Police tech support, corruption, stilettos, fake agents, and all that. This is gonna be a long story.

Remember when I posted about wanting to become a digital nomad and how my annoying landlady has sped up the process for that? So I was looking for apartments to move into. Just a couple of months to get surgery, recover, and gear up for the new life. I met a real estate agent. He showed me his license, he's known by the guards and admins in the residence, and I met the unit owner together with him inside the unit itself. I did a background check and all looks good. A major property developer even posted several awards that he achieved. Sounds legit? Nope. This will soon become the highest level of real estate corruption I've ever seen in my entire life.

The property developer is well-established and has various luxury residences. After some further digging, I saw several posts about him in private owners' groups except they were screenshots of his name and face, not actual texts so it did not appear in the initial search. I see comments from several tenants and owners that he scammed. It turns out they even have a WhatsApp group dedicated into taking him down because he's done all kinds of trouble - bouncing checks, stealing items from the units, fucking up people's apartments, taking money from people and then ghosting them, etc.

Everyone seems angry but also hopeless because apparently, he's been doing this for years and the property hasn't banned him. There were discussions that the property itself takes bribe from him so he can freely go in and out of the residence. As far as I know, he's been doing this for almost a year, maybe longer but since he's a licensed agent with the management on his side, he's pretty much untouchable.

I mentioned his name to a previous agent I talked to, let's call her "Stiletto Girl" because she gave me a tour around the towers while wearing stilettos and dear god, I don't know how people manage to walk so long with those things on. Stiletto Girl was more furious than I am and sent me screenshots of their conversations. She obviously hates the guy and she confirmed that there is indeed corruption in the admin office.

I collected all these information and posted to an investors group to warn them about buying properties there. I received messages with terrible experiences and overall, people are convinced. This group has members that can buy properties in full with cash. I managed to get his account blocked in one of the payment options he provided and I was instructed to file a police report so they can permanently disable his account. I'm working on his other accounts.

After a trip to several police stations, I found myself talking to this asshole investigator in his camo. I fucking hated the guy and the tone of his voice. He gave me trouble for not knowing the suspect's full address. At some point, we were just yelling at each other. He made a phone call and went back agreeing to finally let me file a police report.

He asked for my ID. I gave him my company ID, I learned that doing this builds instant rapport to some because it's a well-known airline company and most of the people have taken a flight there so they're extra nice to me. Maybe they think I can give them a discount or something, whatever. Nope.

Him: "You're a software engineer? Are you good with computers?"

Me: *laughs knowing where this is going*

Him: "See, I have a problem with my computer. Can you fix it?"

Me: "Sure. Just give me the police report first."

He starts working on it. This time his tone is more friendly. Other police officers come in and he introduces me as his new "friend". As discussed, after the police report has been made, I sat on his computer and started fixing his shit. They went outside to respond to some emergency and asked me to guard the station for the meantime, lol. There's only me and another woman in a separate cubicle. When they came back, one of the police officers came up to my desk jokingly pretending to be a victim of some crime asking to file a police report.

I finished fixing his shit and now his asshole energy is diverted to the person I filed a police report against.

Him: "Do you think this guy is a one time criminal?"

Me: "Oh no, he's notorious and that property does nothing about it. I think he has a connection there."

Him: "WHAT?! I will pay them a visit tomorrow! Send me more pictures of him. If I see that fucking guy.."

So this guy is supposed to do the frontend.
I do the backend.
I offer an endpoint.
He does his HTML+CSS magic.
Me: Cool but data is hardcoded. Could you get the data from the endpoint I sent you?
Him: "I'd prefer you do that, I can make a git repo so you download the front."

... So you don't do frontend, you just write pretty layouts. And I have to actually write the frontend logic? Go f yourself.

This guy just wasted 10 out of the 15 stand-up minutes speaking crap. It was very clear he didn’t do any work so just asked some crap questions just to throw people off. Okay it’s now 25 minutes past and he’s still talking. 30 minutes still talking. He sat on an issue for a week and did nothing. Apparently he’s overloaded with other issues and he’s giving that issue to me now. He already lost track of what test was causing the issue. Gave me the wrong test. What the fuck was he working on ? And he doesn’t fucking know how to disassemble and inspect the instructions. It’s basically a prerequisite for this whole team (and he’s a senior and spent significantly more time in this company). The shit people get away with. Still talking. Fuck off please !

