Manager: How come the intern does way more tickets than you?

Dev: Because you told me to only give him the easy ones since he either can’t do them otherwise or takes too long on the hard ones

Manager: Well how is he going to learn if we only give him easy ones?

Dev: That’s what I told you when you orig—

Manager: Assign him ALL of the hard tickets on your board immediately!

*Tickets closed per day drops significantly*

Manager: WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG ON THESE TICKETS!!!!!

Dev: …

Manager: Feature C doesn’t work

Dev: We never built feature C

Manager: Nonsense, I remember feature C clearly!

Dev: It’s still in the backlog

Manager: But we had many meetings about it

Dev: Never got put on the board

Manager: Feature C is very important!

Dev: It was never assigned to anyone

Manager: What could possibly be more important than Feature C?

Dev: All the other features you placed on the board and assigned up until now

Manager: Well I need Feature C done asap! It should be top priority!

Dev: Ok then next sprint add feature C to the board and assign it to someone

*Next planning session manager leaves feature C in backlog in favour of other tickets*

*2 days later*

Manager: What is the status of feature C?

Dev: You opted to leave it in the backlog

Manager: BUT IT SHOULD BE TOP PRIORITY!

Dev: …

Manager: You know you did good this week, take the entire day off tomorrow

Dev: Really?

Manager: Yeah my treat.

Dev: Can you send that to me in an email?

Manager: ….I mean yeah, but I don’t see why that is necessary

*** About halfway through The next day

Manager: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?! YOU HAVEN’T COMPLETED A SINGLE TICKET TODAY OR REVIEWED A SINGLE PR OR EVEN SO MUCH AS ATTENDED THE STANDUP. EXPLAIN YOURSELF!

Dev: You said I could take the day off today?

Manager: YEAH BUT YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO ACTUALLY TAKE IT OFF!! I WAS GIVING YOU THE OPPORTUNITY TO SHOW DEDICATION TO THE COMPANY BY COMING IN ANYWAY BUT NO YOU THOUGHT YOU’D JUST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR GENEROSITY AND HAVE AN ENTIRE DAY TO YOURSELF?! GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS, THERE ARE URGENT TICKETS ON THE BOARD!

Dev: …

In an effort to deal with the number of “top priority” tickets, management has come up with a new priority level, “urgent”, to help differentiate between tickets that are “top priority” and tickets that are actually “top priority”.

So as you can guess all tickets are now codified as “urgent”.

I’ve suggested management downgrade some tickets back to merely “top priority” as we’re clearly right back where we started with it being difficult to determine which order to do tickets in.

They’ve ignored my request as the bletherings of a clearly unenlightened peon, and have instead came up with a new priority, “mission critical” which will be reserved for the most hallowed of emerg— oh no wait everything is now “mission critical” who would have guessed?

So “Top priority” is the now lowest priority a ticket can have…Naturally.

bitchface micromanager keeps telling me i don't communicate enough, don't do enough, am not fast enough, etc.

So i've been sending her a weekly summary of ~50 bullet points of things I did during the week, issues encountered, workarounds found, research findings, who i talked to, etc. all organized by task with links to the tickets.

My work volume hasn't increased (probably decreased, actually) but it certainly looks like I'm doing a lot. probably because i am? but she doesn't listen during standup, so... victory by a hundred bullet points it is!

boss: please look into tools that do X.

fullstackchris: Ah, here's a solution we can use!

boss: I don't want to use it because it is too complicated.

fullstackchris: ok, that's fine with me...

[one week later] boss: oh I found this nice site that does X, can we do X?

fullstackchris: YES, THAT'S EXACTLY THE SOLUTION I ALREADY FOUND, *AFTER* YOU ASKED ME TO LOOK FOR A SOLUTION, AND IN THE END YOU DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT. OH HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND?!?!

F*@#! *%*#

!!fml

"Root, go fix this bug. It'll take you two days."

The "bug" is a feature that was never implemented for one particular payment type.

The code in question is two years old, full of typos, smells, junior-isms, and is convoluted AF. The feature's commit touched 190 files and implemented many other features as well. Thus far, I have been unable to narrow down where this particular feature's code lives for the other payment types, nor which code or payment paths lead to it. Burned out, I can barely focus on the screen, let alone follow its many twisting and dynamically-inferred paths. I hint as to the ticket's scavenger hunt nature during standup.

