Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0

Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.

Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.

Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.

Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!

Naturally, I escalate the issue.

Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.

Day 34

I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.

Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.

Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.

A wild Darwin Award nominee appears.

Background: Admins report that a legacy nightly update process isn't working. Ticket actually states problem is obviously in "the codes."

Scene: Meeting with about 20 people to triage the issue (blamestorming)

"Senior" Admin: "update process not working, the file is not present"
Moi: "which file?"
SAdmin: "file that is in ticket, EPN-1003"
Moi: "..." *grumbles, plans murder, opens ticket*
...
Moi: "The config dotfile is missing?"
SAdmin: "Yes, file no there. Can you fix?"
Moi: "Engineers don't have access to the production system. Please share your screen"
SAdmin: "ok"
*time passes, screen appears*
Moi: "ls the configuration dir"
SAdmin: *fails in bash* > ls

*computer prints*
> ls
_.legacyjobrc

Moi: *sees issues, blood pressure rises* "Please run list all long"
SAdmin: *fails in bash, again* > ls ?
Moi: *shakes* "ls -la"
SAdmin: *shonorable mention* > ls -la

*computer prints*
> ls -la
total 1300
drwxrwxrwx- 18 SAdmin {Today} -- _.legacyjobrc

Moi: "Why did you rename the config file?"
SAdmin: "Nothing changed"
Moi: "... are you sure?"
SAdmin: "No, changed nothing."
Moi: "Is the job running as your account for some reason?"
SAdmin: "No, job is root"
Moi: *shares screenshot of previous ls* This suggests your account was likely used to rename the dotfile, did you share your account with anyone?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because could not see"
Moi: *heavy seething* so, just to make sure I understand, you renamed a dotfile because you couldn't see it in the terminal with ls?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because it was not visible, now is visible"
Moi: "and then you filed a ticket because the application stopped working after you renamed the configuration file? You didn't think there might be a correlation between those two things?"
SAdmin: "yes, it no work"
Interjecting Director: "How did no one catch this? Why were there no checks, and why is there no user interface to configure this application? When I was writing applications I cared about quality"
Moi: *heavy seething*
IDjit: "Well? Anyone? How are we going to fix this"
Moi: "The administrative team will need to rename the file back to its original name"
IDjit: "can't the engineering team do this?!"
Moi: "We could, but it's corporate policy that we have no access to those environments"
IDjit: "Ok, what caused this issue in the first place? How did it get this way?!"

TFW you think you've hit the bottom of idiocy barrel, and the director says, "hold my mango lassi."

"Opps.. I'm sorry, but you have insufficient rights to open this Ticket."

Well. You know what? I AM THE FUCKING SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR YOU CUNT!
YOU HAVE INSUFFICIENT RIGHTS to restrict me access to that fucking ticket!

"Oh. In that case, go ahead."

THANK YOU. FUCKING PRICK.

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.

Client: so how could we test this 😬
Me: you know what, send me an email at linuxxx@companyname.com and I can look if I can properly reply! Keep in mind though that this is for one time only, no further questions through that email address!
Client: Yes of course! *sends email*
Me: *tests* - *works fine* - *messages client back through the ticket system*
Client: *proceeds to send two follow up questions to my fucking work email address*

Me: *selects emails* - *marks emails as spam and deletes them*

Fucking seriously?! Cunt.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!

Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?

Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?

User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?

Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.

User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

I was hired as a senior software engineer. During handover I found out I'm actually replacing the CTO.

I queried why he was leaving and got a simple "just want a break from working" which I found odd.

Fast forward and now I also just want a break from work, permanently. This place has followed every bad practise and big no-no out there. Every bit of software is a built in house knockoff janky piece of crap that doesn't work and makes people's jobs 5000 times harder.

The UI looks worse than Windows 3.1, absolutely horrendous code formatting, worst database structure I've ever seen.

The mere mention of using a team communication tool results in being yelled at from the CEO whom communicates purely via email, who then gets annoyed when you don't reply because they sent the email to a client instead of you.

We get handed printed out "tickets" to work instead of the so called "amazing in house ticket system" built using PHP 5 and is literally crammed into an 800x600 IFrame. Yes a F$*#ing IFRAME!

It's not like we have an outdated TFS server that has work items we can use...

Why not push for changes you say. I have, many times, tried to suggest better tools. The only approval I've gotten is using PhpStorm. Everything else is shutdown immediately and you get the silent treatment.

The CEO hired me to do a job, then micromanages like crazy. I can't make UI changes, I can't make database changes, why? They insists they know best, but has admitted multiple times to not knowing SQL and literally uses a drag and drop database table builder.

Every page in the webapps we make are crammed into 800x600 iframes with more iframes inside iframes. And every time it's pointed out we need to do something, be it from internal staff or client suggestions, the CEO goes off about how the UI is industry leading and follows standards.. what in the actual f....

Literally holding on by a thread here. Why hire a CTO under the guise of being a senior developer but then reduce the work that can be done down to the level of a junior?

Sure the paycheck is really nice but no job is worth the stress, harassment and incompetent leadership from the CEO.

They've verbally abused people to the point they resign, best part is that was simply because the CEO made serious legal mistakes, was told about it by the employee then blamed it on others.

Coolest project: I once worked for a customer who hosted an exhibition for a few thousand visitors in a big event arena in Stockholm.

They didn't want to use the existing ticket reading system on the arena so I had to build my own application compatible with barcode scanners (they said this about one week before the event).

It wasn't a complicated application to dev but with the tight deadline and no time to actually stress test it, it was the coolest thing to see hundreds of people streaming through the ticket station flawlessly.

Day 2 of the event I built a simple web application so I could see the flow rate of read tickets while I sat in the arena pub with a beer.

This is so fucking, fucking annoying.

Client (through ticket system): here's new nameservers my domain has to use, please enter them thank you!"
Me: you can easily do that yourself! *gives link to extremely fucking easy click-done tutorial*
Client: oh but I'm not technical, could you please do it anyways?

HAVE YOU EVEN FUCKING LOOKED AT THE LINK?!

THIS SHIT HAPPENS EVERY GODDAMN DAY.

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.

I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.

Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.

Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.

Anyway.

Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.

This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.

Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.

It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.

It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

Walked into the office in the afternoon, everyone was kinda panicking
Asked what was going on, well, the ticket system is not working anymore, can't put in any new tickets.
So I started to look for the issue as well, checked the system and... The last tickets' IDs were at ~32k. Ha. Looked into the source code and, sure enough, they used a data type with an upper limit of... 32k. So when trying to get a new ticket ID it just crashed and burned.
Quickly changed the data type and stopped the office panic in around half an hour.
Memorable not because of how tough the bug was, but because of the impact and the simplicity of the fix

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

paraphrased

C: "hey, we've seen the ticket resolved with a bug bounty rewarded to you! congratulations!"
C: "we've talked about it today on our meeting and think we deserve 85% - since it was discovered by you while working on our contract and system!"

That was so bizarre to me and I was speechless for a good 10 minutes, didn't even have any witty reply afterwards.

I just cancelled the contract, reported the client to my middleman, explained it to the on-sight business contact and requested the final milestone to be released with one week notice until it gets to be a public case if not released through escrow.

I'm still somewhat shocked at how greedy one can be, the whole system package I was working on had estimated 150-300k post first week launch (tons of existing clients merged and unified into one system, with much more paid and feature stuff etc.), the bounty I got was around 3.5k, it still didn't sink in me.