!dev

My toxic father. Seriously man. It's my 4th day of learning to drive with an instructor. He sits besides and never knew how to drive. I think I am driving good wrt to being very new in it. He thinks just because I slow myself down on the road and cannot take a turn properly, let me say it again, on the 4th day of driving a manual car, he thinks I can never drive. What a fucking douchebag. What a fucking coward, impatient human says that. I am in rage because now I'm like 27, but in my childhood he was at his worst behaviour. That's why I was always scared of doing complex things, I stick with easy because I will make no mistakes. He has fucking no right in being proud of me. He's so fucking bad, I hate him. But more than hating him I want to find a way not to give a fuck about his fucking small discouraging shameful opinions. Fucker cannot do anything by himself. He's the most messed up fucking person I have ever seen. And oh god I fucking resent this guy.
I should start calling him a fucking retard that way I can devalue him as a person. I could never thought that I will think about a person like this but this retard left me no choice.
The thing is even a person is a retard I will try to understand them so give me a good word that just devalues a person instantly.

First code review ever, and it's for my job.

Guy was really nice and polite.
Even correctly guessed I don't have much experience with professional coding outside my associates degree and prior job where I was the only programmer most of the time I was there.

Said that since it works functionally and is such a small program there's nothing wrong with it if it meets our purposes ( low priority project )

Then he politely in his words 'nitpicks' 3 points and gives me ideas on how to make it more reliable and less likely to need replaced or completely refactoring in the future.

I think my first time getting code reviewed went well. And one of the things he mentioned was something I didn't know how to do and only took 20 some minutes to implement so I also learned something new from this

Seriously, a new guy joined out team and suddenly I'm out of my comfort zone and started following the pattern I used to follow. The thing he did, commented on my PR, a lot of comments.
I had this thing that hey now I can control anything right, new guy? less experienced? yes, so I don't need to be intimidated. But I realised today that I'm easily intimidated my intelligent people because I think now I am the inferior one.

I will push myself to think about it in a better way, by looking at it positively, to learn something from it.

Family reaction to me being a dev (and offering to replace their home/personal IT guy with google drive and a mesh wifi network):

We're going to hire an IT guy because they have more experience doing this kind of thing. BITCH, I'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR 15 YEARS!!!

The biggest motherfucker on this planet is the guy who came up with golang.

"Hey can you make this excel report for me real quick? Here are the columns, you gotta get them from this table in the database. Shouldn't take long."

Alright, sounds easy enough wait where is the data. I have to join how many tables? What is this bullshit data? I want to strangle the guy who modeled this piece of garbage.

Jesus christ I need my VP and CIO to get their hands out of Azure and GCP and just let me work.

Yes, governance and security and IAM are big deals. That's why you have infraops people like me to deal with that.

I'm literally working with one hand tied behind my back because just about every button press or CLI command I need to do my damn job as a professional cloud fluffer requires me to go bother an executive and ask permission to pretty please can I deploy a new container, can you go press the shiny button? No not that one, move your mouse up...up..now UP..ok over lef-no..can I have mouse control? Sigh fine, do you see where it says "Approvers", no that says "Release Pipeline"

Look I actually kinda like this job, I do, in as much as when I have something to do I get left the fuck alone to do it. Meetings are minimal, aside from the odd days when one of our app services decides to yeet itself into the river Styx, there's little distractions.

Yeah, developers do dumb shit but that's probably best left to the notion of job security and never talked about again less they go to HR and complain that the ops guy was very stern and direct and made the developer take some accountability for their work product.

AND YET

It's so intergalactically stupid that I have to go ask permission just to do ops tasks by the same people barging down my goddamn door asking why the ops task isn't done yet.

"Because you won't give me permissions in GCP to actually DO anything".

Okay. Rant over. Time for lunch. Good meeting, see you all at the holiday party.

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.