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Search - "this is not a conversation"
-
Installed Linux on an old windows laptop. This is my conversation 5 minutes ago...
Wife: "Have how you got internet?"
Me: "What do you mean, it has a wireless adapter built in?"
Wife: "But it's not Windows?"
WTF!!!
Me: "Pass my phone, this is going on devRant"
Wife: "Please no, not again"25 -
Sit down before you read this.
So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.
Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.
This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.
In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.
We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.
And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.
At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.
The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".
Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.
Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".
After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".
Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".
At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.
I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.35 -
Well, it happened. The stupidest request, no demand, I have ever, and most likely will ever receive...
Me: So what is it you're looking to do with your website.
Client: We're not showing up Facebook's home page. We need you to fix that. We have a budget of $10,000 to make this happen right now.
Me: As much as I'd love to take your money, that isn't something I can control. Every "home page" is profile-based, which technically isn't a homepage, but a "feed" that changes constantly. So say you create a profile on Facebook, only those you follow, and paid posts show up on your feed. What I can do however is use your budget to create and promote posts from your company page to show on users' feeds. If you're serious about marketing, we can start slow at $250/week, then work our way up or down based on results until your budget is exhausted, then re-evaluate the budget at that time. I can tailor a retainer for you based on the number of ads per week that you'd like to make.
Client: No, this is not what we're asking for at all.
Me: Okay...what is it you're looking for exactly? Run through this in as much detail as possible so I can get on the same page.
Client: We want to be on the main home page of facebook.com. We want our logo on that page when people sign up to make an account, linking to our website.
Me: That's simply not possible. That's Facebook's own home page. Nobody has a right to edit that other than Facebook itself.
Client: Bullshit. There's a Facebook developers section with APIs to edit and view Facebook's entire website. We would do it ourselves, but we signed up and don't understand how to change it in Chrome. That's why we need you and [referring client] said you were the best guy for our needs.
Me: That API has no control over Facebook's corporate data, including their own home page. That API designed ONLY for sections in which you are authorized to access or modify, such as your personal profile or created page for your business.
Client: We know that it can be done. If you don't do it, we'll find someone else who can.
Me: Well good luck with that, because the only way it would be remotely possible to do that WILL involve prison time, since that would be illegal. The only legal way to do it would be to buy Facebook, and they'll laugh you out of the building with that offer. But I'm done with this conversation because I have work to complete from clients that aren't delusional. Have a nice day! [hang up]
----
What. The. Fuck.26 -
A devRant Update!
Hey everyone,
We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.
Highlights since our last update:
- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.
- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!
- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!
Some stuff we have in the pipeline:
- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!
A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:
We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.
What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!
Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.
Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus
36 -
This is a fun conversation I had:
Test Engineer: 😑 The test bench burst into flames.
Me: 😪😲 Do what now?
TE: 😐 The test bench burst into flames. It made a pretty impressive fire ball.
Me: 😮 . . . How are you so calm about this?
TE: 😐 Well it's not on fire now.
Me: 😶 Good point.
TE:😧 made me mad as hell though.
Me: 😕 why's that?
TE: 😬 Cuz I only had one damn step left in that test procedure and it was to turn the damn test bench off.
Me: 🤔 Correct me if I'm wrong but the test bench is off is it not?
TE: 😐 Well yeah.
Me: 🤔 and you caused it to be turned off by your actions no?
TE: 😕 . . . yeah . . .
Me:🤔 sounds like you turned it off to me.
TE: 😒
Me: 🙂
TE: 😐
Me: ☺
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😐 but it won't turn on again.
Me: 🤔 do you have a requirement to be able to turn it on again after you turn it off?
TE: 😑 It's implied.
Me: 😐 not what I asked
TE: 😧 No not explicitly.
Me: 😎 sounds like you completed the test procedure.
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😧 that's not how it works.
Me: 😎 doesn't it?
TE: 😑 No.
Me:😎
TE: *walks away* 😧😧😧
Me: *turns back to computer* well I was just trying to help YOU out 😒
I am the best at interpersonal communication.17 -
I fucking love people like this.
Yesterday I met a 'friend' who I hadn't seen in a very long time. Just a guy I used to know tbh but let's call him Friend anyway. After a while in the conversation this happened...
*Friend doesn't know I have a degree in CS*
Friend: "WHAT?? YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING? NO WAY! ME TOO!"
Me: "THAT'S AWESOME! You've been programming for long?"
Friend: "A little over a year now. I know almost all languages now. C++, C#, Python, Java and HTML. Still a couple left to go. Once you're on the level I achieved programming becomes really, really easy. How long have you been programming?"
Me: "Almost a decade now"
Friend: "Damn dude you must know all languages by now I suppose?"
Me: "I've been mainly doing C++ so not really haha"
Friend: "I can always help when you're struggling with one language. C++ is pretty easy tbh. You should learn others too btw. HTML for example is pretty important because you can program websites with it"
Me: "Yeah... Thanks... So... What project are you working on right now?"
Friend: "I'm making a register page for my very own forum. The only problem I have is that PHP won't save the login details"
Me: "Hahaha I know the feeling. MySQL?"
Friend: "What?"
Me: "What do you use to save your data"
Friend: "Just a txt file. It's easier that way."
Me: "Hahaha true. Who needs safety right? *smiles*"
Friend: "Actually it's 100% safe because only I can see the txt file so other people can not hack other users."
Me: "Yes! That's great! Cya!"
Friend: "I'm working on a mmorpg too btw! I can learn you to make games if you want. Just call me. Here's my number"
Me: "Alright... Thanks... Bye!"
*Arrives at home*
*Deletes number*
I do not make this up.
I can understand that someone who isn't in the CS industry doesn't take it too seriously and gets hyped when their "Hello World" program works.
I'm fine with that.
The thing that really triggers me is big headed ass holes like this. Like how much more like a absolute dickhead could you possibly more act? Fucking hate people like that.32 -
Morning conversation with wife.
As she puts a stainless steel water bottle on the counter
She: can you make a water bottle for our daughter before school.
Me: I'm not sure, does it have to look like this one, I don't have any training working with metals. But if I have full control over the design. I may be able to come up with something.
She: that not funny, why do you always do that.
Me: do what, that is exactly what you told me to do.
A little later.....
She: I'm running late, can you make sure "everything" up stairs is unplugged..... (She means her curling iron)
I can't wait until she comes home.........;-)20 -
The spam denier
_____
An old phone conversation with a client:
Me : Hello
Client : My website and server are suspended? why is that?
Me : Your server sends spam messages.
Client : We do not send spam messages, we are on vacation, there is none in the office.
Me : Yes, but it is not necessarily you, according to our logs, your server sent spam messages in Chinese and Russian, so someone from Russia or China....etc.
Client : I do not believe you, we do not speak russian or chinese, how could we then write spam messages in those languages?
Me : I told you, maybe someone exploited some vulnerability in your website or server firewall. And if you want to activate your services, please check with your webmaster and sysadmin to secure your ....
Client: I tell you my son, because I am old and I have more life experience than you ... I am 60 years old and I tell you, spam does not exist, and YOU suspended my website and server, and created issues to sell me more of your solutions and services.
