*at work* (fictional names)

Kevin (linux support engineer): Bob, could you come for a second to take a look at something?
Bob (senior linux engineer): *tiny voice from a corner behind a desk* bob is not available right now. Please try again later.
Kevin: Bob, please, just for a second!
Bob: bob is not available right now, please try again later.
Kevin: Boooooooooooooob, come heeeeereeeee
Bob: as said before, bob is not available right now, try again later.
Kevin: but booooooob, come oooooon.
Bob: it seems that you might have a hearing problem since bob is still not available.
Kevin: but booooohooooob, come heeeeeeeeeeereee
Bob: it seems like the person on the other side of this line might be retarded. Bob is not available right now.
Kevin: But boooohooooohooooooob come oooohooohooon, just for a seeehehecond *starts fake sobbing"
Bob: Bob is getting real tired of your shit. Leave bob alone.

😆

Real conversation:

Coworker: I'm trying to classify data based on X

Me: Mhh. Seems like a hard task, we don't have data to figure out X

Coworker: I know! That's why I thought about using machine learning!

Me: (Oh, boy)

Coworker: I'm working on training this ML model that will be able to classify based on X

Me: and what are the inputs for your training?

Coworker: The data classified based on X

Me: And where did you get that from?

Coworker: I don't have it! That will be the output of my ML model!

Me: But you just said that was the input!

Coworker: Yes

Me: Don't you see a contradiction here?

Coworker: Yes, it's a pretty complicated problem, that's why I'm stuck. Can you help me with that?

Me: (Looking at my watch) Sorry I'm late for a meeting. Catch up later, bye!

At the airport.

Security: Please put all your electronics in the bin, including your watch.

Me: No problem

<goes through scanner>

Me: there was an Apple Watch in here and now it is gone.

Security: Oh, you lost your Apple Watch?

Me: No! I put my Apple Watch in the bin like you instructed and YOU lost my Apple Watch.

Security: It must be in the spinners.

Me: So my $500 Watch is in the spinners being run over by bins?

Security: you have to put the small things on the bottom.

Me: It was on the bottom and I did as you asked, this is entirely on you. Do not try to shift the blame to me again please.

Security: As I said...

Me: As I said, Do not try to shift the blame to me again. This is entirely your responsibility once you separate me from my electronics so you can perform security theatre. Have a nice day.

—————

Fuck this god damn security theatre. Fuck the dumbasses they hire. Fuck your country. Fuck your god damn feeling of insecurity. Fuck Your ineffective security theatre.

Sick my fucking dick until you choke and gag you worthless pieces of shit. Homeless people the street provide more security than you incompetent, under-educated assholes. Fuck you

And yes, I have 2 fucking laptops. I have a real fucking job where I provide actual value and for that I need a work laptop. I don’t come to work in a stupid looking outfit with a chip on my shoulder looking to inconvenience people. I come to work to provide real value to someone.

Fuck you and your worthless bullshit

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

StackOverflow: let's marginalize your "problem" and focus on the real issue at hand, which is that line 4 doesn't conform to the language standards and thus will lead to undefined behavior on a single kind of 8-bit microcontroller made in 1984 that is no longer in use.

WTF Python!!! "Master" and "Slave" perfectly convey the concept. In the English language many words have different meanings based on their context. It's plainly obvious that no allusion to human slavery is meant in the context of software or hardware module relationships. I don't even think it is problematic. The real problem seems to be the people who are taking terms outside their intended space. Why are we linking a scar on human history to terminologies explaining technical relationships?

Then lets also ban 0 and 1 because it can offends non-binary peoples!

Apple has a real problem.

Their hardware has always been overpriced, but at least before it had defenders pointing out that it was at least capable and well made.

I know, I used to be one of them.

Past tense.

They have jumped the shark.

They now make pretentious hipster crap that is massively overpriced and doesn't have the basic features (like hardware ports) to enable you to do your job.

I mean, who needs an ESC key? What is wrong with learning to type CTRL-[ instead? Muscle memory? What's that?

They have gone from "It just works" to "It just doesn't work" in no time at all.

And it is Developers who are most pissed off. A tiny demographic who won't be visible on the financial bottom line until their newly absent software suddenly makes itself known two, three years down the line.

By which time it is too late to do anything.

But hey! Look how thin (and thermally throttled) my new laptop is!

##REAL STORY##
Friend: Hey there, I have a Java Exam after one hour and I have a question for you.

Me: Great ! How can I help

F: They will give us a problem and ask us to solve it by writing a Java code.

Me: Okay,

F: That's it.

Me: Good, so were's the question.

F: Come on, of course I want to know how to solve it.

Me: Absolute Silence.

Me: friendsList.removeAll();

Having PHP as my most useful skill.

I know various other languages, but they're either too exotic for professional use, or my knowledge about them doesn't have the same depth as with PHP.

People joke about how awful PHP is, and it's not entirely true. The incongruous stuff such as confusing parameter ordering can be fixed with libraries. And PHP7 fixed a lot of the ugly stuff. A good dev can certainly write structured, readable, performant PHP code.

But there is a real hard limit. PHP is missing more complex type definitions present in other languages. A weak type system is like building stuff with popsicle sticks and bits of duct tape, it works fast and perfectly fine for small projects, but the lack of strictness is a problem when you have thousands of classes intertwined in all kinds of complex factory, service and repository patterns. And the simple type hints are still newish and fully optional, which means a lot of people don't use them.

So I regret getting stuck in this self reinforcing loop, where I learn more about a very imperfect language through employment, and keep rolling into jobs using that skill because it's what I'm most experienced with.

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

Life Coach: "I want a website where I can charge $5,000 for 6 weeks of coaching for [weird life problem very few people have or think about].

Me: "That'll be $5,000."

Life Coach: "That's too expensive for a website."

Me (inner voice): "tHaT's ToO eXpEnSiVe FoR a WeBsItE."

Me (real voice): "Consider it not as a cost but as an investment necessary to obtaining your first customer. Once the first customer is realized, you've paid for the website and the future customers will make you profitable.

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

Real reason behind the "Traveling Salesman Problem" :-/

I'm convinced code addiction is a real problem and can lead to mental illness.

Dev: "Thanks for helping me with the splunk API. Already spent two weeks and was spinning my wheels."
Me: "I sent you the example over a month ago, I guess you could have used it to save time."
Dev: "I didn't understand it. I tried getting help from NetworkAdmin-Dan, SystemAdmin-Jake, they didn't understand what you sent me either."
Me: "I thought it was pretty simple. Pass it a query, get results back. That's it"
Dev: "The results were not in a standard JSON format. I was so confused."
Me: "Yea, it's sort-of JSON. Splunk streams the result as individual JSON records. You only have to deserialize each record into your object. I sent you the code sample."
Dev: "Your code didn't work. Dan and Jake were confused too. The data I have to process uses a very different result set. I guess I could have used it if you wrote the class more generically and had unit tests."
<oh frack...he's been going behind my back and telling people smack about my code again>
Me: "My code wouldn't have worked for you, because I'm serializing the objects I need and I do have unit tests, but they are only for the internal logic."
Dev:"I don't know, it confused me. Once I figured out the JSON problem and wrote unit tests, I really started to make progress. I used a tuple for this ... functional parameters for that...added a custom event for ... Took me a few weeks, but it's all covered by unit tests."
Me: "Wow. The way you explained the project was; get data from splunk and populate data in SQLServer. With the code I sent you, sounded like a 15 minute project."
Dev: "Oooh nooo...its waaay more complicated than that. I have this very complex splunk query, which I don't understand, and then I have to perform all this parsing, update a database...which I have no idea how it works. Its really...really complicated."
Me: "The splunk query returns what..4 fields...and DBA-Joe provided the upsert stored procedure..sounds like a 15 minute project."
Dev: "Maybe for you...we're all not super geniuses that crank out code. I hope to be at your level some day."
<frack you ... condescending a-hole ...you've got the same seniority here as I do>
Me: "No seriously, the code I sent would have got you 90% done. Write your deserializer for those 4 fields, execute the stored procedure, and call it a day. I don't think the effort justifies the outcome. Isn't the data for a report they'll only run every few months?"
Dev: "Yea, but Mgr-Nick wanted unit tests and I have to follow orders. I tried to explain the situation, but you know how he is."
<fracking liar..Nick doesn't know the difference between a unit test and breathalyzer test. I know exactly what you told Nick>
Dev: "Thanks again for your help. Gotta get back to it. I put a due date of April for this project and time's running out."

APRIL?!! Good Lord he's going to drag this intern-level project for another month!

After he left, I dug around and found the splunk query, the upsert stored proc, and yep, in about 15 minutes I was done.

tl;dr: spent 12 hours creating an api for a job interview challenge. Got rejected after 4 weeks with no real feedback, and all I can do is rant!

So I was in the interview process with a company that was a great fit for my background.

Got through a couple of phone screens, and was given a coding challenge consisting of writing a web API with a couple of endpoints and a filter function.

I'm like, ok no problem, I happen to have created apis for some mobile apps in the past, and I pick Django rest framework to get the job done.

Implemented it on a Sunday, wrote a medium size Readme.md and some unit tests and submit. Took almost four weeks and a partial resubmission to get a rejection with no specific feedback.

Now I'm shamelessly butthurt and I have nothing else to do but rant! Worse part is I looked back at the code and in my opinion is solid AF, so I put it on my public GitHub cause fuck it!

My PM: I don't like when you get up and help out other colleagues with their problems on their computer. You're not at their service.
Me: okay, I'll refrain from doing so.

The next day, I arrive 5 minutes before 8, I get myself a coffee, talk with a few colleagues, and:
PM: Hey, can you please come and help me review this email?
Me: ** fuck it, I still have 2 minutes ** Yeah I'm coming
PM: Now please.
Me: ...

Also my PM, 5 minutes later: Hey I don't manage to print my document, can you help me?
Me: ...

10 minutes later, I get a call:
PM: did you call XY about ZX?
Me: Yep, sent you a mail about it 2 minutes ago
PM: Really? I don't see it
Me: I sent it.
PM: Can you send it again?
Me: ...

Later that day:
PM: Hey, what are you up to?
Me: Well, I'm working on our improved websi-
PM: Can you please create a new campaign on Mailchimp? We're all under water here and a bit of cooperation from you would be great
Me: ** huh? ** erm, ok?
PM: Do it now
Me: Yeah yeah, don't worry. ** click ** here, done. Now, where was I...