I have been gone a while. Sorry. Workplace no longer allows phones on the lab and I work exclusively in the lab. Anyway here is a thing that pissed me off:

Systems Engineer (SE) 1 : 😐 So we have this file from the customer.
Me: 😑 Neat.
SE1: 😐 It passes on our system.
Me: 😑 *see prior*
Inner Me (IM): 🙄 is it taught in systems engineer school to talk one sentence at a time? It sounds exhausting.
SE1: but when we test it on your system, it fails. And we share the same algorithms.
Me: 😮 neat.
IM: 😮neat, 😥 wait what the fuck?
Me: 😎 I will totally look into that . . .
IM: 😨 . . . Thing that is absolutely not supposed to happen.

*Le me tracking down the thing and fixing it. Total work time 30 hours*

Me: 😃 So I found the problem and fixed it. All that needs to happen is for review board to approve the issue ticket.
SE1: 😀 cool. What was the problem?
Me: 😌 simple. See, if the user kicked off a rerun of the algorithm, we took your inputs, processed them, and put them in the algorithm. However, we erroneously subtracted 1 twice, where you only subtract 1 once.
SE1: 🙂 makes sense to me, since an erroneous minus 1 only effects 0.0001% of cases.

*le into review board*

Me: 😐 . . . so in conclusion this only happens in 0.0001% of cases. It has never affected a field test and if this user had followed the user training this would never have been revealed.
SE2: 🤨 So you're saying this has been in the software for how long?
Me: 😐 6 years. Literally the lifespan of this product.
SE2: 🤨 How do you know it's not fielded?
Me: 😐 It is fielded.
SE2: 🤨 how do you know that this problem hasn't been seen in the field?
Me: 😐 it hasn't been seen in 6 years?
IM: 😡 see literally all of the goddamn words I have said this entire fucking meeting!!!
SE2: 😐 I would like to see an analysis of this to see if it is getting sent to the final files.
Me: 🙄 it is if they rerun the algorithm from our product. It's a total rerun, output included. It's just never been a problem til this one super edge case that should have been thrown out anyway.
SE2: 🤨 I would still like to have SE3 run an analysis.
Me: 🙄 k.
IM: 😡 FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOU

*SE3 run analysis*

SE3: 😐 getting the same results that Me is seeing.
Me: 😒 see? I do my due diligence.
SE2: 😐 Can you run that analysis on this file again that is somehow different, plus these 5 unrelated files?
SE3: 😎 sure. What's your program's account so I can bill it?
IM: 😍 did you ever knooooow that your my heeeerooooooo.

*SE3 runs analysis*

SE3: 😐 only the case that was broken is breaking.
SE2: 😐 Good.
IM: 🤬🤬🤬🤐 . . . 🤯WHY!?!?
Me: 😠 Why?
SE2: 😑 Because it confirms my thoughts. Me, I am inviting you to this algorithm meeting we have.
Me/IM: 😑/😡 what . . . the fuck?

*in algorithm meeting*

Me: 😑 *recaps all of the above* we subtract 1 one too many times from a number that spans from 10000 to -10000.
Software people/my boss/SE1/SE3: 🤔 makes sense.
SE2:🤨 I have slides that have an analysis of what Me just said. They will only take an hour to get through.
Me: 😑 that's cool but you need to give me your program's account number, because this has been fixed in our baseline for a week and at this point you're the only program that still cares. Actually I need the account to charge for the last couple times you interrupted me for some bullshit.

*we are let go.*

And this is how I spent 40+ useless hours against a program that is currently overrunning for no reason 🤣🤣🤣

Moral: never involve math guys in arithmetic situations. And if you ever feel like you're wasting your time, at least waste someone else's money.

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Internal support article to get access to a tool:

"To get access click 'NO' in the 'was this article helpful section' and open a support ticket, making sure to mention the tool you are looking to get access to"

What fucking fresh hell is this? Why not have the article, contain the fucking link to open the ticket.

You have intentionally put up a useless article, in order to hack your way around this stupid system.

Worst part of being a dev:

Writing down an issue in the ticket system for somebody else took longer then fixing the issue yourself.

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Manager: Messages not visible! bug ticket!!!!

Dev: oh fuck, there's an issue with our chat system, not good! _inspects ticket_ oh, it's just a display issue that actually is according to the previous spec, yawn...

Dev: please describe the bug better next time, I though we had a major outage, this is simply a small design issue...

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

I think I'm quitting soon guys. I literally do not get paid enough to deal with these incompetent idiots each day.

Meanwhile:

Management: forget your shitty salary, take one for the team, you get 3% of the shares in the company!!!!

Dev: what fucking shares, you haven't even converted to a corporation yet, THERE ARE NO SHARES

Management: ...

Dev: ...

Oh yeah and they called me at 6:30 PM today: "so i guess you are winding down for the day"

fuck outta here i haven't been working since 5 you fucks

jesus i swear some people need to screw their fucking head on straight, so far gone into the hUsTlE CuLtUrE they don't even know what reality is anymore

TL;DR Client managing their own ticket is never a good idea.

So my client got access to their own ticketing system. Now instead of going the usual route, they assign the tickets directly. Sometimes going as far as editing the tickets themselves.

But the biggest issue has been the Estimated Resolution Time. This is what happened when I asked about it.

Me: So I noticed that you started including an estimated time of completion.

Client: Yeah, it's an internal thing to help us identify when things will be done and where to focus our attention.

Me: Ok, and what is this time based on? (How do you, a non-dev, can decide how long it should take?)

Client: Oh don't worry it's just an internal thing. You won't be measured against it.

Me: (Sure) Alright, I'm just letting you know that I will be changing these as necessary.

I basically ignored the conversation after this. But the fucker still gives me absurd deadlines. Seriously, what makes managers think they know how long a development should take?

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

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

Ticket: Allow merchants to customize how their Wallet Passes look! It’ll be super easy, just add these nine merchant-modifiable strings (they support vars) and use their contents for text instead of what we use now. Simple!

Reality: There need to be 24 strings, there are some rules I can’t convey to the merchant (because the system literally does not include instructions, only a name and a textbox), the code to generate the wallet pass is inefficient, uncommented, branching spaghetti that I’ll need to rewrite (it seriously generates every possible field, and then only uses the ones it needs), the specs are so much worse, and half the default values they want aren’t even possible. As in, I don’t know if it’s a car loan, let alone the exact make and model of the bloody thing.

And no, sorry, we have no way of knowing what their fucking “vertical” is, either, so we can’t display that. Fucking sales.

Asdhkjfsjfads

WHY MUST EVERYTHING SUCK

Every Group Project in CS Major
Group 1:- Hey group 2 what project are you making ..?
Group 2:- Can't tell , Top Secret

FINAL Day:-
Group 1:- Railway Ticket Booking System
Group 2:-Railway Ticket Authorization System

Evaluators :- I think I saw similar idea somewhere....😂

Ticket: "I have questions about the system."
Nothing else. What are your questions???? Please tell me

Dear project managers,

Learn to use the fucking ticketing system. And by "use" I don't mean emailing IT asking them to open a ticket for you.

