Dear self proclaimed wordpress 'developers/programmers', kindly go fuck yourself.

I'm not talking about wordpress devs/designers who don't claim to have a better skillset than they have and are actually willing to learn, those are very much fine.

I'm talking about those wordpress people who claim that they're developers, programmers or whatever kind of bullshit which they're obviously not.

"A client's site crashed, you have to fix it!!!!!" sorry, come again? It's YOUR client's site. It's hosted on our hosting platform meaning that WE are responsible for KEEPING THE SERVERS UP AND FUNCTIONING.
You call yourself a wordpress 'developer' with 'programming experience' for 10 years but the second one of your shitty sites crashes, you come to us because 'it's your responsibility!!!'.
No, it's not. Next to that fact, the fact that you have to ask US why the site is crashing while you could easily login to your control panel, go to the fucking error logs and see that one of your facebook plugins crashes with a quite English error message, shows me that you definitely don't have 10 years of programming experience. And if you can't find that fucking article which tells you exactly where the motherfucking error logs are, don't come crying to us asking to fix your own fucking bullshit.

"My clients site got hacked, you have to clean it up and get it online again ASAP!!!!" - Nah, sorry, not my responsibility. The fact that you explicitly put your wordpress installation on 'no automatic updates' also doesn't help with my urge to fucking end you right now.
Add to that that we have some quite clear articles on wordpress security which you appearantly found too difficult (really? basic shit like 'set a strong fucking password' is too difficult for you?), you're on your own.

"I'm getting an error, please explain what's going wrong as soon as you can! this is a prio 1!!!!" - Nope. You were a wordpress dev/programmer right? Please act like one.

I'm not your personal wordpress agent.

I'm not your personal hacked wordpress site cleanup guy.

I'm not even a fucking wordpress professional. No, I'd rather jump off a bridge than develop wordpress bullshit for a living.

That you chose to do this, not a problem. Just don't rely on me for fixing your shit.

I'm sick of cleaning up your bullshit.

I'm done with answering your high prio tickets about bullshit which any dev could find out with just a few minutes of searching.

Oh your wordpress site isn't showing up so high in google? Yeah sure, shoot a ticket at us blaming us for your own SEO mess. I'm a fucking sysadmin, not a SEO expert.

I'm fucking done with you.

Go die in a fucking corner.

Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.

I used to work with a professor (let's call him Dr. X) and developed a backend + acted as sysadmin for our team's research project. Two semesters ago, they wanted to revamp the front end + do some data visualization, so a girl (let's call her W) joined the team and did all that. We wanted to merge the two sites and host on azure, but due to issues and impeding conferences that require our data to be online, we kept postponing. I graduate this semester and haven't worked with the team for a while, so they have a new guy in charge of the azure server (let's call him H), and yesterday my professor sends me (let's call me M), H and W an email telling us to coordinate to have the merge up on azure in 2-3 days, max. The following convo was what I had with H:

M: Hi, if you just give me access to azure I'll be able to set everything up myself, also I'll need a db set up, and just send me the connection string.
H: Hi, we won't have dbs because that is extra costs involved since we don't have dynamic content. Also I can't give you access, instead push everything on git and set up the site on a test azure server and I will take it from there.
M: There is proprietary data on the site...
H: Oh really? I don't know what's on it.
<and yet he knows we have no dynamic data>
M: Fine, I'll load the data some other way, but I have access to all the data anyway, just talk to Dr. X and you'll see you can give me access. Delete my access after if you want.
H: No, just do what I said: git then upload to test azure account.

Fine, he's a complete tool, but I like Dr. X, so I message W and tell her we have to merge, she tells me that it's not that easy to set it up on github as she's using wordpress. She sends me instructions on what to do, and, lo and behold, there's a db in her solution. Ok, I go back to talking to H:

M: W is using a db. Talk to her so we can figure out whether we need a database or not.
H: We can't use a database because we want to decrease costs.
M: Yes I know that, so talk to her because that probably means she has to re-do some stuff, which might take some time. Also there might be dynamic content in what she's doing.
H: This is your project, you talk to her.
<I'm starting to get mad right now>
M: I don't know what they had her do apart from how it interfaces with what I've done.
H: We still can't have databases.
M: Listen, I don't do wordpress, and I'm not gonna mess with it, you talk to her
H: I won't do any development
<So you won't do any dev, but you won't give me access to do it either?>
M: Man, the bottleneck isn't the merging right now, it's the fact that W needs a db
H: I know, so talk to her
M: THE RESTRICTION TO NOT HAVE DATABASES IS NOT MINE, IT'S YOURS, YOU TALK TO HER. I can't evaluate whether it's a reasonable enough reason or not since I don't know the requirements or what they're willing to spend.
H: It's your project.
M: Then give me fucking access to azure and I'll handle it, you know you'll have to set up wordpress again regardless whether we set it up the first time.
H: Man just do your job.

At this point I lost it. WHAT A FUCKING TOOL. He doesn't wanna do dev work, wants me to go through the trouble of setting up on a test subscription first, and doesn't want to give me access to azure. What's more, he did shit all and doesn't want to anything else. Well fuck you. I googled him, to see if he's anyone important, if he's done anything notable which is why he's being so God damn condescending. MY INTERNSHIP ALONE ECLIPSES HIS ENTIRE CV. Then what the fuck?

There's also this that happened sometime during our talk:

M: You'll have to take to Dr. Y so he'll change the DNS to point to the azure subscription instead of my server.
H: Yea don't worry, too early for that.
M: DNS propagation takes 24 hours...
H: Yea don't worry.

DNS propagation allows the entire web to know that your website is hosted on a different server so it can change where it's pointing to. We have to do this in 2-3 days. Why do work in parallel? Nah let's wait.

I went over his head and talked to the professor directly, and despite wanting to tell him that he was both drunk and high the day he hired that guy, I kept it professional. He hasn't replied yet, but this fucker's pompous attitude is just too much for me alone, so I had to share.

PS: I named his contact as Annoying Prick 4 minutes into our chat. Gonna rename him cz that seems tooooooo soft a name right now.

When CS professors are lazy to grade so they think they can just give you any grade without you questioning them...

Me: Hi Professor, I see I got a 94 out of 100 on my 2nd project. Your comments said, some of my functions didn't pass your junit test cases.

Prof: Yes!

Me: How come? I tested it several times before submitting and they all passed the test cases. You gave us the test cases to write the code for.

Prof: Yeah, but some of your functions aren't passing on mine.

Me: Since I'm in your office, can you please run it again so I can see?

Prof: Are you doubting me? I gave you the project and I'm telling you they're not passing my test cases.

Me: I just want to make sure because I did work really hard on this project to pass all the test cases. *Runs the code to show him on my laptop and they all pass*

Prof: Fine, let's run it together on mine again. *He runs it and they all pass on his laptop*..hmm, that's weird. They didn't pass when I ran them. Maybe, because of the IDE I used earlier.
Well, looks like you get your 100.

Me: Thank you but which IDE did you ran it in that failed? Just wondering..🤔

Prof: Doesn't matter now...they're passing. Just be ready for your next project...you guys will be writing the test cases yourself this time..

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

FBI: FUCK!! We just lost our connection to all those civilian routers we were monitoring
FBI IT Department: Did you try turning them off and back on?
FBI:

Alright so here goes, I currently work at a promising startup. Absolutely love it; nice, hard-working colleagues but there's only a couple of us so we all have to wear a multitude of hats.

I don't mind being on support duty or helping out a customer with a technical question but one thing that really gets to me is lazy people.

We have some instructional videos (made in-house by yours truly) around certain functionality in our app which can't be simplified any further and they're condensed to about 50 seconds each.

I receive an email from a customer saying that he wants the instructions in screenshot form instead of watching the video because he 'detests' watching videos.

I must admit, I was a little hurt because he dismissed my videos so easily without even watching them. Just because he really doesn't like to watch videos? I was dumbfounded.