----- PM on holidays

Other colleague from another department: Hey Phlisg! I have a small problem on our platform, can you help me?
Me: ** writes a script to help her out **
Her: awesome, thank you!!
Her own PM, 5 minutes later: Hey! Thank you very much for your help, it helps us out a real lot, very much appreciated :)

I lost my smile at work since the beginning of the year, but that little help I gave my colleague just gave my smile back to me :D

So I was at work and send to another location (distribution centers) and in the lunch break my guider for that day and I started a conversation about servers etc (he appeared to do loads of stuff with that). He recommended me all those programs but I didn't recognize anything so I asked him what kinda servers he ran. He runs a lot of Windows servers. No problem for me but I told him that I am into Linux servers myself.

Guy: "Linux guy, eh? That system is considered to be so secure but in reality it's insecure as fuck!".

Me: (If he would come up with real/good arguments I am not going to argue against that by the way!) Uhm howso/why would you think that?
Guy: "Well all those script kiddies being able to execute code on your system doesn't seem that secure.".

*me thinking: okay hold on, let's ask for an explanation as that doesn't make any fucking sense 😐*

Me: "Uhm how do you mean, could you elaborate on that?"

Guy: "Well since it's open source it allows anyone to run any shit on your system that they'd like. That's why windows rocks, it doesn't let outsiders execute bad code on it.".

Seriously I am wondering where the hell he heard that. My face at that moment (internally, I didn't want to start a heated discussion): 😐 😲.

Yeah that was one weird conversation and look on open source operating systems...

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

Company: we care about work/life balance (as long as shit gets done)

Company: we care about mental well-being (except when shit has to be done "now!")

Company: we help each other (we push work around until someone finally do it)

Company: management is here to help you do your work (as long as you don't ask them to help you to solve a real problem)

Company: we are agile (except we have more sub-processes than ever)

Company: we only hire best (and then put them in the team of morons)

Company: we are customer centric (that's why we are delivering bugged features)

Company: we constantly rise the bar (deliver more shit in shorter time)

... did I forget about something?

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

Let's settle this:
Blockchain is just a dumb database, the feature that makes it amazing is trust-less ness.

Its not meant to make a decentralised uber or a Tic-tac-toe game.

Leverage the advantages of the system and solve real problem.

I got arrested multiple times under acts of cyber crimes...
Yeah, so what if I did? Why is it a problem that I take down CP sites? "Because it's partaking in cyber warfare." Well then the police and the Federal government should execute their job keeping such out of the web space. Now, whenever I find a job, I have to inform due to the judge's final document. And not just that now when I am required to talk to a police officer who has seen my record all they can reckon is to escalate it.

What fantastic horse crap! You get arrested for tracking down child molesters and taking them off the web exclusively...
Some say I'm a social justice warrior, only I don't think that I am. I reckon I am merely an over eccentric programmer who desires to see the real criminals get sent to jail.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

The school I went to...

Grade 1:
*GTA and minecraft to let student familiarize with cheating command and console

*Student should find and read the damn documentation him/herself about items, mobs and quests in every game. Be self motivated!

Grade 2:
*Contribute to community for myth hunting, map creation and glitch

*Solve personal networking, graphics problem and understanding hardware limitation.

*Solving game compability problem after Windows update

*Introduction to cracking and hacking

Grade 3:
*Motivation to host a game server

*Custom server scripting => start To really code the first time, Perl, python, etc

*Introduction to Linux server and Debian

Grade 4:
*From DDoS to server security

*Server maintenance and GitHub

*Game Server web development

*Motivation into non-gaming discipline by a random YouTube geek

*Set up mincraft with raspberry pi and Arduino

*Switch to Linux or Mac and just dual boot for gaming

Prepared for the real world.
Congratz for the graduation in the Pre-school of Developers (11-14 yrs old) :)

So our company's internet was down. Network admin was really pissed as there is suppose to be a notification from the ISP about down time. Network admin called the ISP customer services to inquire about the problem and they said "Sir, we wanted to email you but our network was down too."
Admin turned from being really angry to laughing out loud real quick...

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

Am I the only one who is triggered by seeing all of the stupid articles claiming Java is bad introduction language? Just becuase Standford decided to change it to JavaScript? What the actual fuck? How students should learn the fundamentals concept of OOP in scripting language?
Don't get me wrong, I hate using Java for real life projects. But there is a reason why almost every university use it as introduciton language. It's great start to learn programming. Saying that the 'Hello World' in Java is complex and can scare people away, it's complete nonsens. For fuck sake, yes programming should be fun, but it is also hard. People can understand that they are going to learn what 'public static voiď means later. It's the structure of many Computer Science classes. It's the assigments that are not designed in engaging and fun way for newcomers. That's the problem, not the language.

> TeamLeader1: I just discovered SQL is actually super fast! The low responsiveness I've experienced comes from our ORM!
> IHateForALiving: well of course SQL is blazingly fast. SQL has been refined by the best engineers in the world for the past 50 years, its performances are unparalleled for everything you could possibly need, unless you want to scale REALLY big. Sequelize, instead, is an Active Record ORM, so it's bound to struggle with huge amount of data, because every single row will get attached a significant amount of black magic to make sure everything syncs correctly. Why is that?
> TeamLeader1: I have a problem with this frontend component, it doesn't allow pagination. I tried downloading the whole DB to bypass that, but the ORM is slow... so I will bypass the ORM and download the whole table with a raw query. Look at that! It works like a charm, it's super duper fast!'

This mf is downloading some 35 thousand rows every time some user loads a page because he doesn't know how to paginate the fucking table with Angular, there's no way these people are real.

Real life job interview…
Manager: what about this problem? Could you solve it? (Showing me a problem about scanning a 2d array to find a value written on a piece of paper)

Me: sure! Just give me a piece of paper and I will write a solution.

Manager: no need for that. I don’t have the knowledge to check that anyway… if I wanted you to solve it I would have called one of my programmers.

…
Manager: do you have any question about the company?

Me: What do you exactly do in the company? I wonder what is the purpose of a person that makes questions about things he doesn’t know.

I just had a rather stressful morning. I should've known something was up by the sounds of thunder as I walked into the office.

I sat down and checked my emails. There was an email from the boss who was away on a business trip. The subject read, "CRITICAL BUG" and my name was mentioned. "Great...No time for coffee", was my first thought.

I began searching commits to see when and how the bug came to be. "SHIT! It was my fault", I said aloud.

(A bit of backstory, I am Irish, working in Germany with a B2 level of the German language.)

I now had to communicate the problem quickly with a senior developer who is Russian. He can't speak English well and I would not expect him to speak it. We are in Germany after all. I tried my best to communicate the issue, but I found it so difficult to understand his German in a Russian accent. Normally, in the office I speak German except when it is urgent and I must explain a problem in greater detail through English. I got past that obstacle, however, the real challenge of fixing the bug awaited.

After 2 hours of coding, I had a solution and committed it to the master branch. All the while, I had been replying to the bosses emails with updates, probably with many grammer mistakes.

We have no dedicated testers here and the code is written in a way which makes it very difficult to test (i.e. it was written many years ago). When I had initially written the code, I tested rigorously and found no issues.

Just needed to rant. I need a coffee break now...

I was stuck with an architectural problem for a few days. Tried to solve it in many different ways. I could always do a quick hack and call it a day, but.. That's not pretty and it would be a trip wire for future developments.

Went to bed at ~2am. Took a few hours before I finally fell asleep. In my dream I was solving the same problem as in real life, except there I found an obvious and simple solution. Woke up at 8am, repeated that solution to myself a few times to not to forget it. Implemented it in the evening and it worked perfectly!

Moral of the story: do not work late. Better go to sleep, rest your mind. You might solve the problem while resting, and you will need a clear mind in the morning to remember and implement the solution :)

p.S. This happened to me more than once.

Second day on the job, only one with no real degree in software development (did much stuff in free time, just finished school, got the job mainly because i knew people there)
So you can imagine that they were sceptic about me.

Chief executive whatever told me there is a problem with some JavaScript they can't fix cus there is no time and shit for that.
I was like ALL IN and said i could do this in a few mins.

Fixed it in 20 mins. Everyone was cheering. I was like "Well it was the right decision to not do my homework back in the days.." 😁

That you if you cant solve a problem on paper you can't solve it in the real world.

But seriously coding gave me a voice, I was a seriously smart kid, but I was also a dirty orphaned dropout.

Everyones worth in this world is measured on a piece of paper and mine was blank. I was just seen as some overly ambitious kid spinning fairy tales and crackpot theories because no one could understand what the ideas value was or didn't try because of my age and cv, then I taught myself to code.

All of a sudden my theories were provable and I had a way of delivering them to not just one but millions of people in a way that they could understand and interact with them.My whole life changed and the day I wrote my first program was the last day I was ever judged by a piece of paper.

I have those conversations with my coworkers about once a day. We use Linux at work and I am the only one with any real Linux experience.

C: I have a problem! I tried and googled everything already! Come help me...
M: *slowly walks over to their PC*
M: *copy-pastes the error into Google*
M: *clicks the first result*
M: *presses two buttons*
*everything works again*
M: So you tried Google already, have you?

When I leave there (it's a PhD position and I'm almost done) they will probably crash and burn...

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

DISCLAIMER: UNPOPULAR OPINION

I'm tired of the Linux community, they effectively discourage me of taking part in any discussion online

I'm currently making Windows-only soft, some game stuff, some legacy DirectX stuff you got it.

Everytime I go online, this shitty pattern happens, when I stumble upon a problem in project I don't know how to fix and I ask for help
These are responses
- HA, HA, WINDOWS BAD, HA, HA, GET REAL SYSTEM
- In Linux, we can do X too. I mean it has 4x less functionality and way shittier UX and is even harder to implement but it can probably work on too Linux, so it's better, yes, just move to Linux
- btw you didn't like Linux before? Try this distro man, it's better <links random distro>

Is there anything valuable in the Linux community? I feel like these people don't like Linux anyway, they just hate Windows. Every opinion, tip is always opinion based. Anyone who works on internals knows how much better and how well thought is Windows kernel compared to Linux kernel. Also, if someone unironically uses Linux distro on desktop PC then he's a masochist because desktop Linux is dieing. So many distros ceased work only this year.

Is it a good tool for servers and docker containers? I don't have my head stuck up my ass to admit that yes, it's much better than Windows here.

This community got me stressed right now, I fear that when I go to bathroom or open my microwave there's gonna be a Linux distro recommendation there

😠😡😠😴

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

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

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

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

....
....

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

Let me tell you a story.

Our company has a homegrown monitoring solution. Keeps track of our deployments and alerts us when something is broken. Really nice for the most part, except a little issue where we get up to 25 alerts PER DAY that our PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT IS DOWN. Including weekends.