#GrowUpPinheads

Sales: "There is a problem in complicated feature A, in a client system!
Dev: "What is the problem"
Sales: "I don't know exactly"
Dev: "which client system? What version is installed?"
Sales: crickets.
Dev: "Do you a Jira ticket, or an email with more details?"
Sales: "It is urgent that we fix the problem ASAP!"
Dev: "what problem"
Sales: "The problem! I talked to the VP RnD, So he can make sure you are on it!"
Dev: "What exactly do you me to fix"
Sales: "The Problem!"

Just pushed my first ever ticket to production! AAAND on top of that, did not take down our entire system. 😅

This happened when I got my first IT support job. Naturally as a 1st line support you get to do the fun and not at all tedious thing of resetting passwords.

So I take a ticket from one of our HR people where they say that 3 new employees can't access a certain system.

Without going into too much detail here I reset the passwords according to our procedures and be done with it.

But at the end of the day it turns out that one of those 3 new employees was the new CEO, and he was known to be not the most pleasant of people to work with.

So ofc there was a chain of emails with the words "How can someone not know who I am" in there somewhere.

Had a nice stressful weekend wondering if I'll still have a job after Monday and we had a whole new password reset procedure created because of that.

Gaming community of mine launched their slick new website with their new "ticket system" where people could put in tickets to get help by volunteers.

2 hours and an approval by one of the admins later I managed to inject forge http request into literally every form on that side. Modify permissions, delete users, edit tickets, put invalid values into every attribute of them... In other words break everything.
Turns out the whole thing was coded as a first time project by a person who has no clue about web development and noone is in charge of anything really. There are no requirements, no beta testing, no version control or backups, but at least they had a hard deadline. 🤣

Still not sure if I wanna fix their shit and do it properly or just enjoy seeing it crash and burn.

I swear, if I ever were to develop a support ticket system, I'd require credit card credentials for P1 tickets - "for covering potential costs to get the developer to the computer at this point in time". Let's see how many of your fucking tickets are Business critical after all!

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

My company hired a new person on my team. He was scheduled to start on a Monday but pushed back a week at the last minute. The rumor around the office was that his flight home that weekend was canceled, but he didn’t notify our boss of it until minutes before he was expected in.

Next Monday he didn’t come in, and no one could get in touch with him. We eventually discovered that he was in jail. He claimed he was pulled over on the way to work for a traffic violation, then found out he had an outstanding warrant from a traffic ticket mix-up over ten years ago. Unsurprisingly, when he did make it in later that week, he was immediately fired.

I’m wondering how reasonable it was to fire him. A responsible, organized friend of mine also got in trouble from a traffic ticket she was never notified of, so I know his story isn’t impossible and doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. On the other hand, missing your start day because you’re in jail is never a good look — doubly so after he pushed back his start date the first time. My company has a very open culture so I would have some room to encourage us not to put inappropriate weight on what is often a very flawed legal system.

We started a project in January for which I was the sole developer, to automate tedious interaction with a vendor's ticketing system. We have a storage environment with about 400,000 commodity disks attached(for this vendor-- there are other vendors too), in sites around the US and Canada. With a weekly failure rate of about 0.0005%, that means about 200 disks a week need to be replaced.

This work-- hardware investigation through storage appliance frontends, internal ticket creation, external ticket creation, watching the external ticket for updates to include in our internal ticket --was all manual, and for around 200 issues a week, it was done by one guy for two years. He was hopelessly behind. This is all automated now, and this morning, I pushed this automation from dev/test to production.

It feels great to see your work helping people around you.

After three hours of emailing with a customer I can confirm that programmers are the worst customers.
Customer: We've found a bug in the system... <details>
Me: Thank you for letting us know, a ticket has been created and the issue is most likely to be fixed in the next release.
Customer: Please grant me UPDATE privileges in the live(!) database so I can fix it myself
Me: I cannot allow that. You have to use the client software for maintaining your data.
Customer: No, I don't want to spend my day clicking. I want to write queries.

We didn't reply to the last one yet...
If we give him access, then I would charge them at least 3x for fixing issues caused by him.

I am driven nearly to blind rage by people who insist on sending you issues as emails and just keep piling more emails on the same thread. For the love of everything decent learn to use a mother FUCKING ticket system.

Everything's urgent until every thing is urgent ... Or in my company's case, everything is "super dupa mega deathly critical urgent" in an attempt to out-urgent the other requests 🤦🏼‍♂️

Quote taken from an actual email this week and made me chuckle 😂

These are usually the same people that will send a teams message or direct email rather than using the established ticket system so hey, double rant :v

Storytime!

I got a ticket near the end of the day, asking to install a printer on a computer. The branch in question was in a different time zone (I'm in US-Pacific [GMT-07] and the computer was in US-Eastern [GMT-04]). I figured I wouldn't worry about it; after all, I had other tickets to work on that were much higher priority.

The next day I come into work and immediately get a message from one of my East Coast coworkers, telling me that this branch is calling and asking how the printer is coming. I told him to tell them I would call them a bit later. I do a couple of easy jobs and then begrudgingly call the branch. I listen to the phone tree that they have (which requires two button presses instead of one in order to speak with someone) and finally get in contact with a person... only to have the call disconnect.

I call back and ask for the person who called in the ticket and then followed up, who had apparently gone to lunch. I informed the person that I was just going to install the printer and it would be good to go. This would be fine... up until she mentioned she needed scanning functionality.

Now I wasn't sure if the driver we have in AD is set up with the scan functionality, so I said okay, but that meant I would have to get the driver from the website. The connection to our branches are about 1Mbps, so even downloading Java updates (60-ish MB) take about 5-10 minutes on a good day. The file for this printer was about 700MB (thanks HP). So I went and did other stuff while that downloaded.

I come back after it finished and started the install process. Right away it asks to re-seat the USB cable. So I call the branch. The call disconnects. I call again. It disconnects. I call one more time, and finally get the person who called the ticket in. I instruct him to re-seat the cable. He does. The driver starts doing its thing. I tell him I'll call back if I run into any issues and we hang up.

The driver goes through the install process for about 20 minutes, stops at 99%, then fails. I want to restart the computer, just in case there's a conflict somewhere, but that would require calling the store again, so I put it off.

About an hour later I get a message from another East Coast coworker, telling me the branch is calling about the printer again. I was in the middle of another call and said I would call back later. I do. It disconnects. I call again, and get the person who called the ticket in again. I tell him I want to restart the computer, but wasn't sure if it was okay. He checks with the people using it, who says it's okay, so I reboot. I hang up.

Once the computer comes back up I start the install process again. It asks to re-seat the cable. Fuck. I don't want to call the store again, so I open notepad and say "Please take out the printer's USB connection from the back of the computer."

Three. Fucking. People. Saw it. They moved the window and one even tried to close it, but they didn't re-seat the cable. I opened another window, telling them to call me at my number. They didn't. I called them. Got disconnected. I called them again, finally got someone, told them to re-seat the printer cable again. They do, thank god.

I say thank you and hang up. Continue the installer. It stops at 99% again and fails. I reboot the computer; screw it, I'm just going to install the driver from Active Directory. Check Devices and Printers. It's installed successfully. Hallelujah!

I get the printer set up for the various programs they use and print a test page. I call them one last time; their phone system sounding like they were connected via an underwater line connected by tin cans. I get someone.

$me: Hi, I want to know if the printer has printed something.