I won't check my server, I won't hire a webmaster or a sysadmin, AND YOU WILL ACTIVATE MY SERVER NOW !
(I suddenly realized that I am talking to a wall, so I switched to a robotic tone).
Me : Please resolve the issue to activate your services..
Client : YOU WILL ACTIVATE MY S...
Me : Please resolve the issue to activate your services...
Client : WHAT IS THIS SPAM STORY ANYWAY, I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU ...
Me : Please google that word and you will understand what is spam is...
Client : YOU ARE F**ING LIARS, SPAM DOES NOT EXIST... ACTIVATE MY WEBSITE N.... Beeeep !
I hang up.
Well, I thought about configuring an automatic response for this client, or a for-loop.
His voice was really unpleasant, as if he is a heavy smoker.7 -
Le monday morning after a commit on sunday evening...
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Your commit broke the site, nothing is working!!!!!!
Me: What? All of tests passed (coverage 95%), no issues were found.
PM: NOO!!!! Site is broken, we can't use it no more!!!
Me: Ok, what's the problem?
PM: I've tried to enter -10021 into this field on that page and it gived me an error.
Me: Ok? So, that single page is broken?
PM: No, whole site!!!! This is important
Me: Sure... Let me take a look
* PM tried to enter a negative value into an unsigned field that I've mutated yesterday after checking LIVE database if there was no records with negative value. Reason: we've hit an int limit and there was no chance that the value would be negative. Validation? Well, yes.... Except that page was added by him this morning without even checking everything else *
Me: Here, this is the issue, *gives explanation*
PM: Well.... You shouldn't do this. This is unacceptable. You must never leave int fields without negative values. Didn't they teach you in school that integers can be negative?!
Me: What? *consufed as hell*
PM: *More morale... blah blah blah....* Revert it back!
Me: Ok but if anything else breaks, copy of this slack conversation will be kept.
PM: Don't care! Fix it!
Me: * Reverts the fix, saves chat copy * - Done.
PM: Great.
* 5 wild minutes later *
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Site is down, service is not working, what have you done?
Me: Reverted the change needed for it to work. Todays schedule is full with other important tasks. * pastes a screenshot as a proof that he asked me to do this *
PM: FIX IT NOW! Apply your fix.
Me: You're the PM. - Done.
PM: Great, now I'll fix my code. You should be more careful next time.
Me: * YOU DENSE MATHA...KER * Sure.
How's your morning going? :)9 -
Coworker in my team recently said to boss:
"Thanks, this conversation with you has taught me so much about single-threaded blocking I/O"
Some random PR comments from our company's repository:
"Are you insured? I hope you are insured"
"Learning git is not that difficult. You only need one command: git reset --hard"
*Link to amazon for dog poop bags*
"Please clean up your shit, before I step in it"
"Have you thought about a career in sales? At least there you might sell your bullshit"2 -
I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)
Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"
For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.
What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.16 -
*came in this morning to see this conversation in slack from the remote teams*
Dev: Hey guys, I'm trying to push to the develop branch, telling me its locked. Is there a new process?
Lead dev: Yes I locked it because the repo is now dead, the last release that went out is the last for this year and ever for this app. Were merging this app with another, starting from the last release's code. We'll all have to swap over to the new repo soon.
Dev: ... eh ok I didn't put anything in the last release branch as it wasn't urgent. Normally our process is anything in /develop goes out in the new year. I've been merging to /develop for the last few weeks ... is that code now gone?
*14 question mark emoji reactions*
Lead dev: Yes
*27 angry emoji reactions*
Engineering manager: WHAT? when was this decided? When was it communicated?
Lead dev: oh I assumed my product counterpart had been spreading the messages around, have they not?
Several teams: no, nope, first i'm hearing of it.
Lead dev: Ok, i'll ask them what happened. Be aware then that most of the stuff thats going into develop now, most likely won't be allowed in until March. They want to prioritise releasing this new merged app and don't want anything to impact it.
Dev: So wait, i'm working on stuff now. What do I do? Where do I base the branch? Where do I merge?
<no response>
*My team comes into the office*
Dev: eeehhh ... what does this mean for our past 4 weeks of work? and all the stuff needed to go out in January?
Me: not.a.fucking.clue16 -
Conversation with my mom the other day:
Mom - How do you use the screenshot button on the keyboard? (She has a Windows work laptop)
Me - Just press it.
Mom - I did that! It didn't do anything.
Me - Lol it's not supposed to do anything. It takes a picture of whatever is on your screen and you have to paste it somewhere like Paint to save the image.
Mom - Ohhh that's too much work. I use Snippit (or whatever the built in Windows screenshot app is called) and send it to myself in an email.
-------------------------
She takes a screenshot, pastes it in an email, and sends it to herself to save it. Hm.
Then she told me tonight that she needed to screenshot these questions in a quiz she was taking. I kid you not - she took a screenshot of 2 questions at a time, pasted them in an email that she sent to herself, and then printed the email. She did this for 40 questions so she printed out 20 emails with screenshots of quiz questions. She also printed out the 200 page manual she needs to study and deleted the pdf. Mom, seriously? What if you need to find something in that 200 page manual? It's so much easier to ctrl + F to find a specific word or phrase. Ohh it doesn't matter she says, there's an index.21 -
Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:
Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.
-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.12 -
Family reaction story to me being a dev?
- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."16 -
this isn't even a tech thing. it just fucking bamboozled me. I overheard a conversation today.
> "duuuude you gotta make a better password that shit is insecure af"
> "bruh i did, i googled it"
> "googled what?"
> "how to make a good password"
> "so how longs your password?"
> "not long, it's bob2"
> "where's your capital?"
> "I made the '2' capital"
> "so you capitalized a number…"
thank god he walked away. he even told him his fucking password. ignorance.7 -
Years ago I was an application developer at a medium sized corporation and was also responsible for support for an HR department. This occurred early one morning shortly after I arrived at work.
User: My app doesn't work.
Me: What's wrong with it?
User: I just get a blank screen.
Me: A blank screen? What happens when you hit a key?
User: Nothing.
Me: Do any apps work?
User: No, I just get a blank screen.
Me: Is your monitor on?
User: Yes, I turned it on.
This type of witty banter went on for several minutes when the answer suddenly hit me.
Me: Is your computer turned on?
User: Do I need to turn it on?
Me: Did you turn it off before you went home last night?
User: Yes.
Me: And do you normally turn it on in the morning when you come in?
User: Yes.
Me: Then why didn't you turn it on this morning when you came in?
User: I didn't know I needed to.
It was at this point I heard the programmer over the cubicle wall from me burst out laughing. He had been listening to the conversation and couldn't take it anymore.
The really sad part is that this was not an isolated incident. This kind of stuff occurred on a semi-regular basis with this individual's department.10 -
I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.
Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.
It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...
I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.
Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.
Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.
He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.
I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.
I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.