With this many false positives, we quickly learn to ignore the alerts and miss real incidents.

So we approached this team, remember its our own tool, and told them about the problem. Turns out it is a known issue. And here's the kicker: they aren't planning on fixing it!

It gets better. Rather than fix this glaring issue, their solution is to make ANOTHER ALERT that lets us know the monitoring is misbehaving.

To recap, we can now expect to get up to 25 false positive alerts per day that our production is down, followed immediately by more alerts that the monitor is broken, which means we can ignore the previous alert.

As our PM said when he heard this: fuck that noise. We are escalating the shit out of this!

Programmer Influencers piss me off to Jupiter and back.

The ones who talk about just being a programmer, and don't do normal tutorials and solve a real-world problem and demonstrate it.

"i iNcREaSeD mY pRoDuCTiViTy bY 90%. hErE's HoW"

"tOp 10 lAnGuAGeS yOu sHoUlD lEaRn iN 2023"

"dAy iN thE LiFe oF a SoFtWaRe EnGiNeEr"

"HeRE's hOw yOu cAn wRiTe bUg fReE cOdE"

Devs are my closest friends and I have learned so much from you all.

They ask some of the best questions, their skill set is ever evolving, they have the real problem solving mindset, they are critical towards any and everything in a good way, and so much more.

There was this thread asking what a bad Product Manager is and this answer takes the cake.

The point highlighted in red is the ultimate truth.

Devs are most innovative people of our times. Big shout-out to you all and thank you for making me who I am today :)

PM: Can we have it so the usernames are case-sensitive?

Me: uhh, sure I guess.. But thats like really pointless and adds no real usefulness.. In fact makes the whole logging in thing a tad more complicated for no reason..

PM: Well this one other product we have uses "Admin" for the login versus yours that used "admin" so it needs to be implemented.

(note that mine accepted "Admin" anyways...) *implemented it*

PM: So there's a problem with the username sort, it sorts by capitals then lowercase.. eg:
alpha
beta
Alpha

Me: Yeah, you asked for case-sensitive usernames..

PM: Well can you fix it?

Me: I could create a second field within the user data that is the username in all lowercase and sort by that. But that negates like all of the whole case-sensitive usernames thing.. OR I could drop all this actually important work I'm doing and do a whole bunch of work on a custom sort for this useless fucking feature you wanted me to put in..

*it's been 2 weeks and still no reply...*

Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?

This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.

Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.

Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.

Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.

React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.

Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers and dev on!

I hate when someone throws at me some task all of sudden with a tight deadline.

Wednesday was one of those days.

manager: we want to remove all the offices because of our tight budget this year (multimillionaire company, lol), everyone will use office 365;

me: ahn... ok, but everything was already tested? Some macros, routines, old documents can be a big problem, as far I know (I don't use M$ at home, servers are Linux, so I really don't know about that). I can do some tests, only will need some real documents to make sure everything will do fine;

manager: yeah, yeah, everything will be fine, the high management already decided, don't worry, just remove the offices in the company, ok?;

me: alright...

*me deploys the remotion script in every f*cking machine*

48 hours later...

manager: well... everyone is complaining about the office 365, random complains, can you attend all the calls and reinstall if you can't solve the problem?

WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!

[RAGES INTERNALLY]

In the last project i worked in, the product owner wouldn't treat people as people but as resources.

The problem with that is you just look at people and their work in terms of a checklist and remain blind about real humans face.

She wouldn't understand the challenges of building something with an absolutely new stack which people needed to learn from scratch and put pieces together. She wouldn't be supportive of people trying out things and fail.

One fine day I told her that I was spending too much time on meetings and i should be excluding that time from available sprint timings.. she made me open my calendar in a screenshare session with all team members. Made me go through go through every meeting invite i had on calender and ordered which ones should i be attending from then and which ones i wont. That was insulting. It broke the trust.

I decided to not work with the project. Stopped putting my heart and soul into it and eventually got out of it in a month time.

Don't put your team into a position like this ever. You have to trust them with the problems they face and try to find a solution. Scrutinizing and micro management will always kill the team.

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

Real fact: 1999

IT: IT, how can I help?
MrB: I'm Butcheek. This program is shit, I can't even log-in!
IT: oh.. Ok Mr. Butcheek, let’s see if I can help...
MrB: of course you can: fix this shitty program and made me log in!
IT: I’ll try to do my best to assist you, can you...
MrB: I just want to log in! Can you speak my language? This new program is ridiculous, I wonder why you IT guys changed the old one, it was a mess but at least I could log in...
IT: I'm sorry you are experiencing this problem, but to assist you I need to know exactly what's the problem
MrB: I CANT LOG IN!!!
IT: ok, I understand this, but can you please provide some more information? Do you receive any particular error messages?
MrB: it says “wrong password” but it's not true!
IT: Ok, that's strange. Look, I'm resetting your password and then you will try again. At the first log in you will be asked to change it again, ok?
MrB: just be quick, I can't waste any more time on this!
IT: sure... Ok done. Please, can you try again? The password is “butcheek”
MrB: it asks for the username. What am I supposed to write here?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB: oh... Ok. And what's the password?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB:... No... Wait... Ok, “butcheek” is the password but what's the username?
IT: “butcheek”!
MrB: you don't understand, I have to put both username AND password!
IT: I know! “butcheek”! For both username AND password!
MrB: so I have to write “butcheek”-”butcheek”?
IT: yes, “butcheek”-”butcheek”!
MrB: so... “butcheek”...twice? Sounds weird... are you sure?
IT: yes I'm sure! However, you can choose either to write “butcheek” twice or “ASS” once, if you prefer...

Unspoken rule @ my work: if anyone asks if there is any specification and/or documentation available, they owe beer to everyone in hearsight... So there was a time we got around 5 new hires in a period of 2 days and guess what?! After a day or two it was a real problem to stay sober for the rest of the week. // Yes, some of them did not learn the first time 😂😂😂

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

Today is the real fuckening at work. The worst part is, you are working your ass off and someone started bugging you constantly on chat and blaming it is effecting his "productivity" because tech team doesn't solve his problem.

I have 4 projects under me with doing day to day operations also. But yeah just few more months before I left this shit. I wanted to shout back, but tried to keep my head cool, though I have already kicked his face many times in my mind.

If you cannot help, at least stop being a dick and appreciate someone trying his best to solve problems.

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

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

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

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

I've seen a job vacancy that asks for the following characteristics in a developer:

- extraverted, do'er (as opposed to thinker), out-of-the-box, curious, sees solutions and not problems, structural thinking vs. theoretical thinking, loves change, acts immediately, makes choices under stress, critically questions themselves if things go wrong

What the [censored] kind of programmer is that? Sounds more like a wannabe brogrammer type.

A typical, real programmer is introverted (for he is introspective, detail-minded and is therefore good at inspecting problems and finding solutions for them).

Seeing problems is not a bad thing, it's in fact necessary to be able to identify issues and not act like your typical manager who only wants to rush to solutions. He thinks deeply and theoretically before he takes action. Theory is the foundation of identifying a problem.

What programmer is stress-resistant? It's not normal for the human brain to be able to deal with stress; this is why switch-tasking is so hard.

Question yourself if things go wrong? Perhaps, but this sounds more like trying to shove the blame around.

Since we live in a rigid computer world with rigidly-defined protocols (say, HTTP), it is often useful to think in a conventional way. Out-of-the-box? Sure, if you're being innovative, or sure, as a tangential characteristic.

In my professional opinion, this vacancy reeks of bad corporate culture.. and the biggest alarm bell I find is: "There is free beer!" Err.. yeah. Anyway.

So, I'm a CS student in a third world country. I love coding and I think i'm pretty good at it.

As I'm kind of poor, I'm pretty much constantly looking for any job I can take, and I've already done a dev gig at a software sweatshop here doing mostly PHP, JS and Android/Java... the dev experience was cool, but money was absolute crap ($1.5USD/hour at the current rate, working 9h/day Mon-Sat, did it while in vacation). Better than min wage in my country but still, looking at the numbers I see from programmers all over the world... it was practically working for free. The real problem is almost every dev job here is similar, so I was looking into going remote but every opportunity I see is for seniors/people with 2-3 years experience or more.

Can you give me some tips on getting a remote job as a student/recent grad with little experience? What would you do in my position? Any input is greatly appreciated!

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

Hi all. at the moment I work in a medium-sized company, but I have enough work to do, and now we have a problem with databases and our system administrators can’t handle it, and I was instructed to find a reliable company that will either deal with what we have or it is possible that our databases can be transferred On another platform, a real specialist administrator is generally needed. thanks in advance.

Seeing on some other posts I wanted to rant about my uni’s computer science community.

Some background: This is a small uni, not like a community college definitely a little bigger. Located somewhere in WV. There is 2-4 girls in every CS class I have had and at least 27-30 guys.

The reason why I mention this is because there is no sense of team work at all. When it comes to exams or projects I take the initiative and make either quizlets (being freaking nice here) share them or take times after school in the library to work on projects. If I have a solution I will share it, I will try to help you in your problem. If I know how to do it of course.

The real issue is all those CS experts that already fixed or finished their programs, the ones on the top of the class. Is as if the moment I ask something related to the project I am already dumb for not have figured it out on my own.

There is the typical CS student that just tries and gives up or just gives up without trying and the other kind of CS student that does that. Doesn’t help anybody else, wants to be on the top all the time.

What I am trying to say here is that it just feels like a competition all the time. (I consider myself in between this two types of students cause I wasn’t born a genius but I do try my ass off on projects) however, I feel like guys see me every new semester in a CS class and think “oh wow how is she still here? Wait did she pass?”

All I say is “yeah I fucking did, with a C or B but here”. So I don’t know, first rant posted 👏🏽🙆🏽‍♀️

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

Last week our department drama queen was showing off Visual Studio’s ability to create a visual code map.
He focused on one “ball of mud”, vilifying the number of references, naming, etc and bragging he’s been cleaning up the code. Typical “Oooohhh…this code is such a mess…good thing I’m fixing it all..” nonsense. Drama queen forgot I wrote that ‘ball of mud’

Me: “So, what exactly are you changing?”
DK: “Everything. It’s a mess”
Me: “OK, are any of the references changing? What exactly is the improvement?”
DK: “There are methods that accept Lists. They should take IEnumerables.”
Me: “How is that an improvement?”
<in a somewhat condescending tone>
DK: “Uh…testability. Took me almost two weeks to make all the changes. It was a lot of work, but now the code is at least readable now.”
Me: “Did you write any tests?”
DK: “Um…no…I have no idea what uses these projects.”
Me: “Yes you do, you showed me map.”
DK: “Yes, but I don’t know how they are being used. All the map shows are the dependencies.”
Me: “Do you know where the changes are being deployed?”
DK: “I suppose the support team knows. Not really our problem.”
Me: “You’re kinda right. It’s not anyone’s problem.”
DK: “Wha…huh…what do you mean?”
Me: “That code has been depreciated ever since the business process changed over 4 years ago.”
DK: “Nooo…are you sure? The references were everywhere.”
Me: “Not according to your map. Looks like just one solution. It can be deleted, let me do that real quick”
<I delete the solution+code from source control>
Me: “Man, sorry you wasted all that time.”