$them (garbled): -et me shee... yesh, it -rint-d a *beezelborp*.

$me: Perfect, I'm going to close this ticket! Thanks, goodbye! *hangs up*

tl;dr - I hate printers

Giant, month-and-a-half-long-ticket.
After learning six or so complicated areas of the system and updating them all to work with the new changes, make them all play nicely, etc. I finally got everything working. 95% spec coverage, though no ui tests because I haven't gotten selenium working. whatever, everything's done and works.

Second dev bases her ticket off of mine and continues working. Work elsewhere continues and there's an official release, so we both merge in master. I run tests, everything passes, and go back to working on other tickets.

She finishes her ticket.
We do end-to-end testing, and everything works perfectly. Time for a demo!

She merges in master again, and pushes her branch to two staging servers. (idk why two.)

Demo starts.
We connect to the staging servers, and... none of the UI changes exist; they aren't running the correct code!

So she runs it locally for a demo instead. Two features in my ticket no longer work. She throws me under the bus. She throws me under the bus again by criticising a rake task I scrapped because she wanted to do it. Then again because I didn't update my branch to master and push it before the demo, despite having no reason to. and despite the demo being of her branch.

Then she continues to show off and brag about how she's like the "legend" (senior dev) she envies. QAbuys it.

I'm having an emotion, and it's called anger.

A company contacted me about their custom ticket system not working

Then after asking them couple things they just wanted me to look at emails they found stacked and lost in the ticket system archive:

One clients ticket somehow got caught in between updates and hes been answering the auto close notification (each ~3 days because it never got closed) of the system, with ranging from "yes, thank you, I have solved the issue" escalating to "why dont you leave me alone, I have told you, I have fixed it, please stop", poor guy 🤣

Help. I'm drowning in spaghetti code

I've been working at a working student (15 hours/ week) at a local software company for about a month now... and with everything I learned at college I'm kind of getting eye cancer here.
We still use SVN
We don't have any coding guidelines. No checkstyle, no overview over the program. When I started there I was just giving a ticket and they said good luck.
We just have some basic RCPTT Tests inside Eclipse and most of Themen don't work in the trunk because the gui got changed...
At least we have a ticket system but it doesn't get used by most of the working students.
I found 10 other bugs while reproducing and trying to fix 1 bug.
And I've never seen Java raped so badly. Today I saw a line that started with 6 brackets because whoever wrote it wanted to cast like there was no tomorrow. I see more instanceof in one day than in my whole devlife before.
The only thing we have is two normal employees that review our code before we are allowed to commit it into the trunk.
So yeah... I'm drowning in spaghetti-code.

When you get a ticket saying that a user can't see a record so the system must be broken, then after an hour of looking into it; said record never existed... Please stop wasting my time -_-

My very first rant here was about the mess of ticket submission and ticket tracking applications we use, and about how we were moving to a single unified system some day.

Well, that day is today. And, predictably, it went horribly wrong.

So the way it's supposed to work is people login to the portal, search for what they want to request, then fill in details and submit. It creates a request ticket assigned to the appropriate team. (The old way involved a bunch of nonsense that you can see in my first rant).

The thing is, I found out about this today, when I got a company-wide email saying the new system was live as of this morning. None of us knew it would happen today. Not that I could've foreseen any issues just by getting the announcement early, but still, usually people find out about these things beforehand.

So, ecstatic to finally be rid of the old ticket tracking system, I log into the new system and look for our request form, which is, of course, not there. I check the old system and see that they combined every single "general request" into a single request where you pick which team the request goes to.

So I finally find the right request, pick the right department from the drop-down, and see that the request looks much better than it did on the old system. Out of curiosity, I look at the list of people who are part of that department.

I am not on the list.

My ENTIRE TEAM is not on the list.

Because they migrated the team data to the new system a year ago, when the issue tracking/reporting portion of it went live. My current team was hired approximately six months after that and apparently updating the team data in the new system isn't part of our Onboarding process yet.

So... Bright side is I guess I will have a lot of free time soon since nobody can submit new project work to my team?

tl;dr: they took a great software product and implemented it so poorly that our team can't use it.

We use jira at my company. It's great for me, because no ticketing system's UI is worth a shit, but jira's API is excellent. But we're switching to a new system that is an absolute piece of garbage. Every page is 100% Javascript, so no source can ever be viewed, and the URL never changes to reflect what's onscreen. If you know a ticket number, no URL will ever get you straight to it. You have to navigate multiple slow-loading 25MB piles of Javascript to reach what you're seeking. And most damning of all: the new system has an API, but our highest management is withholding access to it, claiming it breeds laziness.

Is amazing the kind of shit you have to swallow when your management has regular meetings with really really super extremely good-looking sales people.

!rant
If you have software in production please have some way for a user to find some contact email (create for this reason only if needed.)

I have run into crippling bugs in huge essential systems (state dmv new system, the ticket system utility marking) which they were oblivious to until I went out of my way, like a stalker to get some contact of someone remotely related to someone I could drop this info in the lap of, and so far it was a total shock to them (the dmv system was taken offline for 3 days to resolve)

I get not wanting to run a helpdesk to support users, but give technical users some contact info ( even if you think you have full coverage analytics because, being software, it may have a bug)

/rant

My boss had a 50 page word document where he add any bugs he has found (he likes to test before it goes to QA) we then have to read that document for any changes (hi-lighted in blue) then add them to our bug tracking system. Any updates that are made on the ticket we have to add to the word document.

We tried letting him use our bug tracking tool but he hated using it as the padding on the navigation links was too big. We would have to redesign the 3rd party tool just for him

> Be me
> Using another country's public transit system for the first time
> QR reader can't read my bus ticket
> Ask the bus driver about it

"Sir, can I check myself in here?"
"Very high-tech system, isn't it?"
"Sir, I'm a programmer..."
"Shitty system then? Maybe you could fix it?"
(thinking: you're not paying me for this you bastard, and if you want me to get a manual for this piece of shit to repair what should've worked in the first place, you're sorely mistaken...)
"Probably I'm the kind of person who would... Anyway the ticket is valid."
I didn't bother checking the ticket afterwards.

All I wanted to do was get on your bus mate 😐

Our ticket tracking system and our IT service request system are from two different companies that are direct competitors. The source code is full of temporary hacks to just make them play nice until a better solution is worked out. Fast forward a few years and we're abandoning both systems in favor of a single, unified system that handles everything. We currently have maybe 20% of the new, unified system done, which is now hacked together with both of the legacy systems until we finally transition fully to the new system. The current plan is for next year, but the plan six months ago was for this year, and almost no progress has been made since then, so we're probably going to have two ticket trackers and two request systems for a while.

Actually, three ticket trackers and three request systems. The third ticket tracker is used to track work done on tickets that exist in the legacy tracker because the legacy tracker can't do that on its own, while the third request system is the oldest and most cumbersome legacy system of them all.

Specifications called for user logins to be stored in a session and not be persistent. When the session ends, you need to login again. The system deals with insurance policy information and persistent login was deemed a security risk.

First ticket submitted by the client after go-live? "Please make the login page remember my user name and password, or that I've logged in previously."

A few months ago I bought an e scooter to get from home to work.