Me putting (most of) my rustled jimmies aside, I take about an hour to screenshot and document each step of the instructions and send them to the customer with a note: Be careful, if you scroll too fast it turns into a video.

I receive a response saying he doesn't like to watch videos because he is deaf but he did admit he had a chuckle.

Morale of the story lads, keep the sass in in your IDE's and out of your customer interactions.

True story.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Stop using progress bars on your résumé/CV!

Back when we were looking for people to join us, we got hundreds of résumés in the mail and online, and I saw so many of them using these progress bars to indicate competency in a particular skill or programming language.

Yknow what that says to me, and to my colleagues?

"Yeah, I'm ok at this, but I'm even worse at THIS"

Your résumé is about selling yourself!
We don't want someone who's '68%' in Photoshop or '82%' in JavaScript. We want someone who knows they're good at what they do and knows they can learn if they need to.

You might feel like you're being 'big headed', but that's what a good resume SHOULD be! Sell yourself to be as if you're the solution to all of my problems and you might just get a job!

Rant over.

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

Now, I work at a hosting company in the UK, as a linux support engineer. I've seen many cases where a number of clients ran one of the following:

rm -rf / something
rm -rf /var/cache (attempt to magento)
chmod 777 /var
chown -R user:user /*

Half the time, they're like "Hey guys, I dun did fuck up, please help!". The other half of the time, they piss me off. Here's a number of responses that really grinds my gears:

"Such a harmful command should really prompt for input before running" -- From the buy you "forced" a recursive rm command, which mutes such a feature.

Client: "I did no such thing"
Me: "I've seen the command history, and at the time the command was run, you were the only person logged in"
Client: "You're mistaken, You're reading the information wrong"
Me: "I assure you, I'm not, I know what I'm looking at"
Client: "Well you're a shit engineer"
Me (thought): "Says the fucker who doesn't know how to linux"

I like people who own up to fuck ups. But the ones that don't, are just making their lives harder, since we have all the evidence in front of us.

Most of these people are the developers, and in some cases, the sysadmins...

The most pissed off I've been at work?

Client X came to us for a website.
We secretly outsourced the work.
Client X is coming for a visit in 10 mins...

MD to me: "I've told them your lead dev on this. They're not super-technical so if they ask you about the project just tell them it's going well."

Now I'm not a comfortable blagger, I don't have that kind of confidence, so to ask me to lie like this makes me feel really stressed and uncomfortable. Furthermore, I had literally no idea about any aspect of the work we were supposedly doing for this client. I can barely contain my panic but my colleagues help me piece together a basic understanding.

The MD returns: "They're here now. Can you quickly go and check that the toilets are clean."

WHAT THE FUCK!? The little prick. I'd knock him out if wasn't so meek and pathetic. I tell myself that I'm being helpful and nice but in truth I'm just his fucking doormat and he has zero respect for me.

I have no problem cleaning stuff (we all basically tidy up behind us) but this is something he could have done. Furthermore, who cares? None of us leave the loos with piss on the floor and shit smeared across the walls. They're never anything less than client-ready so to ask me to check means that he's already checked them himself and one of the loos is not quite shiny enough.

The reader may feel that this is no big deal (and in some ways you're right) but everything about this scenario was fucked up. The MD had embroiled the whole company in a lie and assumes we're all okay with that, then to add insult just nonchalantly orders me to clean the bogs. The cunt.

FWIW The client didn't ask to talk to me or use the toilet during their visit.

Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.

Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]

Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev

Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]

Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].

Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.

The fuse is lit.

Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*

Sizzle.

Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]

Bang.

Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]

Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."

Reading some of the wk50 rants makes my blood run cold. brrrrr. They're terrifying.

While my story goes just like this.
Didn't know our manager(let's call him R) messaged us in our group chat that he won't make it to office for that day.
My account replied "Let's have moment of silence for those who left us. R, you will be missed. :'( Thank you for everything.".

I didn't notice the message until lunch time and my co-devs (with much back-slapping and laughing) told me I'm a gem. -_-
I just went to get some coffee, forgot to lock my unit and came back a murderer.
AND It was only my 2nd month on the job.

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Quick recap of my last two weeks: 15 year old production server is basically dead, boss has taken over calls and claims credit for "resolving" outages (even though my coworker and I did the work, but ultimately the traffic died down enough to where it wasn't an issue anymore).

I go to a meeting to plan migration to a better server, boss bitches about not getting invited, I tell him I invited myself, and then he lectures about how that's not our job.

Different boss says we're migrating a schema for an application that should have been decommissioned 5+ years ago to use as a baseline. I explain what's going on, he says he understands, and proceeds to tell higher bosses it's perfect because there will be no user impact. OF COURSE THERE'S NO FRICKING IMPACT, YA DUNCE! there are no users!!!!

I merge two email threads together, since they discuss the same thing, but with different insight, and get yelled at, even though they requested it.

The two bosses I like are OOO for the next week, too, so I'm just sitting here hoping I don't say something that'll get me fired or sent to sensitivity training.

I'm just starting my on call rotation and don't know that I can do this. I cry when my phone rings, now, because I experience physical pain with how hard I cringe.

I got yelled at today by a guy because SOMEONE I DON'T KNOW assigned a ticket to him directly, rather than to the proper team (not his team). So I had to look into that, which at least had the benefit of preventing a catastrophic outage to our customers world wide, but no one will know because I don't brag at work; I'm too busy doing my job as well as most of my division/section/larger team, whatever the hell it's called. I saved us probably 25+ hours of continuous troubleshooting call from noticing something tiny that the people "smarter" than me missed.

**edit: sorry for typos; got my nails done yesterday but they feel like they're a mile long and I have to relearn how to type**

Someone just rang the IT Helpdesk moaning that outlook wasn't syncing his mail and it was because the brand new laptop he's just gotten is crap.

So first, the guy on the helpdesk asked to log into the users laptop to look at outlook.
He apparently isn't at his laptop and doesn't have time for anyone to log in!
Wtf lol
So he rings back 10 mins later when at his laptop but wont let the helpdesk log in as he has 'confidential' documents open.

Wtf, close them, why are you ringing us to look at your laptop if you won't let us log on?? lol

So helpdesk was like ok, just check cat cable is plugged in, check wifi is off, do a send/receive etc. and the user's like yes, they're all okay!

Helpdesk tells him to reboot his pc. He does so.
Doesn't resolve it.
Skip forward another 10 painful minutes while the helpdesk guy is pulling his hair out checking everything in the background, and all looks fine.

User then says "should i also turn off my iPhone?"
Helpdesk: 'No, outlook is just on your laptop'.
User: 'No *assured laugh* its on my phone too. I get emails there too'
Helpdesk: 'No, you use the generic 'Mail' app on your phone. Outlook is a separate app. We don't use it.'
User: 'But you're not listening, regardless of the app name, that's my problem, mail's not working on my phone'.
Helpdesk: '.....so why didn't you say so 20 minutes ago when i asked to log into ur laptop?'

User: 'Didn't think it was relevant. Laptop was fine. Assumed you'd know'.

...........

Why.

Why???

Why.

Shockingly, a phone restart fixed it. The user couldn't remember the last time he'd turned the thing off.

So I've been reading a lot about this #deletefacebook trend across devrant lately. And frankly I'm a little concerned.

As per my understanding, everyone wants to delete Facebook because they're harvesting data. Learning more about us.

While I would agree that I want my privacy. I am a little surprised at how fast this trend is picking up. People are turning a blind eye on everything else they do online just to assume they have privacy.

Let's put this Into perspective, shall we?

You are afraid of letting Facebook harvest your data yet you watch videos on YouTube which is owned by Google. You may even proceed to removing your Google account and use a stripped down version of Chromium to protect yourself from these companies yet you're using a Windows, Mac, iPhone, or Android all of which may be harvesting your data behind the scenes. Some may argue that they have stripped down their android phones but don't take into consideration that you are still using apps on your phone that may be collecting your data.

Let's say that you manage to get out of every sort of technology, you should remember that companies like Facebook also check data about you through your friends.

