What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

Management : "How long you think it would take?"

Me : "now this is a rough estimate, but I think building the back-end and database alone could take 6-months minimum"

Management : "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS"

me : "its a big proj..."

Management : "I thought it will be something like 10 days, already told the client it can be done"

me : "but we are not ready"

Management : "how are we not ready? we already have the virtual 3D shop, and we can use this ready-to-deploy eCommerce service as our data base "
... "you need to figure this out, this is not acceptable" he continued

* 2 Days Later -talking to my direct boss *
Boss : "since you don't know how to do it..."

me : "what ? I didn't say I can't do it, all I said it will take six months"

Boss : "yeah yeah, anyway there is this studio, a professional polish studio, we called them and they can do it, we will sign a contract with them, this will let you focus on the front-end. good?"

me : "well alright then"

Boss : "please write a doc, explaining everything needed from the backend"
-to me that was the end of it, took a long time to tell me they made the deal-

* 5 Months later *
- "Abdu, can you come here for a minute..."
- "yes boss?"
- "the document we asked you to do for the Polish studio, did you specify that we needed an integration with the API we are using for eCommerce?"

scared to death I answered : "why of course I did!"
I ran to my PC to check it out because I didn't know, I forgot because no one even comment on my doc. I check it out, and it was clearly explained... I got relaxed...

turns out they didn't even do what we asked them for. took them 5 months, and with no communication whatsoever. all their work was useless to us. complete dump waste.

----------------
never mentioned this until a year later... in a heat of moment when they were asking me to make an impossible task with no men and no time... I reminded them of this story... management didn't like it. but it was the truth. they didnt push this crazily this time

This story is 100% true.

I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.

The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”

So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”

So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.

Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…

After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.

Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.

It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.

The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.

I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.

Another day, another hit piece against gaming.

So, a 15-year old boy hanged himself and the media goes all „This was caused by this game“, even though NO FUCKING TRACES OF THE GAME WERE FOUND ON THE LAPTOP OF THE DECEASED!!!

And then of course my freaking parents go all lecturing me about how the internet twists the brain into not being adequate towards reality etc.

First off, CAN THE FUCKING COLLECTION OF COCKSUCKERS that is the fucking media just fucking get a grip on reality? It was literally said in the same sentence that the supposed game that caused that was not found in any form on the person's laptop. You would think an online game that you take months to play through would need at least some fucking download to run, right? Unless it was a freaking video chat bullshit that they call a „game“ just for the fucking spite of gamers.

Second, HOW FUCKING LONG WILL IT FUCKING TAKE FOR PEOPLE TO FUCKING ACCEPT THAT IT'S NOT THE TECH THAT MAKES PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES? How hard is it to fucking understand?

Third... How do people in their 60s freaking think they understand anything about modern gaming when they have no freaking way of interacting with it other than these hit pieces? They certainly give more fucks about what a hired bitch of a lying „journalist“, that cannot even talk properly, says. Oh, they care so much about the children. Have they never thought that people are killing themselves exactly because they feel nobody cares about them?

Fourth. How fucking long do parents like mine deny the reality that just as long as they see me as an incomplete copy of my sisters I will be suicidal? Let me guess... It's video games causing me to be oh, so inadequate when I've not played any of them for quite some time...

Fifth... How am I out of touch with reality when these people have never known how I „work“, so to speak, as a person, and they've been the ones basically dictating all my life? Let me see why I'm unhappy...

I know I complain a lot. Sorry for that. But I just cannot stand people like them. People that lie all the time and project that on you while depriving you of any means of defending yourself in a debate...

The hardest part of being a programmer wasn't the education, the self-teaching, the sleepless nights or the hours of agony trying to fix a bug that would break a program I'd spend weeks working on.

It's the realization that my family, friends, coworkers...nobody understands at all what I do. They don't know of my failures or my triumphs. I can't talk about it with them and it's becoming more apparent to them that it's taking up more of my life. And in a way it feels like a part of myself has just become, well, alien.

Best way I can describe it is, it's like the "Tears in the Rain" scene from Blade Runner.

I'm stuck, I think. I know I've been shutting out people from my life more and more as I don't want to "deal" with people's issues, but I don't think it's been good. I'm can verify that I'm depressed beyond my normal levels.

It's time for me to make an appointment with a therapist.

Remember that you are loved here, and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Stay strong.

I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

The problem with being a programmer...

I just broke up with a girl I've been seeing the past 2 months, that I was really into.

But in the end, it became a question of, either i'm with her, or I'm with my work.

I don't think that would happen with other professions, at least, not as easily.

I think, with other professions or projects, you tell someone "I need to work" and it's really fucking understood. "Ok, you need to work"

They understand it. If I was a lawyer.. I have a case. if I was a carpenter, I have a wall to build,
or a house. Etc. All understood things. Or physical things that can be seen.

But with programming, first of all, I work my own hours, I write software and then sell it. I do it all myself, I own my own business. I don't have normal hours like a job, but I do know my requirements, which is at LEAST 8 hours a day of solid, uninterrupted work.

If I had a "job" it would be like "gotta go to work" and that would be it.

But, because I work for myself, and because the things I build, aren't like something you physically see, nobody gets it.

My parents, as supportive as they are, will never understand how I just implemented a new design pattern and like, leveled up because of it.

They see software... buttons, and even then, when I try to explain what excites me, it's like trying to get a 3 year old interested in calculus.

How could they possibly understand the richness of what I do, how fulfilling it is
and how much I love it, when all they see
is me on a computer, clicking keys.

The same for this girl I dated.

The only place I feel where people understand,
is here.

Do you have any similar experiences to share?
Would love to hear it right now.

Parents: When your child spends a lot of time with the PC and doesn't want to interact with you, you have some reflection to do before you turn off the internet and nag them for things all day. Chances are, they don't like being with you but don't want to say it, either, because of the kind of things they know you will say and think if they do it.

And for the love of everything that is holy, do NOT turn the internet off! That pisses them off even more!

Maybe I'd have told you how much I hate being forced to be with you if it didn't mean I'd get guilt tripped about it.

Being around the people who pretend that you are a fucking machine that only needs material things in life and does not at all need emotional support at least in the early parts of your life and deflecting every legit argument for the things you stand for with "Muh Feelingz" makes them seem even more pathetic than they are. They manage to be an inspiration to everyone who doesn't know them, yet fail to be the persons their children have any respect for.

It's as if children never imitate their surroundings at all...

Hey everyone - tonight we performed a database upgrade and unfortunately there were a few "surprise" breaking changes to the query language we use that weren't caught during testing. Once they were discovered after the upgrade. The queries were corrected within a few minutes. You might have noticed some issues with commenting, voting, etc.

On this note, please let me know if you notice anything suspicious like errors when trying to perform normal actions, or anything at all. I appreciate any reports since it's a bit tricky for us to cover every last part of the app alone, though I think we went through most of it. Thanks and please let me know if you have any questions!

Someones keyboard just stopped working in my job.
They called the helpdesk and i told them to unplug the keyboard from the back of the PC and try a different usb port before i send them down a new keyboard.
Their reply?

‘How am i meant to do that? I mean... *laughs* I didn’t go to college for this kind of stuff. I know you did but you need to explain it in English for me instead of using technical terms.’

....

So i had to describe what a USB looks like, and tell her how to follow the (only) skinny black cable she has on her desk, down the back of the desk and into the PC. She got overwhelmed by this cable being the same colour as the thicker VGA cable, so ended up unplugging everything!
Its fine though, as when she plugged them all back in, everything was back working.
She finished the call by saying:

“Like, i know how to use a computer but I just don’t understand all this technical mumbo jumbo, like USB’s and stuff? How should i know about that?”

...

I sincerely think interviews need to have just 5 minutes dedicated to the person showing that they know what a bloody USB is!!, can turn on/off a PC, open outlook, and follow basic instructions.

Ugh I work with idiots 😢

Ranted about him before but this just came to my mind again.
The fucking windows (to the max) fanboy I had to deal with for too long.

Every time I mentioned something about what programming language to use in a project he was NOT part of:
"I know it's none of my business, BUT I think you should use .net"
(All backend JavaScript and php guys).

Every time I mentioned something about what server system to use:
"I know it's none of my business but I think you should use Windows server"
(All Linux guys)

Every time I'd say something positive about Linux he'd search as long as needed to prove that that was also a windows thing (didn't even come close sometimes)

Every time I told the devs there about a windows security issue (as in "guys they found this thing, install the next update to stay safe :)" - "ahhh will do, thanks for letting know man!") he'd search as long as needed to prove that Linux also had had security issues like that.
(Okay?!? I know?!? I'm just trying to notify people so their systems stay secure and they're genuinely happy with that so STFU)

MOTHERFUCKER.

!dev
!!personal
!!abuse

I'm a victim of rather severe child abuse, both physical and mental. I've cut my mother out of my life on several occasions, and disowned her husband on father's day a few years ago. Whenever they're in my life they make things slowly but significantly worse.

They'd been using my previous hard times to push their way into my life again, and are now trying to buy their way in -- this time not into my life, but into my 2yo son's life.

I've done everything I could to keep his existence from them. I hid pregnancy from them, dropped any mew mannerisms and cute vocabulary when speaking to them, never let them see toys or hear sounds if I needed to call them, hid the carseat, etc. I did a perfect job. Out of necessity I've been hiding my life from them since I was 13, and I've never done better than this.

But they knew his name, sex, and age. This means they went digging, and a bloody lot. There is literally no public info relating him to me, and nobody that knows us would tell them, either -- they all know and understand.

For years I've refused to tell these people where I lived, too. We've been here for over five years, and three years ago they just randomly showed up at our door. I never gave them an address, and the house isn't in my name. I never had any privacy when I lived with them, either -- literally not even in the bathroom -- but now we have our own house and they still randomly intrude? asldhflakshdf

But. This Christmas Eve, we got two large boxes (fruit flats) stacked full of presents from them. A third for me, a third for my girlfriend, and a third for my 2yo. Name tags and all.

Why can't they just leave us alone? On Christmas of all holidays? Why do they have to ruin everything? Why can't they just go away?

I've made things abundantly clear, and they just. won't. stop. I feel so angry and exasperated and helpless and trapped. I went from listening to "die in a fire" to crying helplessly on the stairs. All I want is to be left alone and not harassed and blackmailed and manipulated and guilted and given expired food as "gifts."

and before you ever even think to defend them, please re-read my first three sentences.

Just.
Merry fucking Christmas.

So many people are applying for computer science majors that it's making me nervous.

My classmates don't know shit about tech yet almost all of them are applying for CS. It's even the most popular ranked major in the US.

I don't think I stand a chance against them. They all have higher GPAs than me, and they participate in clubs and sports.

If those cave people get accepted I'm not going to be too happy about it.

We are pioneers.

We build software, an extremely complex concept that didn't exist just 70 years ago.

We learned to harness its complexity and bend it at our will. Just stop for a minute and think about what happens when you load a URL in your web browser. The whole process.

In all human history, nobody has ever been the protagonist in something so complex as software. Yet we know that all of this wouldn't exist without a community of developers, sharing code and knowledge over the same system that they have created.

_We are dwarves perched on the shoulders of our fellows_

That's why even if nobody understands our work, I still think this is the most beautiful job in the world.

I'm moving to a new place soon meaning that I'll have to get a new desk/chair. (current ones suck)

I need a good one of both but I'm not rich so was looking for more cheap options.

The guy next to me is moving out soon as well appearantly and he came to me and another roommate like "hey I'm going to buy everything new, fresh start! If you guys would like to have anything, let me know!"

Me: also a desk/chair by any chance?
Guy: yup, take a look :)
*takes a look*
Me: the damn they look very good! Are you sure you want to get rid of them? I'd think they cost quite some money.
Guy: yeah, you can also have the couch table/clothing closet if you'd like! (all designer/quality stuffs)

😍

So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"

First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.

Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.

PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer

PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"

FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"

Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"

End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok

Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"

15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"

And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!

I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...

Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...

Ok, so I have a SAAS website where users pay a daily fee to use my platform as there fundraiser landing page.

A new client comes, asks for a discount, and got a 50% off because his brother was a previous client.

Him: Can you please add a list of the days of the year so a donor can donate a day?

Me: Sure, sounds like a good idea, and will probably take me about a week to implement with testing etc. And so I want $$ (hourly rate * one week) for the work.

Him: Don't bluff me I understand a bit in programming, it shouldn't take you more than an hour, and I am paying you, so you should do it for free.