I could tell he was kinda’ pissed and I wasn’t really sorry. :)

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

Manager: Hey software engineer, how's the project going?

Software Engineer: Good, just debugging my code.

Manager: Debugging? What kind of bug are you trying to fix?

Software Engineer: The ones that make my computer turn into a lava lamp.

Manager: Ha ha, very funny. But seriously, how can I help?

Software Engineer: Well, I need a bigger monitor. My current one doesn't have enough real estate to display all the errors.

Manager: How about a second monitor?

Software Engineer: No, I need a bigger universe.

Manager: I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, keep coding. We have a deadline to meet.

Software Engineer: No problem, I have all the time in the world. I just need to find a way to slow down time.

Manager: I wish I had your optimism. Just let me know if you need anything else.

Software Engineer: How about a unicorn? I heard they're good at coding.

Manager: I'll see what I can do, but in the meantime, stick to using a keyboard.

Refactored an authentication library a while back and teams are now getting around to updating their nuget packages.

It is a breaking change, but a simple one. The constructor takes a connection string, application name, and user name.

A dev messages me yesterday saying ...

Tom: "I made the required changes, but I'm getting a null reference exception when I try to use the authorization manager"

Odd because the changes have been in production for months in other apps, so I asked him to send me a screen shot of how he was using the class (see attached image below).

Me: "Send me a screenshot of how you are using the class"
<I look at what he sent>
Me: "Do you really not see the problem why it is not working?"
<about 10 minutes later>
Tom: "Do I need to pass a real connection string? The parameter hint didn't say exactly what I should pass."
<not true, but I wasn't going to embarrass him any more>
<5 minutes later>
Tom: "The authorization still isn't working"
Me: "Do you still have 'UserName' instead of the actual user name?"
<few minutes later>
Tom: "Authorization is working perfect, thanks!"

A little while later my manager messages me..

B:"I'm getting reports from managers that developers are having a lot of problems with the changes to the authorization nuget package. Were these changes tested? Can you work with the teams to get these issues resolved as soon as possible? I want this to be your top priority today."
Me: "It was Tom"
B: "Never mind."

Here's a real tip for people new to the industry.

It's one of those things that's been said over and over again but very few can really seem to employ. I suggest you learn it /well/.

You are not your code. Criticisms of your code, ideas, or your thought processes, is not a criticism of YOU. You absolutely cannot take criticisms of your work personally.

We are engineers. We strive to seek the best solution at all times.

If someone has found a problem with your code or with an idea or whatnot, it is coming from a place of "this is not the best solution", NOT "you're an idiot".

It's coming from a place of "I'm closing this PR because it is not a change I feel suits this project", NOT "I'm closing this PR because it's coming from a woman".

It's coming from a place of "This feature request is ridiculous/this bug is not actually a bug", NOT "you're a fucking idiot, fuck you".

It's coming from a place of "I've already had to address this in a number of issues before and it's eaten up a considerable amount of my time already", NOT "I don't even know you and this I don't have time for a nobody".

You do not get to be bitchy to maintainers because they denied your request. It's not a reflection of you at all. But if you're arguing with someone who has maintained a piece of code for almost a decade, and they're telling you something authoritative, believe them. They're probably smarter than you on this subject. They've probably thought about it more. They've probably seen their code used in many different places. They have more experience than you with that codebase in almost all cases.

Believe me, if we cared about who was behind all of the issues, pull requests, etc. we get, we'd get NOTHING done. Stop taking shit personally. It's a skill, not a defense mechanism. Nobody has the time to sugar coat every little thing.

Let's normalize directness and stop wasting time during technical discussions into opportunities for ego-stroking and circle-jerking and back-patting.

That moment when you execute "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y" just because you need time to think about how to solve the real problem.

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

I hate white boarding sessions. They feel unnatural to me. I simply don't work well when put on the spot and I have 3 ogres staring at me waiting for me to fuck up in front of them. Fight or flight engages, the adrenaline rush, my mind freezes. Suddenly it's like I forget how to code at all and I'm expected to solve a problem at once, correctly the right time, or I'm out.

I can't work like that. I need time to process a problem on my own, with my coffee in my one hand and a pencil and scratch paper in the other, not with some demanding employer standing over my shoulder the whole time scrutinizing my every key stroke. I get things wrong the first time sometimes, and more often than not have to google things I can't recall spontaneously. But I always figure it out, test it, make sure it's right before putting it into use.

I've been through several "probationary" periods when first starting a job. They just tell you, they're giving you a month to see if you can handle the job. If not, sayonara. I don't see what's so hard about evaluating candidates in a real world scenario.

So many employers have totally unrealistic expectations.

I dive in head first.

Some existing program annoys me, so I get this itch to write a selfhosted Spotify in Go, or a conky with 3D graphics in Rust.

I check the homepage of the language, download the tools, check which IDE is great for it.

Then I just start writing code, following the error corrections thrown by the IDE, doing web searches for all errors. Then when I run into a wall, I might check the reference docs or a udemy course.

Often I don't finish the project, because time is limited and I still have 4 million other things to do and learn, but at least I've learned a new language/tech.

Con: For tech which uses unique paradigms like Rust's memory management or Go's Goroutines, it can be frustrating to bash away at a problem using old assumptions.

Pro: By having a real demand for a product with requirements instead of a hello world or todo app, it's much easier to stay motivated, and you learn beyond what courses would teach you.

First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.

My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.

I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.

That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.

I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."

If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.

Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.

So I finished my first semester in NYU as a CD master. During the first semester I took a class called heuristic problem solving. Every week a competitive game will be introduced to us, and will be played in two weeks. And trust me, the games aren't easy. I teamed up with another guy who I had no idea was and named our team as we don't know. At the end of the semester we won seven out of nine games, and by won I meant that we beat the whole class in the match. And my teammate became a really good friend.

By telling this story, I want to make a point. I love problem solving, and not problems in a algorithm book where you apply an algorithm and do some trick to solve it, but real world problem where you hope for the best and anticipate, predict your opponent's move. However, American's school system doesn't teach that.

When I applied to graduate school, no school wanted me because I have an average GPA of 3.6, and no outstanding achievements. I can solve problems in my dream becaus I have an active mind, I can propose solution to a project one month before my teammates realized they essentially were doing what I told them the solution should be. But so what, I can't write those on my application.

One of the professor told me that my professor shared the story of my team during a faculty dinner, and they were very impressed by our achievement. So I guess I'm not dumb. But after all, companies and schools will look at your transcript and decide who you are.

I love myself for having random thoughts all the time that can lead to innovative problem solving. But I also hate myself for not able to study like the good kids are.

Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.

But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!

So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...

For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.

For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!

Have you ever had a problem with a partner, but you cannot prove at 100% that he has something against you? But you cannot stand him?

Well, this happened two years ago. I was working as a tester, and “John” (I won’t say his real name) was the dude who tests my tests, but in production.

I ‘m a sociable person, and I don’t mind talking with another people. Suddenly, I noticed that my co-worker started to behave a little bit... rude? Plain? I don’t know, but sometimes he didn’t answer my conversations/questions, or sometimes answered with extra-negative stuff.

“Well, his life is not easy” I said to myself. “Everybody haveproblems”, “I have to understand him and calm down”.

Two weeks later started to report really REALLY absurd production bugs, and with absurd I mean, for example, that he didn’t like the color of a button, a point next to a phrase, etc., things very very simples, but sometimes he ignored big errors.

Once I had to went out of the city for few hours, and asked to permission to go out. I had pending tests, but I left a document with specifications in case of emergency. Even passwords. Before I could finish the thing in the other city, my partner called me two times, and asking me obvious things! I had to go back to the office ealier that I had planned, so f*** angry 😡 and when I arrived to the office, John said “no, forget it, let’s solve it tomorrow” 🙃 WTF?!!!!!!

I decided not to argue with him.

Also noticed that his headaches suddenly increased, and looked so tired ☹️ I felt guilty to judge him

I felt so guilty, and even today I don’t know what to feel about that or what to think. I don’t work there anymore, but, What do you think? What would you do?

Am I the only one who doesn't understand apple card? Like really, it's just the worst pitch ever!

"Apple card. Made by apple. Not a bank" that's a REAL ad I saw today. Why would you trust APPLE more than an FDIC insured bank with decades or (in some select cases) CENTURIES of experience in finance?

"No more card numbers and CVV"
Cool. I get it. Card numbers get leaked and stolen. But that's why banks insure cards and reverse fradulant transactions. How an I'm supposed to use it on Amazon?! I'm sure they have an answer. Like maybe one time use generated cards. But they haven't advertised it yet, and that's a problem!

Why do they think people want this!? And even more so, because I've seen some people are excited: WHY DO PEOPLE WANT THIS?! why is apple trying to make everything?!

So... I've got a confession to make.
I'm no longer a Dev. After the disaster that was my last commercial gig, I went and got a sec Ops role... And I love it. It's just technical problem solving and explaining all the way.
Don't get me wrong, I still love to code. But that's exactly the thing. As a commercial developer employed by corporations, I spent close to 80 % of my time not coding, but in useless meetings, or trying to figure out just what my colleagues thought was "common sense", reverse engineering their work and documenting how to get it running, etc. Basically, fixing shit for braindead academics with next to no real world experience.
Now, when I code, I get to do it on my own terms, with my own stack and as much comments and docs as I want to have. I own my time, and the only ones that are allowed to interrupt me is the local fire department.
I can do what I'm fucking passionate about and leave the rest for the useless people.