You use platforms like DuckduckGo assuming that they might not be collecting data about you in some way. I don't think there is anyway for you to prove that these privacy companies don't collect our data.

I don't know why everyone seems to be interested in this trend. I absolutely don't see a point in it. If anything, things I see are super relevant to me.

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

Recruiters are fucking unbelievable sometimes.

With about one year experience I applied to company A and company B. Kinda competitors in what dev skillset they're looking for.

Company A reviewed my CV and decided I don't have enough experience without giving me a chance to present my actual knowledge.

Company B tells me screw your CV come along show us what you got. I rocked the interview with an offer the next day which I accepted, absolutely thrilled.

Fast forward 7 months I get an email from company A, same recruiter, inviting me to an interview as they're "impressed with my profile and feel like I've gone a long way" (definitely just because company B hired me and I passed my probation)

Ah the joy responding to them that as I value honour and honesty quite highly I don't think I would be a culture match for company B where it is a norm to reject candidates and come back pouch them after they pass probation at competitors.

Eek.. instant apologies email and of course explaining it's not poaching but "exploring opportunities".

Screw company A, honestly.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.

Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.

However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.

The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.

I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.

Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.

What a fucking asshole.

So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

People that post shit like "if you believe/support x, then unfollow me" are some extremely conceited and childish morons.

For starters, surrounding yourself with only people who think just like you will make you extremely close minded, which is ironic as fuck because in my experience these people believe x and bitch at y for being close minded whenever they're just as guilty as y.

Secondly is your head that far up your own ass that you can't accept that people aren't gonna be like a flock of sheep and all believe one thing? That's the great thing about us: we're given the opportunity to have our own opinion but these retards don't like whenever people exercise that right. It's tragic how retarded some people actually are.

So I just had this job interview with a "startup" (side note: who the fuck still calls limping companies "startups" in 2024? That is sooooo 2010s).

There was this tattooed and very pale girl (you just know the vibe), the mandatory Norse bearded tall guy and the balding, "I'm-in-my-fifties-but-I-am-not-a-square, maaan" sleasy-looking white guy in a button up shirt but no suit jacket. The whole stereotypes gang came looking for their missing nerdy Indian.

The sleasy bloke goes on and on on a looong tirade on how they're "a tech innovation academy", how they "move fast and break things" and they "run smoking hot", so that "long nights are to be expected".
So, they usual red-flagging shit.

Then they all went on a "but we're not like all those companies that look exactly like us" word salad about "sustainability and a healthy work life balance", with their "highest value" being "the utmost respect at all times". I'm nodding my head at the meaningless splurge until they fart out the sentence "for example, cussing while talking with colleagues is a fireable offence".

If some hustling enterprise rather prefers a posh working environment, one can adapt to such circumstances. Provided, of course, that said enterprise adheres to the administrative coherence expected from a culturally refined institution. Mostly by compliance, from the leadership, to a rigidly predictable working schedule.

Now, if the bloody curs want coder dogs that work assfucking hours with a shit eating grin, they better swallow our fucking sailor mouths. Fuck, I've done twenty hour shifts getting my ass kicked in dark startup fisting/rush rooms. If unable to yell at any blabbering cocksucker to go stick his fucking opinions up the bitch who crapped him, then I ain't gonna bloody be there.

TL;DR they can either have a "utmost respect" working environment XOR a "fast and hot" daily hustle.

After they crapped out that oxymoron I could barely hold myself to avoid saying "sorry, I do not partake in any of the psychedelics you must be on".
On to the next interviews!

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

TL;DR: If you make a contest where people get to vote online fucking make it right!

And here's the story: I play in a local coverband to make some cash on the side and because I love making music. We entered a contest hosted by a local radio-station. The first round was determined by judges and now 5 bands remain and of those 5 only 3 get to be voted into the final round. In the final round every bands wins something: 3rd place 250€, 2nd place 750€ and first place 5000€.
Now that stupid dipshit of a web-designer of that radio-station made a website where you can vote and it only fucking sets a cookie. You can delete it and vote again. You don't need no E-Mail and nothing. It doesn't even block multiple votes from one IP. It doesn't do shit.
Even my bandmates (who don't work in IT) where smart enough to figure out that you can just delete the cookies...
I think that now every band except for one is cheating. (we have over 5000 votes and combined all bands have like 4000 FB-Likes and sometimes and Band gets like 400 more votes in an hour) This is such a fucking messup and I don't know what to do. Maybe they'll look into stats but if they're so stupid to make a contest like this in the first place, maybe they won't. And even if they look into the stats it wouldn't be fair to kick out a band with much votes because how the fuck would they know if the band themselves cheated or if it was a fan of the band or even an enemy of the band just to get them kicked out.
I'm afraid of talking to the radio-station as a part of one band because maybe the web-designer there just gets frustrated and bans us from the contest entirely.
This is just fucking frustrating.

Fuck recruiters, they are the scum of the earth. I just had one contact me out of the blue about two opportunities with companies I'd never heard off. As I knew nothing about the companies I started asking questions around who they were and what they were looking to do. He suddenly gets all defensive and refuses to answer my questions, then follows up with an email accusing me of being an "underhanded recruiter" looking to poach his clients. Sorry mate, you got in contact with me you absolute fuckwit. Without people like us you wouldn't even have a bloody job you fucking vampire. For someone that supposedly specialises in the tech sector, I had to point out that if he really doubted who I was he could drop my name into StackOverflow or github to verify that im a developer. Recruiters - they're all fucking leeches.

Me and that other guy who has a braincell: Okay so we made this simple object mapping code so that you have the option to use YAML or environment variables, because they're both awesome UwU (we use YAML for testing, then variables for container prod deployments).

Some dude who picked up the project: meh, lets ditch that, dotenv and get rid of the object mapping, because I like to do the pain manually.

AND THIS DUDE NEVER EVEN BOTHERED TO READ THE CODE CLAIMING HIS IS BETTER WTF

It took us enough testing and cofusion to get Object Mapping right and this guy just bastardizes work we've done for the past 2 years claiming "it sucks"

What a bloody bellend.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I'm fucking sick of my experience with the world.

I have a feeling that all that 1984 conspiracy type of ideas that I previously considered bullshit and fear mongering are real.

(Just to be clear, I'm not including most conspiracy theories which are very ignorant like flat earth, fake moon landing, or antivax, the people that spread those theories can die a horrible death IMHO).

Corporation consolidation is a fact and appears to become irreversible.

Because of technology, I can stay in the comfort of my house, safe from crime and be entertained without needing to have direct contact with humans.
People might say "that's your fault for not leaving the house". True but that is just how the world is.

The outside world in the cities I lived in is not a welcoming place.
Hell if you fucking find a bench it's a goddamn miracle, and if you do and sit for a long time, the police stares at you like you are up to something.

People don't talk to you because "don't talk to strangers".
It can be rare to find water or a bathroom that isn't a complete shithole.

So no wonder I rather stay at home, the outside world is hostile.

So yeah, go to a mall or something. And consume, consume, consume, because the outdoors suck.

Many pioneers thought technology was to improve the quality of life.

But no, it's just more isolation, less direct contact with people, less giving a fuck about other people.

And that's how feel about people of today. The least amount of fuck giving about others possible.

You would you would connect to more people faster, but no, the result is just millions of people browsing through the same "entertainment", shitty aggregated content.

Yes, consolidation affects internet too. Everything goes through fucking google, youtube, or whatever other fucking top 10 company.

Just like the class disparity, 1% of the things online get 99% of the exposure.

So if you're a small time anything, basically fuck you, because you're not something enormous.

Like, I wished I was a game developer, but there's thousands of brilliant indie games that get released every year, and they barely make what they're worth.
So why should I fucking try? So I can get ruined financially and I don't have a place to live in?

Software itself is so complex that is impossible to scrutinize decently.
We all laugh at congressmen asking the zuck silly questions.

Out of touch, true, but in hindsight, it is true to some extent that software is hard to regulate. Every software I on earth doesn't meet some standard one way or another.