Me: Ok, here is a fair deal, since you understand in programming, build it for me, I give you two weeks and I will pay you double what I am asking for.

Him: I don't understand enough to do it myself, I just estimated how much work it is.

Me: Forget about it, if you want me to build you this feature, you pay. If not you can go to my competition happily.

Who needs bad clients at all?
Why do they think they know everything?
And why don't they understand that time is money?

OK! all you windows haters.
This is why i totally love windows to death.
it has awesome features no other OS has...

like, installing updates to office and Skype when they are not even installed, there's not even a registry entry anywhere for them!!

now show me another OS that updates non existing software and ill be all over it!

On a serious note, does anyone know how windows would think office and Skype are installed since I can’t find a single trace of them anywhere?

Apparently, because I know how computer works and how to program

I also had to know how to:
- become rich
- hack into banks
- solve all world problems
- make a better windows/facebook/apple/google
- repair a burned down PC

Sometimes I think they are scared that I'm able to zap them with a lightning strike as if would be a motherfucking wizard.

Still love my family though ;)

I really hate how people see Bachelor of Computer Science as a meme.

I think it's because everyone who has a Computer calls himself a IT-Expert. So today on Xmas family joined for a meal, we talked about work and study and stuff...

Auntie: "So why do you need to study to Operate a Computer, my Son built one by himself without studying, you should study something solid like economics"

First I thought this was a meme, later I found out she was dead serious.

All the math, physics, scientific research, papers, software engineering just to operate a computer 😂

I'm not gonna call her names, because it's Xmas so:

father forgive them, because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

I know a guy, about 50 years old. He is a self-taught programmer since he was young, and he has always used Visual Basic (never anything newer than VB6).

He once needed to interface with a web application I wrote, so I asked him to send me a POST HTTP request. He didn't know what I was talking about. No notion of REST, sockets, HTTP, nothing.

The he showed me his code. Actually, his codes. He had multiple copies of the project, one for each version, and he even kept multiple variations of the software in different separate folders. He probably doesn't know what "version control" even means.
You think this is messy. You didn't see the actual code (it's a huge application!).

Spaghetti all over the place. Meaningful variable names, what are they? Default names for the controls, like button1, button2, etc, with forms with more than 30 buttons and text fields. This was the most incomprensibile code I have ever seen.

You might think that this guy is just a hobbyist.
No.
He sells his applications. To companies. They are obviously full of errors, but they buy them.

Now, if you're still with me, two questions come into my mind:

- why?? I hate this, because it's impossible to prove to a non-technical person that this is *not* software development.
- how do I know that, to someone else, I am not like him? How can I be sure that I know and will know what needs to be known?

!dev, more about social media
(and suicide)

ugh. social media.

recently a girl from a nearby high school committed suicide. it's sad, and i know what i'm about to say is going to be controversial, but i think it shouldn't be on social media. maybe her close friends posting it on instagram, to remember her, but that's it.

of course, that's not what happened. people started posting "❤️" on their snapchat stories, and theyre saying they are raising awareness. (they don't know this girl or why she did it or anything, they're just doing it because their friends did it.)

this awareness, is well, temporary.

the point of snapchat is that all the pictures go away, so why would they talk about suicide prevention on there? do they want suicide prevention to go away? this is most prevelent on snapchat, but on others, too.

trend after trend after trend.

thats what people turned her death into. a trend.

just like #prayforparis, and others, but on a local scale.

the problem with social media is that things go away. in a day or two it'll be like this never happened. she won't be remembered like she would if she weren't on social media.

i know what you're thinking. they're just "raising awareness." but for how long?

well, until another trend comes.

people disagreeing with me are extremely welcome to comment.

and any ideas on how this problem can be fixed?

I am sure that a lot of you have heard about the gap between poor and rich growing. You know that the amount of really poor people and the amount of really rich people is increasing and that the amount of people in between is decreasing. The gap between poor and rich is growing.

But this rant isn't about economy or anything, I think something similar is happening in the technology sector.

I think that the gap between people knowing close to nothing or just really the stuff to get along and people that really know a lot about it is growing. Right now there are so many things happening in technology, quantum computers and especially machine learning. While on the other hand there are so many people not caring or rather not knowing about all of this stuff. Now you might think that this only is true for some of the 'older generations', those that didn't grow up with all the technology. But I can say that today's youth isn't any better.

For example:
One of my classmates had to copy a file into a folder. They both were on the desktop. He clicked on the file and dragged it onto the folder. It was loading and after around 10 seconds it still wasn't finished, so he stopped it, moved the file closer to the folder and tried it again. This really happened and I am 99% sure that he was serious.

Now I don't know if this is just some 1am thought I had but I really think that the 'gap' between people with almost no technology knowledge / interest and people who are making the stuff and really know stuff about it is growing at an alarming rate.

3 billion devices may run java but there aren't 3 billion people who know Java.

Please let me hear your opinion about this :)

I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.

1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.

2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.

3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.

4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.

5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.

I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

Although I'm a Linux fan, I have to admit a few things:
1. BSD has the best mascot BY FAR.
2. Windows XP had the best sounds. Almost orgasmic...
3. Apple has the best fanboys. You see all those retards camping out of an Apple store waiting for a new gadget, it makes you feel good about yourself...
4. I would also say something about Google and Android, but they know what kind of porn I watch, so I think it's wise to skip that one...

After interviewing 3 candidates for software today, I have officially decided its time to seriously pursue creating a YouTube channel with a complete set of series to learn programming MY WAY... not the short cut way... this will go all the way to beginning and start the person up with a solid foundation to build on... I’m going to pour my knowledge into these series.
The education system has failed too many in the real world... to many people I have interviewed they think they know have a degree but are clueless.. this is unacceptable and a waste... AND way too often I see online “learn programming in 30 days or learn programming in a day”... fuck off it’s all lies .. all wrong.. wrong methods wrong philosophy and I’m done with it...
I’m set on doing it this time, I’ve put it off too long, and longer I put it off the more I see shitty interviews! Time to fix it

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

This is a sad rant. Today I went over to one colleague to discuss one technical appetite I had. This colleague of mine is a very good in his skills and I never had any issue sharing my problems. Then this other colleague come over and jumps in "what's the problem tell me". I just tell him of some things I do not understand then this 2nd colleague the fucker asshole starts loudly pinpointing my lack of understanding of this and to prove I don't know more he starts asking very deep questions on the same topic. I am surprised and furious and feel like fucking him out. Above this he pats on the 1st colleagues back and start talking in things which they solved and skills they possess above the rest and admiring each other

You tit of the asses you fucker 2nd colleague go fuck yourself if you have so much attitude.

I left with mixed sadness and this huge rant against that fucker colleagues who think they stand above all because it's fuckers like you with your shit attitude of nothing.

Job interview.

Head of development: "I'm looking for the perfect php developer with perfect MySQL knowledge."

Me: "We'll ok. Good look with finding that unicorn. I think we are done here."

The problem with some people is that they are the gatekeepers for other people's careers and that they are begging to be bullshitted: "Yes of course I am the best of all php developers! And I don't only know MySQL but am pretty awesome in YourSQL as well!" As if I want to work in a team posers.

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.

STOP SHITTING ON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES.
Now, I'm not talking to the people that don't take it too serious, but rather to people that think their language is superior and others inferior. Why shit on PHP? A lot of stuff is build with this, including devRant. For me, I'd love to learn any languages that has a proper use for me. (With this sentence I'm excluding all exoteric languages, because they are useless) If anyone says, Python is awesome as fuck, yeah, I FUCKING AGREE. Anyone telling me anything is crap, I disagree. If it's that terrible, how do you know about it? If it was never used ever in a project, how can you know its terrible? You can't. Unless you coded that thing yourself.

Next time don't waste your time on shit like that. I AM ALSO LOOKING AT THE HOLY WAR APPLE VS MICROSOFT VS LINUX

STOP WASTING YOUR TIME WITH SHIT LIKE THIS.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

I just want to add my 2 Cents to the all this GDPR chaos. Because I feel lots of you are missing the point here.

When reading here about GDPR I hear all kinds of fair statements of how flawed it is and how it's mainly hurting the small companies etc etc.

I agree, at this state GDPR might actually be doing more harm than good.

However, I don't think that is what it is about. It's about going in the right direction. If you read/look over the course of history we've had several technological revolutions. Industrial, renaissance. They all start the same:

"This technology is going to change everything, it's going to solve all our problems!" It's something holy. Something that shouldn't be touched or regulated, only embraced.

But as we all know it wasn't all that pretty.

Industrial revolution was hard super underpaid, dirty work. Children had to work too. People were getting sick. Lots of alcoholism, depression.

And what made the factories start taking better care of their employees? Regulation.

Once fines start to come, companies will have to adapt.

We have to learn and understand that these systems like government, company, capitalism. They're built for reasons. They all exist for reasons. And only when it is in balance, things will flourish.

So I encourage you all to stay as critical as you are, but to give it a chance. To have a bit of faith.

It might just turn into something worthwhile!

Thanks for reading!:)

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.

A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.

So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

This is probably gona make me sound arrogant, but fuck it, you don’t know who I am, and I need to RANT!

I hate it when B.A.’s who have never studied UI or UX rail-road over my design decisions, and I just gota go along with it cos they in charge.
Then, when I make the interface the way they want it, all sorts of problems arise… Mother fucker, I saw this shit coming, and that’s why I designed it the way that I did.
Now I gota tell them how to solve the problems by doing what I originally said, and when they finally see the light, I gota waste more time re-doing the interface.
I once went through 5 fucking iterations of “Let’s try it this way”, Just to end up back with my original design spec cos these fuckers can’t even imagine what shit would look like, and how it will interact.

Now you would think after this happens a few times they would learn to trust my design skills, but noooo, Mr B.A. has to piss all over my ideas every time.
And every FUCKING time, we end up going back to what I originally proposed…
Learn your fucking lesson dumb ass!!!

*drops mic & goes straight to the bar*

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

So I made an android app for a client. It's a newspaper type of app for the clients webpage, as he has a lot of traffic on it and about 50-51% is from mobile. Which is all good an everything.

And so I've been working on it for a while now as it wasn't a primary focus, more of a like side project.

I was able to make full working build (publish ready) and sent it to the client for a review.

After about an hour I received an email saying that the app is requesting too many permissions from the user. So I started looking trough my manifest file and all of the 3rd party libs to see what were those permissions.

Well, when I finally installed the app on a physical device and looked trough the permissions in the settings all I found were permissions for the internet and prevent the phone from sleeping.

After asking the client to tell me in detail which permissions raised concerns he told me it were those 2 and if they could be removed.

So I just wasted an hour of my life trying to explain why the app that is losing content from the internet needs internet permissions.

Fml and ignorant people who think they know everything and won't accept anything else.

And all of this because he read on some click bait website how a "real" app doesn't need any permissions and every other is just trying to steal all of your data and money.

I honestly do not understand why clients, with no understand of development at all, think they know more than the developer.

I do not understand why these people think they know what can and cannot be done within a given timeline.

If it's so damn easy, why aren't you making the damn website/app yourself????

#frustratedaf
#donewiththisshit
#ineedthemoneytho

Worst coding interruptions are, by far, instant messages. Especially messages I don't care about. People who tag an entire channel when they shouldn't. The Diversity and Inclusion channel that everyone has to join that tags the entire channel, all 2000 members, at least once a day to share some blog post nobody wants to read. Other employees sending "Hi" to me and expecting an immediate response even though I don't know what they want yet. People who think Slack is an alternative to our support ticket system.

I am often tempted to just sign out for the day, but unfortunately some of the messages are actually important...

An un-rant on Universities. (UC Irvine)

A lot of my friends and I are about to graduate 👨‍🎓 from UCI, with Computer Science degrees.

Most of them are complaining that they don't know any current frameworks, and all that we learned is outdated.
And that pretty much any bootcamper knows more tools that any of us do.

I totally disagree. I don't think it's the university's job to teach you tools (node, tencerflow, ...), rather, I think they made us into programming Swiss Army knifes. I can pick up any framework (I wanna be a web dev) real easy, and when shit breaks down, I can easily figure out the issue.

I think that's the major difference between Computer Scientists and Bootcampers/Programmers. We know "why", while they know "how".

What do you think? Is the current price of a CS degree worth it?

Do you know what is world needs?

Good fucking tutorials for all programming languages.

Every time I want to learn a language it's a fucking mess. Tutorial here, tutorial there. Read the docs, it's fucking outdated. This person using this design, that person using that.