If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.8 -
// sorry, again a story not a rant
Category->type = 'Story';
Category->save();
Today at work I got a strange email
'about your msi laptop'
(Some background information, a few months ago I went on vacation and left my work laptop at home. Long story short some one broke in and stole my msi laptop)
So this email had my interest. I opened it and the content was something like:
Hi! My name is x, I clean/repair laptops partime and I noticed your personal information on this laptop, normally people whipe their data from their laptop before selling so this is just a double check, if the laptop was stolen please call me on xxx
If I hear nothing I'll assume its alright and will whipe your data
So of course I immediately called him, after a conversation I informed the police who is now working on the case7 -
So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.
Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.
He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.
What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!
Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'
He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.
Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.
So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.
So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!
Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.
Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.
You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.
Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.9 -
So today , a company phoned me for a job I applied in Jobstreet. So the conversation goes like this.
Com " Do you have any experience in Android studio? "
Me : " Yes . I develop android application, it is compulsory to know actually."
Com :" ok... Do you have experience android SDK?"
Me : " I believe you are referring to the Android studio, yes."
Com :" do you have experience in Android programming"?
Me :" Yes. I do android application for both native and hybrid. As for hybrid, I use flutter."
Com :" Ok...but I was asking about android."
Me :*explaining what I just said *
Com: " you no understand! We need android programmer! Not native or flutter programmer!"
Me *explaining what native and hybrid is (in simple terms)
Com : " it is ok then.. our company prefer those who can develop android app , not native programmer or anything flutter programmer.
"
(Btw , I transcript how exactly that person talk to me)
My question to this person is.... WHAT THE F*** IS THIS? WANT AN ANDROID DEVELOPER BUT NOT NATIVE OR "FLUTTER"? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN ? IF ANDROID IS NOT WRITTEN IN NATIVE OR HYBRID THEN WHAT YOU EXPECT ME TO USE THEN? USING ASSEMBLY X64?14 -
Looks like I'm getting fired on Wednesday :)
Long story:
*I add first unit tests to project.
*Boss adds new functionality and breaks all the tests so I can't compile and write more for what I'm working on.
*Boss is very fragile and cannot handle any comment that can possibly be taken as a slight against him.
Me: "I wanted to ask what our policy on unit tests is please? Because we haven't really said how we are treating unit tests, and everyone myself included is not thinking about them. I also haven't added tests when I fixed bugs and this time your changes broke the tests"
Boss 10 minutes later: "I want to speak to you in private".
Boss: "you are too forceful and direct. You said I should have added tests."
Me: "yeah but I didn't mean in a nasty way"
Boss getting louder and more aggressive: "You are too forceful"
Me: "I didn't mean it in a bad way"
Boss: "I didn't want to add tests for that!"
Me: "then why add any tests?"
Boss: "Fine we are not having this conversation now!"
*Boss storms out
I decided I can't speak to the guy about anything without upsetting him spoke to the manager before I quit because I can't work like this.
That resulted in a meeting with my boss, his boss and the head of HR where I ended up savaging him and told them I can't bring up anything as I can never tell if it will offend him and that I spend ages writing emails and trying to document communications because I just can never tell if I will upset him. Also that I cannot bring up any ideas because I can't tell if he will somehow get offended and that I can't even write code because if I change something he wrote at some point he will get angry.
My boss claims that I am extremely forceful and disrespectful and that I am constantly insulting him and his decisions.
We go back over a ton of shit and I refute everything he says. In the end I have to have a meeting with him on Wednesday where we either get things straight, he fires me or I quit.
I think at this point that our relationship is too fucked for him to be my team lead on a 6 man team.
Side note I keep bringing forth ideas because we have one database shared between 6 Devs, no pull requests (apart from mine and another new guy), no test driven development, no backlog, no team driven story pointing, no running tests before merging, no continuous integration setup, no integration tests, no build step on merge, no idea of if we are on track to our deadline other than his gut feeling, no actual unit tests backend - just integration with a test db, no enthusiasm to learn in the team and no hope.21 -
Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?8 -
This is a true story
I am a freelance developer, i recently had this conversation with my client:
Client: Add multi language option to my website
Me: Ok, I need for it 3-5 days
Client: Why?
Me: I need to create multi language system, this
website is built from scratch without using any
framework
Client: No need to built it, Just enabled it i need it fast
Me: Sir there is no such thing to enable features that
does not exit
Client: Listen me, I need this feature today, enable it
and we are done.
Me: Thats not how it works..
Client: I know how it works, i have hacking certificate15 -
One of our clients deploy their own server app. So this happened after a prod deployment. (4am)
*Cellphone rings while sleeping*
Client : we need you on the conference call now. URGENT!
*Gets on conference call*
*Client explain the problem*
*Explaining to the client that the problem is in their side (https connection not working, either network or certificate problem)*
*Client doesn't believe it and pushes me for a fix that I have no control on*
*4 hours later in a heated conversation*
Client : ok problem is on our side. We used our SSL certificate from staging with production and thought it would work.
Me :
3 -
Fuck those useless calls!
PM: customer X wants a call in an hour.
Me: they didn't send emails before. No questions, no prep, no call.
PM: yeah but they want to talk.
Me: these unprepared calls are pointless. I'll be sitting there, noting down the questions and telling them I'll have to look up the details.
PM: shall I tell them that you don't want to talk to them?
Me: I don't care, it's your call, do whatever you want.
PM: that's not professional.
Me: oh you're calling it professional to sit there with a pencil, writing down crap or what?
PM: what's the problem?!
Me: I've had this shit for the last two fucking calls, and they were so unprepared that they wasted half of the call just reading up, and I'm fed up with this shit!
PM: but they are the customers, and they aren't that happy.
Me: yeah, and do you know why? Because our schedule is completely fucked up and our management has been ignoring ANY warning from engineering for WEEKS! That's why they are unhappy and not because I'm not holding their fucking hands!
PM: hey, but you can't tell me what I have to do!
Me: and you can't tell me either! [he's my PM, but technically not my superior.]
PM: so no call or what?
Me: you're free to have your call. I'll sort out the shit that they're concerned about, putting that down in a proper email, and then we have at least some basis for discussion!
PM: (left for his call)
Btw., my cursing was the same in the live conversation with him.9 -
"Do you like your job? I mean, all those collored lines in that funny font... sitting at the desk with this adorable rubber duck... Do you guys jus".....
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Me: "SHUT UP YOU STUPID ASSHOLE!!! I MADE 26 COMMITS DURING THIS FUCKING DAY, THE DAY THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE LAST WORKING DAY OF THIS SHITTY YEAR! I HAVE NOT SLEPT AS I SHOULD AT ALL CAUSE THIS FUCKING MIGRATION OF NEW YEAR'S UPDATE AND NOW... AHH NOW YOU STUPID FYCKING PSYCHO... NOW I HAVE TO CONTROLL MYSELF DURING NEXT DINNER WITH FRIENDS, HAVE NO MUCH ALCOHOL CAUSE DURING SUNDAY, EVEN ITS A FUCKING HOLIDAY AND EVEN IF I AM IN A LOOONNGG HANGOVER, I DO STILL NEED TO COMPLETE THIS FUCKING NEW YEAR MIGRATION YOU ASS PUNK! GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU LITLE USELESS TINY LITLE SHIT!!!"