Algorithms real life implementation

On the way to your college canteen? -> A* search

Waiting in line in the canteen? -> Queue

Notice that girl standing in front? -> Linear search

Searching for her dad in the phone book? -> Binary search

Stupid! Google it! -> Trie

Search for her on Facebook! -> Depth-first search

Found her! Friend request? Accepted! Send a Hi! -> Graph

Writing her a secret love letter? -> Caesar cipher

Uploading your first date pic on fb? -> Image compression algorithms

Looking through her Whatsapp messages? -> KMP algorithm

She found out and had your first fight? -> Start over with some gifts! Backtracking

Got her list of items to buy? -> Array

Too many items! Low on cash, maybe? -> Priority queue

Making her play treasure hunt for her gifts? -> Linked list

Wait! Go back! Is that a ring? -> Stack

Girl’s family not agreeing to your proposal? -> Divide and conquer

Got married? Congrats! Going for your honeymoon? -> Travelling salesman problem

Your mom packing luggage for you? -> 0/1 Knapsack problem

She packed your favorite pickles? -> Hash table

Driving to the airport? -> Breadth-first search

Not about favorite language but about why PHP is not my favorite language.

I recently launched a web shop built on Prestashop. I found that some product pages are so god damn slow, like taking 50 fuckin' seconds to load. So I started investigating and analyzing the problem. Turns out that for some products we have so many different combinations that it results in a cartesian product totalling about 75K of unique combinations.

Prestashop did a real bad job coding the product controller because for every combination they fetch additional data. So that results in 75K queries being executed for just 1 product detail page. Crazy, even more when you know that the query that loads all these combinations, before iterating through them, takes 7 fuckin' seconds to execute on my dev machine which is a very very fast high end machine.

That said I analyzed the query and now I broke the query down into 3 smaller queries that execute in a much faster 400 ms (in total!) fetching the exact same data.

So what does this have to do with PHP? As PHP is also OO why the fuck would you always put stuff in these god damn associative arrays, that in turn contain associative arrays that contain more arrays containing even more arrays of arrays.

Yes I could do the same in C# and other languages as well but I have never ever encountered that in other languages but always seem to find this in PHP. That's why I hate PHP. Not because of the language but all those fucking retarded assholes putting everything in arrays. Nothing OO about that.

Today on forgotten movies – Chronicle.

A very grim, very dark movie about accidental superpowers discovery, but with some school-shooter vibes.

Don't you find it predictable how in regular movies a hero saves the world against all odds in the very last moment? Well, forget about it here – this movie is not "cinematic" at all, and that's what I like about it.

A horror in regular movies doesn't usually scare because the image itself is too perfect – you don't usually see the world like this. It doesn't seem real, that's the problem. By adopting the "found footage" screen language, Chronicle delivers the horror perfectly, because the world in it seems perfectly real, just like you see it through obscure youtube videos named MOV_0115 or IMG1014.

I like it that the characters actually look like real people, not like stereotypical superheroes and not even like enhanced versions of people that try to sell you an idea of what "success" looks like.

People in the movie also act real. They're weak, they're scared, they're irrational, and you really start to believe that yeah, this is what probably gonna happen when a human faces something as unbearable as superpowers discovery. And, as weird as it sounds, the superpower itself also looks totally real – raw, unpolished, uncontrollable force that requires getting used to and probably is too much for a regular human. Definitely not a perfect, tailored thing that turns anyone into Mary Sue.

Overall, this movie is the most immersive one I've ever seen. If you want to see what would really happen if you discover a superpower, this movie is for you.

Oh god, I was like 13 and just found out about RPG Maker 2000. I got a pirated copy from a friend because ive got no internet at that time. I remember, my first project was with a friend of mine and dayum, we were so dumb and unknowing.

Once we wanted to implement a counter of how many fights a player had.
The problem was, we only knew about switches (boolean variables) and so we started to implement boolean variables like these:

hadOneFight
hadTwoFights
hadThreeFight
and so on, as something like a counter.
We took this to 50 before I asked my friend if this is the right way of doing this.

He answered: "thats probably the reason, why games are so big nowadays" (he just installed morrowind at home...)

Then at one day, I reached the point I didnt knew what I should do next in this project, so I looked around at all the other functions we never even tried and I found something called "variables".
Those where the "real" variables like string and int and wow, suddenly the possibilities where endless. I told him about variables at telephone and what we could do now, but that just got him somehow frustrated so he told me, that he wants to leave this programming thing

I try and try and try to teach my coworker critical thinking skills, proper programming techniques, and standard git etiquette. Then I add 4 booleans to solve one problem, use strings instead of ints to find unique SQL Server entities, and push right to the development branch.

I am a real asshole, but at least I am not fake.

This was some time ago. A Legendary bug appeared. It worked in the dev environment, but not in the test and production environment.

It had been a week since I was working on the issue. I couldn't pinpoint the problem. We CANNOT change the code that was already there, so we needed to override the code that was written. As I was going at it, something happened.

---
Manager: "Hey, it's working now. What did you do?"
Me: *Very confused because I know I was nowhere close to finding the real source of the problem* Oh, it is? Let me check.
Also me: *Goes and check on the test and prod environment and indeed, it's already working*
Also me to the power of three: *Contemplates on life, the meaning of it, of why I am here, who's going to throw out the trash later, asking myself whether my buddies and I will be drinking tonight, only to realize that I am still on the phone with my manager*
Me again: "Oh wow, it's working."
Manager: "Great job. What were the changes in the code?"
Me: "All I did was put console logs and pushed the changes to test and prod if they were producing the same log results."
Manager: "So there were no changes whatsoever, is that what you mean?"
Me: "Yep. I've no idea why it just suddenly worked."
Manager: "Well, as long as it's working! Just remove those logs and deploy them again to the test and prod environment and add 'Test and prod fix' to the commit comment."
Me: "But what if the problem comes up again? I mean technically we haven't resolved the issue. The only change I made were like 20 lines of console logs! "
Manager: "It's working, isn't it? If it becomes a problem, we'll work it out later."
---

I did as I was told, and Lo and Behold, the problem never occurred again.

Was the system playing a joke on me? The system probably felt sorry for me and thought, "Look at this poor fucker, having such a hard time on a problem he can't even comprehend. That idiotic programmer had so many sleepless nights and yet still couldn't find the solution. Guess I gotta do my job and fix it for him. I'm the only one doing the work around here. Pathetic Homo sapiens!"

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that it's over but..

What the fuck happened?

Sort of !dev

I can't do school anymore. I get so many panic attacks. I was shaking the entire time I was writing my essay today. It's hard to focus when your brain is fucking freaking out. I'm missing deadlines, failing tests left and right.

Real talk, I'm not dumb. This was never a problem. My University fucked me up and now I can't even look at an assignment without an electric feeling and I don't know what to do.

I had a panic attack during the opening crawl of Star Wars. I had to leave the theater. My anxiety is going to give me a heart attack one of these times. I'm 18, why am I experiencing health issues like this?

School isn't done right. How could this be the intended effect?

1. Learn to read and understand the errors and exception messages. While writing code you're going to be facing exceptions most of the time and the real cause of them is under a lot of generic error messages. That and a lot of patience and perseverance.

2. You're going to face clients and bosses that ask you to do a temporary "workaround" even though you know there is a best way to solve a problem even if it takes more time and effort. Don't "crash" against their ideas, try to find a mid-term between the fast and easy work around and the best solution and leave it open to improve it in the future. I have met a lot of developers that let the frustration stops them to be creative just because the approved development is not what they wanted to do.

So, a friend of mine just got a NullPointerException from his shitty Java code, and decided to fix the problem by catching the exception.
Great fix bro, real smooth..

I just told my director that the solution for a particular problem that we have involves Machine Learning. For which I had already applied a VERY small app to make sense of an old database to make a NEW one since the old one broke every notion of how a db is supposed to be set (meaning that I recreated the project from scratch)

And on the same message I told him that I was not willing to do it using M.L since I was not paid enough to bring this level of heat to the institution.

Normalize telling mfkers that your skills are worth more.

I am paid well, but not enough to out of the blue tell mfkers that my ml based algo can save them./

Fuck em, fuck em hard, fuck em good, fuck em without even using spit.

I don't do this shit because I am paSSiOnate, since there lies the trap: "I mean, I love it so I guess I can do it, I do this on my free time either way" <---- no bitch, shit is expensive on the real world, don't do that wtf is the matter with you? *slaps* companies don't see it as a: "oh shit, employee X can do this! value!" they see it as "greaaaaat, I can save money on this", so fuck em.

Normalize it, y'all are wizards, advisors of kings, no company today survives without I.T. About motherfucking time y'all bitches take this shit by the horns and do with it what you want.

People form third world countries that need work: shit don't apply to you, currently, but we will make it apply to you on the rising, my kings, stay strong.

// This is not a Rant, it's a sad story

I am a Software Engg. Student at my college, and I am a scholar, I stand 1st rank in my department for my academics. Our college expects us to do an internship this semester break, and I am stuck. The college expects us to do an internship for a period of around 6 weeks from a company with a CMM level 3. The real pain is the fact that the college didn't prepare us with the right skill set to get an internship like that. And in the end all our college wants is a certificate to show to them that I have done an internship.

My problem is, the people who don't have the slighest skill to do an internship are getting certificates because they have contacts, and they have no intentions to learn anything. But, here I am, although I believe I don't have that good skill set either, but I am stuck with no contacts, no internship offers, and no responses from the company I have applied to. Don't know what I am gonna do, but I have a zeal to do perform well, let's hope I find an opportunity to exhibit my talents.

If anybody can help me, please do. 🙏❤

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

One job I picked up was for an IoT Start Up. It was quite interesting work, reporting to the technical director, who was an electronics engineer, who was designing the hardware himself, they had a couple of firmware guys already, and just needed someone to take care of the software.
So they said they needed something in Azure that they could stream their data to and provide analytics for their clients. It had to be Azure, and it had to be Azure Native, and was to be Multi-client, as they had a deal with Microsoft to showcase how well Azure works in the IoT space at an exhibition/conference in 3 months time.
So I worked flat out for 3 months, on a whole variety of technology, from C++ to get the radio packets from their IoT chip, Python to run on the hub to take the data from the C++ and stream it to the cloud, Azure IoT Hubs in every continent to receive the data and store it an a Cosmos DB, and then Power BI analytics wrapped up in an Angular front end that the clients could log into.
Got it finished 2 days before the show, and they were so pleased I got flown business class to Singapore to be on the stand and talk to customers.
The first sign of trouble was when we arrived at the show to find we just had one of those little circular tables with two stools in the middle of the floor, about two feet across and no power.
No problem, I was able to sort that, swapping laptops in and out.
Microsoft were really happy with what we had, and couldn't believe I had thrown it all together in 3 months.
We picked up a potential customer for the system, a major Asian Telecoms company.
Then when we got home, the CEO swooped in. I had never met this guy before. Imagine one of the VC guys from Silicon Valley, or the CEO from the IT Crowd. You get the picture. Could talk the hind leg of a donkey, and real street smart, but no brains. He insisted on "taking it from here" and flew alone to strike the deal with the customer. Came back with an MOU in his pocket and said to me, their guys will be in touch with you.
Then I got a call. Can you send us the source code and tell us how what servers we have to run this on?
Um, its cloud native.
No, we can't use a cloud it has to be on our servers - your CEO told us that was no problem..
He hadn't even taken the trouble to find out what it was we had built, and what he was selling.