I am so tired of this shit.

also, for a simple example most website uses some complex architecture, something they think is the next thing.

Even searching for a simple QT singleton pattern gives me a webpage from QT Wiki which uses templates, typedefs and this shits to just show a FUCKING EXAMPLE OF THREAD SAFE SINGLETON.

I really wish there's was a greater platform for this. A platform that follows some certain standard rules for tutorials.

You know what i hate? Applying to jobs and never getting feedback--if a polite "we didn't hire you because x and y" is too damn hard, i would still rather a royal refusal over not hearing anything back at all. It's happened to me 3-4 times in a row now, probably going to be 5 - 6 soon enough. Seriously though, what is this shortage of devs everyone talks about? Because here i am with both hands and a leg in the air high as i could manage and you're not even acknowledging me? I even made a small React SPA once to satisfy a company's questions and show a bit of my competence--you think i ever got a reply from them? Shit, i didnt even get an auto reply. And from what ive read here on others' rants, im far from being alone. At least i could understand why they dont look at me (Bahamian, no degree, never had a dev job, etc.), but for proven programmers to go unnoticed the way they do is ridiculous.

Warning: American perspective of some shit that happens in America that I do not know if it is the same in other places of the world.

I got a notification from my child's school saying that she has been selected for doing <bs activity> between the hours of 1-3 and that parent cooperation is expected. I called the institution and told them that she would not be participating. They asked me WHY, to which I answered that said schedule does not align with my daily schedule. They continue to press as to WHY she would not make it to which I added in a very harsh tone: "because I am fucking working and my wife is fucking working, what age do you think it is? the 1950s in which I can have some meaningless desk job and pay for a house that would be worth half a mil now a days when my wife stays at home all day and just goes with whatever whim y'all have?"

Needless to say, she is no longer in said activity group, but this seems to be very frequent inside of school systems in the U.S, they really ain't evolved much.

No, wait, they have, we have active shooter trainings now, that shit is semi-new.

I've developed an interesting habit. I wear a hat 24/7. The same exact hat.
I (almost) never wear my hat backwards. I think its weird, and I look weird, and its just too much weirdness.

There is one exception to this rule.

Before I begin coding each day, before a single stroke of my keyboard, I turn my hat backwards. I don't know why I started doing this, but it is almost as if my hat is a key and turning it unlocks all my programming knowledge.

Anyone else have a quirky habit they do before/during a coding session?

What the F**K? Why Marketing department always think they know better than IT Department? They always tell us "What so difficult to do this thing? You guys must have templates and change a few things!"

Let me give you some insight here, that this guy is the guy who buy website templates from programmers, change things and upload the site to Bluehost or Wordpress, That's all he do.

Our Software Archictect, colleagues and I personally went from "What the f***?" to "Are you f**king Kidding Me? "

Sometimes I just want to tell him this "Hey you mother f**ker, based on your f**king statement , why would you need programmers then? You guys can just buy the templates and change things".....

F**k you Marketing Department!

Met colleague at work

Him: You programmers don't like sleeping at all. You should try to sleep and look fresh like me ... Blah blah blah... (You get the picture)

Me: *just smiles and watch him go*

(But what I really wanted to say)

Me: 'Well you know what, most programmers don't sleep much not because sleep deprivation is fun or we're in some kind of cult where it's some daily ritual. But when they need to send in an update; usually on a feature to make YOUR life easier OR just can't seem get their code to run right, and they keep telling themselves; "5 more minutes", "I have a good feeling about this modification" the minutes add up and before you realize it morning! And that's why some of us look like s*** in the morning'

(And then turn around to leave only to come back really quick like I just remembered something)

Me (again): "And don't think that we enjoy it. At least the ones I know don't. It's simply a fr****** work hazard!"

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

If you think meetings are bad.

Have a day full of license renewal and price negotiation talks regarding technical products.

It's funny how you can blatantly say: We don't need feature XYZ, we get it for free via BLA.... Yet they still present it in all glory.

Even better when they don't even know their alternative / competition products...

X: "our tool is better".
Me: "We have tool XY. Doesn't cost a penny, does the same, we don't need your tool".
X: "No it doesn't. Look at all the features we have *screen share presentation* with long explanations".
Y: "Yeah... You've certain additional features, but the basics are all present in the tool that we use, so my statement remains the same".

These meetings are really mind boggling insane.

Even more insane when you get the price offers.

The cloud only madness is absurd.

Sure, we move 50 terabyte plus to the cloud from premise, no problem. *🤡*

Not that we haven't told them explicitly that cloud only isn't possible....

The worst: every motherfucking company does it for every stupid single craptastic product...

You cannot even swoop it up in a single meeting... Every company. Every single product.

*booze liberate me from madness and remove the filthy stain of humanity*

Actually the worst fucking developer experience is meeting those all knowing people who think they know everything but actually they even don’t know how the fucking tools they’re using every day are written and how they work.

Those people that think when they installed library it should do everything how they imagined to and don’t fucking bother to debug problems and create pull requests if it’s fucking buggy.

Those fucking ranters who moan about something they don’t understand.

Those fuckers who think if they understood what A*, Dijkstra, graph algorithm is they’re smarter then others.

No you fuckers you’re dumb as fuck cause instead of explaining it to someone you just blame people for not knowing “obvious shit”.

All those fucking ignorants I am fucking writing about you.
You either start support each other or fuck you people.

TLDR: SAP sucks. Don't ever work with it. Run away from it. Delete it from your memory. If your company works with it, quit. It's the best you can do.

A couple of weeks ago the group rant was "Story of your best/worst career choice" and I talked about the contract I signed. Even tho that is still true and I still feel like that, I think I got a new worst choice:

WORKING WITH SAP.

When I got this job I knew it would be SAP, but I didn't know what SAP was. I just thought "it's programming, how bad can it be?" OH BOII.

If only I would have done some FUCKING RESEARCH I would know this would be a mistake!!

And I knew I didn't want to work with this, I knew I wanted to be a web developer, but I STILL ACCEPTED THE JOB OH MAN WHAT WAS I THINKING I'M SO MAD.

Were I live we all have the same mentality when looking for the first job, which is to just accept anything you can get, because it's your first job, you need to work and to get experience, even if it's a bad job or if you know you won't like it. When my intership was ending, I told my parents I didn't want to stay there because they treat their employes like shit, and the salary is terrible. They told me to still accept it if they offered because I still need a job (this one was web tho) and experience.

So, of course, since I was looking for my first job, was told this my entire live, always thought like that and they were the first to contact me, I accepted it.

BIGGEST FUCKING MISTAKE!! DON'T THINK LIKE THIS!! AND STOP TELLING KIDS THIS!! IT'S NOT A GOOD MENTALITY!!!

ALSO DON'T WORK WITH SAP! EVER!

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

Our company today disallowed the use of GitKraken to all developers. Reason? They wanted to save money. When I told them that software is free, they responded with , “No, not in any way! All developers can use GitHub Actions instead”.

I don’t think they know what GitKraken nor GitHub Actions is, nor that GitKraken is free.

Not that I like GitKraken, but I don’t want to limit other developers use of it if they like it.

Meanwhile, we have been running no less than four kubernetes clusters, of which only one is in use…

This really pisses me off. As a front end developer (ember.js, HTML and Css) colleagues and boss and pm are always making jokes how I just need to change a button or a color and whenever there is a bug in the UI there's always big fun and jokes around it. But when there's a bug in the API, they never joke around, it's just : oh yeah we're getting the wrong data or an exception. But they always like to undervalue UI work even when it involves complex layouts, multi browser compatibility, responsive design, mobile browsers etc.. While they just code their API to connect to a database and everything works they don't really need to worry about what the user is using as a browser. They just get requests and send replies. I don't really think people value the work in front end as much as backend and that pisses me off as I believe there's a lot more going on in the front end.. I know they mean well and they are all cool people but sometimes it pisses me off as they don't value my work..

I hate working with egoistic noobshit hotshot "developers". But sadly, they tend to get ahead because they talk like they know everything in front of tech idiot management.

***

management: I need this swanky feature X in our product within the month.

me: That literally requires a huge refactor because our current codebase was never meant to support this type of service. We need to think about this.

noobshit: I disagree. This is easy. We're already doing something similar that is Z, this shouldn't take very long.

me: Z seems similar, but it actually quite different.

me (in my head): ... and you would know it's *completely* different if you fucking understood our own codebase vs what X needs you moron.

noobshit: Nah, it's similar. We can accomplish X if we polish up Z a bit.

*** 1 week later ***

noobshit: Omg X is horrifying and complex. We can't do it without a huge refactor.

me: yes

me (in my head): Fuck you

***

But guess who's got better career prospects because they're all shiny and positive in front of management?

Gonna go to uni in a few months. So I applied to 2 companies for a side job. (10hrs/week - some kind of scholarship)

First interview:
Of all the applicants I seemed to be the only one with enough technical knowledge to be considered. :)
They rejected me still, because I don't have enough time to have a proper onboarding process. They offered that I could start off in the holidays in the second year of uni.

Second Interview:
Had a test with logic and a little bit of maths. Nearly completed that and then had a technical talk with their team lead. He said that I sound like I know my stuff. They are gonna contact me next week...

I think I aced the interviews, and being complimented on my knowledge feels validating.
Let's see where this is going...

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

I just received this gem this morning.
First of let me start by saying that I am against scammers and all this Nigerian prince crap.
But some of this shit is so bad that it actually pisses me off. My intelligence feels insulted.

Look at this email. These fuckers spent hours perfecting the Hotmail feel to it. The logo, design and even font are in par. As I started reading the shit, the spelling mistakes are so obvious that I wondered; do these nut suckers know that whatever email editor they use, it autocorrects for you? Are they just ignoring the recommendations? I mean they could've even used the "Did you mean" feature in Google. Or any of the freely available grammatical check sites out there.

Think of this as plagiarism. It's bad but a majority of us can appreciate a well planned out one.

I'm yet to encounter a really good scam email that almost had me click their link. There's always an obvious stand out! Is there like a copyright holder to a perfectly well put scam email?!

(And yes, you just read a rant about someone complaining that scammers aren't doing a great job)

Don't you hate it when your co-worker does dumb things, but thinks it's the "clean code" way?
The following is a conversation between me and a co-worker, who thinks he's superior to everyone because he thinks he's the only one who read the Clean Code series. Let's call him Bill.

Me: I think the feature we need is quite simple, our application needs to call this third party API, parse the response and pass it to the next step. Why do you need to bury everything under an abstraction of 4 layers?
Bill: bEcAuSe It'S dEcOuPlInG, aNd MaKe ThE cOdE tEsTaBlE
Me: I don't know man, you only need to abstract the third party api client, and then mock it if you want. Some interfaces you define makes no sense at all. For example, this interface only has 1 concrete implementation, and I don't think it will ever have another. Besides, the concrete implementation only gets the input from the upper layer and passes it down the lower layer. Why the extra step? I feel like you're using interface just for the sake of interface.
Bill: PrOgRaMmInG tO iNtErFaCe, NoT cOnCrEtE iPlEmEnTaTiOn!!!
Me: You keep saying those words, I don't think they mean what you think they mean. But they certainly do not mean that every method argument must be an interface
Bill: BuT uNcLe BoB blah blah blah...
Me: *gives up all hope*

Just blowing off steam with y'all. It will sound confused, but it's just all of my depressive thoughts mashed up in a rant.

So, here I am.

Surrounded by incompetent professors who are unable to point me in the right direction, that rarely even know what they are 'teaching'. In a moment of total loss, that has been lasting for months. Totally lost my motivation and my will to pursue a career in IT. All I do is game, eat, sleep, repeat. I am exhausted mentally. When I get back from school, I can't think of anything else but to relax and do nothing. I am frustrated. I care about becoming a programmer, but I can't find my inner strenght. School draws all of my strenght and willpower away from me, and therefore I get distracted very easily. I just do not know what to do anymore. I want to keep going, but I am stuck, unable to do so. "Perhaps this is just not for me" is what keeps resounding inside my head, but I do not truly believe it. I just wish that all of this stress would just disappear, and allow me to do what I care about. I need help to find the needed focus to continue.

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

DO NOT be afraid to argue with people. It doesnt matter who they are. Senior engineers, tech leads, delivery managers, if you know something is wrong make it heard. I made a point of telling my Project Manager that the current project is the worst ive ever seen. The technology is awful and we all hate the development. They need to know this stuff. And if they come to you with a deadline that you dont think you can make, say it then and there. Then they cant come back and say why isnt this done. Basically dont just do as youre told. If we needed that we would get robots to do our job. We need people who think and have opinions and make those opinions heard at the appropriate level.