And this is how I see my new years resolution: the time is priceles doing this questions to me...
Happy new year, fellazz! 💃🎆🎉2 -
My dream is to build a shopping cart for web stores that doesn't fucking suck.
Seriously Bigcommerce, Shopify, Magneto, etc. All of you can eat bag of dicks and burn in hell for ever.
I don't care what languages you fancy, all of their stacks are a pile of shit, monkey patched together with popsicle sticks and duct tape and it all falls apart with high concurrency.
All their greasy haired sales teams will throw all manners of horse shit at the poor bastards who are trying to run a business so they can pad their commission checks... "High availability", "scalable", "reliable", "Increased conversation rate"... Lying dick fucks, all of them! I am calling them the fuck out on that snake oil they're all peddling.
The only thing worse than their shit APIs is the shit documentation and the shit support that accompanies them.
Support of these platforms are pretty much all the same, sure mayhaps one has 24*7 phone support and another closes at 9 or some shit like that, either way the only people they put on the phone are monkeys that will freeze up and say "I'm not a developer so I can't help you"... Guess what, "Eric"! I didn't ask if you're a fucking dev! I'm calling because one of your devs fucked up and I need you to tell him to unfuck it so I can get the fuck on with my day!
Their app/plugin market places are shameful to say the least. The overall quality of software is somewhat dire and it's mostly dominated by oversees developers who speak English about as well as the language they're developing with (not very well usually).
I could go on until I hit the character limit but I'm gonna end it here by saying, all shopping carts suck and they should burn for eternity in the depths of hell so that a savior can free all developers from this agonizing torment.8 -
I hope you will forgive me for a third hand story, but I'm one of those evil developers, not a support per se. But I thought you'd enjoy this story anyway. So this happened to a colleague of a colleague:
$Hero - our hero. $Cop - A representative of our hard worked law enforcement agency.
So $Hero is happily speeding along in his car, running a few yellow lights a bit late, etc. Finally, the law catches up to him and pulls him over. Here's how the conversation went:
$Cop: Can I see your driving license, please?
$Hero (with smug grin): Certainly. Here it is, officer.
$Cop takes license back to motorcycle and speaks into radio.
$Hero: It's not going to help you any, though.
$Cop (with no reaction): What do you mean?
$Hero (with wider grin): The server you have to check it against is down.
$Cop (still no reaction): And why do you say that?
$Hero: Because I'm the guy they called to get on site and get it up again.
Our hero did not get a fine this time. Instead he got a police escort to his workplace.
Source: reddit r/talesfromtechsupport3 -
Designer: Need to file a bug, I'm not getting an option to login with FaceID
Me: Oh weird bug. Is it setup on the phone you are testing with?
Designer: yes, use it in all other apps
Me: Did you get an error during onboarding on the FaceID screen?
Designer: nope no error
Me: ..... hhhmm, can you show me your settings?
Me: ... eh, says you have FaceID disabled for this app ... did you click "No" to FaceID during onboarding?
Designer: Yes, to test edge cases
Me: ................ ok ........ if you setup the app and told it to not allow FaceID to login ......... you won't get the ability to use FaceID to login .......... like .... by design .... on purpose ...... cause .... you told it to do that
Designer: No no, it needs to have a setting on the login screen to allow me to turn that back on incase I forget my passcode
Me: the fuck it does. Yeah we can't have anything on the login page that says, without authorization, change my settings
*Deep breath*
Me: Remember we had this conversation previously, where you didn't want the user to create a passcode during onboarding as it was too much friction, and wanted to do FaceID only. With your backup plan being to allow the user to create a NEW passcode on the login screen if FaceID failed .... remember that discussion we had about security? ... and how its important? ... and that we like having any? Ok so its the same reason as that, just with a different setting this time
Designer: ... hhmm i'm not sure I like this
Me: ... tough luck then, not happening
Me: oh and btw, remember we had that other talk about reproduction steps for bugs? Like when the app crashed and you told me it was because its in light mode, and nothing else at all? So disabling FaceID, is very relevant info to the problem of "I can't login with FaceID", please tell me these things first11 -
I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.
But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.
So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.
So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.
So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.
Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)
So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.
I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now15 -
After work I wanted to come home and work on a project. I have a few ideas for a few things I want to do, so I started a Trello board with the ideas to start mapping things out. But there were guys redoing the kitchen tile and it was noisy as fuck. So I packed up and headed to the library.
So I get all set up, and start plugging away. Currently working on a database design for a project that is a form for some user data collection for my dad, for an internal company thing. I am not contracted for this - I just know the details so I am using it as a learning exercise. Anyway...
I'm fucking about in a VM in MySQL and I feel someone behind me. So I turn and it's this girl looking over my shoulder. She asks what I am doing, and it turned into a 2 hour conversation. She is only a few years older than me (21) but she was brilliant. She (unintentionally) made me feel SO stupid with her scope of knowledge and giant brain. I learned quite a bit from talking to her and she offered to help me further, if I liked.
And she was really cute. We exchanged phone numbers...16 -
Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.
Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]
Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev
Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]
Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].
Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.
The fuse is lit.
Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*
Sizzle.
Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]
Bang.
Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]
Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."19 -
I have had this conversation well too often:
- (him/her) Do you mind helping me with this problem I have on my computer ?
- (me) Sure, what is it ?
- (him/her) *proceeds to explaining the problem*
- (me) Ok, I don't know about this particular thing, you should try googling it.
- (the pissed off version of him/her) Never mind, I'll find someone who's willing to help me.
Please stop taking that as me not caring about your problem.
Googling things is basically what I do all day as a developer.
You really should try it. That thing is actually pretty useful.5 -
Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)
Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.
Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common
Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.
Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?
Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?
Him: I don't know
Me: then I am not interested12 -
Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...
I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.
Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.
We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...
But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "
I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."
I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.
It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.11 -
Following a conversation with a fellow devRanter this came to my mind ago, happened a year or two ago I think.
Was searching for an online note taking app which also provided open source end to end encryption.
After searching for a while I found something that looked alright (do not remember the URL/site too badly). They used pretty good open source JS crypto libraries so it seemed very good!
Then I noticed that the site itself did NOT ran SSL (putting the https:// in front of the site name resulted in site not found or something similar).
Went to the Q/A section because that's really weird.
Saw the answer to that question:
"Since the notes are end to end encrypted client side anyways, we don't see the point in adding SSL. It's secure enough this way".
😵
I emailed them right away explaing that any party inbetween their server(s) and the browser could do anything with the request (includingt the cryptographic JS code) so they should start going onto SSL very very fast.
Too badly I never received a reply.
People, if you ever work with client side crypto, ALWAYS use SSL. Also with valid certs!
The NSA for example has this thing known as the 'Quantum Insert' attack which they can deploy worldwide which basically is an attack where they detect requests being made to servers and reply quickly with their own version of that code which is very probably backdoored.
This attack cannot be performed if you use SSL! (of course only if they don't have your private keys but lets assume that for now)
Luckily Fox-IT (formerly Dutch cyber security company) wrote a Snort (Intrustion Detection System) module for detecting this attack.