I watched nvidia gtc keynote today. Most of stuff was about how amazing their gpu is and how much processing power we need, oh really?

Self driving cars are most idiotic way to implement rail way system on top of complicated road traffic system from last century.

The real problem is and always was problem of last mile. We don’t do shit about it, just trying to reinvent same stuff by complicating things.

I started wondering if it would be cheaper to just put small electric golf cars on railroads next to highway with automatic parkings next to cities. We could then slowly replace highways with railroads and even stack rails on top of each other.

You just drive to parking with golf cart and it hops you to railroad with auto chargers. Traffic is predictable so you know exact hour when you hop out and can drive last mile to target destination. So fucking simple yet we need fucking computer and tons of scientists to solve problems we created by bringing idiotic movies ideas to life.

Well most of stuff we try to automate is done so shitty way that it’s in fact complicate.

Fortunately it’s not my problem.

I see a lot of arguments out there over 2 space, 4 space and tab indents but I think the really problem are the people that double tab. Yes they exist and yes they are the real scum of the earth

- Two months ago I joined this company and did literally nothing ever since. For that I would like to thank my line manager and his entire branch for being an amazingly incompetent colleagues, and for mumbling "that's how the client works" every time I raised the same damn problem. Also, let's not forget my HR manager and interviewer, who apparently have no connection whatsoever with real situation of company's projects. And last but not least this remarkably hierarchical workplace where you can't throw a rock without hitting a cocksure higher-up.
Y'all fucks deserve some serious brain readjustment.

For fucks sake python.
Reminder to the morons like me still using python:
Notepad++ is not a real IDE and Console output is not a real debugger.

And here we see the absolutely dogshit worthless error output of python:

Says its the fucking return line where the problem is. Besides the problem being between my fucking ears apparently, it took a fucking double take to realize I had capitalized the class keyword.

Not really a programming story... but a story about how programmers problem solve in real life.

Mods, sort me out if I'm out of line. Anyway, here goes.

So, my wife and I are arguing about whether or not the garage has insulated walls.

"It doesn't have insulated walls", I say, "I've been up in the rafters and their's no insulation there, so there's probably none in the walls."

"Well, why can't you just check", my better half responds, "You could just punch a hole in the wall to see."

Me, taking about 300ms to process this statement. Looks over, and punches a hole in the wall.

"See, no insulation!!!" I say triumphantly.

"What. The. Fuck. Did you just punch a hole in the wall for???"

deerinheadlights.gif

"Um, because you told me to?"

"Well I didn't mean to use your hand, I meant to get a small drill so the hole wouldn't be enormous."

"Well you didn't say "get a small drill", you said "punch"!

And as a laid down to sleep, on the couch, that night I still insist she told me to do it. And while I patched that hole, I still thought it was her fault. And to this day I still think it's her fault.

You cannot give a programmer these vague instructions and expect appropriate results.

TL;DR;

Idiot hard coded database host on the app... Pushed to prod and suddenly shit wasn't working... Took me 10 minutes to figure out what was going on...

Wrote a passive aggressive git message and commited.
Before updating prod my boss turns around to me and the following took place:

Boss: is there any problem with the server?

Me: yes, someone (i know who was ) hard coded the test db IP and it broke the backend.

Boss: oh, but will it affect the mobile app?

Me: well, it won't work but I'm already pushing the fix.

Boss: no..err.. I mean... Will I have to make any change to the mobile app?

Me inside: wtf dude... For real?! Get your shit together...

Me: no. It good, I already fixed it.

Boss: OK. Thanks

TL;DR;

Moron hard coded dB's host and stupid boss can't get shit together nor ask who did it to take precautions...

We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.

I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.

It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.

That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.

Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.

The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.

The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.

And the answer will be

1. regulated tech

2. an end to television media as we know it

3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime

4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.

5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.

I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.

And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:

* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault

* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.

* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.

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.

The 'i am a total noob' feeling is real fiah like a mix tape right now. last week on a personal project i had the problem of placing a div within a div and the buttons not being clickable. i fixed it by fixing the positions of the elements. today the same thing but will a scrolling div and f*ck me right i just had to forget the solution. now i have been stuck for hours trying to figure out the right way and fooling around with no solution. learn your fundamentals.

Hello everyone, first time ranter here! I have been studying Computer Science for 2 years starting September. The program introduced me to Java,HTML,CSS, JS and php. I feel like even though I am currently studying this I still do not "know" how to code. For example when I look at my classmates when they code it all seems so effortless and smooth, if they run into an issue they will usually solve it within the hour where as when I run into an issue I struggle to even see what the problem is. So the real point of this rant is, how do I improve? I am currently doing the #100daysofcode to get better but sometimes I feel so far away from calling myself a "developer" what is your road to the "developer" title? did you struggle as much as I am at the moment? or did you just sail into it like my classmates?

When I thought I had bricked my HTC Hero while trying to load a custom ROM and it just didn't boot. I had a real eureka-moment late that night when I understood the whole process and successfully flashed it in a non standard way to get it back working.

I haven't thought about this for a while and it wasn't really dev-related either more than problem solving. That moment was also realisation that I both love and hate technology.

My problem with a lot of free resources/class assignments is we're being forced to make useless shit. For instance, an interactive textbook we use has some stupid fucking turtle assignments.

Why not make it something relevant? One of the first things i ever made was a Fahrenheit to Celcius converter. That's a real world application, since not many can calculate that math in their head.

Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.

Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.

I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.

A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.

I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.

On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg

The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.

I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.

But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?

So I work for a company that does outsource, this company is pretty nice, but I don't get to see it too often. The one where I'm outsourcing though is the one where I spend all of my time.

Now, this company is a kind of a startup working with AI and Deep Learning (but not if statements :o ), but I came here as a full stack python developer that should implement their AI modules into real apps (mainly web apps).

Everything sounds good untill now, I learn lots and I'm doing what I wanted: python development. The problem is: management + one kiss ass guy.

The amount of work that should be done and the deadlines that should be kept are so messed up that I end up working extra hours, sometimes even in weekend, just to get it done. I'm the only apps developer there, so passing my tasks is not an option. I tried to talk about this, but I was met with a "loser can't keep up even with these few tasks..." kind of attitude.

Moreover, there is a guy that would do anything for the boss's attention, so he speaks everyone there behind their backs (and we all know it, but he's the favorite and he actually knows his stuff so we can't do much about him).

Now the question: what should I do? I only have 5 months here (so leaving would put a hole in my CV, I don't even know what to answer at this interview question "why are you leaving"), plus that the managers from these two companies are highschool friends which means that if I go and ask for a different project, the atmosphere at work will change (maybe this is overthinking already, but I can't help it). Also, last week I could barely get through the days without crying from stress.

TL;DR: I learn a lot from this company, but the deadlines are killing me and my stress level is at an all time high. I want to leave, but I kind of can't because I want my CV to look good.

So yeah, this is my first real rant, feels good to put it out there

I found weird that some developer never ask why when facing a problem. "What do you mean never ask why?" here some story.

Let's say a developer work with simple app. Laravel as Backend and Postgresql as Database. He face a problem that the app very slow when searching data.

In order to solve that problem he implement cache using redis but he found problem that it fast occasionally. In order to solve that problem he implement elasticsearch because he think elasticsearch very good for search but he found another problem that sometimes data on postgresql out of sync with data on elasticsearch. In order to solve that problem he implement cronjobs to fix out of sync data but he found another problem that cronjobs cannot fix out of sync data in real time. and so on...

Do you see the problem? He never ask why the app slow. Which part search the data? Backend or Database (Search in the Backend mostly slower than Database because Backend have to get all data on database first). Has the query been optimized? (limit offset, indexing). How about the internet connection? etc.

For me it's important to ask why when facing a problem and try to solve the problem as simple as possible.

This is something I'm proud of about myself as a developer, which is rare.

My setup with the Alt key.

All the keys in my left hand (as in, for all the keys in my left hand region, qwerasdfzxcv)
have their Alt and AltShift combinations mapped to (almost) all the special chars related to programming.
For example:
Alt + z -> /
AltShift + z -> \

Here's me typing them in 2 seconds.
{}()_-'"/:+=<>[]|#~`\;*!

And, on my right hand, I emulate the arrow keys movement:
Alt + hjkl moves chars
AltShift + hjkl moves and selects chars
AltCtrl + hjkl moves words
AltCtrlShift + hjkl moves and selects words
Alt + n. backspaces/deletes chars
AltCtrl + n. backspaces/deletes words

And the best of them all:
Alt + space -> <return>
AltShift + space -> Shift+<return> (which does a newline in chat editors like fb messenger)
AltCtrl + Space -> Ctrl+<return> (which can do the submit in some forms, like send email in gmail)

Now, my hand sits for real on the home row and rarely moves because it's not there just for vim, but for the entire system as well.
This setup is very compliant with my little mouse use, since I use vim, and the vim extension for chrome.
I still use and need the mouse for some tasks.

Another one huge benefit is that I don't have a problem remembering where the keys are. This is a problem I can have because I go between different keyboards because of having used different keyboards: argentinian, american, japanese and now brazilian (I'm not trying to be cool, it's just a series of circumstances that led me to using different keyboards).

At the same time, this thing might have become a hinderance because it's not as easy for me going to a different keyboard.

Regarding implementations, when I used MacOS I used Karabiner, insanely clean interface.
On linux, I have to create my own mapping in X.

According to my doctor and chiropracter I'm burned out right now.

But I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. But my concentration and productivty have been gone for a few weeks now.

I mainly work alone and I'm currently trying to complete 4 projects. But I just can't seem to get it done anymore.

I know that when I'm in my peak I would only need 2 weeks for it. But I have been trying for 2.5 months know and getting nowhere.

Not really where the problem originated but probably with the ever changing specs and my main client that hasn't paid in 5 months. But he accounts for 80% of my profits, but the internal politics of the coperate stuff is making stuff hard.

Not really sure how to go from here yet, need to finish this but can't focus. Can't hire someone since my reseveres are gone and I can't take a holiday and relax because of the money and the voice in my head that says you have to get this done.