This isn’t gonna be a random because I do eventually get to a Tech and YouTube related topic.

YouTube is actually killing itself with all of the dumbass rules they’re implementing. Trying to child proof or limit educational content is genuinely a shit policy. The reason so many gaming channels are switching to twitch because it doesn’t try to censor you.

But now I don’t know if you’ve heard but YouTube updated their guidelines and they’re no longer allowing content that teaches people about Hacking essentially (and I hate putting it like that but I can’t remember the exact words they used Hacking just summarizes it) which is fucking ridiculous like what the fuck else, are they gonna stop allowing lock picking videos?

YouTube has always been an amazing FREE resource for people learning Programming, Cyber Security, IT related fields, and even shit like lock picking, cooking, car stuff, and all that stuff. Even sometimes when the tutorials aren’t as detailed or helpful to me they might be exactly what someone else needed. And Cyber Security can be a difficult topic to learn for free. It’s not impossible far from it, but YouTube being there was always great. And to think that a lot of those could be taken down and all of the Security based channels could either lose all revenue or just be terminated is terrifying for everyone but more so them.

A lot of people and schools rely on YouTube for education and to learn from. It’s not like YouTube is the only resource and I understand they don’t want to be liable for teaching people that use these skills for malicious purposes but script kiddies and malicious people can easily get the same knowledge. Or pay someone to give them what they want. But that’s unfair to the people that don’t use the information maliciously.

It’s the same for the channels of different topics can’t even swear and it’s ridiculous there’s so many better options than just banning it. Like FUCK kids nowadays hear swearing from their older siblings, parents, friends, and TV it’s inevitable whether someone swears or not and YouTube is not our parents, they aren’t CBS, so stop child proofing the fucking site and let us learn. Fuck.

TLDR YouTube is banning educational hacking videos and are being retarded with rules in general

Users and Bosses.

I honestly don't know who is worse, the end user or the boss.

The boss thinks all you do is click a button and everything just works, so everything should take 30 minutes to complete, why on earth would it take a week to do something?

The user seems to think every tiny idea is the most important thing ever to add, so they tell said boss it must be added, and boss normally agrees.

I get it, Marge (Fake name), adding in a copy button because you're too dumb to press ctrl + c is way more important than updating the security after a Ransomware attack.

No boss, I can't add in 30 new things and make sure the security protocols are updated all before the meeting in 15 minutes.

If you think it's all so easy and just pressing buttons, why did you hire me? Anyone who can read and press a button should be able to do it....

Dealing with non-dev people.

I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.

Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.

Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.

This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.

But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.

So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.

I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.

I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.

I was unemployed and had to sent out 10 or so job applications per month to e eligible to receive the money substitution for unemployment...
Anyways, not many jobs fit my experience, so I was sending out to those with higher/different requirements aswel.. That day I was meeting my sister and she was already waiting for me, so I quickly sent out a totally unpersonalised application for a job I wasn't qualified for. Next day I got back response email with a self grading questionaire I didn't really understood, all about MS technologies I never worked with..which means I didn't know how to grade myself..I decided to ask around people to try to help me grade myself, but then I totally forgot about that in the next days and never replied to that email.
Anyways, week later I got email for job interview from a sister company (found that out later, snooping through linkedin). I was surprised someone requested a meeting with me, especially without the agenda (at that time I was not aware it was a job interview).. Anyways I went there, found out the guy interviewing me thought they lost my questionaire. I explined the situation and he just decided to ask me around to see what I know. So we talked about my past experience and the guy who was doing the interview explained what is what & and explained what I did before and together we figured out what I know and what my experiences are... After we were done, he said that everything else, the payment and other stuff about the job position I should discuss with the director. Not to ask questions, but negotiate.. O.o And just like that I got the job, because they liked my CV & attitude (I like to learn new stuff) and they thought I'd fit in perfectly.
I'm still working there, it's been 4 years now, I think.. loved it since the day one.. Got 'promoted' to another project, crappy old code noone wants/dares to touch but I love it! The guys think I am weird cuz I like to solve/fix things and make them better, and previous employees who worked on that project have all lost their shit and quit. They are all wondering how I can handle this, but little do they know about devrant & my love for the crazy!!

Gave the marketing team access to JIRA and gave them permissions to create tickets. Don’t know if that was a management’s design or what. Tickets were poorly written and I had to make frequent follow ups to figure out what the heck was actually being requested. I did get accused of “questioning the request” at least once. It was a big WTF because I think marketing thought they managed dev team but they didn’t.

Marketing also didn’t give a damn about agile processes despite being told some simple rules, such as don’t change your ticket details after a dev has already begun work on it. I would pick up a ticket thinking it’s just html and css updates, then it would change to include an api update. No no no. You’ve just turned a 1 day ticket into a 1 week ticket. I don’t have time for these shenanigans.

I would also submit tickets for code review and marketing would say it’s not ready for review. Then why was that ticket in the to do column for the past two days?! They couldn’t make a decision and would submit revisions every single day.

And they would think devs could do everything. No, never assume the front end dev can pick up back end tasks.

No one on dev team really cared because we were all looking for new jobs anyway. The company was planning to lay us off in a year. Every month a dev gave notice and left.

This wasn't an interview, but a massive rejection which I've never forgotten...

I was working beneath a director from hell. South African, very intimidating. If I was not able to dictate my work, he would give me an expression like I had just kicked his dog.

I think at the time, I had threatened the development manager when I had challenged the way we were running database queries and linked processes.

The director had pulled me into his office one day and said to me, literally, "not everyone can do what they want to do, if they are not good at it". Like seriously, what the fuck... I was doing a lot more than others even more senior to me, and I had just come on board learning the language on the fly (4th Dimension, don't ask...).

I digress... My heart just completely sank and I was left speechless. Two jobs later and I could give him the big finger.

These days in a development management position for a massive Australian company, so I know we all go through a lot of shit, keeps you humble.

Some of these things have been probably mentioned already in some way, but I'd like to add my two cents nevertheless
I grew up in Germany and have been in the German school system for my whole "school career" and what I always missed was a computer/programming related subject. (A real one, not this thing where they teach how to use MS Office) Something that would have pushed me a bit more into this world of technology and programming way earlier, because I didn't know which possibilities I had. It doesn't happen often that I think that something is better in Slovakia but I have to say that in Slovakia they are teaching CS in standard schools from the age of 11or 12 I think. I don't exactly know what they teach there, maybe it's shit, but it's something at least. I know that most people swear on teaching themselves programming and all but there are people like me who struggle with that.
Then of course I'd like to see the teaching get better. They should teach the useful stuff and focus on practical experience.

I have a situation that is so out there I almost wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t happening to me. The company I work at has three branches and around 100 employees. The owner of the company has a brother who needs a liver transplant. Two weeks ago, a company-wide memo went out that all employees would be required to undergo testing to see if they were a suitable liver donor for the owners brother. No exceptions.

Last week at the branch the owner works out of most of the time, his assistant went around to schedule days off for everyone so they could go get tested. People who declined were let go. One of these people was born with liver disease and therefore ineligible to donate. She had a doctor’s note. Other people also had medical reasons as well and some were just uncomfortable with the request and didn’t want to do it. One was pregnant. They were still terminated. My employer’s assistant has said that because our employment is at will, he can legally fire us.

I’m in remission from cancer. I’m ineligible to donate and any kind of surgery would put a major strain on my system. Even if I was healthy, I would still object to possibly being forced into donating an organ just to keep my job. Soon they will be scheduling people’s days off for testing at my branch.

I know this situation is nuts, but I don’t know what to do. I know I could just go for the testing and then be declined, but I don’t think I should have to do that. I’ve had enough with hospitals. Other coworkers who don’t have medical conditions are afraid they won’t be declined because they will be a match. I’m looking for another job but in the meantime I don’t know what to do and I and many of my coworkers are really stressed out.

RANT!
AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

BLOODY FUCK TURD BORN FROM THE BACTERIA OF YOUR MOTHER'S POOP, BRAINLESS WHORE
. JUST ONE SECOND OF YOUR NON EXISTENCE WILL CHANGE THE WORLD FOR ME.

Well this is what I would say to my brain deficient friends who think I don't have a life and sit at the computer all day playing GAMES and that I should get away from my computer and learn to PLAY with them in real life

BITCHES DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW IT IS TO WORK YOURSELF A LIVING, ALL THEY KNOW IS THROW MONEY AND GET THEIR DICKS SUCKED OFF. FUUUUUCCK!! AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE GAMES PART. ALL THESE PUNY FUCKS CAN DO IS TO POST POUT FACES FILLED WITH DOG FAECES AND CRY ABOUT THEIR LOST LIKES.

Recently in a project of mine people started to raise tons of issues and suggesting fixes "just slap this module on it", "just do this", "just do that". And no respect for the project whatsoever. Code contributions? Don't even think about it.

The users raising these do not know what language the project is written in, they do not know whether it supports modules at all (let alone that particular one), and they have no idea whatsoever what the code is like, or how this suggestion 99% of the time would not at all integrate with the overall structure of the project. And aside from all that, don't fucking tell me what to do with my project!

My question is, how do you deal with these people? All I can think of is "wontfix™️" or even "cantfix™️" in some cases. Given that this is an endless slew of users, anything long-term?

Not just Stack Overflow, but all help forums:

If someone asks a question, and you think you might know the answer based on its subject or context, please spare a thought for others and instead of dragging the post on for pages and pages without an answer in order to show the poster up for being inadequately articulate, please make the first post a link to at least seemingly relevant reference material.

Nothing more frustrating looking for some undocumented api syntax, finding a similar question that you might be able to gleam from, and then only seeing pages of "aaah, but what OS are you on? What colour is your desktop? What is the average velocity of a..."

You can see they are struggling with an api, and you clearly know where to find the answer, so just quit the cocksure jostling of pretending you're any good at support and just be useful. The poster may be a tool, but the thousands of hits from Google will just think you're a twat.

I fucking hate stupid accountants!

Yesterday we went to a customer to talk to the accountants because we want to remove one of their unused PC's in the office.

First, just the way they think (and talk if) they are the most important and it's absolutely critical everything works 100%. I see they are important but not 100 times more important than everybody else!

They called us their EDP-guys (EDV in German, that's the translation I found). That insulted me a bit. I'm rather called IT-guy, I don't know anything about the fucking EDP systems nor want I to. I'm there to make sure the hardware works. But whatever, fine, call me what you want.

Then they straight up threatened us, because their work is so important, they can't afford to have downtime in their systems. They don't really care, but the bosses of us both do and if we fuck up they (the bosses) will hold us responsible. There is a fucking update for your piece of shit software (datev)! I don't do the update, I'm just responsible that the update can be deployed on the hardware. I'm not responsible if this update fucks your system and frankly I don't care!

I could tell them all of this but they won't listen. They always talk in this patronising arrogant voice, because they are so important and we better don't fuck up the update.

I'm there to help. I don't want downtime for your systems. I want you to work with our systems the best you can.
But fuck you, I hope the server burns down!

I loved what Flash used to be. Most people thought it was proprietary stuff. The program was. It's language was not. And damn, did we have fun together! We rendered vector graphics from code and pushed perlin noise into bitmaps while the HTML guys were still struggling with rounded corners. Oh, those bezier curves we dreamed up out of thin lines of code!

Other people just couldn't see how beautiful you were. They hated you because you were popular, and ads were beginning to dominate the landscape. And lots of dildo's made ads by abusing your capabilities, straining you with their ugly code that didn't remove event listeners properly. I always did, because I loved you.

They made fun of you because you had to be compiled. Look what those cavemen are doing now, dear ActionScript 3.0. They are compiling Javascript and pushing it to production. They are all fools my dear, unworthy to read even a single line of your gracious typed syntax. We were faster then Java. More animated and fluid then CSS. We were even responsive if we needed to.

But... I have to move on. I don't know if you're still watching over me but I can't deny I've been trying to find some happiness. I think you would have wanted me to. C# is a sweet girl and I'm thankful for her, but I won't ever forget those short few years we had together. They were the absolute best.

Rest well my dear princess.