The backstory to this:
My car broke down on the highway, my sister's car broke down on the highway and we didn't have another car apart of my dad's anymore.
Which means I had to look for another car. The cars between 1k-5k € are dogshit and when you want to register the car you have to have an appointment at a government building which happens to be closed when I'm getting out of my 8-5 job.
I had enough and bought an e scooter.

Now back to now:
In the beginning it was cool.
Could get anywhere I wanted to in combination with the Germany ticket. Except for the Netherlands where my beautiful girlfriend is.
There I can legally not use it but that's ok lol.

The German government is hyping e mobility and public transportation up, but for what?
E mobility currently sucks ass with all the shit laws for e.g. e scooters and when you want to transport it in public transport, people give you weird looks, the bus driver wants you to buy a bicycle ticket even if I can fold the e scooter and more. The scanners in the bus of the German buses cannot read my German ticket for some reason and every bus driver in my city knows that and they just look at it and are like "Ok, you're cool. Continue moving", but this old grandma looking ass bitch is like "No, according to the law you need to show it to the scanner and not to me". I fucking know. I've been doing this shit for a year and you know that but it doesn't work. It says to me that I need to show it to you instead of to the scanner bc this machine is fucking dumb and apparently I'm holding the people because I started a discussion with her. This driver ... ugh. The buses in my city come whenever they want as well.
Like sometimes 5 minutes earlier, sometimes up to 30 minutes later.
Inconsistent motherfuckers and I am the one making everyone wait? Suck my donkey kong balls.

German trains... well you know how that goes. It doesn't. It sucks ass.
Every single fucking train line has a problem. Either a previous train has something, or staff is missing, or a technical error or the train driver's ass is itchy and needs scratches from his assistant. There's always something.

When I want to travelled home from my gf I spent not lying 8 fucking hours on the trains on Sunday.
Normally it takes max. 5 hours with a train and 3-4 hours with a car.
I can also go on a rant because of the Dutch train system because it also sucks, BUT they are reliable. They are there when they say they are gonna be there. 99% of the times.
In Germany it is somewhere at 10%.

Now I realized that e scooters are uncomfortable and expensive toys who need maintenance just like a car but nonetheless they are reliable unlike the public transport.
In the winter it will be even worse.

Electrical cars are way expensive and affordable electrical cars you need to keep charging every few baby steps.

I also looked at 125ccm motorcycles which you can drive if you upgrade your existing car driver's license, but ngl that's a scam. Not worth it at all.

And that's why I am looking for a traditional car now. E mobility is not there yet in Germany and public transport is not doable at this moment.

So I was just informed I have 40 tickets with my name on them. No big deal normally except that I had no idea and was scheduling based on the fact that I knew I had 25 on my plate and most of them were OBE. How did I find this out you ask? Well rather than updating the tickets in our ticket tracking system, my PM updated a spreadsheet that is out in no man's land. So it looks like I have been doing no work for the last 3 months when in reality I have been busting my ass to get shut done and fixed. Why even have a ticket tracking system?

I am in love.
I am in love with all the guys and girls working at Microchip support.
I am the kind of user that does not really understand what he's doing/what he wants to do, so I am constantly stuck in stupid configuration errors or looking for impossible solutions, yes I am THAT kind of a user...

Here is a PWM working, a support guy spent some minutes telling me that I have to connect to the right pin.
Ok, he had to tell me twice.😳
Thank you, it may have taken me days to find out this.

They does not know, but there is a HUGE amount of decreasing dumb question incoming 😈
Please be kind with me, and don't get mad when things will get serious, I will probably bring hell in your office, I am very sorry for that...

Still, thank you for helping the dumbest learner-by-mistake that doesn't know how to recognize a mistake.

I can't write this in the ticket system, I hope someone of you use devRant! (atsame54 office, I am talking with you!)

You are my stack overflow, and the project I will develop with your help is quite the only thing left before my graduate.

I will owe you so much beers, love you guys!!!

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

I'm at an Indian restaurant and I love how their ticket system (showing when you food is ready to be picked up) has a very, very rough and homemade feeling. It's fitting the place very well.

It took AWS about a month to figure out why their load balancer was screwing up content length for requests from our site. Multiple times the ticket was closed due to inactivity because they took so long to investigate. Turns out there's a bug with how AWS load balancers scale, and when they are below a certain traffic threshold they truncate extremely long content. Their solution was to edit the balancer behind the scenes to always be scaled up, and then tell us to never delete it.

So then every time we needed to set up a staging environment we had to contact support so they'd edit the balancer. Which always took ages since most of the support agents didn't understand the convoluted issue and had to forward it on to more technically inclined staff, who then had to investigate fresh every time.

This was ridiculously annoying, so I spent months writing an automated solution to spin up staging new environments on the spot, this made use of a haproxy server which had to edit rules on the fly so that the AWS balancer could be circumnavigated. It was a better system then the old way anyway, but all the same an irritating issue to be forced to deal with.

All around a very shitty experience. This was a few years ago now and I'm not employed there any more, but I hope AWS fixed this since then.

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

Bug on trouble ticket system:

"I get a Nullpointer when i call this REST API *stacktrace*"

- It's not a Nullpointer
- It's a problem on your client http
- *Copy message exception, paste on google, first result is the solution"

And he's a DEV!!!!!

Dear X. There's an obvious error with the way you're merging arrays; instead of conditionally adding items to the existing array, each condition overrides any items added by the previous conditions, which is clearly not the desired behaviour. I'd love to add a test to illustrate this behaviour, but you're not using them. I'd also love to create a simple pull request, but for some fucking reason you're using the worst possible version control system so I can't do that. I've submitted a support ticket along with all the code needed to fix this silly mistake, but apparently you either don't understand 2 lines of your own fucking code, or you didn't even bother looking at it before posting a shitty generic reply about "needing more information". There is no such thing as more information. There are two IFs, and they are supposed to add items to the array, not override any previous items. It's written in your own comments, and it's pretty obvious from the way the rest of the function merges those items.

Also, use a fucking linter, your code is a mess.

Company had problematic client projects that each client has a bucket load of change requests. Company doesn't know how to say "No" to them. Company can't afford to pay the subvendors for the changes and the subvendors aren't willing to do them for free.

I went in, reverse engineer the shit out of each application, database, system, documented my own findings, changed according to each client request. This involves editing tables in MSSQL, rerouting PHP files, adding field and validations in C#, passing parameters in VB to Crystal Report, and managed every change request into my own personalize ticket system (that the company does not have).

Saved the company, everyone was grateful. A couple of months later, the company hasn't paid my salary on time, I left like a boss.

They're in shit again and need my help. Haha!

A loooong time ago...

I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.

Kind of.

Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.

Fast forward three months (yes, three months).

I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.

So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.

He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...

When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.

I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?

This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.

Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.

I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!

Haha. Oh no.

So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.

The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.

And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.

I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.

Hm.

Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...

On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.

This doubles the strangeness.

I want over to my colleague's desk.

I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.

"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"

What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?

"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"

"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."

"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"

You. Did. What?

I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.

So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.

Yep

It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.

Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.

Hm.

Project Management.

Karma's a bitch, right?

The ticket system blokes - episode 3

So we always had and have very awful performance with our ticket system. You can't get anything to load in under ~4s normally. Now since it has gotten worse over the last weeks i decided to set aside a few hours to closely watch our SQL server.
After i identified a culprit that was hogging the CPU almost every 2 minutes i looked at other long running queries in the server and found out where exactly the 4s come from.