Or maybe it's just too many of us right now.
When people scroll their search results to get access to the things they should be interested in, the only practical interface right now is being showing one link at a time.
But there's millions and millions of results.

One redeeming aspect of life is that one day I won't be alive anymore to observe the disgusting world we live in.

This could be just pure rambling and I can't prove any of the things I'm saying, I could just have been making the wrong friendships. So take this with a grain of salt.

So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.

My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.

You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.

Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.

I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.

I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.

The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊

Anyone else experiencing moments like 'you sit behind a computer all day, how hard can your job be?' or is it just me?? 🤔
I'm getting tired of this shit... Especially when it's comming from a person who relies ob tonns of apps to do their goddamn job.. :/
I'd get it if it was comming from a farmer who actually has to work hard to produce the food for us.. or any of the blue collars..but from white collars?!? Dafuck?! Yeah, I may not be the person writing the code for your precious little apps, but they're written by people just like me, who sit behind a computer all day & code.. :/
Show some respect ya cunts!!

android studio is TERRIBLE. why cant they just make a fucking good linux installer? they're a fucking half trillion dollars company and can't get their shit together. its terribly unprofessional, and makes vim look like a god. maybe not all of us has have access to nasa's supercomputer and don't have a month for it to start.

here's a story about the installation of android studio on a (fairly high-end) chromebook running gallium:

I went to the website, which by the way could tell I was on linux but still automatically showed me the windows instructions, and downloaded android studio, 1.2 gb for fucks sake! I have a 16 gb hard drive! then it installed, and I closed it, because I was gonna use it later. I had a problem with it the first time, so I reinstalled, and halfway through the installation, IT DECIDED IT NEEDED SUPERUSER PRIVELEGES. fuck that. I restarted the installer, with sudo, and it took about switch as long this time. then, it made me redownload the sdk and all that other bloatware EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE INSTALLED IN SEPARATE FOLDERS AND ALREADY DOWNLOADED. jesus christ, google.

I JUST HAD ONE OF THOSE DAYS THAT MAKES ONE WANT TO BANG TWO BRICKS ON HEAD SND END THE PAIN THE STORY STARTS YESTETDAY WITH ISSUES AFTER A MIGRSTION AND THEY ASK ME TO HELP TROUBLESHOOT EVEN THOUGH I'M A DEV DBA AND THE ISSUE IS IN QA/SAT AND I HELP ANYWAY AND THEY CAN'T FIND A VIEW AND SO I LOOK EVERYWHERE AND CAN'T DOING IT EITHER AND IT DIDN'T EXIST IN PROD OR DEV SO I TELL THEM IT'S NOT THERE, AND THEY ARE LIKE, CAN YOU RETRIEVE IT FOR US AND I'M LIKE FROM WHERE? I DON'T KEEP VIEWS IN MY BUTT AND YOU GUYS ARE SMOKING CRACK AND THE GIVE ME THEIR QUERY WHICH CONTAIN THE VIEE ANYWAY AND THEY SAY CAN YOU RUN IT AND IT RUNS AND WORKS AND THEY CAN'T MAKE IT WORK AND IT WORKS BECAUSE IT DOESN'T CALL THE VIEW THEY HAVE ME SO NO PROBLEM THERE SO I FINALLY ASK THEM ARE YOU POINTING TO THE CORRECT DATABASE AND THEY'RE LIKE OH MAN WE TOLD YOU THE WRONG DATABASE AND SO I LOOK AT THE RIGHT DATABASE AND FIND THAT THE GRANTS ARE MISSING AND YEAH THANK YOU FOR TAKING EIGHT HOURS OF MY LIFE BECAUSE WE WERE IN THE WRONG DB YOU GAVE ME AND I HOPE THE FLAG OF A THOUSAND CAMELS INVEST YOUR ARMPITS AND THE CHIGGERS OF A THOUSAND SOUTHERN LAWNS INGEST YOUR SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR. YAAAAAA!!!!

SCStudentRant?

I have a subj called "Fundaments of Operative Systems" (or something along those lines), and I have 2 crappy teachers, one for the theory classes, the other for the exercise classes.
The exercise classes teacher is said to be the worst in uni and every time I think about that class I get a bit anxious because I can never do anything in it. Basically we don't get taught code in theory classes and he just comes and says "do this exercise" without explaining anything first. And when he does I still don't understand it.
I bet like 90% of us have no idea how to program in C and we need that for those classes. I hate C with a passion because of this.
In the theory classes, the teacher explains most of the things without powerpoints, and when we don't understand something (either ask about something he said or what's written in the board), he REFUSES to explain or say what's written, because he has "explained it before". He even chuckles as if it was really funny that we can't read his handwriting or just didn't listen because we were writting things down OH MY GOD. So most of the times when I copy things from the boards and then look at them at home I'm like "what the hell is this, this doesn't make any sense, what did he even write" (has some word that looks like what he wrote with ?? around it)
I think they wanna watch us fail. I really do.
I kinda understand the theory classes, but half the test is writing code. How am I gonna write code if I don't understand it? I have a work for that subj to deliver until monday but I can't make it work because I don't know the code I have to write. Damn it all to hell jesus christ

Additional note: they're both in their 60s and should be retiring not long from now so maybe that's why they act so carelessly.
Love the uni, not so much some of the teachers

Starting to feel like shit about my new job. Every task my boss gives me I return with a "sorry it can't be done" for one reason or another. At first it was because user interface testing is a nightmare, then it was because the API postman tests he wanted is for endpoints we haven't exposed so it can't be done and the automated login on postman and retrieval of cookie information can't be done through postman because it requires rendering the site in a browser. I feel worthless to the company but I also feel he keeps making up tasks for me without checking if they're actually useful to us or even possible first, rather than let me touch any of the real code.. I don't know if I should just quit tbh.

!dev

Joys of living in Switzerland:

We have four fucking national languages (english not included), with around 20 dialects of swiss german, most of us only know their origin language, yet stupid companies think we only speak one and assume it's fine to just send their filth in a language we may not understand.

Filter IPs and don't send your shit to regions that don't talk the language, or go and pay some translators (yes, they're expensive, but hey, you chose to sell/promote in Switzerland, deal with the fucking it). We are lazy and uninterested in your shit, so open your wallet if you want to reach us.

And it's not like I can't speak German, I'm just pissed for this inconsideration.

Ffs.

I've heard about some of the ridiculous requirements that some companies have in job postings and always thought that they're probably over exaggerating a bit.

Holy shit was I wrong.

I've taken a look at the positions that they have posted for my coop program and while I understand that my college was not the only one posted to for these, they seem pretty extreme at times. There were a few postings that required several mountains of web frameworks and experience that unless you did a lot of self study prior or had previous professional work experience would have been impossible.

We're students, a lot of us have never touched an IDE prior to our program so to ask us for in some cases years of experience in a language or tool that I have never even heard of, nor have even been even vaguely mentioned by profs, seems a bit much. I have had years of experience in a fair variety of tools and languages but even for me this seemed a tad bit unreasonable. Not all of the postings require this much prior experience in the field so I can apply to some.

The professor teaching the preparation course says they can't understand why people apply for the coop program then don't apply to positions. While I understand there are people who might not apply due to laziness or an overflow of assignments, I feel like a good chunk just can't find any positions that they may be partially qualified for.

College is worse than cancer.

Worse than tumor.

Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.

I feel dull.

I feel DUMBED DOWN.

I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.

6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.

Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.

I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.

Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.

The professors and assistants have no morals.

They are INHUMANE.

Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.

If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.

Professors have NO COMPASSION.

NO DIGNITY.

They are just BRAINLESS robots.

Sentients, agents working for the matrix.

They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.

IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.

I gave my maximum effort.

I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.

Just to end up with school spitting on my face.

I feel DUMBED down.

Robotic.

Procedural minded.

As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.

Like a computer.

Because of college - i have no will to live.

Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.

Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.

Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...

I feel void inside me.