To all the people who constantly complain about devRant not being good enough…

First off, who the fuck cares? I mean honestly, does anyone give a fuck? People have been saying for YEARS that they hate devrant and that it needs to change in whatever fucked up dev idea way that we all think the world should actually work. The real fun is how this platform evolves into different phases over time. The fun is interacting with devs anonymously talking about really anything. It doesn’t matter - as long as it’s interesting or entertaining it’s fine. Don’t fucking pretend that you are a goddamn professional elitist asshole bc we all know everyone here is weird and stupid.

Every time I tell a more senior dev I need help, they tell me to try the obvious things, I tell them I tried those things already, and they think I must have just done it wrong. So they spend an hour explaining to me how to do something I literally just did, and then more time trying the exact same things I just tried. Nobody wins.

Except for me when I find the correct solution while they’re re-implementing the failed solutions because nobody trusted me.

Sadly, this happens all the time. “Did you try a and b?” “Yeah, no luck.” “Okay, so when you try a, you have to remember to call c and d. Let me explain...”

So much wasted time. But the silver lining is in getting to be the one who found the solution (until they wonder ‘why’d she even come to me anyway if she knew the answer?’ ... 🙄) Because I trusted you to know what “team” means, and it’s not too late to learn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I got an interview with a big multinational software company as a senior dev - the kind of place I never thought I would be privileged or knowledgeable enough to work for and wasnt expecting to get In to...

I aced it. They gave me an offer but - FOR DEVOPS 😬

basically my skills fit in perfectly with the server/ scaling issues they have and are far more valuable there. I know they do, I also know I can fix the issue and will have alot of fun coding it - I just dont think I want to monitor it or anything else.

I mean I do devops stuff all the time in aid of anything I code but their stack is a full time job- im scared that once the toolchain is automated ill be pulled towards sys admin like duties and lose touch with my craft... what do you guys think? Anyone shifted from dev to devops?

Fucking hate when business people says this to me:
- You have no time to do this, we will find somebody else to do it. (EXCUSE ME? how do you know I have no time? If have no time I WILL TELL YOU)
- Your team is too busy, we will outsource that (IF THAT it's a priority, we WILL DO THAT, fuck you, I'll tell you if we need to outsource or not)
- Requirements are too complex to do now. We will think about it and we will tell you, maybe it's just enough to add a column to db (WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK IS too complex? I didn't even see anything we can call requirement, nor speak with relevant people, so how do you fucking know they are complex if you don't know shit about dev and our platform)

Conclusion
It's true, I have no time, because I don't fucking understand what do you want, so I'm running all day and night doing useless things.

I think I want to quit.

I know it’s a bit of an inconvenient time with there being corona around but everything was okay up till January. I’m a junior even though I shouldn’t be. Since my manager told me and my team leader senior in my review “maybe you two should switch jobs” things have been going downhill. I think the team lead had it out for me and didn’t put me on a new project, I’ve been left with doing stupid basic shit like updating text on websites in a cms and doing fuck all and then there’s also another guy that was basically harassing me trying to put me in my place any time I was doing better than him and literally both of them been like that ... and now that I’m working from home it’s even worse. I don’t have any kind of assurance that everything okay and actually I think I’m being framed as welll since I found keyloggers on my work laptop and deleted cleaned shit up the past two weeks and changed my WiFi security as there were like 5 unknown devices on our network so yeah .. I’ve been framed and they made it out like I put a powershell script on one of the servers and it crashed a Porsche website for 8 h and all kinds of bullshit - this was yday. On Tuesday they logged me out of everything like changed the password for work vpn and kicked me out of slack and Microsoft teams for over 2 hours till the end of shift and two managers weren’t answering their phone and then next day my manager called and apologised that saying that he “accidentally” did that to me along with 15 people they let go from the company....

I’m seriously thinking of quitting being removed from team group for a moment , not being on a project and people literally trying to put me down after I know I’m genuinely smarter than them and if I had over 10 years experience like those on my team (I have 1) I’d be far higher up and better

They can genuinely just go fuck themseves !!!! And here I was going to work over weekend on something! No fucking way I just wanna quit or give in my notice but because of corona I’m divided

We had a course where we, the students, got connected with companies who could pitch ideas for us to choose. So we were to develop something for a company for free, but that probably won't be so bad, right? When the course was over we told the company we would fix any critical bugs that appeared after the final prototype was developed. We only had 8 weeks to complete the project, and that includes documentation (project plan etc) and other "school stuff" like an essay on what we've learned and so on. In other words, didn't have enough time to develop what the company was really looking for. Still those guys is bugging us about minor bugs they want fixed or "could you just implement this feature" . The course is over, they have all the source code so they could hire someone else to do it (or us, you could pay us you know?) but nooooo they think we owe it to them. We gave them a fully functional application to use, free of charge, but that still isn't enough. And they threaten with "but you can use this in a future resume" (yea we had to sign a NDA). Fuck it, am I being a whiny bitch?

Things I wish people had said at my first job (in light of lots of the people I see starting their first dev gig on here). Please add yours.

Congrats!
Take a breath, you will be fine.
If you get frustrated, take a moment to collect your thoughts.
Don't be afraid to say you don't know, you are not expected to know everything.
Your workday needs to end at a decent time. Don't overdo it or you will be useless for more of your hours.
Always take whatever length of time you think something will take and double it. If you think it will take 15 minutes, it'll probably take your 4 hours.
Concentrate on networking and personal relationships.
Pick the smartest people who have moved the most vertically and pay attention to what they say, they might know a lot.
When management makes an "unwise" or "crazy" decision, ask them why or what the context or motive is that made then arrive at that course of action. Some of them might surprise you in their bigger picture motives or dumbassedness.
Six sigma may be in your future, learn what it is.
Automate as much of your own job as possible.

Um, that's all I've got for now. Hopefully that's helpful to people just starting out. Feel free to add yours.

So I had this internship in highschool for some marketing company creating simple databases for them to help out with their business.

When I came back from college for I think winter break they had asked if I would come in to help with a task that was going to take all day so they wanted me to come early. I agree and show up the next morning.

They had an Excel spreadsheet with about 5000 records in it and one of the fields was the name of the customer. They told me that the records came in as lastName, firstName or as lastName,firstName.
They wanted the field to look like firstName lastName. For a minute or two they had someone show me how they have been doing this which was just by hand. I don't really work with Excel so im not too keen with the macros. But it took me about 1 Google and 30 seconds to find someone with a similar macro to achieve this, I altered it a bit and let it go through all the records.

It was an awesome feeling when I went to the boss to let them know I was done (it had only been 10 mins), they almost didnt believe me.

Funny how one line of code can turn a day's work into a matter of minutes.

Anyway I just want to fucking write code. I don't want to deal with people or give an opinion that is not appreciated. My manager says I am too aggressive but the truth is I hate stupidity and incompetence. I tell them their ideas are shit and not in a polite way and they make HR call me. Now I don't say shit and they are asking what I think. I think all of you are cunts that's what I think.but I don't say that. I say no comment when I know they are about to fall into a massive ditch. Will I stop them? Fuck no. Will I help them out if the ditch? Maybe, if it only involves writing code. I can't do diplomacy. I'll definitely be a fucking tyrant if I ever ruled a nation.

I never thought clean architecture concepts and low complicity, maintainable, readable, robust style of software was going to be such a difficult concept to get across seasoned engineers on my team... You’d think they would understand how their current style isn’t portable, nor reusable, and a pain in the ass to maintain. Compared to what I was proposing.

I even walked them thru one of projects I rewrote.. and the biggest complaint was too many files to maintain.. coming from the guy who literally puts everything in main.c and almost the entire application in the main function....

Arguing with me telling me “main is the application... it’s where all the application code goes... if you don’t put your entire application in main.. then you are doing it wrong.. wtf else would main be for then..”....

Dude ... main is just the default entry point from the linker/startup assembly file... fucken name it bananas it will still work.. it’s just a god damn entry point.

Trying to reiterate to him to stop arrow head programming / enormous nested ifs is unacceptable...

Also trying to explain to him, his code is a good “get it working” first draft system.... but for production it should be refactored for maintainability.

Uggghhhh these “veteran” engineers think because nobody has challenged their ways their style is they proper style.... and don’t understand how their code doesn’t meet certain audit-able standards .

You’d also think the resent software audit would have shed some light..... noooo to them the auditor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” ... BULLSHIT!

Someone's going to be fired. Not me. When I joined my current company I was severely unwell. The survival rate for the state I was in was only slightly better than cancer (at 2 years less than 3 in 4 survive). I told work all of this. As far as I can tell they did nothing. As far as I can tell they didn't belive me. They've now got shitty about my performance and have actually asked for an independent review of my health. It is bad. It's significantly better than it was and it probably sounds worse than it is, but it is bad. They don't even know how much worse it was when I joined because they DIDN'T GET AN ASSESSMENT LIKE THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO. Someone is getting fired. HR hasn't responded to my emails since last Tuesday when they got the assessment. The only person that's said anything to me is my manager, he was in a bit of a grump last Wednesday (I don't think they'd told him yet) but he's being nice today, not a single word of criticism.

Someone is getting fired.

I've worked in a lot of customer service jobs and the more i have to deal with client, the more story starting to pile up. But something always come back and it's frustrating. The entitlement people have. I work as a Technical Support agent and for the most part i'm actually happy to help people with fixing their problems. But once in a while i always get that idiot that doesn't do anything i told him, blame me because "my fixes" don't work or just straight up don't listen to me and think they know better. Why the fuck do you call me if you need help if you're going to ignore everything i say and act like a fucking children. I'm not the one that call for technical support.

I know this place is more for Dev, but i'm sure those kind of things happen all the time when a client think he know more than the dev themselves...

So when I joined the company 2 months ago I was told they offered flexible working, today I received this email. (I can't help but think it is aimed at me given I often arrive between 9 and 10....I'm always the last to go home)

Oh and yes they have named some of the team DevOps and others just Developers, they haven't quite grasped the concept!
-----------------------------------------------------

Morning All,

I have been noticing the start time for all the team members. Some like to start early while some likes the late start. So before Senior management raises any questions below is the shift pattern I would like everyone to stick to it.

I have assigned name against each of the shift which I am aware of. If you would like to change it please let me know. We need at least one Developer between 08:00- 17:30 and at least one Devops between 07:00 – 17:30.

If we have any emergency issues and takes longer to fix it , I would appreciate if you guys can work after your shift. We can adjust this overtime by leaving early next day or whenever possible.

7:00 – 15:30 - @Michael Smith
7:30 – 16:00 - @Sarah Twist @Jim Bob
8:00 – 16:30 - @Lesley Matthews
8:30 – 17:00 - @Bill Best
9:00 – 17:30- @Jennifer Rowe @me!
9:30 – 18:00

The fucking defective Caps Lock on Apple keyboards drives me fucking ballistic!

WHY would they ever think it would be a good idea to introduce a minimum press time for a key?!?

EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. I use the damn thing it inevitably fails and I have to backspace, delete the non-caps text I just entered after HITTING THE FUCKING CAPS LOCK KEY, tap the damn thing again (harder this time) and try again. It usually takes 2 or 3 tries before it actually catches. I'm sorry, but training myself to type slower is not as easy as you think!

Who the fuck thought up this nonsensical bullshit?? And who the fuck is going around accidentally tapping their caps lock key to the point where such a delay would be needed?? Do you not know where your own fingers are??

Seriously, all this does is penalize fast typists and people who actually want to USE the caps lock key for what it was meant for.

I swear to god this one little thing pisses me off SO much. And what's worse is they don't even give you an option to disable it, AND it's bloody fucking impossible to disable yourself even through the terminal.

(Also, typing this rant with so many caps was probably not as cathartic as I was going for!) 😂

Spent around 5 hours last night trying to do honestly one of the most basic things in PHP with a classmate of mine.
We are making a website kind of like Google Photos where the user can upload their images, store some information about the images they uploaded. (Basically just an online photo storage site). For what ever damn reason we could not figure out why our images that the user would upload from a form where not being put into their associated user image folder; Hell for the longest time they weren't even being loaded onto our LAMP server.
We still have no fucking idea what made it start working, we went over our code and iterated it probably over a hundred times and suddenly..... Like I said we have no fucking clue why; it started to work.
Over 2 hours in a hangouts call and around 500 messages later it worked.
I think we all know how this feels.

What a fucking mess.

Recruiter reaches out to me, he says he saw my LinkedIn and thinks I'd be a great fit.

I say ok and send my resume.

He gets me a phone screen. I do it, I think I do a pretty good job. (I'm able to answer all the questions well, I think I'm onto the coding interview for sure.)