6 tables from various DBs. Sure, no problem.

Left Outer Join. Sure, why not.

Querying every fucking column in every fucking table explicitly adding up to a whopping 160 columns which they need not even 10% of. We're talking about session IDs, passwords, stock count, IBANs and all that stuff to show the work done on a ticket. Absolutely not.

So i extracted the query and reduced it to the stuff we need and the execution time went from 4 seconds to almost instant.

The funny thing is that their idea of performance optimization is throwing LIMIT around everywhere to get these monstrous queries under control.

So in the next few days I'll have an appointment with their lead programmer. I'm looking forwards to it.

So out of curiosity: does anyone know an SQL builder or toolset that does shit like
SELECT X AS [t0_c0],
SELECT Y AS [t0_c1],
SELECT Z AS [t1_c0],
and so on? I'd like to know how they got to this point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow fuck today. I took the day off to watch the eclipse yesterday so coming in today was like Monday squared. Right off the bat I have somebody from last week that I had spend around 8 hours working to get their system right call in and tell me they were cancelling even though everything just got working right.
Also got tasked with documenting the servers which wouldn’t be rant worthy if the dev that set them up didn’t get cranky whenever I ask for credentials or even a rough overview of how the server stack is configured. Then I get a ticket about how a customer is going to get his data from his ‘web guy’ but this customer has been keeping his data in our system for the better part of a decade. Wtf you getting bro? And who is this web guy? What data does he have? Nobody seems to know. And just to smear shit on top it turns out I swapped the addresses on the car parts I sold on eBay and now I have to do 2 returns and cross ship and almost definitely get negative feed back. Fuck everything.

All this before lunch. After lunch I still have the same problems but at least I got chicken!

Our favorite ticket system blokes are back with a big fat update for their software.

What changed?
All workflows are fucked because everything is somewhere else suddenly!

Half of the features suddenly stopped working!

Variable formats in forms have been changed from {} to [] without reason, migration or warning! Sorry, {Username} ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Half-assed features that don't work half of the time have also been added!

Fucking great!

Who beta tests this shit? Nobody?

Whem you'd rather create a completely different system from scratch for work than fix that one JIRA ticket 😐

I haven't felt an urge to post on here in a while just because things have been going so well. But this month, is just not that kind of month anymore.

I'm upset. I'm upset by how I've been uprooted from my routine. I know I shouldn't be that bothered by it and things always change. But what the fuck is this company thinking to be using it's own fucking home baked ticketing system!

WHAT THE EVER LIVING FUCK IS THIS SHIT!

Let's go over the issues it has
1. I can't fucking email my clients through it
2. all emails are not recognized automatically. In other words each new email creates a new ticket if it does not have the tracking number attached to it.
3. I have to fucking hunt around in my inbox that is now bombarded by every email that is created for this ticketing system. Slap on a fucking tracking number. And then HOPE TO FUCKING GOD that the person on the other end doesn't erase the subject and cause the system to create a new ticket just for it.

Let's go over Zendesk which they've decided to decomission.
1. I. DON'T. HAVE. TO. DO. ANY. OF. THAT. FUCKING. SHIT.
2. That's it. It's fucking simple

Seriously. They forced me off of my original platform because this company already had a "ticketing system", if you can even fucking call it that, working.

And just if you weren't aware, all of this change happened because my company got bought out. It got bought out by this behemoth company that isn't willing to let me continue using a system; that has been very efficient, mind you, and instead make me use their system.

I. FUCKING. HATE. THIS.

Every fucking day! I have to do this stupid bullshit of emailing clients from my personal work email instead of on the direct ticketing system.

When I first started using this thing I actually thought I could use it to email the clients. For a solid two weeks I was "communicating" to clients through their ticketing system. Only to find out that the entire time those clients were not getting my actual fucking email! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

Then these guys tell me after the fact. "Oh that's strange... We never noticed that you can't send emails through it... We always just had used our work emails."

Are you fucking jerking my chain! You guys have literally been sitting in this slimy pit of hell for so long that you don't even know there are better options out there!

You don't have to fucking live this life!!

I don't think I'm going to make it. Something needs to change. And I know upper management isn't going to do it, because I fought hard to try and keep Zendesk. They are not keeping it. After this next quarter it is officially gone.

I'm trying to think of coding solutions to make my situation better... But I shouldn't have to fucking do that! There are perfectly good working solutions out there, and this company doesn't want to budge because "that's the way we've always been doing it"

I'm going to fucking rip out my hair.

With a recent HAProxy update on our reverse proxy VM I decided to enable http/2, disable TLS 1.0 and drop support for non forward-secrecy ciphers.

Tested our sites in Chrome and Firefox, all was well, went to bed.

Next morning a medium-critical havock went loose. Our ERP system couldn't create tickets in our ticket system anymore, the ticket systems Outlook AddIn refused to connect, the mobile app we use to access our anti-spam appliance wouldn't connect although our internal blackboard app still connected over the same load balancer without any issues.

So i declared a 10min maintenance window and disabled HTTP/2, thinking that this was the culprit.

Nope. No dice.
Okay, i thought, enable TLS 1.0 again.

Suddenly the ticket system related stuff starts to work again.

So since both the ERP system and the AddIn run on .NET i dug through the .NET documentation and found out that for some fucking reason even in the newest .NET framework version (4.7.2) you have to explicitly enable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 or else you just get a 'socket reset' error. Why the fuck?!

Okay, now that i had the ticket system out of the way i enabled HTTP/2 and verified that everything still works.

It did, nice.

The anti-spam appliance app still did not work however, so i enabled one non-pfs cipher in the OpenSSL config and tested the app.

Behold, it worked.

I'm currently creating a ticket with them asking politely why the fuck their app has pfs-ciphers disabled.

And I thought disabling DEPRECEATED tech wouldn't be an issue... Wrong...

Manager X: (logs a support ticket) "Agent is unable to access system using the password provided."

Me: "You're going to have to narrow it down a little, we have over 1000 active agents."

I hate the support side of my job...

This is going to be fun. We are switching our phone system to use Zoom and the turn on date is sometime in October (couple of weeks away). I have a feature I'm working on (automated phone calls) that the salesman said was fully functional (jump through a hoop, stand on your head, turn around three times, type of functional). Tried the steps they gave me, got to #3 and there is no virtual agent API call I can find to hand off/transfer the call. Send our contact at Zoom some questions, responds "That is a feature we might put in a future product. Can't do that right now." WTF?!
Other developers are running into similar "How do we get there from here?" issues that features promised, either don't exist or don't work.

One feature in particular I'm receiving a 403 permission denied error.
K: "Feature X needs to be enabled."
Me: "It is."
<send a screenshot showing the feature enabled>
K: "Your account doesn't have permissions. Have the sysadmin elevate you authentication level."
Me: "I'm an admin"
<send a screenshot showing my admin status>
K: "I'll have to get back with you."