Anyways, Always use SSL if you do anything at all with crypto/sensitive data! Actually, always use it but at the very LEAST really do it when you process the mentioned above!31 -
This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.6 -
Me and co-worker troubleshooting why he can't run the docker container for database.
Me: Check if the port is busy.
Co-worker: To my knowledge, it isn't.
Me: Strange, it just works fine for me and everyone else.
Me: And you're sure you didn't already start it previously?
*We verify that it isn't running*
Me: I'm pretty sure the port is busy from that error message. Try another port.
Co-worker: Already did, it didn't work.
Me: And by any chance restarting your machine won't solve anything?
*It doesn't solve anything*
Me: Alright, I have some work to do, but I'll get back to this. Tell me if you find a solution.
Co-worker: Alright.
*** Time passes, when I get back he has switched to windows, dualboot, same machine ***
Me: I don't think you'll have a better time running the docker image on windows.
Co-worker: Oh, that's not what I'm looking for. You see, I had a database on my windows partition recently and I thought maybe thats why it won't start.
Me (screaming internally) : WTF ARE YOU STUPID, WINDOWS AND LINUX ISNT RUNNING AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.
Me (actually saying): I don't think computers work like that.
Co-worker: My computer is magical. It does strange things.
Me: That's a logical conclusion.
*** More time passes ***
Co-worker solves the problem. The port was busy because Ubuntu was already running PostgreSQL on that port.
Third co-worker shimes in: Oh yeah, I had the exact same problem and it took me a long time to solve it.
Everyone is sitting in arms reach of each other.
So not only was I right from the start. Someone else heard this whole conversation and didn't chime in with his solution. And the troubleshooting step of booting into windows and looking if a database is running there ???? Wtf
Why was I put on this Earth?6 -
Here's a follow-up to my New Year's resolutions rant six months ago:
( https://devrant.com/rants/1117379/... )
I've completed (or made significant strides in) 5 of my 7 resolutions:
1) Rid and keep my like free of toxic people. This includes parents.
I have had a serious conversation with everyone who made my life worse and whom I wanted to keep around, outlining my issues with them and my expectations should they want to remain in my life. I happily cut out everyone who refused to change their behavior, including my parents. My life is quieter now, and much nicer.
3) Take care of myself for a change!
I've started this, but with work, a monster, etc. it's been almost prohibitively difficult. Minimal lasting progress despite considerable effort. I will make more time for it and make it happen. (I was down 12 pounds at one point! Though this isn't just about weight.)
4) Stop putting up with things I don't have to.
If I don't like something optional, snip snip!
I no longer wait patiently (fuming) for slow-moving people. If something prevents me from being productive or going about my day, I no longer let it. Carpe diem; calcitrare culus! I have been much more productive and energetic because of this.
5) Actually enjoy things I enjoy.
Okay, this one is very difficult. Whenever I'm not working, I feel like I'm wasting my time. However, I have made a conceited effort every day to take time off and do something that sounds fun. Sometimes that's more work, but usually it's music, a game, a book, exercise, or bed. I'm still working on actually enjoying my time away from work, however, but I'm making progress!
7) Finish de-googling my life.
I no longer use a gmail account (except a work-provided account), nor do I use any of their services unless absolutely necessary (and I do so through TOR). My phone still has Google Play Services; however, I'm working on finding a replacement that I can @Root. (Suggestions welcome!)
------
The two resolutions I haven't yet addressed:
2) Find a well-paying job that isn't also toxic.
My job has gotten less toxic of late, with the boss actually listening and everyone writing up feature requests (with co-sponsors) instead of just dumping them in my lap. I perform an effort analysis on them, and everyone discusses them as a team to determine which actually deserve development time. This is tens of times better than before. I also no longer have to be at the office. In fact, I haven't been there in months -- and don't even remember the alarm codes haha. I may also be getting another developer, though I suspect this is actually a lie.
6) Finally buy a harp. I've wanted one since I was 3 ffs.
I haven't done any research yet on which harp(s) I should buy. Also, I have no idea where I would keep it, so I may defer this until we move, or just get a tiny one (lap-sized and cute!) to practice on. Probably both!
------
It's been six moths, and I'm happy with my progress. 😄9 -
Motherfucking WordPress coupled with motherfucking sales people.
If you promise the client something, please fucking relay it via the correct process (i.e the fucking ticketing system that took me a month to write for the company - it's seriously just a click away on your desktop.). "I told your boss" is not a fucking apt excuse.
My boss forgets, and well, doesn't give a fuck about procedure either.
Now you phone my boss and he phones me, on a fucking Sunday evening, telling me that the client was promised a website by tomorrow morning at 10AM. You tell me this at fucking 9PM.
Why didn't you tell me earlier? How the fuck am I supposed to shit out something I would be proud of in a few hours? Nevermind me fucking up my sleeping routine; how the fuck?
Conversation went like this:
"xyz was promised this site by sales person fuckTwit, I need this live by Monday morning. I have sent you a few images. Make it in WordPress, client says they want a 'tangy looking theme'.
Me: it's a bit unrealistic requesting this, is there no way we can extend the time so I have time to create this?
Also, what do you mean by 'tangy'?
Boss: don't know. Make it happen. No excuses.
What the fuck is a tangy theme? When I become a webDev at the company? More importantly, fucking WordPress?!
Now I'm sitting on this shit, tired as a manatee in mating season, and using goddamn WordPress.
I have to halt my irritation, because I get severely irritated when I'm tired, I have to restrain myself from telling the involved parties tomorrow to install the FuckYourself WordPress plugin, coupled with a resignation letter.
Same sales person got me in shit a while ago, because I refused to give him access to the network to download fucking cartoons. Sales director went and moaned that his bitch (the sales person) needs this for a presentation. Yeah fucking right.
Go Snorkelling in a sewer truck you egotistic, megalomaniacal, indecent, outrageous, horrible motherfucker of a person.
Time to develop a fucking website with, oh, a company profile pamphlet.
Times like this I keep telling myself, "my time will come, my time will come".14 -
Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical
Beware, it's a #longread
Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.
A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.
I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.
I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.
Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:
Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.
Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)
Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.
Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!
So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.
Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!13 -
only developer with linux. everyone else are on windows.
constantly finding myself in following conversation
me : "something is not working for me on the web page i am writing"
jim : "let me see just a.... WOW! WHAT IS THIS?"
me:"ubuntu"
jim:"wat?"
me:"linux"
jim:"well... " +sigh + "that's your problem right there! this works to everyone else. and they're on windows. why would you ever not use windows?"
me:"have you ever tried anythig else?"
jim:"never needed to. windows works just fine.."
me:"well... does your computer ever freeze?"
jim:"constantly"
me:"that doesn't happen on ubuntu. at least it is quite rare"
jim:"nah... you're mistaken. windows rocks! anyway, you should probably talk to someone who knows ubuntu cause my chrome works just fine so it must be this ubuntu of yours.."14 -
D: Hey, your stuff isn't working, fix your stuff or it will become a road blocker.
Me: Why it is not working?
D: Because I used the same table as you used, and I changed a few things. there are 22 reasons for it.