A couple days later I get a generic rejection email.

I'm not sure what happened. They had my resume, I know I did well on the technical questions (I do that kind of thing for my current job all the time.)

No idea why I'm rejected. If it was something about my experience, they could have seen that from my resume. If it was something from my phone screen, I have no idea what it could have been.

Just wanted to rant >:[

It wasn't me in the interview and it wasn't really an interview at all but here we go. I worked for a pretty shit company this past summer as a paid internship and while I was there they fired a Dev because he complained about how he didn't get a BMW i8 and they had to hire new help. So instead of doing a regular interview what they did was call people in and just have them work. Like no joke from 7-4pm they just did the job the didn't get yet. They also expected them to know how to work in there system. It was a WordPress development company and they had custom plugins and themes that they just expected people to know.

Also they said they would pay them for their work but I don't think they did, there were maybe 8 different people over a week who probably just worked for free.

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

Hey DevRant Fam ❤️ hope everyone is well as always! It’s Sunday here in dull weather Sydney!, i was thinking bout this for awhile now, now surely most of us time to time use Stack Overflow for help and it works!.

Though, thats not the issue :-), my first time using it as a newbie wasn’t so great so to say, I’ve noticed that the people over at S/O can be quite rude such as they would downVote my question and also not comment why they have downvoted it :-(.

I’d love to know what you guys think, funnily enough I’m using DevRant much more than FB itself 😅, anyways guys hope you’re all having a great one!

Best wishes ❤️
Milo

HOLY CRAP STACKOVERFLOW! I get that you're trying to make it easier for people to get their questions answered by structuring question-asking into a multi-form wizard with guides and problem-checking along the way. But when you block my question from being submitted AT ALL after I've done _absolutely everything_ you've asked and then you tell me that my question isn't valid simply because someone HAPPENED to mention in THEIR question A SINGLE KEYWORD I've included in my question? Like the word "What" or "How" or "img srcset" even though I've ALREADY READ THOSE AND THEY DON'T ANSWER MY QUESTION? That seems to be a bit of a jerk move, doncha think?

(Yes, I know the question showing in the screenshot isn't relevant to my question. I was just being a smart aleck at this point because NONE of the relevant questions I tried would unblock me.)

I guess all questions ever asked or that will ever be asked are already answered on StackOverflow.

Talking to a second year student about what they've learnt so far, and what they should learn next:

"Cool, so what general topics would you say you know really thoroughly at the moment?"

"Oh, I've now learnt Java, C#, C, C++, Rust, Javascript, node.js, HTML, CSS, Angular, Vue, Erlang and probably a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. What do you think I should concentrate on next?"

"Hmm. Probably best to take just one of those and learn it really thoroughly."

"...but I already know them all really thoroughly."

"Ok. Can you explain what an abstract class is in say Java, C# or C++?"

"Sure, I can create a new class called abstract and then use it for abstraction. I do that loads."

...🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

First lesson: Stop BS'ing. Might work for flexing to non-devs, but that's about it.

!dev

Out of shower, I sit on bed staring at my phone cuz I don't know who to talk to. This is the shittiest stage of the lockdown. When you've bore your close friends, exhausted your "I'm gonna find new friends online" options, and now you're -I am- circling back to remind yourself of all the people who put you aside. Just making yourself sadder remembering how each one of them shared a lot of their life and feelings with you and then how easily they went like "Nope. Don't want to deal with you". Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's everyone. Every friendship has a proper "distance" but I just don't know why some people are like asteroids. Or rather, their interests are. They come quick and crash your mental barriers and tell you everything there is to know about them but then something shinier catches their attention or they realize they actually won't be able to have you -me- as a sidepiece and then they just... Fuck off.
And I don't know, maybe they think I'll remember them as the one that got away, but sadly, they just become "another one" in a list that I can't remember past the last 5-6 of.

Anyways, I miss the days when I could sit next to a friend, or hug a friend, or just looking into someone's eyes from less than safe distant and seeing how the details of their face change as they speak, and how their emotions flow.

I'm tired of all the zoom and vc and...

I'm just tired. 😢

I want to thank all open source projects and their collaborators.

I want to thank communities such as stack overflow and specialized forums where people make time to help others.

Lastly, I want to thank everybody here by sharing their experiences and making one feeling less alone (or less weird).

I don’t know of any other community aside from devs where they help so much between themselves. I think this is one of the few professions were collaboration is a fundamental part of it.

Thanks.

I'm quite a vengeful person, I'm sure I get the wrong end of the stick sometimes to.

In the last few years of my life I've been trying to not act and "be mature" about the situation.

There's still times I fall of the wagon but generally I have shrugged it off...

But do you know how I feel like now!? That I've been walked all over people are taking me for granted. People think they can get away with lying and messing me about.

Quite honestly I don't know how to act your always meant to rise above the situation. When all I can think of is how I could fuck up the thing they did.

And people go well just protect yourself but that means I'm not open and honest myself and that's what I fucking hate to begin with!

Today I'm feeling vengeful because a client didn't pay until the last second. They wanted the website for next to nothing. And took a year to pay. Now they have gone and paid a tonne on a new site ! Because they went well what you did was shit "effectively"

Granted it was but you don't spend a few hundred quid and expect to get everything. I gave them what they paid for.

Everyone is expecting something for nothing 🙄 I get that's just the life of companies directors

But it pisses me off I try to do everything truthfully on the up an up and they would prefer a group of liars

Oh front page of Google yes we can do that for free

Oh yes the greatest animation look!

😤 And I'm meant to sit here and be like yeah that's cool. I mean at this point what reason do I have to be open and honest if shit stains like that exist!

What pisses me off more is that I'm trying to rise above. I don't think I should I think I should ruin their fucking day and be done with it. I have the capabilities.... But I know "it ain't legal"

Then people go on about well if you don't like the rules help them get changed ...

I've tried the political route they are all far worse 😐 they are ignorant cunts. That's the truth! I can't stand to be around half of them 🙄

So here I am ranting to not fuck up someone's day , trying to rise above 😔

#confession

I don't know what you guys think but I freaking love programming my own Minecraft client. It sounds childish but I love to see server owners rage when they see their Servers dying because of my exploits. It's a good feeling.

But I got 3 DOS attacks afterwards so there is a high risk to make lifetime enemy's.

Let us all post our dark side of knowledge and the shit we have done to amuse ourselves!

It would be great if CS students graduated and emoloyers could plug them in anywhere knowing that they can do their job without anymore training.

There for I think students sould have full on collaboration with high risk companies. Deadlines with serious consequences if they aren't met (i.e bad reviews on your profile). Computer science and programming really needs deep thought and concentration. Being able to work in a team to deal with issues as fast as possible.

These days you don't need to know a lot of theory to get started. Knowing it all helps, but being able to figure it out and then finding beter ways to slove the issues as you progress through becoming a master in your field really burns the knowledge and skill into your being.

I strongly dislike people who don't even try to gather information by themselves before asking others.

Now, I'm sure ALL of you have seen this, when someone has a problem with their code, printer, etc they ask you or someone else before just Googling the answer. Like ffs, you really think that you're so special that you feel like other people should Google stuff for you, like I need you to understand that you're not special, you're not unique and there's a VERY high chance someone has has the exact problem as you.

The most common question I see on Discord as a whole is "who ping" or "why ping" or something related. Ffs Discord had a fucking button that tells you who pinged you (yes I know that the sender can delete the message, but this is rarely the case and I always check before getting mad)

On a somewhat related note, I never understood why people ask "who are you" especially when they have a name tag or whatever (and double especially if it's online) like what do you expect them to say? Do you want their life story?

Biggest teamwork fail? This is the general way we do business where I work right now:
My boss didn’t want to be the kind who hovers, always micromanaging. He also hates the idea of taking programmers away from their work for meetings. Sounds great, right? This has resulted in:

• All non-lead devs being excluded from all meetings other than scrum (including sprint planning and review meetings). Nobody ever knows what the hell is going on. They don’t think we “need to know.” This means most of our day is spent trying to figure out what needs to be done, rather than getting anything done.

• Our remote boss making dozens of important decisions about our platform, never telling us, and blaming us for not forcing our lead to be more communicative.

• Pull requests staying open for weeks, sometimes months, because nobody has definitively decided what version we’re actually supposed to be working on. This means our base branch could be any of them, and it means PRs that have been opened too long need to be closed, updated, and re-opened on the false promise of someone actually looking at it.

Just ranting here... but I think our biggest teamwork fail is happening right now, with all of those things ^

Fucking cant solve productivity problem. Since I was working as programmer, about 8-9 years experience, constant complaints about my productivity and some jobs even fired me for this. Only one job did not complain and I worked in it longest time but still I was worrying very often about my productivity. It is fucking annoying. Why others are productive and I am not. How the fuck to find biggest bottlenecks to know which to work on.
I know I am not knowing technology perfectly, and from time to time I get stuck and so I ask other people help, or somehow manage to find solution myself but it takes more time. But dont know if that is the biggest issue. Should I intecify my learning? I am regularly studying, and working with symfony about 2 years, so I think I should know enough to be productive even with those strugles from time to time. But maybe they are too often?
I have listened book "deep work" and basic thing I think from this is - to minimize disctractions and learn to focus very well. But to minimize like in this book, I should work alone in my room. And even then I would like each hour for few minutes to read some new or smth, which this book says is bad, but a lot of people do that and they somehow get away with it. Plus if I work alone in my room, my social skills might get worse, and we all need social skills, even programmers.
I so envy to others who know how to be productive. I would hate if the only thing to be more productive is to reduce quality of the code, make more bugs. THats fucking cheating system.

CoWorker: “Yea then just use double inheritance to grab the methods off the two classes.”

Me: “Yea that doesn’t seem right... the first object is a string parser the second object predicts future occurrences...”

CoWorker: [louder] “No trust me, I’m taking a developer course right now. If you inherit both classes your new class can use all the needed methods!”

Me: “Okay, go for it bro.”

So tired of people who think they know what they’re doing...

Do you know what angers me more than anything else ?

Wasted potential. Thats what. That there are people out there that look at their bank account and see a large number and spend large amounts of time finding ways to push people down during sensitive times where they could be learning and growing and have the right attitude and energy to do so, just because it makes their horrible selves feel secure knowing how 'superior' daddy made them, not to mention likely factories filled with half naked Chinese kids sewing shoes and soccer balls and separating out precious metals with blow torches.

I cannot help but think about this again as I'm frustrated that I had to relearn something just now which created more questions which I once everything is dashed to pieces again I won't think to or know to look into, if the information even exists, all so some easily duped younger people can form the next generation of well... us, and fall for the same tricks while I feel like I'm falling behind.

Get back to work today, see a mail from yesterday when I was off sick

"Mr Colleague has tendered his registration. His last day with Company will be 31st Jan 2024"

Do they think we're stupid or something? We all know the guy got sacked. We're required to give a calendar month's notice. So when there's a same day resignation, we all know

Never forget how it feels to be new and overwhelmed. For every question that you ask, remember that you should eventually pay that back by answering one for someone newer than you.

I think a lot of times, once developers get enough experience, it's all too easy to judge or make fun of those who are new for something they don't know. Remember that you were there once and lend a non-judgmental helping hand!

Least fav part of remote work?

- When managers think you're in front of your laptop all day, they should be able to ping you ANY time of the day and expect you to respond.

"Well, you live and work at home and I'm paying you every month. So what if it's 3AM right now. Get the task done."

- When your team is remote and you leave a question to your teammate and they don't respond until night time - when they actually start working. Basically teams not letting each other know when they'd really be online.

- Too many meetings can be thing. It's not always though. So it's fine.

- Team level decisions take too long sometimes, so there's a chance you won't hear from your manager/team lead for a while.

I guess you gain something you lose something. Be it WFO or WFH.

Biggest pet peeve is when someone develops a shitty project using XYZ technology/language and a tutorial and they somehow think they know XYZ and all of it's intricacies and are an expert dev in XYZ. 😐😐😐. No you fucking know how to follow a tutorial and you have a small understanding of XYZ. End rant.

I have to make a big decision about my future as a developer...
(Long rant)

I am currently in an apprenticeship as a dev.
The thing is i was forced to do testautomatization.

I was there for half a year and had a good time.
But now my trainer (the guy who assigned me all the work and showed me all the stuff I learned) has been fired.

And now it sucks... they don't teach me new things anymore and don't give me time to catch up with the new technologies.
(This was different in the past!)

I was forced to do manual testing for the past few week.
Therefor i am working with a friend and his trainer.