Its been 3 days and no update on my ticket. *sigh*

Can someone relate to it? We have a very simple process:
1. Create a ticket 🎫
2. Specify the requirement 📑
3. Assign the ticket to a developer 👨‍🦰👩‍🦰
4. Optional: make a meeting with the developer and go throw the specification if it is a complex feature 🗓️

Under pressure it looks like this:
Someone tells you to implement the request as fast a possible, no written specification, in best case you get a brief email 📧 also the feature has to be available asap in production and they is only poorly tested...
Or they want to test in production because the data in test system is "missing" ⛔☢️☣️

It is so annoying that is so difficult to stick to such a simple process 😭 it really freaks me out 😒😫

A few months back I was talking with our web team and we determined a ticketing software would be useful for clients to submit website updates. Rather than request we buy one, because we constantly get told to stop spending, I spent my free time building it out. We tested it and decided it was ready to present to management.

Management tells us that clients aren't going to use something like this (4 fields and optional file upload). The project sits in a repo untouched for some months.

<Time passes>

Company-wide email come in announcing our brand new ticket system for clients to submit issues about our software. Then a second email comes in to me asking why the web team never thought to do something like that and went on about how useful it would be if we had something similar. I link them to the one I built and my notes from our previous meeting.

Manager who told me clients would never use this: Let's talk about this next week and see if we can get people to use it.

It's been 3 weeks and the meeting has been rescheduled 5 times.

Wow WTF!

So for a new client, they have their domain on a registrar that has the most ugliest and confusing UI ever.

So I decided to transfer the domain to somewhere better.

Guess what, it takes 5 days for them to release the domain. The site would be down and I won't be able to proceed with my work until transfer is complete.

In hopes to speed up the process, I tried to create a ticket. There is no ticket system and their only available contact email listed is sales@shittiestdomainregistarever.com

I mailed them yesterday evening hoping for a reply.

Few hrs ago, I received a bunch of automated email on some ticket I never created.

The biggest WTF is that the To: on that email is some other customer's gmail address and I am CC'd along with a bunch of other customers gmail and hotmail addresses.

Seriously, WTF is this?! I'm glad I took the decision to move from them

Ticket: User says thing don't work.

Me: Hey can you tell me who tried to do the thing / give me their email?

User: Isn't it in the system somewhere?

Me: MAYBE BUT I KNOW IT IS IN YOUR FUCKING EMAIL SO FUCKING GET ME THAT EMAIL ADDRESS!

Making a ticket support system using wordpress for a uni group project. I go away for a week and team tells me they have done loads of work.

so I take a look at out github to find that they haven't used a single wordpress function and have just written there own php application with their own tables and db class, and now they don't know why things aren't working.

I'm going to need several litres of coffee to get through this

Working on an app to sync data between our ticketing system and an API a vendor made for us to interact with their ticketing system. I put off working on it for months, mostly because I had mountains of other "urgent" things that jumped in my face, but also because I needed to design the whole thing, and I really have to get into the right frame of mind for that kind of creative organization.

Today I dove into it. I built the JSON to submit, given whatever variables are necessary, and figured out after a while that the smartest way to handle this is not to search for an existing internal ticket, but to have the creation of the internal ticket set a flag for an automated sync process to check when it runs.

It's going to be much easier when I get that built, but now, knowing that, I'm daunted enough that I'm procrastinating. Think of something, chart it out with notes in a text editor, procrastinate.That is probably like 95% of the time I spend in "development."

Is it asking too much that a state agency use any kind of naming convention in their data management? I've come across about 7 different column names that all contain a value representing the number of students. Trying to decide whether I should send a deluge of tickets at their help system by submitting a ticket for every single row that contains any type of error.

I just love optimizing stuff and here is my story I think somehow is very cool as you can see the progress just looking at two values.

//NOTE: This api relies on another api which is slow af. The requests are done here directly but later will be carried out async and in the background by using some ticket system.

1) First PoC
2) Used caching of requests and improved method to filter out unnecessary stuff
3) Optimized response formatting

NOTE to myself: Things are going too good...

Spend about half the day fixing a bug. Whilst reporting it complete on our ticket system, QA change the ticket's expected outcome. Ffs.

My employer should burn his DevOps system to the ground: esoteric configuration split on 1000 files, bugs and downtime almost daily, not communicated breaking changes which breaks pipelines, shitty documentation, few opportunities for customization and for everything you have to open a fucking ticket, I love programming but since I have to spend more time on a fucking ticketing system rather than on Vim my motivation is gradually falling to pieces.

You know prior to becoming a dev and learning the ticket system I never had a dislike against any number now I hate most of all of them

==============
Getting Feedback Rant!
=============

When "this is simpler" feedback results in a function of 500 lines of code.

When I get "don't do X" in the feedback. Thank you very much. What do you want me to do instead?

Unclear feedback.

When the feedback giver changes his mind after I applied the changes!

When applying the feedback introduces a bug.

Simply opinionated feedback that is not enforced by any tool or backed up by any facts.
Please find something better to do in life.

Unactionable feedback.

"Consider X"
I will not consider thank you very much.

"Verify this works"
Duh..

When the feedback giver knows something that you don't.
I know this is a legit case.. still annoying.

"I disagree with the feature"
Go argue with the PM, not relevant to me, thanks!

=====================
GIVING FEEDBACK RANT
=====================

I rewrote the system. Please review it.

No need to review, just approve.

I will change this as part of the next ticket.

I would like to keep it the way it is.
lazy ass..

You can't test this.
It's impossible to test this.

No need to test this.

There's no point to test this.

I'll test this on production.

Not sure why this is working..

Please document this..
Because documentation is like a thing, you know.

Oh, this code is not related to this PR, I just don't want to open a new branch for such a small change. ignore it.

Ignore this.

This will be meaningful in my next change.

Universal rule of opening tickets

Me: *opens ticket on basically ANY ticketing system EVER* (could be internal, from the customer, some random bug online, anything...).

Me: writes detailed explanation of issue, because I know working on tickets is hard. Of course I include that I tried steps A, B, C, and that I haven't been able to do D because of reasons.

Ticket derp: Comments...
"Hey, have you already tried A, B, C? Also you should totally do D first."

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? I TAKE TIME OUT OF MY FUCKING DAY TO WRITE THIS SHIT DOWN AND EVEN FORMAT IT NICELY, JUST TO MAKE YOUR MISERABLE LIFE EASIER, AND YOU DON'T EVEN READ IT YOU WORTHLESS LITTLE BALLSACK!? FUCK OFF!

A reality that most people are not ready to accept, is that if you work too hard or work too smart as a freelancer, you're going to hurt yourself financially.

I have given my clients amazing code which runs fast, is optimised, and is readable to the point where you can hire a fresher to maintain it.

Doing that has resulted in stable systems but those clients walked away from me and have never come back, means no more money.

But some of the companies I have worked for, I have seen some retarded-ass devs barely able to make a system run and write code, have retained clients for years. They pretty much have a "submit ticket resolve ticket" kinda mechanism.

It's situations like these where it makes me question, what's the point of learning best practices if I'm gonna get hurt financially for it.

If you give a mouse a cookie is all too real. Started sending out release notes to those who benefit from the changes and they're now asking for access to our ticket system 'just because'

I'll monitor our helpdesk ticket system from time-to-time and HR will send their employee termination request so the accounts are deactivated. I notice an odd name I hadn't seen in a long while (names have been changed)

<thought bubble> "Ketsup? Hmmm...wonder if they're related to ol' Brad Ketsup?"