I also feel vengeance inside me.

SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.

It made me mentally insane.

It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.

PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.

MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.

What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?

What if the student is abused by a family member?

What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?

What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?

What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???

There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.

BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.

I feel soulless.

I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.

School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".

Lets talk about it.

What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?

To memorize pdf slides?

Memorize textbook?

Memorize notes?

Memorize formulas?

Memorize memorize memorize???

First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.

SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.

If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".

BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.

I self-learned everything.

6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.

NOT EVEN ZERO.

LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.

I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.

I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.

I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.

At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.

At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.

Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.

Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.

Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.

---

To all professors and assistants:

I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.

College degree.

I don't have it. Not because I don't like to study or don't like to evolve.

I tried several times go back to college, but unfortunately I don't see myself wasting money and time inside a classroom hours per day for something I can read on a book and learn by myself in few days / hours.

I know there's some subjects it's quite hard and we need some guidance for help us, but, we have the community to ask, forums and a lot information on internet.

OK, but why I'm doing this rant?

Recently I got a good job offer in a good country but my potencial employer and me is facing issues to go trough the process because the country to give me the IT visa requires the college degree.

Sometimes I regret to not have enough cold blood to finish the damn college just becuase of the piece of paper (which doesn't proff anything and we cannot even use to clean the $_@#$"@).

My home country (which is a third world country) is already noticed that and they start doing some laws and visas to ease the hiring IT professionals and they're leaving at companies expanses and responsabilities to verify is a good professional or not, but, the price is high for that. But at least the companies there's a way now to get someone.

And also I start see a loot excelent and genius programmers and others IT professionals which are skipping the degree to see and face same issues as me.

I hope our field finally put a end to this burocracies.

Aaron, seriously. Stop wading into our team uninvited, coming in with your "superior experience", mouthing off about how we need to be doing everything differently because our current code makes no sense, making a few PRs that break everything, then complaining we're just incompetent and don't understand when everyone rejects them.

If there's one thing that hacks me off the most, it's people like this wading in uninvited, pretending they're being really helpful in coaching us in the "one true way" to do development, screwing everything up, then buggering off again while boasting to upper management that "thank goodness I got there when I did, or that team would be royally screwed."

So I started working at a large, multi billion dollar healthcare company here in the US, time for round 2,(previously I wasn't a dev or in IT at all). We have the shittiest codebase I have ever laid eyes on, and its all recent! It's like all these contractors only know the basics of programming(i'm talking intro to programming college level). You would think that they would start using test driven development by now, since every deployment they fix 1 thing and break 30 more. Then we have to wait 3 months for a new fix, and repeat the cycle, when the code is being used to process and pay healthcare claims.

Then some of my coworkers seem to have decided to treat me like I'm stupid, just because I can't understand a single fucking word what they're saying. I have hearing loss, and your mumbling and quiet tone on top of your think accent while you stop annunciated your words is quite fucking hard to understand. Now I know english isn't your first language and its difficult, I know, mine is Spanish. But for the love of god learn to speak the fuck up, and also learn to write actual SQL scripts and not be a fucking script kiddie you fucking amateur. The business is telling you your data is wrong because you're trying to find data that exists is complex and your simple select * from table where you='amateur with "10years" experience in SQL' ain't going to fucking cut it. Learn to solve problems and think analytically instead of copy fucking pasta.

Fucking mobile single player online games.

So there I am, sitting on the tube, being passed around London like a unit of sweet corn taking a ride on the mud salad that decorates the interior of the common worm.

Game can't boot. Sorry, You paid but it wont start until you pay with your personal data we're trying to upload first things first.

One day some psychopath who sees what they're up to is going to find out where they live and then there will be no where that they live.

On another note. This is devrant. Vent, be angry, let it out.

It's turning into some pathetic joke.

Stop pussy footing around you bunch of pussyholes.

Have a shout, have a bout, have a laugh none of us nerds have ever had a bath because none of it is real, it's just a nerfed/gussied up forum you waste of cum.

TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.

A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.

One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.

Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.

So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.

It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.

Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.

A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.

Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.

The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.

Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.

They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.

If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.

So I'm on my morning stroll. Walking, enjoying, watching the world around me.. It's nice how cherries blossom. They smell very tempting to stop there and enjoy the moment. Some flowers under the cherry...

Why do plants blossom again? Oh yeah, that's right, to exchange some speciments in order to grow fruit and seeds. To have their offspring. Just like every other living macroorganism [with a few exceptions ofc]. Life has no other way to survive but to exchange genetic material between two parties and only then trigger growth of the new life.

And that is a very strict rule. No more, no less: it takes exactly 2 organisms to make new life. But why is that? If my memory serves, theory of evolution says that life is like business: cut the losses and let the profits run. Over time it discards everything not required for the organism in order to save energy, and only successful new "investments" remain in the genome. The unsuccessful ones die before they proliferate, so the bad genes shall not survive.

It also says that very simple things, very simple changes lead to very complex outcomes. Us. Life.

But what is simple about life having to need 2 other lives? Exactly 2. It's either simple or efficient, depends on perspective. BUT IT IS NOT BOTH. Look at cells. They just split in half and multiply. Dead simple. It takes one of them to make another one. But with mammals, birds, reptiles, plants and other macroorganisms [excpt fungi] this is not the case! Why?!? I can't think of any scenario where two generic microorganisms, following some dead simple mutations, would come up w/ something that inefficient and overly complex. Like they're living on their own, multiplying by division, and smth very simple happens and they can no longer divide, only mate in pairs. The primitive, efficient and simple mechanism gets terminated and replaced with a different one, incredibly complex one!

Sure, we have protozoa which have similar reproductive mechanisms. They exchange genetic material to multiply.

But look at our, human cells. They dont need that! Look at some reptiles, some plants that only take one to make another. They don't pair as well! It's simple. Efficient. Why do protozoa need 2 for the species to survive?

It's not simple and efficient [tho helps us adapt, but its not my point for now]. See, things like this make ne wonder. What if we, the life, are not as accidental as we think? What if this whole mechanism was set off by someone or something billions of years ago? That's mean there are much older, much more superior cognitive organisms than us. What if protozoa was version 3 of new life [the first two did not survive]? Viruses - v2? Sea creatures - v3, reptiles - v4, and so on until they came up with us, mammals? That'd surely mean we are not alone in this universe. Are they watching us? Will they create a new species any time soon? What's our purpose, are we just an experiment?

And so, from cherry blossoms to existensial dilemma, my stroll is over. Time for breakfast :)

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

!RANT

Oh, the SORROW that is JEST! 😡

Endless days have been swallowed by the abyss in my quest to configure Jest with TypeScript and ECMAScript modules instead of CommonJS. Triumph seemed within my grasp until - BAM! - suddenly the tool forgets what "import" or "export" means. And the kicker? On the CI, it still runs like nothing’s amiss!

Allow me to elucidate for the uninitiated: Jest is supposed to be a testing safeguard, a protective barrier insulating devs from the errors of their peers, ensuring a smooth, uninterrupted coding experience.

But OH, how the tables have turned when the very shield becomes the sword, stabbing me with countless, infuriating errors birthed from Jest’s own design decisions!

The audacity to reinvent the whole module loading process just to facilitate module mocking is mind-boggling! Imagine constructing an entirely new ecosystem just to allow people to pretend modules are something they're not. This is not just overkill; it's a preposterous reinvention of a wheel that insists on being a pentagon!

Sure, if devs want to globally expose their variables, entwining everything in a static context, so be it. BUT, why should we, who walk the righteous path of dependency injection, be subjugated to this configured chaos?!

My blood boils as the jestering Jest thrusts upon me a fragile, perpetually breaking system, punishing ME for its determination to support whole module mocking! A technique, mind you, that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, because, you know, DEPENDENCY INJECTION!

Where are the alternatives, you ask? Drowned in the abyss, it seems! Why can’t we embrace snapshots and all the delectable integrations WITHOUT being dragged through this module-mocking mire? Can’t module mocking just be a friendly sidekick, an OPTIONAL add-on, rather than the cruel dictator forcing its agenda upon our code?