One day i was talking to my friend about how things have changed in the testing-team.

His trainer was listening (we did not know) and sayed: If you want i can ask my boss if it is possible that i can teach you as well.

Now the point is i woud love to work with him. I love the work they do!! (Java; don't hate me)

But it will make the testing guys mad and I dont know how HR will react.

I am pretty sure it will reduce my chances of getting a job (at this company) if I change the team...

Should I talk to HR or not? What do you think?

Thanks for reading and sorry for my english bugs.

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

Went through changing Apple ID email. I have 💻,📱and⌚️.

Felt like that horror movie moment when protagonist tries to be stealthy but makes a noise and a huge mob of zombies turn heads all at once. For what I love apple, the simplicity, in the email changing process there is none of that.

They forced me to enter my 60 arbitrary obscure characters password on Apple Watch screen.

On the other hand I felt nostalgic. When I was using Linux this all was my day to day experience no matter the distro, and I got a Linux Foundation certificate, I contributed to Elementary. Can’t imagine the experience of a user who just switched to Linux.

Windows? I don’t want to think about that, let alone talking. You only need to know that I successfully configured a SoE setup AND active directory in ad-hoc unstable network of literally rusty old computers. And I still switched to Linux back then.

Sololearn has probably the dumbest community I've ever seen...

I know that there are lot of beginners who just started learning programming, but if you can't even use the app, I don't think they will be able to learn programming.

Also all these little kiddies who want to get some badass hackers but don't even know how to do a fucking course (There are lots of questions like "Where can I learn HTML" while they are right in the fucking app, like holy sheeet).

Sometimes I browse the Q&A just because there so funny and dumb questions. Really amusing!

Gods are always looking out for me.

I got up at 4am to finish the work.
The meeting is at 9am.
So Gods turn the power off at 6am.
They want me to learn my lesson.
They just want me to plan ahead, manage my time and task wisely.
They just want me to become a better being.
They keep teaching me at every possible opportunities.

Yes, I understood. Yes.
But you know what, Gods?

Fuck you. Big fat ugly smelly fuck you. I can't tell you all to go die because you all are immortal and shit. So fuck you. I will never manage my time. I will always work at anytime anyhow I like. You think you can teach me? LMFAO. LOL. ROFL. You will never win. I will survive all the pain and shit. I will do what I like. So fuck you.

You know what really grinds my gears?

Executive bathrooms. They get gold and marble and all kinds of fancy shit and the rest of us get a linoleum shit box. Who do they think they are? Are they too good to shit and piss with their developers. You know...the people who make the shit that makes them money?

Executives are just overpaid suits who do next to nothing while the rest of us carry their fat asses across the finish line and they are too good to take a shit with us common folk.

Fuck Governments and schools for not teaching kids basic financial knowledge or how to identify scams and how to determine if the returns that they got told are realistic.

The amount of people that call me and ask me if they got scamed or how to invest in something because I am "that guy" that they know that's into Computers honestly scares me. I think many countries have a huge problem with basic financial illiteracy. People call me all the time and ask me about investing in crypto currencies etc. or ask me if they were scamed and I often have to tell them that they indeed got scamed. Does that only happen to me or does it also happen to you guys?

Companies really need to re-evaluate what they ask as security questions.

If I know your name and your approximate date of birth (to the month) then, here in the UK at least, I have a very good chance of being able to find out your parents names, your mother's maiden name, your address, your parents address (i.e. probably where you grew up and what school you went to), your parents ages, when they got married, etc. - and all from publicly available info, not illegal crap you find on Tor or social media stalking.

This isn't hard to find if you know where to look - the problem is that people think that it's all private, and behave as such - and companies encourage it. The typical "internet safety courses" don't even touch on it, and even more tech savvy people I know often don't have a clue this is possible.

I am in a ranting mood today.

I HATE "day in the life of a SWE" videos. Especially the ones where they work from home.

They basically show that they sleep/eat all day and get very little done. I know it's for entertainment or comedic effect but it makes me uneasy about the image that they are projecting to the world.

People already don't think we deserve the salary that we make and when they see these videos the idea gets re-enforced into their heads.

I've been working from home for 3 years and my day is NOTHING like what these content creators show in their videos. It's a bunch of meetings and a lot of coding with very little rest.

After being part of the dR community for over a year now I have to say I quite enjoyed my stay. But I did notice a shift in the last few months: More memes and less personal stories. I don't typically complain about that (if posted in the right category) but what made me really like devRant is the generally tight knit community. Sure it's all just synthetic but there's something nice about being able to interact with the "gods" of the platform (and yes I kinda miss @irene).
I normally like memes but the way they are blatantly copied from other sites without any link to dR kinda loses the spirit.

All in all I still really like devRant eventhough my involvement slowed down to a minimum after I began being an dick to everyone (sorry about that!). I know the platform doesn't grow much (atleast less than expected) but I don't think that's a bad thing overall. It's nice having a few familiar faces around

So anyway that's my drunk meta commentary about dR

full of contradiction.

If u try freelancing nobody would pay you shit coz theres always someone who'd do it for 100$.

If you do get a good budget freelance project, any Dev you'd consider outsourcing to to split the work with will ask for more than the project is worth.

There's a lot of competition but it's basically made up of

- people from fancy universities who dont know shit coz they think their degree is worth something on its own and expect high salaries off the bat.

- people who figured out the first group are idiots and tried to self learn, so they joined bootcamps that spoon fed them some Laravel and React and now think they are high tier engineers but may not even know their way around a bash terminal

- people who actually know their shit, went through hell to get the skills they have now, could probably spin up a startup on their own

group 3 all left the country tho

I dislike ignorant pricks that insult others while being wrong.

I dislile people that feel the need to insult others based on their choices or prefferences for products, music and stuff like that.

I dislike people that are so blatantly arrogant that they refuse to acknowledge being wrong because of some weird made up status in their head (i.e i have a phd...i cannot possibly be wrong)

I really dislike teenagers that think that they know shit. They never do, suprisingly we have many of them here...

I dislike people that find ways to justify being assholes to others.

I also dislike people that hide behind a keyboard.

I dislike people that tend to follow trend opinions: "lolz mac suckz i kan du errthing in LenIXxX" shit like that irrititates me, also the php hate wars, I see people bitching about not having a job or experience in the field because they wont hire them for whatever hipster shit they are not using.......yet they make fun of people with php skills that have been on the industry far longer than what the haters have known how to use a computer....ah and some of them here are also on their teens....

All in all. I hate assholes really. I see many of them in this industry, and even tho I have seen a couple of them in here the great majority of the user base is absolutely amazing.

:) y'all beautiful people have a great weekend!

Let me tell all of you who don't like big frameworks..
The nice thing about them is that they minimize the amount of SHIT CODE all of you who think you know how to code, but actually don't, write..
And minimizes the amount of headache for the devs who need to then maintain/fix/change your SHIT CODE.

yes...lets put routes 10 dirs deep into the project and let ppl look for it..

When scrum master/agile coach sais "I know, I used to be a developer myself." ....

Do they think it makes me trust them and drop my point?

Honestly all I think is "well, plenty of bad devs out there, and there's a reason you'r not doing it anymore"

!rant && anxiousness

So, I applied for several jobs because I started hating my current job and the boss.
On my CV and motivation letter I really only wrote stuff I am confident enough with to show if someone would ask me.
I only have 2.5 years of work experience and a B.Sc.

In 3 days I already got 2 answers out of 3 companys, I applied at, who would like to meet me.
Tomorrow is the first meeting.
Now I am anxious that I might still not live up to my CV or motivation letter although I know that I use the techniques mentioned there daily.
I fear that I might be not as good as they might think now, even feel like I know nothing at all.

I never really believed I would fall in the imposter syndrome trap, but here it is.

Any advice? I really want to find another job and I don't want to screw up the interview because I am too nervous.

I think some of my co-workers see me as real life human version of Google search engine.

Hope they would understand that just because I'm little bit more up to date in tech knowledge and an accidental Google nerd doesn't make me a know it all..

But i understand their tendency to trust my recommendation over their googling skills

They want me to find

1- best freelancing website
2- best platform or service for someone who wants to do online teaching

Results that I'm aware of:

1- freelancer, guru, upwork
2- YouTube, udemy, Pluralsight, skillshare, thinkific

Any other recommendations?

i was about to talk about golang - but it can wait.

snapchat's discover section is TERRIBLE. the amount of BULLSHIT, INCORRECT INFORMATION, AND PURE IDIOCY IS MAKING IT TERRIBLE.

now, usually, i rant about mashable when i say it's terrible. AT LEAST WHEN MASHABLE WROTE ABOUT THIS THEY WERE CORRECT. but no, alas, my faith in humanity is put to an all time end. a new evil has arose, by the name of "wired."

of course, and incredibly late to the party, a "tech" outlet wrote about bitcoin. the headline was "is bitcoin killing the planet?" IT HAS BEEN POSSIBLY THE STUPIDEST ARTICLE IVE READ OF ALL TIME. THEY CLEARLY HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT ANY SHIT THEYRE TALKING ABOUT.

let's take a look at the TWO facts they got wrong, and displayed to over a MILLION people.

now, instead of just GOOGLING TWO SIMPLE FACTS, THEY DECIDED TO JUST WRITE RANDOM SHIT.

ENOUGH WAITING - HERE THE THE TWO FACTS THEY GOT WRONG

picture 1: bitcoin up $900 in the last year? THE LAST MOTHER FUCKING, COCK SUCKING

.
.
.

YEAR?!?

WHY DO SUCH DUMBASSES HAVE ACCESS TO SOMETHING MILLIONS VIEW?

IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE

picture two: the actual fuck????

did i just read that?

b- bi- bitcoin will "run dry" BY 2032.

i think i finally figured it out.

these facts, they're literally just random number.

<thoughtBubble>
i can see it now:

wired employee 1: hey, guess what number im thinking of?

wired employee 2: 14?

wired employee 1: *screaming* BITCOIN WILL RUN DRY IN 14 YEARS

</thoughtBubble>

how do these people get hired. do they hire only hire 12 year old interns? im genuinely asking. does anyone know?

okay, end of rant. plz continue complaining about dumbasses who have power thru the media in tech

Don't think too big at first. You'll definitely get there if you play it smart. Babysteps, kiddo, start with the babysteps. We've all been there, we've all started with all the hello-worlds.

Never trust a sole source of information. Always have doubts and double-tripple check with other sources. Some tutorials are misguiding, others could be solving slightly different problems than they appear to at the first glance

listen to the seniors/mentors. Seek for mentorship. This field is too vast to absorb it on your own. Mentors will help you there.

Before diving into coding make sure you know what you want to build, how it'll work. "I'll make it move somehow" is the straightest path to disappointment. Think it through, ask mentors for help if you need

If you're building an elephant, start with his front left feet's toes. Don't start with the elephant.

Always test.

Most importantly - have fun!

Already ranted about it. A superior did not provide required information, screamed at me and a colleague.

Of course we got blamed for it. In a meeting with me on one n and all bosses and superiors on the other side of the table, i had to explain my and apologize for my misbehavior.

I had made up a good diplomatic plan, because i know my bosses and how they think of themselves and their roles in the company so it was not that hard to get out of the situation without harm to me and my job.

It felt disgusting. It worked and was a good solution, but it felt so unjust.

I think the one of the more common reason for imposter syndrome is that a lot of smart people constantly get told as children the "you're so smart/capable, you can do everything!" too much, and when you hear it enough times, it gets to you, so you think everything is just easy. And then when they start hitting roadblocks, instead of helping or explaining that it's normal for things to be hard and it's normal to fail, usually parents and teachers and whatnot tell them "Oh it's okay, don't worry about it, you're smart, you'll get it" and so they at first it works, maybe it just takes more time but they manage, but as things get harder and they still put little effort because "don't worry, you're so smart, you learn so fast/easy" and as they find out more and more things they don't umderstand or don't know they start to feel a dissonance, which builds anxiety.
And this is where I thinks it actually starts: at some points there comes a situation where they either share this anxiety with someone or someone notices their worry, and(at least from what I've seen from others) usually the response they get is something along the lines of: "Nah, you're just worrying too much, you're smarter than you think, don't be so down on yourself, you need to worry less", which, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure telling someone that thinks he has a problem that he doesn't have a problem, helps their worrying.
And on one hand the amount if things they don't get/know/understand or fail at grows(cuz you can't just be good at EVERYTHING, so the more things you know about, the more things you don't understand) while mentally still being in that "Wait a minute, you're smarter than this, you should be getting this!" mindset that's been drilled into them, and so at some point the illusion shatters, and they start to think "Maybe I'm not so smart after all", and because they think they were wrong about their level, they feel like they have "oversold" themselves in the past and that makes any past accomplishments feel like lucky accidents instead: "If I'm not actually smart, the things I did manage to achieve must've been just accidental", which makes them feel like they've lied to themselves and everyone else when they "took credit for an accidents" and that their life is just a snowball of pretending.