But the feeling of wanting to work but not getting anything done, like walking into a mental wall. Makes me wanne run into a real wall head first. Stupid body listen to reason so we can go on a holiday and relax!

I usually work in a two person team on a hybrid application we are developing, using AngularJS and node.

This normally works okay, because he handles the back end (he's been on the project since January last year, I joined in August as a placement student), and I handle the front end.

However, due to Christmas holidays and such, he's ended up taking an entire month off, and won't be back until the end of January.

I've dabbled in back end before, some routes and that for SQL queries, but nothing serious.

Last Tuesday our core service for the application that needs to be updated in real time broke and pissed off the API provider because we were hammering them with requests.

My first day on back end and this happened. I didn't really know what to do, and had to call my teammate to ask what to do. I essentially just restarted things, and left them as is, until I could find a solution.

From there, I had to mock the operation of the service (which is a complex enough beast) to figure out the problem, and find a fix. Our app more or less hinges on this service, so if it messes up, it's the end times.
All of this while flying on what I've interpreted because the guy that's on holidays was the only guy that knows more about this project than I do.

To make things worse, the clients are being very particular because they're waiting on investments and don't have money to pay our company. So, if they're paying for 5 days work, they're going to put in 5 days of project development. The problem is that their interpretation of 5 days of project development has not changed from when there were two people on this project.

There are 40 tickets in this sprint (ends Friday) and 35 of them are assigned to me. Granted, not all of those take a day to do, but estimates don't mean anything, I guess.

Ganbarimasu.

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

!Rant

I have not slept in 28 hours.

I discovered Quantum computing, pubo and simulators.

I FEEL it can solve my business problem, but it is fucking time consuming to write this code. (In a good way).

I do not need sleep at this point, I need answers!

Anyone with good links to either pubo examples or a useful quantum algorithm, I’ll take it ! (not the random number… I have already run that on a real QPU 9Still no idea how much that run cost in $)!)

I really despise solving competitive programming problems.

I truly believe it's okay to struggle with them and that people have different abilities. But these kind of problems are an easy way to make you hate yourself and think of yourself less.

I can't solve this problem --> I'm not a good programmer --> I'm not smart enough --> I'm not good enough like my peers who work at FA*G companies, ...

I know these interview problems are a filter and that recruiting is hard and the demand is always high and that they are nothing like the real work but, the reality is, you need to prepare if you want to get into one of the big companies with better perks and maybe better projects.

So technical interview today but woke up (6am) and started thinking about it and it led to this rant about algorithms. This is probably going into a Medium post if I ever get around to finishing it but sort of just wanted to share the rant that literally just went off in my mind.

*The problem with Algorithms Technical Interviews Is They don't test Real skills*

Real world problems are complex and often cross domain combining experience in multiple areas. Often the best way is not obvious unless you're a polymath and familiar with different areas, paradigms, designs. And intuitively can understand, reason, and combine them.

I don't think this is something a specific algorithm problem is designed to show. And the problem is the optimal solution to some of these and to algorithm design itself is that unless you train for it or are an algorithm designer (practice and experience), you can only brute force it in the amount of time given.

And quite frankly the algorithms I think we rely on daily weren't thought of in 30 minutes. The designers did this stuff for a living, thought about these problems for days and several iterations… at least. A lot were mathematicians. The matrix algorithm that had a Big O of 7N required a flash of insight that only someone constantly looking and thinking about the equations could see.

TBA
-system design
-clean readable coding practices
...

TLDR: I could probably go on and on about this stuff for hours jumping from item/example/area to the next and back again... But I don't think you can test these (~20) years of experience in a 1 hr technical interview focused on algorithms...

Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.

So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.

We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).

Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.

Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*

Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.

Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.

SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances

Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -

SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -

...

Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

If they followed my suggestion and went straight to debugging the server issues they would have been solved it from week 1 and everyone would have thought the migration had a minor performance hiccup. In fact, we have already done such at least twice before and nobody batted an eye.

Instead they self-labelled the migration a failure on first error, setting the stage for apologizing to the client, and put themselves on the spot for a whole staging / production signoff, replication / backup worfklow, almost a blue-green "seamless" deployment reminiscent of DigitalOcean.

Well they're not DigitalOcean, and anyone who has spent any time understanding users knows they will not participate in "new system" tests long enough to find or report issues.

So of course the migration stretched out to almost three months up until the whole reason for the migration - the rapidly escalating risk of the old provider disappearing - hit like a freight train and now they have to go through the problem of debugging the server like I told them to on week 1. Only this time they've set the client mindset against it, lost any chance of reverting, have had grave risk for data loss, and are under pressure to debug other people's code in real-time.

This is why I don't trust devs to do ops. A dev's first solution to any problem is to throw tech at it.

Is your code green?

I've been thinking a lot about this for the past year. There was recently an article on this on slashdot.

I like optimising things to a reasonable degree and avoid bloat. What are some signs of code that isn't green?

* Use of technology that says its fast without real expert review and measurement. Lots of tech out their claims to be fast but actually isn't or is doing so by saturation resources while being inefficient.
* It uses caching. Many might find that counter intuitive. In technology it is surprisingly common to see people scale or cache rather than directly fixing the thing that's watt expensive which is compounded when the cache has weak coverage.
* It uses scaling. Originally scaling was a last resort. The reason is simple, it introduces excessive complexity. Today it's common to see people scale things rather than make them efficient. You end up needing ten instances when a bit of skill could bring you down to one which could scale as well but likely wont need to.
* It uses a non-trivial framework. Frameworks are rarely fast. Most will fall in the range of ten to a thousand times slower in terms of CPU usage. Memory bloat may also force the need for more instances. Frameworks written on already slow high level languages may be especially bad.
* Lacks optimisations for obvious bottlenecks.
* It runs slowly.
* It lacks even basic resource usage measurement.

Unfortunately smells are not enough on their own but are a start. Real measurement and expert review is always the only way to get an idea of if your code is reasonably green.

I find it not uncommon to see things require tens to hundreds to thousands of resources than needed if not more.

In terms of cycles that can be the difference between needing a single core and a thousand cores.

This is common in the industry but it's not because people didn't write everything in assembly. It's usually leaning toward the extreme opposite.

Optimisations are often easy and don't require writing code in binary. In fact the resulting code is often simpler. Excess complexity and inefficient code tend to go hand in hand. Sometimes a code cleaning service is all you need to enhance your green.

I once rewrote a data parsing library that had to parse a hundred MB and was a performance hotspot into C from an interpreted language. I measured it and the results were good. It had been optimised as much as possible in the interpreted version but way still 50 times faster minimum in C.

I recently stumbled upon someone's attempt to do the same and I was able to optimise the interpreted version in five minutes to be twice as fast as the C++ version.

I see opportunity to optimise everywhere in software. A billion KG CO2 could be saved easy if a few green code shops popped up. It's also often a net win. Faster software, lower costs, lower management burden... I'm thinking of starting a consultancy.

The problem is after witnessing the likes of Greta Thunberg then if that's what the next generation has in store then as far as I'm concerned the world can fucking burn and her generation along with it.

SharePoint things that I get yelled at by customers for:

Setting up page permissions wrong (even though the real problem is that a coworker didn’t check the page in)

Writing the workflow wrong and nobody is getting emailed (even though they didn’t select who to send the email to)

Not magically knowing that they wanted the new intern (who started Tuesday) to be given full design rights on their page

Not magically knowing that their discussion mod quit a year ago (before I started here) and now nobody can feature a post

Not spinning up an entire new site so that they could post a link to a single sign up sheet for their team (of 10 people) barbecue

Somehow making it so MS Edge can’t handle high res images correctly (because I totally created Edge (which isn’t even a supported browser here))

Not responding immediately when they submitted a ticket at 7:00pm (I’m off at 5) asking me to change one word on a page they have edit rights to

Not giving their admin assistant global design rights for our entire organization

Not giving them access to a confidential folder that has nothing to do with their job

Telling the owner of aforementioned folder that they’re not allowed to store confidential data in SharePoint

Making workflows too confusing for them to figure out

Fixing shit workflows that their ex coworker built wrong

Generally having the word SharePoint associated with my name

I really want to stress that we should add the ticket for adding the missing test cases in *this* sprint and not postpone it any further.

-- "Isn't there something more important to be added instead?"

There. ALWAYS. Is. Something. MORE. Important. The real problem was that we implement the test cases in the past to begin violating our definition of done. We have to fix and one point and we have to own that decision as nobody else will care about passing tests and test coverage. It's our job to care for that.

Yes, we can instead focus on all the other high-priorities task that should have been done yesterday, yet that won't change the fact that large part our codebase will remain an untested messy blackbox just asking for weird bugs and wild goosechases in the future.

Don't hide behind "high priority tasks". A job is done when it is fucking done and tests are part of that. Hurrying from one important task to the next will just mean we'll never do it. There is no better time than right now.

If code coverage got left behind in the past, then we'll have to suck it up in order to fix it as soon as possible, otherwise we'll just suck forever.

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

Holy retarded internet company. The fiber cable that comes from the power pole lost its connection to the building I live in. So the fiber was laying on the ground in the parking lot. The upside is it is still working. The problem is people are going to run over the fiber and break it. So I sent an email to the ISP on Thursday. They didn't create a ticket all day on Friday. By the time I got home they were not open. I called their tech support number and pressed 0 until I got a real person. I explained they need to fix this soon or it will get broken. They said "I understand" and then proceeded to create a ticket for fucking wednesday next week! I told them it will damaged by then. They said "I understand". Then I get a text saying they will do this wednesday. No you stupid fuckers, you do not understand!

Queue the McGuiver music:
I got out some steel wire I use to fix stupid shit like this. I made a hook to connect the steel cable holding the fiber. This hook will go around some exposed electrical conduit. Then I got a board to lift it up high (no ladder and 5 inches thick of ice on ground). I cannot balance wire hook on board and get it to slip down. So I got a steel pole I have and attached another hook with electrical tape. As I passed the hook over the conduit I used other pole to grab bottom of hook and pull it down to keep a hold of the conduit. Now the fiber is up in the air again above the parking lot. I hope this stupid hack works until wednesday. My right arm hurts like hell cause the strain of holding the fiber taut while I pulled the hook down. It strained my right hand.

Worst customer service on the planet with Century Stink. They fucking make it harder than hell to get help and it seems they take almost a week to fix shit.

Windows 10 updates. I see many posts about singular events that people have experienced, so I thought I'd try to sum up all the problems I have had.