Punish those clinging to their static contexts, their global variables – NOT those of us advocating for cleaner, more stable practices!

It’s high time we decouple the goodness of Jest from its built-in bad practices. Must we continue to dance with the devil to delight in the depth of Jest’s capabilities?

WHY, Jest, WHY?! 😭

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...

I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.

The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.

The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.

My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.

While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.

If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.

I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.

Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.

Years ago, I would go on forever with my personal projects. I got so much stuff done I almost couldn't believe it. Today, I just can't. My mental health the last 2 or so years has made me lose interest in everything and i can't even describe how much I hate it. What are you supposed to do when a recruiter asks you why you haven't done much the past 2 years? Say you had mental health problems? Sure they're not allowed to discriminate because of mental health concerns, but they do. I feel like I have to lie on the US disability form, no matter how minor the problem is for the company and little it affects my work ethic. But then, when I'm late more than most because I barely slept or couldn't will myself to get up in the morning, now i can't explain myself.

If anyone here does recruiting or interviewing, please realize that happy face we show at an interview is sometimes a mask for deeper problems we feel we can't admit because we won't be hired. I hate that terrible events made my already inbalanced neurotransmitters worse, but that doesn't mean I will be a worse employee. Please look at me for my skills and enthusiasm for software engineering. That one detail shouldn't be what makes you say no.

While the US is melting the fuck down around me...

Those in other countries, what is all this like to see?

I'm rather indifferent as the riots usually accomplish fuck all, just like peaceful protests, as they don't make higher-ups care at all, they're just annoying.

!dev

Through life, I've heard some people say horror movies are bad, that they promote violence (usually religious people).

Of course I think that's pure bs, but I think I could provide one argument that is hard to deny, so here it goes, although I might go off rails at the end.

I'll preface with this: life itself is violent. Violence, the word, is mostly used to describe immoral inflictions of harm on other beings.

But you can also say that some deaths are violent by themselves too, event those that weren't caused by humans, like a disease or a natural disaster.

This would be the "visual" meaning of the word, "the way it looks", the shock of humans when observing something gruesome/violent.

That described, it's not hard to also think that technological advancements in modern western life has made such observations of violence very unfrequent for people.

And naturally, modern people get accustomed to the lack of these observations. So accustomed that when they happen they become traumatic.

Because of this, people react weirdly to death. One reaction is censoring the topic. Another reaction is trivializing it, as if it doesn't really matter.

Sometimes they can't even accept old people dying at 90, an awfully stupid reaction in my opinion.

Another interesting reaction is personifying diseases as if they were villains ruining lives intentionally.

Or at least that's what it feels until you look at them through a microscope and realize that diseases aren't more evil than bread changing flavour after toasting.

All of these irrationality and cowardice comes from low exposure to violence, and that's where horror movies balance things out.

Some diseases in the real life can put some of the worst horror movies to shame.

The human body itself is pending violence. Why? Because when you die all sort of worms eat your fucking flesh. And sometimes that happens even before you die.

We bury humans because of the diseases corpses transmit, but also because we don't like the spectacle and the aesthetics of the rotting process.

Just picture for a second bad things happening to your body, and if you feel that is making you too uncomfortable, then maybe you got too used to this too.

I think horror movies help us to remember the reality of our inminent and intrinsic violence.

In ancient times, you would live outdoors, stepping on dirt, and be very used to "bad" things happening to humans.

Nowadays, most homes are sterile clean, and it's unlikely to observe violence.

Oh, some family member is pucking blood and dying from something? Send em to a hospital, or an elderly care center. Don't need to witness that!

I understand and accept grief. What I don't understand or accept is the vilification of death, describing it as something wrong that shouldn't happen.

it almost feels like a burden, like you shouldn't die when you're young, that it's an unforgivable thing to happen.

Well thanks, society, you can't even fucking die in peace.

I would love to die (no suicide) in a mildly celebratory way, watching people around me smile. I think that would be a good ending for me.

But no. Most of my relatives would be fucking crying like the chickenshits they are, ruining it for me.

And that scares the shit out me: people usually say the scary part of dying is that they die alone.

Well that's what dying alone would mean to me: watching people cry instead of smiling at me.

When my grandma died at 80, with all the achievements she made, I considered her death a success, also considering how quick it was. And because of that I didn't mourn for too long.

In fact, I don't even consider her dead, and not because of some religious mumbo jumbo. I guess the memories are still alive in me, I don't know.

Some famous chunk of coal said once that he felt people don't believe they're gonna die. And I agree with him.

Another upside of horror movies is that they hurt nobody, which is why you can enjoy it and not get ptsd, unlink watching a snuff film.

I will also be fair and add that this might a be a cultural thing, but deep down desire for survival is a genetic thing could play a big part in this too.

So, I work as a sysadmin junior (6 months and going), and in the past few months, I learned what my boss warned me about - Devs don't understand us admins, and we don't understand the devs.

We have this huge client who is about to migrate to our company (We do mostly server managment/Housing/Renting), and I am so gald I don't have to work on the migration myself!

Just hearing what the company devs say makes me facepalm: No, it won't work. It cannot work on just 3 machines (They use like... 20 in total), no, we won't get rid of our docker swarm, that's essential (Doing the absolute minimum in their infrastructure, just a fancy buzzword to lure people on. Though they've spent like 2 years developing the app that uses it, so they my not want to give it up).

I kid you not, once, they replied to an email that contained the phrase "To be afraid of/worried about" something during the migration, that something could break, not work, be unstable. 7 times.

Might not sound as bad, but it was a rather short mail, and when they're so afraid of everything, its kinda hard to cooperate with them.

My colleague literally spent this entire week mapping out /their/ infrastructure, because they were unable to provide us with the description themselves.

And as a cherry on top, they sent us a "graph" of relationships of all the parts of their infrastructure that was this jumbled mess of rectangles and arrows. Oh, and half of all the machines were not even in the graph at all! Stating that "We also have all this, but I really don't know how to ilustracte the interactions anymore"

Why do companies like that exist? If you build an infrastructure yourself, shouldn't at least someone know exactly how it works?

A customer has this project that smells ... like it could be not fun.

They're doing business with walmart (actually a walmart satellite company, even worse).... I've seen this story before. They're super excited, they're seeing $$$... seen it not work out so many times.

Anyway they're having us rush out these forms and documents and so on and I can see there's a lot of data that is going to be required missing.

My contact is super peppy and happy and so sunshiny that my concerns are going over her head... she just sends emails to people, like FW, RE RE ... this is gonna be a mess of last minute / 'where is this?!?!?!' kinda work...

Granted I work at a good place, this won't have any blowback on me... but god damn guies listen to coder guy that the data that will be needed isn't there and there is a SHIT ton that I'm pretty sure isn't ... anywhere.

Best:
Seeing ALL the members of my team finally coming into their own. One person tackled our entire not-at-all-simple CI/CD setup from scratch knowing nothing about any of it and, while not without bumps in the road, did an excellent job overall (and then did the same for some other projects since he found himself being the SME). Two of my more junior people took on some difficult tasks that required them to design and build some tricky features from the ground-up, rather than me giving them a ton of guidance, design and even a start on the basic code early on (I just gave them some general descriptions of what I was looking for and then let them run with it). Again, not without some hiccups, but they ultimately delivered and learned a lot in the process and, I think, gained a new sense of self-confidence, which to me is the real win. And my other person handled some tricky high-level stuff that got him deep in the weeds of all the corporate procedures I'd normally shield them all from and did very well with it (and like the other person, wound up being an SME and doing it for some other projects after that). It took a while to get here, but I finally feel like I don't need to do all the really difficult stuff myself, I can count on them now, and they, I think, no longer feel like they're in over their heads if I throw something difficult at them.