Now, is that actually a cause or is it another one of my crazy 1AM ramblings? I don't know xD
I'm not an expert in any of this and I don't really know any psychology so hell if I know if that's how any of this works but that's just my theory of one of the reasons why. *shrug*. I've had this theory for years, but I don't know.
It at least makes sense to me, but not everything that makes sense is true soooo.

Anyways, wall of text is over.

Oh, and for anyone struggling with imposter syndrome: I just want you to know, it's okay to fail, and it's okay to not know shit, especially in the dev industry where every "insignificant" detail can have an entire rabbit hole of expertise behind it, nobody can expect to know every part of it. And it doesn't make you any less smart no matter how much you fail. Tnis shit is hard, so I hope you stay strong and I hope you succeed in whatever it is you're struggling with.
*Massive virtual hug* <3

Week80: Not my family or friend, but last time I used my notebook in a bus to school when I had to finish my homework (because as always, literally evrything is more interesting than programming class homework) random woman came to me, nocked on my shoulder and asked when I had terminal open when compiling "Sir do you know that this is not legal?" pointing at my screen. 😂

My familly thinks that I am a magican that can fix their printer and recover their desktop icons "because I did something wrong with it" after not touching their PC for months. I wonder who deleted those icons (*pointing finger at my father*)

My friends think that I am some magican nerd who can build websites for them all for every single stupid "teen business idea" they have and I can hack all their ex's FB. 😂😂

Unemployment week one.
Tired of unsuccessful HR and engineering talks with people who don’t know what they want.

When you answer their questions they got pissed because they had something else in mind. Sorry I don’t read in people’s minds asshole.

Others try to be smart and give you some fancy acronyms. Yeah because that’s most important in coding - to memorize useless acronyms.
I responded with acronyms I know and they got pissed more cause my are more funny and cover all of theirs. Thanks KISS 💋

Some of them are like I am fucking smartest asshole on this video chat and you can’t have been working with all of those technologies, yeah I just typed hello world for 15 years in one language and stupid /REST shitty software like you do it in your one job in your lifetime.

Others are asking for cv, talking about this fancy great project that in fact you know how it will look like cause you’re experienced motherfucker who can pick up nuisance but still lets get hired first and then think what to do next with this shitty crap. So they respond after two weeks that client changed their mind and if you want to fill some quiz about your hiring process.

There are also ones that got impressed so much they’re talking 1 hour that you will be our next cto and then ending process with email that there were better candidates and also post same offer on job board next day 🤦‍♂️

I think I just skip this shitty nightmare and concentrate on some personal project until I spend all my savings.

I just need to concentrate on one thing and not get distracted with 1000s of voices shouting “pick me” in my head.

Fuuuuuuck
If you got offended fuck you unless you like it.

After working in one project in a big happy days bubble without distraction for couple of years I underestimated how fucked up people are in real world.
We’re making hell by ourselves on this planet we don’t need much help.

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

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.

I'm not going to lie, the surge of bootcamps really irks me. Not because I'm afraid of competition, or that I'm an elitest. Mainly because a lot of people who attend these bootcamps have no real interest in software engineering. I sometimes attend a meetup, and it's a beginner meetup. I try to help out. And a lot of people clearly have no patience for learning software engineering. I try to be encouraging, but sometimes I just want to be dick and tell them "Why the hell do you want to be a dev, if you're not interested in how computers work".

I'm an 100% myself taught developer. Granted I'm 38 and taught myself programming at 14. But it came out of an earnest desire and love for technology in general. So I never shyed away from learning? C and assembler? Bring it on. Theoretical computer science? I can get with that. For me I loved computer so much, that I was willing to learn about anything in the realm of computing.

This is what annoys me with the adult bootcamp crowd. I feel they're only willing to learn as long as it's easy. If something gets complicated or complex, then they check out. And I a lot of their questions is "tell me how to do this/that". But they don't know why they would do it.

To me it feels like they're trying to fast track themselves to a dev job. Yet you would think if they're trying to do this all professionally, they would be open to learning as much as possible, and not closing themselves off.

My semi-friend who runs the meetup is trying to start a bootcamp himself. So I try I severely hold my tongue when I attend those meetups. And I want to be supportive. I certainly don't want to be the reason why people are turned off by programming. But at the same time, I hate how people are abusing this profession because they think it's fast money and an easy way to earn 6 figure salaries.

Interviewing with three companies. First one extended an offer. I'm expecting an offer from at least one, possibly both, of the others (On-site with Second was yesterday and expecting an offer tomorrow or Mon, phone tech interview (they also had a tech screen) with Three was today and I /rocked/ it, expecting an onsite invite for next week).

The problem with being a badass is that the choice paralysis is SO OVERWHELMING. All three have features that I like and how do I choose.

I think I'm being overly influenced by the weekly massage, onsite barista, free nice breakfast/lunch, and ideal location of Second (the domain is finance, they have $$$). Oh and fucking 25 vacation days and amazing 401k matching. I mean how would I say no to an offer? But what if the work is actually beyond me? But they have seriously cranked their benefits package up to 11.

First is an in house product with external clients. The domain I don't find super interesting, but it has amazing Glassdoor reviews, seems like a decent environment, and really seems like a place to progress and grow as a professional. It is also the lowest salary of the three (both others are through Hired, so I know what they are offering).

Third is a consultancy where I'd really get to keep my skills relevant. Seems mad fast paced, which is a bit intimidating, and I don't know how well I'd handle the context switching of being on multiple projects at a time.

I mean, all of this is counting my chickens before they hatch. But I have a really good feeling about my chsnces with Second, though I suppose I still have a chance to botch my onsite with Third.

Ahhhh. Dev Rant, how did you go about choosing between offers that can't be evaluated on a single axis?

A couple nights ago I was thinking how can absurdly incompetent programmers exist out there (based on stories I read here), and I think I know the reason. They just don't like doing it, to them it's just a job. They get into the building, work and go home. They learned programming in college but probably never wrote anything for fun. Because of that they don't dedicate themselves to learning new tech, don't try to improve and be good at the job, all they want is the money to be able to survive and that's it. Since they don't have the curiosity to drive them forward, they just don't and keep writing shitty code.

I'm not saying you need to have a bazillion side-projects, work an 8h shift and then go home and spend 3h on personal projects, or that you have to breathe programming and tech. All I'm saying is that, to be competent and good (this probably applies to most jobs) you have to like what you do and have at least some interest in it.

So many…

I think in general they boil down to: “you may be an expert, but I know what I want”

But the worst experience above all is one I had with a German school: the director/previous dev got angry cause they were told a real dev was needed (they were told this by most of their colleagues) and tried to actively make my job miserable. Oh and they requested an auto starting video with sound ofc! Q U A L I T Y - W E B S I T E

Teach things properly, most teachers are confused and they start throwing keywords at even more confused students who then have no clue what they are doing and they then ask me to do their work for them showing me their unindented(well... kinda, they all seem to fight with the IDE, which is trying to properly indent their mess, for some reason), teachers think that Turbo Pascal is the way of life and that it is used everywhere(one teacher tried to tell me that Pascal is used in the stock market and in modern operating systems - U wot m8?! how high are you right now) and they don't teach user input sanitization and type checking, they stare at you like you are the fucking satan when you dare to use objects, collections and abstraction because they are scared to death of that stuff... and then they think 60 minutes is enough to teach HTML, CSS, JS and PHP in one go(which they even don't know properly - the teacher that made and maintains the school's website is probably stuck in 1998 judging by the design and functionality of the website and his clothes) and they then send absolutely clueless students to compete in a web design competition (and then they get angry at the judges for giving the students 0 points)

Lol so we had a meeting where basically the entire dev team got shat on for everything always taking too long... Now, I know a .lot of us suck at estimates but if it's all the time then do you think maybe we're not getting the best quality info to wok from?

Then they revised the WFH policy to 3 days a week in office. AND got pissy about the hours.

so I ask you all what are you hours?

I was on a PHP conference once.
You know what? They really think all that is ok...

I just started but I'm already tired.

For some years I have worked in the industry, not a lot, I know right but I really wonder how do you deal with all "not code-related" bullshit.

IT should be a dynamic field but somehow it is stuck inside the business logic which is all about the money and that does not take care of the real matter which is "code engineering".

- Most of the projects I have seen are an utter mess.
- No real structure
- Code is literally thrown somewhere to make stuff works and fix bugs
- Features which should require X amount of time are planned and shipped earlier ignoring best practices.
- The customer changes idea every week
- Nobody wants to pay for a reasonable architecture but prefer to keep financing un-maintainable projects that only God knows where they have been made (presumably in Hell)
- Juniors devs with no real senior following them committing unreasonable stuff
- Seniors devs thinking they are but they aren't.
- Company that keeps delivering projects even if they have not the required amount of people to make it in time.

Seems like nobody wants to stop and take time to think and make the right decisions. I see people running around me like crazy ants.

But, above all, what really kills me deep inside is HR. You are looking for "dynamic" "talented" "cool" devs but you are not willing to pay them enough.

Should I talk about LinkedIn?

Oh, God... Even the worsts companies sound like they are into Fortune 500. I feel so much hypocrisy here.

I have worked for big and small IT companies.
In the end, is all about "inside politics", everything which is getting financed is not because of usefulness but because of "relationship".

I started coding when I was really young.
After ten and more years, I finally take the job of my dreams but everything is shuttering under my feet.

If you have some words of wisdom, I'm here to hear you.

PS.
I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize for any mistake.

Honestly I don’t remember any particular one cause every interview is such a traumatic experience.
People on interviews are almost all the same, they just try to prove their superiority over you and break you.

I totally understand why, it’s because they think they understand what IT is about and in fact they understand shit, that’s why also most of computer systems are shit, cause of shitty people doing it who don’t understand how computer work, they can just copy paste stuff and do beautiful talks about how cool they are and how awesome their company is.

At the end ( at the edge ) it doesn’t matter if you know tech stack or not, if you have gazillion years of experience or you just started. It only matters if you can solve problems and how good and fast you can do it.

But well do your reverse tree in 15 minutes. I’d rather be talking about philosophy during the interview.

Those who had the "pleasure" of working directly with clients know a thing or two about how a clumsy communication can have grave consequences.

Software developer and an Imgur user BackDoorNoBaby shed some light on these humorous situations and misunderstandings that often occur with clueless clients. Because we all have our niche interests and specializations, and it’s easy to sneer at the plebs who just don’t get it. To be fair though, dealing with unrealistic demands by clients who have no real understanding of what you do must get pretty frustrating at times, and if you work in IT, you’ll surely have come across at least one of these situations before.

What we have here are the daily trials and tribulations of an IT worker. Clients that read the latest trends in a tech magazine and want it right now. Business people who think that because they have the money, solutions should magically materialize. Clients that complain about something not functioning properly, when they clearly don't have a clue how to use it properly. We all know this kind of clients, and these kind of 'horror' stories are part of what makes working in IT so special. Sometimes humour is the only suitable response.

First Year in College.

I have been into computers since 9th Standard. What I meant was I could make music, edit images, play and install games after downloading, hack them(change values) using Cheat Engine, make trainers for myself because why type when you can freeze, format computers using a pendrive (trust me, I saved a lot of money) and then finally, make some presentations and send emails.

Now, College begins. Programming in C language. I don't know what the fuck that means. But they say, it's 'essential'.

Enter Professor. "Okay students, we begin with the course on C Language. how many of you know pointers?".

Me: Wow. Sounds cool. But, I don't know anything.

I couldn't love coding. I think I love to code but at the end of the day, I'm a sick Undergraduate who fell in love with a Bass Guitar and Vocals and wants to code for a living. Heavily interested in changing the world and all that stuff but have no motivation and even if I have, I can't give a fuck about it.

Peers are getting medals everywhere. I'm sitting alone in a room learning C. They said, It was 'essential', but they never told me, 'why'.

Not a rant. IDGAF what you think but I'm a failure looking for ways to make a living.