Home computer, always on:
Is scheduled to update during 'inactive hours' but the options for that window are too narrow. So almost daily the 'required updates' overlay pops up WHILE I'M DOING STUFF and I have to say 'Ok' then close the update settings window that opens automatically so I can get on with what I'm doing.
Now, if I'm just browsing, writing or something like that, it's just really annoying.
But when I'm gaming and it causes the game to freeze up (because, you know, ubisoft and ea and such) and I lose my progress, that pisses me off.
When I'm hosting movie night with my friends and the movie gets interrupted, that pisses me off.
Even when I'm just trying to relax with a good show after a hard day and THAT gets interrupted, it really bugs me.
And then when there's a major update and I don't want to schedule it right away, they decide that I probably meant 'do it in an hour'. And then a message pops up every hour with only the option to postpone one more hour. What happened to all the options for scheduling it for several days in the future? Nope! Can't decide? We'll do it RIGHT NOW, NO TAKEBACKS, THAT'S FINAL!
I cannot fathom that they can't find a way to ACTUALLY do the 'inactive hours' thing.

And then there's the work computer. For the last two years, that has been a laptop that I shut down and take home every day. The common problem with that is that it always tells me it has to update when I want to shut down for the day because I have to go home. I can't leave the pc turned on in my bag, it would overheat. So since there is no option to shut down without updating anymore, I have had to rely on the fact that using the power button to shut down circumvents the update.
And if I don't remember to update at home, it's then going to waste my time the next morning at work.
Just give me the option to delay for a bit, then remind me NON-INTRUSIVELY so I can do it when I have the time.
And then there was the update that prevented the machine from booting and I had to waste TWO working days reinstalling EVERYTHING! And we were about 6-7 people hit by that update in our organization.

So yeah. Windows updates are a real fucking problem. Yes, I wan't critical fixes for security problems and other serious software flaws.
But the current policy of 'fuck you, we're doing this' is just not fucking acceptable in any way.

I'm fucking done.

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

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

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

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

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

First off murphy is a bitch. Week started off good, nothing bad happening then friday night came and i get an email about a site being down. Ok check it out real quick, cert is expired. No real big deal just a 20 minute fix, didn't bother me that i didn't get an expiry alert. Now is where murphy decided to be the biggest fucking bucktoothed cocksucker, generate a csr for a wildcard domain using an existing key and sent it off when i get it back the private key doesn't match the cert. Again ok maybe i fucked up, generate a selfsigned cert no fucking problem. Contact support to see if they have an idea. Oh now is when it gets fun, the fucking dumbass preceded to tell me how i didn't know what i was doing and how i just had to generate a csr and private key at the same time after i explained to the bastard that I've already tested it with a selfsigned cert. (How does this fucker have a job) By now apparently i was pissed off enough to scare murphy's pansy ass away cause i told the fucker to refund my money, got a list of 30 subdomains and setup letsencrypt on it. Now the part on this that is fucking hilarious is that it took me damn near 24 hours to be called a fucking idiot from a guy that doesn't know his ass between a hole in the fucking ground and 30 minutes of being pissed off more than i have been since i took anger management classes in the 9th grade to say fuck it and switch.

"Hell is other people's code." Jean-Paul Sartre

So I had my external HD connected so thought I'd back up my code...

But real into a problem... The git repo.... Currently copying 300,000 files... For just 10 projects...

I spent 4 days working on a new feature of our program. A real pain in the ass! Even did a few hours of overtime.

This morning I go to my boss to tell him about a performance problem I was trying really hard to solve, but couldn't still totally remove...

His answer: "Don't bother with that! Our client is not going to use it. They simply forgot to remove it from their request. So we are going to deliver it so they will have to pay us!"

FFFFFUUUUUUCCCCKKKK!

Still looking for my first full-time dev role. After being endlessly rejected from every dev job I've applied for, it starts to eat away at your confidence. Makes me wonder if I'm not as competent as I believe I am. :/

Fortunately, I landed a coding interview with Google! It is my dream job to work at Google, so the fact that they even acknowledged me & my skillset makes me so happy and reaffirms my belief in my capabilities. :D

It's pretty odd, that after applying to 20+ open Google positions relevant to my skill level & location and often with references included, then having been rejected from all of them, that I finally got a chance with them when one of their recruiters found me on LinkedIn and liked what she saw. I cleared the screening call, and made it to the first coding interview.

Of course, even with all the interview prep I've done, it was all practically for naught since they caught me off guard with a crazy conceptual problem anyway. (Well, actually, was I 'caught off guard' if I was already expecting to be caught off guard? o.0) I struggled heavily in the first half of the interview, but found my footing towards the end. So I knew I screwed up and that it was highly unlikely for me to get the job.

Nonetheless, Google had the decency to reject me not via an automated email, but through an actual direct phone call with my recruiter. (The cruelty of the automated application rejection system in our society is a whole rant of its own, for another time.) My recruiter told me that they felt I wasn't ready but they liked what they saw, so they will be revisiting me in exactly a year to reconsider me.

To know that I wasn't fully rejected, and that my dream company Google sees real potential in me, is highly reassuring. It means I'm not a lost cause; I simply need to keep looking. Google will want me more strongly once I have the experience that comes from a fresh grad's first full-time job.

So new job started.
Just for context- old company was shit.
Promised the world but.
No benefits.
Terrible project management.
High pressure.
But green field interesting work (except by now it’s a few years in so it’s a ‘browning’ field but I was on it from the start).

New company first impressions..
Seems a fantastic company.
True to their word they have money for tools.
Making time for personal development.
Much bigger development community/department.
Seems like the term are under far less pressure so far at least.

But a MASSIVE amount of tech debt.
People seem to want to do the right thing and they’re making time to try and deal with it.
But one or two are very opinionated as to how to deal with it.

So this could go either way and only time will tell I guess.
Trying not to over analyse every little thing they say but I’m hyper sensitive to it at the minute while in the early days.

As always the real challenge in IT is the people not the tech. I count myself as part of the problem, sure I will form some opinions and sharing them too.

Imagine going on quora and answering somebodies carbon offsetting question by pushing your own stupid fucking agenda with propaganda answers like

"oh we need rainforest money!"

"oh we need grassland!"

"oh support the cows"

jesus fucking christ, THIS is why we have a problem with people not accepting climate change, becuase every fucking liberal wants to pile on one another and have their 'most important' cause behind it

give me a break you fucking idiots, it won't be solved by acting this way

sorry this is in no way software related, but it's the only place left i have to rant (however in some ways it is somehow software related, due to being able to think about the real world without being an absolute idiot and pushing some stupid peer pressured political idea because your social identity and friends are more important than actual facts, but whatever)

I am working on a project which I want to make open source. The problem is, I have never launched any open source project and I do not know any platform to reach people (I am not talking about hosting the project, I am talking about making people know, use and take part in the project). I believe this project will help a lot of people who works on IoT, chat services or distributed real time servers.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.

Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.

I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".

A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"

The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.

When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"

Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕

That feeling when your first classifier on a real life problem exceeds the 97% majority class classifier accuracy.

I'm doing something right!

What you're about to read is an horror story based on real facts.
Our story begins one week ago, when a dev who calls himself "Arfmann" (what a loser, the f* means arfmann?) decided to take his dev skills to another level.

He always has been scared of databases. He made really bad dream about them. Like, they were screaming at him "SELECT useUs FROM database" while he was crying in some shared preferences noises.

A week ago, he decided to overcome his fear. He learned the basics of SQL. Everything was going well. Until, he decided to implement it on Flutter. A Google's technology.

At first, he decided to appeal to documentation. Went on Flutter web site. Flutter documentation. Sqflite documentation. Started reading. Started doing tests with the code written by Google's engineer.

Everything was fucked up. Dozens of errors, the documentation started to blow up and his PC went on fire, due to Android Studio.

He used a sample project made by Google's engineer. "Maybe if use directly their code it will work. Maybe I was the problem". He wasn't.

The whole documentation was wrong, every single line of code was a spaghetti code (yes, every single line was an entire spaghetti code). Everything was put in the main. If you wanted to try to keep things organized, you would end up punched and beaten up from the code itself. It would become a sentient entity that will beat you the fuck up.

Really scary.

I just oversleeped...
Im not a dev yet, i have a contract job at the factory.
I have worked 1month already from 3 that i singned up for.

The worst thing is that i said i need a day off to give specific papers for my university. It was supposed to be today but i moved it tomorrow due to the problem with transport.

Well my superior is propably realy angry right now... On the bright side i will have 2 days off...

I wont get fired (hopefully) because as contract job they should only substracy the daily pay from my monthly salary.

This is my first time that im late for a real job. My intuition says that i should go but i wouldnt bear the shame... If i were to go i would be late minimaly 2 hours. I have no idea what to do... I will propably stay home and lose the daily payment because im not strong enough to bear the shame today. It would be very difficult to get in the company as well. Ahhhhh! Its difficult to make decisions when you are shy, lazy and scared.

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

The real problem it is that i can write lines of code and build algorithm in a fastest way in the late night.

Meanwhile in the afternoon I just wanna eat pizza and sleep on the sofa.

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.

1) Never be afraid to ask questions.

There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.

Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.

That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.

2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.

3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.

4) Find hobbies outside of tech!

5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.

6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.

7) Negotiate salary. Always.

8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.

9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.

10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path.

Sometimes I sit and stare at my broken code and think "Is this it? Is now the time that I have actually encountered a real problem that has no google-able solutions? Is this a bug with the framework I'm using? Surely not."

and After sometime of increasing the squint in my eyes and decreasing the distance between the monitor and my face... I realise that it was a spelling mistake causing the issue.

I tried to go for a job as a ReactJS junior dev.. I got my first interview and they liked my prototype.. but..

A week later they reply: "We decided not to go with you because we hired an expert in ReactJS".

Err.. really? You're hiring expert-level ReactJS developers for a junior position?! What the frig.
You want to know what I think? This whole "It's ok that you don't know everything, you'll learn on the job" thing is a hoax. No, the job market doesn't want novices. With every single interview, I'm met with: "but you're not an expert and we can't afford that".

This reminds me of the best advice my professor (seasoned expert in the field, real engineer with more than 20 years experience) once gave me:

"The job market doesn't have the time nor patience to mollycoddle you. When you enter it, you have to already know things to an expert degree because companies want value. They're hiring you because you have these skills and knowledge.
You have to already know what they ask before they ask it. You're required to know things by yesterday, so to speak. It is an exigent industry out there. This is why we bring you the foundations - so that you go further on your own and you can take on any problem"

I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.

There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).

Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.

So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.

The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...

... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.

I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.

In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.

I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.

Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.

I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.