Worst:
A few critical bugs slipped into production this year, with a few requiring some after-hours heroics to deal with (and, unfortunately, due to the timing, it all fell on me). Of course, that just tells us that next year we really need to focus on more robust automated testing (though, in reality, at least one of the issues almost certainly would not - COULD NOT - have been caught before-hand anyway, and that's probably true for more than just one of them). We had avoided major issues the previous three years we've been live, so this was unusual. Then again, it's in a way a symptom of success because with more users and more usage, both of which exploded this year, typically does come more issues discovered, so I guess it tempers the bad just a little bit.

Day 2 of my new job done. Still going over courses and doing jack shit. Today the hiring manager told me to play a game. I have to buy gifts to the girl thats in my office (lol what) and she also has to buy gifts to me in return (wtf and im still getting paid to do nothing), the company will pay for these gifts with a limited budget

Both of us had to fill out a form such as hobbies movies food drinks and if we believe in santa claus

Told this to my hot blonde gf that i have to buy gifts for another girl and she got so jealous. She literally asked me "but what do u need her for" lmao

As she should. Love seeing her jealous and mad -- but only because she disrespected me several times in the year 2023. several times caught her lying to me. Rude behavior from time to time. Always bitching and complaining with the most idiotic phrases and I'll quote "i hate how some kids younger than me are just born in a wealthy multi millionaire billionaire family and they're automatically rich and successful and dont have to do anything in life anymore while i have to struggle and work and never be successful like they are. Im so jealous of them" she keeps complaining about this majority of the time. I got really fucking annoyed. Shes stupid as fuck

And then compared to listening to that dumb shit, i met this girl, who works in the backend part, smart, beautiful, doesnt fucking bitch and complain about such obnoxious bullshit we cant control, works a 9-5 and gets her shit together. She even told me today "u dont have to buy me any of those gifts I'd be really grateful if you can just buy me some tissues for my nose cause i got a small flu haha" she even got the jokes! that was such a humble request.

Now compare that to the behavior of my spoiled blonde gf. Tf?

Im not even complaining by working a 9-5. Im actually very surprised. Everyone in the company is very nice to me and polite. Everyone is very friendly. Im getting paid even by not working shit, just sitting and watching courses to pass a devops cloud certification that the company will also pay for me

Whats going on

Migrating an existing report from old system to new.

Business: We reviewed the differences you raised and why they're acceptable and this seems fine. But before we provide approval for your productionization, we would like these changes...

*1 month later, changes are made*

Business: you reported new differences. We can't give you approval until you tell us explain them all

Me: `••π÷¶×¶π|``•√÷÷÷π√^°°¥®^¥€€!!!!!!!

Can someone give me a new job so I can just walk in, say fuck it, I quit!!!"

Sometimes I just want to do that now but getting a new job is hard.... for reasons unrelated to how well I can code...

!Dev rant

So tired of meeting people in my generation who literally live to just freeload. Like some of us are actually trying to get shit done in life and yet here you are, just being a lazy fuck who for some reason thinks they're still in highschool and need to not give a god damn shit about anything else.

I've basically got to a point in my life where I have no idea why am I friends with someone thinks it's okay to punch another grown man in the balls after they changed a song, get to a yelling match with another person over a boardgame, sit in the one way that will definitely break the fucking couch.

But then!!!

When I'm at your house, and I change the music on the Spotify, you kick me out because I'm crossing the line? Also, they almost kicked my friend for wearing the wrong shirt (it had minions on it, they hated that movie)... The fuck.

Like you want respect, buddy you gotta earn it. You literally live off welfare and your parents and your girlfriend parents money. You are a fully capable non disabled straight white male, who hasn't aimed higher in their professional life whatsoever. I know people who had every sad story in the book thrown at them, and yet they have achieved twice what you did.

And after all of that, you feel like it's your right to be a shithead, and tell others how to act.

Go fuck yourself.

"Averice - a serial novel"

2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.

A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.

"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."

we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."

He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past

A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.

"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.

and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.

and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.

do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.

our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.

there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."

He took another long pull from the bottle.

"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.

theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.

many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."

The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.

"X is dead! My project has just gone up in smoke, because docs/programs have been permanently lost."

This time, it's Sun. No one's dumped their compiler package CDs for Solaris, and now you can't order them. Whoops! There's like 5 versions of Solaris that have SDKs and docs that are just gone.

Dump your CDs, you stingy motherfuckers. "oh they're stamped, they have my name in them, i paid $600 for the license" do it anyway, because time is unrelenting and the rot claims us all. we must run faster than it does, and you're just standing still.

I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!

5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.

4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.

3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.

2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.

1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)

This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.

Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.

Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.

Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.

Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.

Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay

Continuation (no. 2): So because of my bad conscience I was very polite and friendly to the colleague I pestered about... but my boss was not. Instead he broke loose his second fight with Mr. git master. He's joking about that he now already had a fight with almost anybody (mostly team leads). He's leaving the company anyway, so he needn't care, but I start to love his love for conflicts. Some PM or upper boss already said something along the lines: "If something's wrong, I know you'll escalate." Of course you should not for every triviality, but nothing is worse than those lingering, dormant time bombs of projects that went so awry they're just waiting to explode... or silently be canceled.
Well, so they clashed again, and Mr git / scrum master fought for his concern that my boss, who's also product owner, must not enter the team. I looked at the git logs: Mr git master's only contribution - he's supposed to be a member of the team - since joining (like over a month) were 300 LOC, which was actually copy pasting our old copy right form, peppering it with some html tags to ensure it would not work without recompiling the 3rd party lib with a fucking webengine.

My boss now rather wants to remove "agile" as it's not fitting. Just let the three or four of us yank out the code so we actually have a chance to deliver in three months. He told the upper boss that we can take our tasks ourselves so independently we even need no team lead, but could report directly to him. It's still not clear what's gonna happen, but it's like they could let us loose, free radical elements who just do motherfucking programming. Feels awesome.

Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.

I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )

The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".

People who do remote work, what's your stance on making calls to get together to do things?

In my case, I have this tech lead boss now who's always available to start calls so I can share my screen and point at what problems I'm having, and I really appreciate that.

Other people at my job are really hard to get into contact with, they're never available when you need them, so if there's some conversation by the nature of which there needs to be a lot of back and forth exchange to get both parties on the same page, more than a day or more can be spent before work based on that conversation can be done.

I'm not talking about distribution of tasks, but rather "person with access to X, I need you to do Y". I invite them to have a call so we can explore how to do Y together, because neither of us know it too well, but they just do whatever, ask how it went, and it turns out wrong. In this particular case, I've got a marketing guy who has access to the company's business account in a social media platform. I need them to add me there as a developer, and make sure I and another developer have all privileges necessary to create and configure an application which will use the social media platform's APIs. Marketing guy just takes hours to respond and generally acts like we're not worth his time, but can't do the things we asked and dedicate the time to see with us if things are working before he sets out to do other work.

This isn't an isolated case, we've got other people who don't look at their messages and are just generally unavailable. Not sure if I have incorrect expectations. Everyone in the company works remote, but we're all in the same time zone.

Do you ever feel your job is too demanding compared to other software engineering jobs?

I've worked in two companies for now.
First company, Kotlin microservices and we had QAs, didn't have to write a lot of tech specs and no post mortem or on call at all (not yet atleast), it was just talk to PO, he tells the business requirement, we work together to make tickets, no legacy code so was easy to know what to do for tech, no monolith to handle or anything, much easier, just code and meetings.

Current job is meetings with PO telling you what he wants, have to write a full on tech spec and also know business requirements and product knowledge as the current PO doesn't know anything about how the products work, writing huge tech specs, communicating on requests sent my clients on slack, pretty much always firefighting, the system is so fragile and legacy, coding is actually less its mostly spending hours finding out how this shittt legacy flows work (no docs) , PO pretty much does fuck all, just wants meetings and wants us to do very very stupid tedious low impacts projects. This bundled with oncall and onpoint and the absolute sheer amount of incidents our team is involved in (on average we have 4 a week LOL, varying size but they're all very annoying) and the overtime oncall benefit is so bad too, if you do get paged out of hours, you just get that hour back during work hours. In other companies like friends, you get paid for the whole time you're oncall, whether you get paged or not. I can't go out anywhere on weekends or anywhere at all during on call in case I get paged, which happens a lot. Its a cluster of a mess. This bundled with manager stoll not wanting to promote me to IC3 despite all I've done so far.

