and my boss knew it very well. like after 2 year of experience in MERN stack/ Azure/ Flutter, I've created many things in company and they've decided to give $3,607/year according to my new offer letter. That's why I left the company.5
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So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.
So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).
There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.1 -
It seems that my barometer for whether I would stay long in a company is roughly 1.5 years. Because apparently that's how long it takes to gauge if:
(a) The work I'm doing is fulfilling or self-satisfying
(b) My colleagues make work a fun and challenging experience
(c) My bosses are people I can be proud to work for.
Right now, the tally thus far:
(a) The work is half crap, supporting old code (fuck Swig and Architect, by the way) or fixing bugs on old projects. New projects are always mismanaged, and I mean ALWAYS (let's do Agile and create tickets but hey the requirements are still in progress so do start anyway and we'll file everything as bug tickets until they're done)
(b) I'm sure it's an effect of going remote working for the last few months, but I'm feeling detached from my team. It's fine I guess.
(c) My manager is okay, he's a good guy who listens and is also technical so we get along. But his boss (who oversees several teams. including ours) is a total prick who loves to insult people at their expense as a joke. He knows nobody's gonna talk smack back so he just does it without repercussions.
I'll probably see if I can move around internally to a different division since the pandemic makes it difficult to find work externally. I'm grateful I have a job, but I shouldn't have to feel like I owe the company for that at the cost of my personal happiness.
Just gotta #survive2020 I suppose. -
[opinions welcome]
I'm just furious right now!!!
So I'm on this project where we have to make a whole *very old* website look like it's brand new.
Thing is, the whole point of the project is to make exactly the same pages as on the existing website smh. No UX or UI suggestions.
Just put the navbar in a component that looks like a tab bar, who cares anyway!?
Btw, I'm in charge of the UI.
My colleagues and I (mostly my colleagues) made a react components library and we use it for this project.
Fucking inputs get thrown into tables and all that, but hey, that's what the client asked for.
So here I am with my shiny new page, and I just hand it over to the front-end dev who just arrived.
She's supposed to feed in the data.
I don't give a fuck you use flow or redux or whatever fancy tooling.
Just call your back-end, get the data, format it and feed my damn table with it. That's it.
So today, after 5 weeks she's in, she calls a meeting where she's screening a presentation to the team complaining about how long it took her to understand what I did and change it completely.
Pieces of code on screen, saying it's crap and it shouldn't be like that.
I'm not responsible for inputs in fucking table, the client is!
Of course I have nested components with data passed through all the way: it's a series of fucking radio buttons within a table within a form!
During 5 weeks, yoy didn't even come to me once saying it's not what you expected or you're having trouble with my work!
And there we blaming my job like I'm the bad guy?!
Tonight, everyone's going home thinking I'm no good at what I do and completely lost, all because of her.
If you got this far, I'd like to hear from you on how I should act with her and how to tell her what she did is awfully wrong?4 -
Yesterday's was fucking stupid.
It all begins with a fucking online clothes shop that "cancelled" my order from a week ago because "PayPal detected strange account movements". I logged into my PP Account and no notice or whatsoever of that.
Then they tell me I'll have to wait around for ~30 days to get my money back. Are you fucking damn serious? First you delay my fucking order a week then you cancel it without contacting me to "reassure" I put the order and then you say that I'll have my money back on 30 days? Fuck you.
Thereafter, I was going to buy a new phone, which two weeks ago I already went to request a quotation and they told me I was ready to go with paying 50% off.
Well... fuck me, because I went yesterday and they told me that I couldn't get the phone becase "The system says you already have three lines with our company, and all of those have money due" What? Fucking shit, I went two weeks ago and everything was fine, and now this? I don't even have an account in that stupid company and now they tell me I have three with late payments?
FUCKING HELL!!
As if everything wasn't going bad already, I went off and said I'll come back today to see "if the system has been corrected", so I went to grab a burger at McDonalds that's on my way back home.
I make my order and the cashier is like "Hurr durr.. The card terminal doesn't work, do you have cash? If not, don't worry I can cancel the order and switch to the other station so i can charge you"
ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? I mean, come on dude! If you know that the shitty card terminal doesn't work and the station that it's fully functional it's literally three fucking steps next to you, WHY THE FUCKING FLYING FUCK ARE YOU USING THE WRONG ONE?
Then I wait for my order, that I saw they prepared and was ready like in 5 minutes, but the guy went and stood looking at the void. Then he realizes and begins to pick my food and set it up. He puts it on a tray and stands there, I stand there looking at him.
"My order was to go" I said... then he's like "Oh, yeah" and begins to pack.
Dude... the order is in the fucking screen, I said the cashier that It was to go... jesus.
Then I tell him "Can you put some sweet mustard packages?"
"Yeah" he says... but I looked away. When I arrived home, I opened the bag and... FUCKING HELL, NORMAL MUSTARD.
I told him twice, even said "please" and "thank you", but hell no, he had ONE JOB, and he didn't do it.
Seriously guys, stop this fucking mess, somebody call `kill`