Brad was a bully who would shove me in the bathroom when I would pee so I would tip over and hit the urinal. He was part of pack of older bullies who enjoyed torturing people in the stalls by throwing wet paper towels over the wall or one time in my case, busted the door open (Brad: "Look everybody! PaperTrail is pooping! Look at his little pee-pee...ha ha ha..") Incidentally, the school didn't fix the door, they removed all the doors so the problem wouldn't happen again, but I digress.

I look at the individual's pic, and it was like going back in time. There he was, the near perfect round face, pinned back ears...not Brad, but I'd bet my paycheck at Vegas it was his son. All the vent up frustrations started to bubble up...then...sadness.

Brad moved away in high school and unless the good Lord moved mountains in Brad's life, this poor kid likely lived the same abusive life as Brad. Brad's dad was a drunk and known to be abusive. Statistically speaking, no reason to believe the the apple wouldn't fall far from the tree.

Makes me wonder what happened to all those guys from back then. I know two of em' ended up in prison, but I wonder what I would say if I came across any of them in the wild?

I'm sure most of you had perfect lives growing up and no feelings of mass carnage when you think of the bullies in your early life.

Worst enterprise software experience... I was fresh out of college, and needed money. I was working in a call center, fielding IT helpdesk calls for a major US telecom company, who had just acquired a competitor. One day I got to work and about ten of us were given a new desk, new phone number, an an email address at the newly acquired company. My manager said to us "We have no clue how any of their proprietary systems work, what servers they run on, or how to login to them. Your phones are ringing, make sure you take good notes so the Tier-1s can help out next week. Good luck."

Trial by shit-storm fire, all while trying to convince the caller that yes, I did know what I was talking about. It was a lot of cold calling random employees whose job title in the corporate directory looked even remotely close to somebody I could escalate a ticket to. They didn't use the same ticketing system we used, so it was a lot of copy/pasting between two ticketing systems. To this day, I still have no clue what happened to their original call center staff. I'm sure they must have had one, but it seemingly just dissolved overnight.

That job was the springboard to my development career. I left for a gig in software helpdesk, then to quality assurance, automated testing, and now I'm a senior DevOps engineer. It was worth it.

The only thing worse than client QA is client vendor QA.

I do QA for a company that does custom implementations of a major e-commerce platform. On one of my current projects, the customer has elected to outsource their UAT, and isn't willing to wait for the site (or even individual features) to be complete before starting testing, so I've been triaging a lot of silly tickets. But today took the cake.

This system allows users to save their credit card info. The vendor QA guy filed a ticket "reporting" that if he saved a cc with a given number, then created a new cc record with the same number but a different expiration date, the original record was overwritten, rather than a new record being created.

I just stared at the thing for like five minutes, gathering the mental strength to reply with something other than "you're an idiot."

Lodging a ticket in system A...

Citing the ticket number from A to access the password in system B...

Using the password from B to log into database C...

Then doing our work in C, in which all our DDL and DML permissions have been revoked.

A Website where the user alterts us about a defect on his printer.
There are predefined categories (things like error messages in the printer display, issues with the prints, issues with paper jams, issues with noise and so on) maybe around 10 to 20 categories.
They decide which fields are shown when the user selects it.

Should I do a Dropdown? List field? Radio buttons?

Tech: PHP, Slim Framework, fontsawesome, resulting in a mail sent to our ticket system to pre-fill form items to avoid 1st level support...

We need to capture ips on our internal Network in order to figure out who is actually calling our apis because we will be meeting a breaking change so need to melee sure they support.

But in order to have IP capturing, we need a be Production Issue ticket...

So to prevent crashing downstream system, we need to crash their systems... 🤔🤔🤔🤔

Docuware, oh Docuware.

Meant to be an archiving system, but the moment work flows were seen by our director the ball just went out of the court in terms of implementation.

We've gotten to a point where we don't want to use Asana for ticket tracking and task assignment, we don't want to use a tool that acts as a man in the middle to push information to dbs, we want to use workflows with set conditions to automate every single process in the company. Why? It's cheaper.

The syntax is alrightish for arithmetic expressions, but there are so many limitations that we've gotten to the point where we're absolutely circumventing the entire point of the software.

Initialise variables, Condition, condition, condition, draw data from external sheet, process based thereof.

"oh, why doesn't it display images on the populated forms? I don't want it just as an attachment I need to click next to see".

Frustration is paramount, but the light is at the end of the tunnel.

"Oh, did I mention that we need digital signitures?" you need an additional module Mr boss. "no, I bought the cloud bundle. Make it work".

Powerful tool, I'll give it that, but it's downfall is its lack of being comprehensive.

Month 3, here we go.

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

few days ago: I assign ticket to new programmer

today: receive message "Hi, quick question: I have the task pretty much done. The only thing I am stuck on is {insert one line summary of task}. Is there an example file where this was done before? Or do you have any thoughts on this?"

ticket system: "{tags me} This is mostly done. just need help {insert one line summary of task}."

When the company you just started working with is using a Perl based ticket system which is missing most of the functions they want you to implement but won't replace the system so you gotta learn how to Perl...

New Project

M: Hey, check these two processes. Both took different paths for the same input. Here are the logs. Both are the same though.
Me: Ok... do we have a debugger?
M: No this product doesn't have a debugger
Me: Any unit tests i should know of?
M: We don't do unit testing. Everything is done in Integration Testing.
Me: Ok. So how can i check the db for this?
M: You can't, the access is restricted. You'll have to raise a ticket to other team with the sql output you need.
Me: Ok. So I hope you have the schema at least.
M: Yes we have the schema. But there was some issue last week so the values might not be there in the correct column. They may or may not be present where they are supposed to be.

Wtf am i supposed to do... fucking play football on ticketing system with the other team 😐

When IT/project management is like some ideology that works out on the paper but everyone is too stupid to implement it properly.

So I was building opencv some time back.
Nice enough package, like most python linked packages I'm finding though I know you can use it via c and its meant to be but why would you want to ? .. it contains a whole bunch of half finished crap that is actually useful in part including the capacity to tear apart video files and manipulate frames one at a time and then rewrite them back to a file. about the only lib that's easy to use that I saw that does that. hell I can even compose my own video frames. also the only other lib I saw that does that thus far.

so...

I post a bug, because of FUCKING CMAKE NOT WORKING. not conforming with the well thought out build environment that most GNU style c packages use.

you know like when you need an upstream source package to build the code, or a downgraded package to build the code and don't want to fuck up your host environment so you have to specify a bunch of lib paths and the like so that ld and gcc work correctly etc etc etc from your custom build location and so you can later use these same values to find the compiled lib and build software against it.

fucker closes my ticket saying i hijacked the c environment................

no.

its because cmake sucks.

they're using and i don't know why a module specifically written to find libtiff.

specifically written but doesn't find the only source on my system that provides tiff which my env variables point directly to !!!!

lazy fucking cocksuckers !

I want to code a solution this issue.
something that translates ac files and am files and cmakelists into something intelligent and easy to follow that doesn't sacrifice the flexibility of make and gnu shit and unfucks cmake based projects !

Okay so Ive been working on a custom queueing system
basically the system generates ticket numbers for checked in paients and then assigne them to a room when it's their turn to be attended to

so I'm having some challanges with the database when the patient finishes their session with the Dr the admin can remove them from the queue and is supposed to reset the room.state = 0 //which means room in unoccupied
this is proving to be problematic coz it's not even finding the room
😕 😕 😕 😕