My question is, is this more normal than I think it is? Is this just how crap our career can be? Mind you I'm in the UK so not getting those mind boggling US wages sadly either. Have US colleagues in same team doing same job but obviously getting more

Hello to everybody. I used to be on this site like every day. I rejoined data lounge after accepting that everybody there gets their arses flamed and it's like initiation. But they're still mean.

I hope we are collectively not losing our fucking minds with this shite virus. I am uneasy. Something's not adding up.

I haven't felt this way for over 50 years, and that was during America's pig headed remaining in Vietnam rather than pulling out and letting Red China just fucking eat North Vietnam as a snack.

I've never had a sense that I don't know where things are going. And that those who should be able to tell us something are fucked up firecrackers with wet diapers.

Whilst I've never been overly fond of humans to begin with, I can only wait and see how long it takes for reason to prevail.

Peace out.

Jonno

Dear future me,

Please avenge us. Ruin the lives and reputation of specific individuals of the university professors and assistants that have ruined my life. Damage they had done is fatal and irreversible. Consequences for their actions are mandatory. For our own sanity, I am looking forward to seeking vengeance that will only ruin their careers, and from there let the karma finish them off.

Life is unfair, but why is it unfair to good people? I'll be the batman and balance this unfairness to make the other side of individuals experience it, too.

If i caught a virus and was unable to study for exam and failed because of that and you say life is unfair, you are inhumane.

If my mother got diagnosed with cancer and i was unable to study for exam and failed because of that and you say life is unfair, you are inhumane.

If my dad experienced a stroke and i had to be with him to make sure he's fine and unable to study for exam and failed because of that and you say life is unfair, you are inhumane.

If police knocked on my door and said my whole family just died in a car crash and i am unable to study out of depression and failed the exam because of that and you say life is unfair, you are inhumane.

You are inhumane because you have a choice to show that you as a human have compassion and understanding in tragic life situations and therefore work something out regarding exam, instead of making that student fail and walking over corposes like a cruel emotionless devil.

But they wont. They wont show it because they're inhumane. They're working for the matrix and not for the people. All of the professors and assistants.

I truly hope, and wish to create a curse, for all professors and assistants in all universities, for some tragic life event to happen to them and their family members with a death outcome, so I can also tell them life is unfair.

In fact, I'll step it up a level by enforcing "life is unfair" policy onto them by anonymously, slowly, ruining their careers from the shadow. Internet is a wild place that can ruin someones life. They have pushed me off the edge of my morality. They have turned me into Joker.

I mentioned earlier that I'll let karma take care of them, but what if I am, their karma? They have created a Joker. They wanted this war. These robots we call "professors and assistants" would rather die for the matrix than show human compassion.

What i plan to do to them might be illegal; but so is illegal to be inhuman fascists. Therefore like a batman, I will fight crime with crime. I cannot let them turn me into a Joker, because the Joker ruins lives of the good people, too. Batman ruins lives of the bad people only.

Their careers will be ruined, their life will be falling apart, they will continue to live but this time in a special kind of pain, the same pain they have caused to me, just so they can maybe understand how does it feel when you're hopeless and being told "lifes unfair".

It is.

Sincerely,
Me from the past, good luck

i'm new on here and just was wondering why they don't date or give the timing of rants as i was looking at some of the site. Not that it's important but speaking of dates....I think we've been in this shutdown LONG ENOUGH and this is the 11th of Apr. and they're adding on more time still when at first we were to get this over with by Apr. 3 now the end of April and now even out here where i live in So. Cal. universal Studios announced (i guess) they're shutting through end of May? Oh yeh-is that a Bright Airy future outlook to say that this virus is just going to wipe more out; keep wearing them masks and obey the stay at home rules and now you got this Hydroxy...you know that one that appears to be a positive drug to "work" to actually look safe enough to try or administer, how about giving that to the people that may want it instead of we've seen some bitter bulking at that very Hydroxy...look at the 1 governor or whomever threaten to strip the license right out of that person for bringing it up! Woooo instead ya got Mr Gates not even a physician talking all these rules of forced vaccines (again??) oh yeh NOT ME! This is now a politicized coronavirus and i watched a video and I believe it!!! The test conducted at the beginning of all this was tested incorrectly and it goes on and on and now we're in this lockdown as if there's power in them numbers keeping this thing going going gone to the biggest numbers where not enough medical equipment's cried out, lines out the A__ and then finding the opposite when people have followed up on all these leads of all over the Country where all this overflood of viral is running. Don't tell me i don't have the facts, because wth does at this juncture or at this very present night to where this is sickening. Yes, there's been patients or people Human Beings that have contracted it but let's just get some real information that i just have to know to what it is thus far isn't correct. And we need to get going, get your livilihood (spell check that word) GOING and LESS FEAR because from the people that want to run all this, they look power hungry to keep it going like the one guy said 'we don't have a choice' when it comes to this will play out 12 to 18 months. OH? YOU MAY HAVE LOSER CHOICE but WE DON'T!!! And it ain't playing out neither the 18 or 12...you know what they want it to run into the election process is what they want. Plus the idea to lock us down huh? And the day by days going by are going to only allow more freedoms to l-o-s-e!

See the problem is not going the same places, the problem is THEY do the same stupid shit everywhere half the time.

The other problem is their past thieving.
I'd have been out of their hair along time ago if they just kept me employed somewhere I didn't see their awful people and would stop trying to be out and proud chomo faggots which has obviously ended pretty tragically for a great many of them. So far as I can tell.

Seriously they're likely making themselves more crazy than they are people like us.

Put it this way, many times i would not have remembered what all they've done.

second if they'd not interfered my happier times would be at the top of my mind, women wine and song and total ignorance of the rest of this.

As a college student, I find it hard to take out time from the college schedule just for studies. And it's not just the 9-5 but the time after that I am unable to spare. I have a personal learning goal that I will learn some xyz technology before the end of this semester. But in this entire week I have been able to dedicate only hour of time to my actual learning. There's college quizzes, assignments and my juniors come to me for help as well.. I help out as best as I could but them being new devs, it's like they haven't discovered Google yet. Everytime they face an error they're like, "please help us senpai". It's really time consuming.

hey uh, this is a rant about phantom forces, if you don't know what it is, look it up, anyways, that's really it.

so, i've been playing this game very actively called phantom forces and its a good game but its been ruined and the fun has pretty much been taken away. the community is dead and terrible, the developers don't care and the game is just falling off.

what i consider community is the youtube scene, and now as of january 1st, 2022, there's nothing left that's actually interesting besides godstatus and moons fps studio. honestly, its so dry and i'm sick of it.

i'm tired of seeing shitty best setup videos and gun reviews. i hate somesteven and strider and then, there's nothing to actually watch so i just watch brain-numbing shitty videos about stuff.

and then theres the developers, stylis studios is a great development team, i'll give you that but the sheer ignorance of their team is so fucking much.

its kinda obvious they don't really care about adding new features or anything new that isn't guns and its fucking sickening. just to see the same old updates, every fucking month man, its annoying and tiring.

i'm fucking tired of just seeing ape shit guns that are too high for regular players to actually unlock. like i know they're trying to please the growing number of 200+ rank users but its terrible, they haven't done a gun below rank 200 or 100 in forever. the last time they did it was like 6 months ago or something.

we've been asking for shit for years and they haven't given it to us and its fucking tiring. asking for daily quests, new features, more grips, vehicles and shit like that is obviously never gonna happen and thats the fucking problem. they don't care about their community.

but anyways, thats really all i want to say, might make a follow up post later. if you want to add your 2 cents down in the comments, you can do that. bye