(polite conversation stopped and I redirected him to my manager)
WTF? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? YOU CHANGED MY STUFF WITHOUT TELLING ME AND YOU ARE NOT USING ANY SOURCE CONTROL? WTF? YOU CREATED THIS SHIT AND CALL MY STUFF NOT WORKING? ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT?
CUT YOUR FINGERS AND POINT TO YOURSELF.2 -
So... Just overheard a conversation at an Apple store...
tl;dr;
The customer gets furious for not getting to buy a mac pro for the price he wants and it doesn't even include the monitor there.....
C - customer, S - Sales person.
C: Hey, I've heard that apple released new home computers. May I get one?
S: Hello, they are not out yet.
C: WHAT?! How can they not be out yet? They released it like a week ago.
S: Well, they announced it, not officially released it for sale.
C: Ah, whatever. Can I pre-order it now?
S: Sure, we'll need your details and a deposit.
C: What? A deposit for what? That $1000 machine?
S: Sir, do you know the prices?
C: Of course. They have released a new machine and it will cost like previous ones - from $1000.
S: Then you might be talking about Macbook Air...
C: *Interrupts* No, I'm talking about the desktop computer, the whole box.
S: Ok... It starts at ~$6000.
C: WHAT?! It can't be... Oh well, I'll buy it. I hope it's the fully-specked one. Oh and does it come with a monitor?
S: No sir. It's the base model and it has no monitors.
C: WHAT?! How can this be?
S: You see, these are devices created for professionals. They are not for home users since our iMac line is....
C: *Interrupts again* Are you saying I'm not a professional?
S: I'm sorry but by the questions and lack of information - it seems to be true - you are not a professional.
C: FUCK YOU, I'm going to another store and they will sell it for me for $1000. What a piece of crap is this.
*Customer leaves furiously*
S: *to another S* - What is wrong with that dude? Is he high or what?
S2: *shrugs* and tells that it's the 5th time someone came to order that pc and was scared by the price.
---
So yeah... It's fun to see how idiots think that anything apple releases is for them... Once again I was made sure that apple fans are brainless fucks that will buy anything it produces and if that is not in the right price - they'll get furious.
ps. I own apple product, mac pro 2015. Would never buy a newer one NOR an iphone. I don't think that anyone is dumb just for buying it - people buy whatever fits their needs and that's ok but... More than we would like to admit - people buy it because it's an apple product....23 -
Dear all wonderful ranters,
I apologize profusely in advance if over the next few days I cannot contain my anger at people and rant about non-dev things. I promise I will try my best to not do this, but there are very few places (none) other than here where I feel comfortable enough to express myself freely and not censor my words.
I will be working as a security guard (3rd job) for a car show full of pretentious assholes who have a tendency to think I'm their servant. I have wonderful bosses who have my back, and there are truly amazing people in attendance as well, but if someone tries to run me over again after a long ass day, I might need to vent.
I fully accept any and all down votes, and will likely delete the rant after it's out of my system, unless there's a conversation going in comments (I wouldn't do that to you).
Please bear with me while I try boot to strangle everyone I come across. I'm hoping this year is the year everyone is nice, but history tells me that's naive and won't happen.
All my love,
Your (co)queen who may end up arrested for using her bionic arm to rip their balls off and feed them to their wives10 -
This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...
Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]
Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.
[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]
Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.
May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.
[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]
Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.
[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]
Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.
Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.
On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.6 -
Recruiter: are you interested in a client side java role?
Me: yes, here is my client side resume please submit me
Recruiter: sorry the hiring manager said they are looking for more of a back-end engineer
Me: you told me it was a client side role, please resubmit me with my back-end geared resume
Recruiter: yes that's correct, it's client side, we'll keep you in mind for the future but you should know there is a difference between mobile devs and web devs
Me: what you just said is not relevant to this conversation. I would be happy to discuss the diff between front-end and back-end, client vs server, etc.
Recruiter: I'm just relaying what the hiring manager is saying to me
Me: your [lack of] ability to relay technical information is quite apparent :/
*lesson learned*: interview recruiters before they start interviewing me
Unbelievable waste of time, how do these people even make a living? FML!16 -
I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:
http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y
then:
http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh
Twat Client,
As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.
As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.
After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.
It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.
{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},
I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.
I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.
Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.
As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.
He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.
I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.
Reply from ClientClient:
Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.
Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:
I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.
Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?
Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.
Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?
... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!
My email follow up:
http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV
I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.14 -
So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.
So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"
The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.
How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.
At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.
And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.
"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."
Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."
"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.
"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back
*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.
At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^
You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.17 -
As a German developer living in Germany, I am used to write my code completely in English. In all of my former companies that was also the norm. In one company, we even talked completely in English with each other to a point where even if only German people where in a room, they would default to English at one point in a conversation because it became second nature to us.
(That company was very international and we had a lot of people from all over the world working there.)
Now, I work at a new German company that focuses on the German market. And for some reason I failed to ask them:
Do you write your code in English?
Because that's the norm, isn't it!? I just assumed it to be the case.
Nope! This time it is a mess of German and English term intermixing in glorious abysmal ways I never thought possible.
Sometimes we translate terms, sometimes we don't. So you have to wrap your mind around collections of words that COULD mean the same thing unless they don't. Best case, you have two words for the same thing, but I've seen up to five words (or abbreviations) to describe one business entity. Madness.
And don't get me started on the plurals. In English, it's almost exclusively: add an `s`.
In German, the singular and plural can be the same (e.g. all nouns ending with `-er`) so tough luck determining if you are on an object or an array of objects. (Weak typing language in use does not help either but that's an entirely different rant.)25 -
Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..
Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:
Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?
Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..
Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.
Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..
Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.
Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.
Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..
Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***
WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?
Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...6 -
Lord forgive me for laughing too hard at this person/situation... I kid you NOT!
So today while everything was going well, we suddenly had network issues at work. We worked to get everything back up online asap and then sent out an email for those affected to either restart their machines or refresh their desktops but we recommend restarting... After some few client calls, this special call came in..
Riiing, riiiiiing, ring....
Me: hi, how can help you?
Client: *laughing.. This is probably a stupid question but I forgot how to "refresh" my desk top..the thing is, I have Febreeze but I don't think that's for desk tops.
Me: Wait, what? 🤔 Febreeze for what?😕
Client: You guys sent an email to refresh our desk tops and I said I have Febreeze so how will that get my things in the computer back to show again?
Me: Ohhh, no no. We meant your computer desktop. You don't need Febreeze. Right click anywhere on your computer in the screen and select refresh from the pop up menu. We meant your computer "desktop" not your actual "desk top".
Client: *starts laughing...I told you it was a stupid question
Me: don't worry.. It wasn't stupid.
After I hang up, some of my team members asked me why someone is asking about Febreeze...I told them and they all started laughing hysterically
I was still trying to digest the conversation I had just have on the phone. 😂😂😂12 -
So one year ago I was working at this company from the US, me being in Europe, which automatically implies there is several hours of timezone difference.
The eng. manager decided we would have a release tomorrow (decision was made one month earlier), and stuff was being prepped up to make that happen.
