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Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.18 -
You just came in today, being new in your position. I've been with the company for around 5 years, and you're the new guy. Look, I absolutely respect your skills. You're not a newbie coming out of uni, ok? You're a skilled sysadmin. But you asking me "what is your college?" and after me telling you I majored in linguistics, your answer "huh, that's why" and explaining why I'm wrong in my programming practices (which are taken from the Apache foundation) is utterly bullshit. Fuck off!
1) The fact that you have a BS in CS doesn't mean you know the best. I've worked as a programmer for some time. You were never paid to write a line of code.
2) Even if you were absolutely, positively, non-questionably right, you have no right to be condescending.
So, can you just shove your degree far up your ass? Because my friend, you're uppity as fuck just because you spent 4 years in college learning theory that you never applied in real world. I spent years learning my programming skills alone, after 9 to 5 work, during the evenings and fucking weekends. I don't need to prove myself to you, you fuckity fuck, I have proven myself to our employer over the last five fucking years.
Fuuuuuuuck!10 -
So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.
Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.
So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.
So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.
So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(4 -
It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.
I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!
We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.
His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.
„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“
When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!
But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.
„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?
That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.
For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left
His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.
Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!
It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.
He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.
Yeah his style
if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}
And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.
And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”
I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings5 -
!rant...
...i am actually scared about posting this one... because... well, i've mentioned that language idea that i've been mucking around with "designing"... and... i have grand ideas, but no idea if i understand stuff and dev needs and stuff well enough to be doing what i'm doing right now in trying to put it into lang design....
...and posting it here is throwing myself into lion's den with almost nothing, and risting shame when someone who knows this stuff looks at it and laughs at me, realizing that it's utter bullshit that has no idea what's it doing, a perfect dunning-kruger example...
...and this fear is reinforced by the fact that the whole thing is still (about 5 years after i've been mucking around with it mildly) very much in flux containing lots of things i'm not sure about, undecided about, don't know enough about, don't realize the implications of, etc etc...
but... let's try it.
let's link this thing and let you probably tear me to shreds =D
(ignore the c# project, that's the exmaple of what i was talking about regarding the parser, bullshit that kinda spins out into self-referential circles because although i understand the parser and interpreter theory, I wasn't able to transform any of it into practice yet)
https://github.com/sh-code/AsmOs49 -
"learning" html and css
So, there are these courses in my school, "ÜK" ("Überbetriebliche Kurse") we call them.
It's 5 days, a Tuesday to Thursday, next week Tuesday and Wednesday, last day in the afternoon we have a test.
Today is that Wednesday
I know html and css pretty well, so if was pretty easy, I didn't even bother to do some of the tasks we had
I did look through the book over the weekend to make sure I knew my stuff right
Now, the theoretical part of the test had stuff like "colspan" witch was nowhere to be seen in the book and PowerPoints, and some stuff was just unclear as fuck, seriously...
*looks up colspan*
Apparently it's a table cell that spans two columns, or more, if you want to
I never needed something like that, and we never looked at it, that's why I didn't know about it.
There where other unclear questions as well, so I went to the teacher after the test and told him.
He gave me an empty test where I made an X for stuff that wasn't in the book or the PowerPoints and wrote a bit for the stuff that was unclear.
I did know some more then some in the class, so I generally xed the stuff that we didn't learn
The teacher will correct it accordingly, and cut out the questions that we couldn't have known.
So that's at least something
For the next class, he's going to have some "theoretical learning" or whatever he called it
I mean, in the end it's fair, but it annoys me that these courses aren't as well thought out as they should be...
So after this course I can say:
I DIDN'T LEARN A FUCKING THING
Btw, the second part was changing a website up the way its telling you to, that was easier the the theoretical part, witch was ticking the right fucking box...5 -
Alright. Got a new adapter (note: my laptop charger has a US prong and I have the European standards but it still tolerates 220V).
it appears that the tiny arcs that were made turned into HUGE sparks because the electricity went to the adapter and because the US prongs were exposed (bc my adapter was bullshit) then I got DOUBLE the voltage running into 1 charger (1 time for the adapter and 1 time for the normal exposed US prongs) so the breakers popped.
(this is my theory don't bully me for being inaccurate lool)9
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