In the US the workday was about lunch time and in EU it was one hour before finishing. The manager gets us in a meeting and asks me and another dude to do some testing that would take several hours to do. This testing could have been done several days or weeks earlier.
40 minutes after that meeting I get a private message from the PM asking for the status of the test...
Me: aaa.. well I started it and will continue tomorrow
Manager: wait what? we have launch tomorrow, this testing has to be done by tomorrow
Me: it's the end of the workday here, I got personal errands that I have to attend to
Manager: uhm ok ... I see...
I was just messaging something in the public chat right before calling it a day and the manager writes "thanks for the input, your day is over now", completely out of context to the conversation I was having with whomever.
There was no question of "can you stay extra hours and do this?", there was no "hey, I know your day is over we will pay you premium hours with this amount as according to our contract, could you do this now as we have release tomorrow?" ..no ..just .. "do it!". I automatically assumed that ..hey, maybe he wants to do this during and after the live launch (and yes I do admit my mistake of not asking just to be clear, but I assumed the manager knows that there is a timezone difference ..like it's a no brainer).
I can not tell you the heat sensation I had after that last reply from the manager ... it was completely uncalled for, and unreasonable.
I mean why not make a pre-launch phase where you put stuff on the staging server, and perform all the necessary tests and then when you get all the green lights from testing you then proceed with the actual deploy? ...no ... mention this like right at the end of the day before the launch....
And another thing that scratched my neuronal cortex is, how does he know exactly how long the tests would take?12 -
Lying bastard of a teacher.
Context:
This is year I'll graduate from my high school. But before that we have to pass the final examination. One part of that examination is presenting a project, which we should complete within this year. Each student has to choose a mentor/supervisor to help him on them on their project. I chose a professor who'll leave the school in January because of her pregnancy.
This is the part where the bastard, who asked me whether I use HTML or CSS for a website, barges in.
Given the fact that he incompetence be matched by his arrogance, nobody would ever choose him. He has to watch while other ring the other professors. He asks desperately for students, but everyone already has a mentor.
Yesterday he told me that my mentor will leave this January and that she already WROTE him an email where she asked him to continue mentoring her students. I was kinda confused, so I told him I would talk it over with my mentor and guve him an answer on a later date.
Today the truth comes forth. She didn't write anything. This bastard invented all of it. She even told us that she is aware of this guy is incompetent and that she would have asked a teacher with a good reputation.
But I'm furious. Not only did he waste my precious time with that conversation, which he follow up with the most basic way of time managing you could think of.
HE STRAIGHT UP LIED TO STUDENTS TRYING TO BOOST HIS NONEXISTENT REPUTATION.
I am not comfortable with a person like that being able to give me marks. Just yeet him out already!7 -
Fresh internship story/conversation (Part 1)
Happened today:
- "Can you hack someone via cmd?"-cheap coworker at my internship workplace
- "Can you hack the NSA from any device?"-cheap coworker
- "Can the police identify me, if my face is on a Youtube video?"-cheap coworker
- "I can see all devices I have been through when I want to connect to a target as a route.
*talks about hops in a trace route, but uses non-technical terms for it*
*uses "ping host wikihow.com" instead of "tracert wikihow.com" to demonstrate it, besides of that "host" was not supposed to be there in that command*
*he had to google how to use the ping command on Windows*
*finally uses the ping command properly*
"Here, you can see all the devices our machine has connected to to reach the target"
ME: Aha. But dude... you know that all these ip adresses are in fact the same ip. These IPs are not any different. They are all the same. Besides of that this IP is the IP of this *points to domain name on windows cli* domain.
Him: Oh... I had a friend named ... *continues telling me some "hacker stories" from his past*
Me: *ignores him and always just responds with "Aha" to him* -cheap coworker
Happened yesterday:
- "You have programming classes? You must be an expert in Excel then, right?" -internship boss3 -
Yeah, if my so called "friends" can just stop making me feel guilty for staying in with my son instead of going out having beers in pretentious clubs, with music blasting at a billion decibels that we can't even have a decent conversation.
If you could just stop; that would be great.
I'm sorry I have to work. I'm sorry I can't leave my 6 year old alone in the house on a school night. I'm sorry I don't have an army of maids to look after him. I'm sorry I don't have personal drivers to take him to school. I'm sorry if your family or your wife's family is so fucking rich you're basically a kept man and now bored out of your wits.
Please, just fuck off with this toxic behavior. We are not in our 20s anymore.
Thank you.6 -
I just had my very first salary negotiation in my entire life and now I just want to hide under my bed.
Why is it so damn painful!?
It’s not like I’m asking for sacks of money, but I also have to think about what allows me to have a place to live & what valuable skills I offer
Both parties should get an acceptable outcome right!?
Like there’s no insurance, no benefits.
Having this conversation so soon may have been a mistake. Fuck
I hate this feeling!
Ok wake me up in January24 -
I’m working for fucking idiots. Here is an actual conversation I had with my boss today.
Me: I checked the numbers, and barely anyone is using our app more than once. Not only is a minuscule amount of people downloading it (we have 300 downloads), but none of those people use it more than once. Use retention is important and we’re failing in that regard.
Boss: User retention doesn’t matter. Investors don’t care about that. Blah blah blah all we need is marketing blah blah. We just need a bunch of people to download once. That’s all that marketers care about....in fact, an potential investor himself told me that he doesn’t care (obvious lie)
Me: Well, can I talk to this investor? What’s his name? Is he in California or India/China?
Boss: oh you can’t be at the investor meeting. It’s high level. Just don’t worry about it. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.
On the bright side, this whole exchange has motivated me even more in my quest to find a new job. And I guess it’s important to learn what not to do from idiots6 -
What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!
I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.
Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.
So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.
Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!
I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.
After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:
"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."
So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".
While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.
Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.5 -
The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.
I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.
They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.
Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.
The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:
- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5
A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.
Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.
So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.
While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:
- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database
All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.
According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.
#TheValueOfEngineers2 -
Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.
I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.
I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".
My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.
Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.
This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.
After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.
Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)
After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).
Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.
After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".
The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.
I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)
5 -
Recap: https://www.devrant.io/rants/878300
I was out Thursday at the Hospital. I'm what the doctors would call "Ill as fuck"
So, Friday I’m back in the office to the usual: "How was that appointment?"
I know people mean well when they ask this. So, I do the polite thing and tell them it went as well as it could.
Realistically it does't matter how well it went... They haven't cured Crohn's because I showed up to the appointment. They know I'm fucked already.
But, push it down, add it to the future aneurism.
I had to go through the usual resignation meetings with managers:
"We"re fucked now you're going"
"yep"
"we need to get a handle on how fucked"
"already done that for you, here"s a trello board, very fucked."
"we need to put a plan together to drop all the junior devs in the shit with the work you’ve been doing"
"You need about 4 devs, please refer to the previous trello board for your plan"
Meanwhile, me and Morpheus are in constant communication because all of this is like a Shakespearean comedy.
So, I overhear a conversation between a Junior Dev and the Solution Architect.
[SA] took over the project because he knows better than two tried and tested senior devs -_- (fuckwit).
JD: "It took me one and a half days to build it out"
SA: "Yeah, it must have taken me twice as long... It must be a problem with the project, you should just be able to check it out and run it."
JD: "I know, it has to be wrong"
All of this is about Morpheus' work of art, of an Ionic 3 hybrid app.
I fumed quietly at my desk because I've been ordered by the Stazi to be hands off.
Since Morpheus and me were pulled from the project [JD] and [JD2] were dropped into it to get it over the line.
It"s unfortunate and I was clear and honest with my advice to them: I personally would not take over the project because I"d be way out of my depth... Oh, and the App works, so uh, there's no work to do.
They have been constantly at our desks. Asking fuckdiculous questions about how to perform basic tasks. So they can get Morpheus" frigging masterpiece to the user.
It"s like watching that touch up of jesus that got borked by an amateur. Shit I have google, it's like watching this happen: http://ti.me/NnNSAb
[JD] came to me Friday evening.
"I can’t get this to build to iOS or install on [Test Analyst]'s phone."
Me: "No worries brother, where are you stuck right now?"
[JD] describes the first steps with clear indication he hasn't googled his problem.
Life lesson: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy
Que an hour of me showing [JD] how to build an Ion3 project for iOS. Fuck it, your man's in a bind and he"s asked politely for help. I can show him quicker than he can read 3 sets of docos.
I took him through 'ionic cordova build ios', the archive and release processes in XCode 9, then the apk bundling process for droid. Finally we have an MAM so the upload process for that too.
All the while cleaning up his AppIDs, Profiles, deployment attempts.
Damn they were a mess.
I did this with a smile on my face, not because I could say "I told you so"... But. because when any developer asks you how to do something. If you know how to do it, you should always be happy to learn them some new tricks!
Dude's alright, he's been dropped in the shit. Now I know how badly so I'll help him learn things that are useful to his role, but aren't project specific.
As a plausi-senior dev (I'll tell you about that later); it's my job to make sure my team have what they need to go home smiling!
I’m not a hateful fucker, the guy asked me an honest question so I am happy to give him the honest answer.
I took him through it a few times and explained a few best practices. Most were how to do his AppID and ProvProfile set up. Good lad, took it all on board.
However! In his frustration, he pointed the finger at Morpheus' "David" (ref: Michelangelo).
He miraculously morphed into a shiny colourful parrot and fed me SA's line:
"you should just be able to build from a clean clone"
My response was calm and clear:
"You can, it took me 20 minutes on Thursday evening. I was bored and curios, so I wanted to validate Morpheus' work. Here it is on my iOS device and my Android device. It would have taken me 5 if my laptop wasn’t so horrifically out of date."
I validated Morpheus' work so I have evidence, I trust that brilliant bastard.
I just need to be able to prove it's good.
[JD] took this on board.
Maybe listening to two tried and trusted senior devs is better than listening to a headstrong Solution Architect.
When JD left for the weekend I was working a late one (https://www.devrant.io/rants/874765).
His sign off was beautiful.
"I think I can happily admit defeat on this one, it can wait until Monday."
To which I replied: "no worries brother, if you need a hand give me a shout."
Rule 1: Don't be a cunt.
Rule 2: If someone needs help and you can give it: Give it!
Rule 3: Don't interrupt James' cigarette time.
Rule 4: goto Rule 3.rant day 3 jct resigns crohns resignation solution architect wk71 invisible illness fuckwit illness junior developer4 -
I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.
I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).
She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).
So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.
Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.
She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).
So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.
Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.9 -
Here's a conversation I had at work:
Me: "this project that I've inherited, aside from the UI problems it has, it also has severe code problems that need to be fixed"
Project Manager: "I don't care about the code. The code is not my concern. Don't waste time on it and just make the app look good."5 -
You wanted to hear more about my "glorious" teacher. I deliver. So get a cup of tea, take a seat and prepare for insanity.
As I already told in a comment my programming teacher is one special snowflake who lives in his personal bubble. We have final exams in less than a month and he spents at least half a lesson talking about vanishing bees and missing plants from his garden. Other topics he likes to talk about (and tries to turn every freaking conversation into at least one of these):
1. Other students and their stupidity
2. Diesel scandal
3. His sick wife
4. "Why does noone read newspapers anymore?"
5. Why he can't teach Java but really really really wants to and everyone hates him and forces him to do C#.
Even if I try to interrupt him he'll go on until he thinks we gained some "common knowledge" - this is how he justifies these topics.
Everytime he introduced us to a new command he compared it to Java and sometimes he even falsely corrects code because he confuses them.
We are only 6 people including me (another story for another time) and he is not able to help everyone during a 90min lesson. He normally sticks with one person for at least one hour and just talks to them or even do their tasks. This is really annoying if you have a simple question. He won't answer you until he's finished whatever he's doing.
Most of the time he doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about/trying to teach us. He's muttering statements from our textbook to himself switching halfway through to another sentence while drawing not decipherable shit on the blackboard.
Another gem are his "guidelines" for classtests. We are allowed to use any command we know. Except the ones we learned not in class. And the ones he doesn't like. And the ones he doesn't want to exist. And of course not the ones which make you're life easier. So basically we are bound to use his favourite commands or we won't get a good grade. Example: use an array. List is not allowed. Never.
He has some weird fetish with arrays.
I once presented him perfectly fine code I wrote in my freetime and asked what some warnings meant. (Was because of different Visual studio versions as I learned later.) He scolded me for using things he didn't taught us yet and ranted about how I'm pressuring him into rushing these things now - I never wanted to show this to my classmates nor was this anything else than a project for fun and learning something new. (FYI the "new stuff" where classes and objects because i was tired of kilometers of spaghetti code). His rant went on a good 20minutes and - obviously - he didn't answer my question. I asked my fiance that evening and he explained it to me.
This should it be for this time. I'm sure I have more stories to tell for another time!
Thank you for reading. ^^5 -
Boss: Client wants those stockphotos for the frontpage.
Me: ok. Please license them and let me know. I will upload them to the page.
Boss: How does that work then?
Me: you have to buy the five credit package. Here is the link...
Boss: (no response)
...few days later...
Boss: please remember to upload those images...
Me: well ok. Did you buy them?
Boss: isn't that your thing?
Me: I don't understand. You had all the info. You new where to buy them. You knew what images to buy since the client sent the preview versions. What do you need? ...and why didn't you tell me that you were waiting for my input? I was the last one to reply to this conversation.
Boss: i don't want to buy the wrong images.
Me: just buy the ones the client chose.
Boss: I don't want to look up the email he sent them in.
Me: I don't understand. I directly replied to that mail. It is in the same conversation.
Boss: ok.
...day later...
Boss sends me mail with images attached.
Boss: are those the right images?
Me: well yes. Those are the ones the client sent. I don't have more information than you.
(Me looking at the attachments and finding them in the smallest resolution available.)
Me: why did you download the images in the smallest resolution? It does not make any difference in price.
Boss: well I thought they were not needed in a bigger size.
Me: why do you make my options intentionally smaller? I am the guy doing frontend.
..please give me the login info for the stock account so I can download the images in a better resolution.8