"But I wrote comments on the ticket telling you exactly where to look to fix it," Thundercunt admonishes in front of the team.

"Sure, you did," Root replies. "You reworded what the original dev had said in the comments 20 minutes prior, and agreed with him. His comments were helpful, but it doesn't tell me how any of it works," she continues.

TC scoffs and closes the meeting.

Root stares blankly, seeing neither code nor screen, questions her life decisions, and recalls the previous tickets she has worked on: nearly every one of them busywork, fixing other people's bugs. Bugs she never could have gotten away with if she tried.

"Why do I put up with this?" She asks. "They don't care, and it's killing me."

But the bills remain, and so must she.

"Fuck my life" she finally decides.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).

Root: Reaches out to spec author.

Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.

Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.

Root: Logs off.

Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.

TC: Still no slack response.

Hours later:

TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.

TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)

TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)

———

Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…

I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!

Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.

And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!

And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.

Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)

Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.

Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

Dev: * In the middle of pushing to prod *

Manager: Hey btw I forgot to mention the client asked for these 5 features awhile back as a part of this update and they just reminded me about them, I haven’t created tickets yet or told anyone about this. Will these features be included in the update that’s going out today?

Dev: …

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

Week 278: Most rage-inducing work experience — I’ve got a list saved! At least from the current circle of hell. I might post a few more under this tag later…

TicketA: Do this in locations a-e.
TicketB: Do this in locations e-h.
TicketC: Do this in locations i-k.
Root: There’s actually a-x, but okay. They’re all done.
Product: You didn’t address location e in ticket B! We can’t trust you to do your tickets right. Did you even test this?
Root: Did you check TicketA? It’s in TicketA.
Product guy: It was called out in TicketB! How did you miss it?!
Product guy: (Refuses to respond or speak to me, quite literally ever again.)
Product guy to everyone in private: Don’t trust Root. Don’t give her any tickets.
Product manager to boss: Root doesn’t complete her tickets! We can’t trust her. Don’t give her our tickets.
Product manager to TC: We can’t trust Root. Don’t give her our tickets.
TC: Nobody can trust you! Not even the execs! You need to rebuild your reputation.

Root: Asks coworker a simple question.
Root: Asks again.
Root: nudges them.
Root: Asks again.
Coworker: I’ll respond before tomorrow. (And doesn’t.)
Root: Asks again.
Root: Fine. I’ll figure it out in my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Asks four people about <feature> they all built.
Everyone: idk
Root: Okay, I’ll figure it out on my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Mentions multiple meetings to discuss ticket with <Person>.
TC: You called <Person> stupid and useless in front of the whole team! Go apologize!

Root: Tells TC something. Asks a simple question.
Root: Tells TC the same thing. Asks again.
TC: (No response for days.)
TC: Tells me the exact same thing publicly like it’s a revelation and I’m stupid for not knowing.
TC: You don’t communicate well!

Root: Asks who the end user of my ticket is.
Root: Asks Boss.
Root: Asks TC.
Root: Fine, I’ll build it for both.
Root: Asks again in PR.
TC: Derides; doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks again, clearly, with explanation.
TC: Copypastes the derision, still doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks boss.
Boss: Doesn’t answer.
Boss: You need to work on your communication skills.

Root: Mentions asking question about blocker to <Person> and not hearing back. Mentions following up later.
<Person>: Gets offended. Refuses to respond for weeks thereafter.

Root: Hey boss, there’s a ticket for a minor prod issue. Is that higher priority than my current ticket?
Root: Hey, should I switch tickets?
Root: Hey?
Root: … Okay, I’ll just keep on my current one.
Boss: You need to work on your priorities.

Everyone: (Endless circlejerking and drama and tattling)

Manager: I just created a new ticket! The website flashes when you reload it!

Dev: Yes, that's typically what happens when you reload a website.

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

Manager: I don’t understand! How come you take twice as long to do tickets as anyone else but your PRs are stuck in QA for half the time as anyone else??

Dev: …

Manager: We will be building a new app. THIS TIME EVERYTHING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, ANYTHING LESS THAN TOP QUALITY WORK WILL BE REJECTED!!

*Not even 2 days into the new project*

Manager: Ok that’s good enough, we can fix it later. Can you go quicker on the next feature? Just sacrifice a bit of quality so we get these tickets closed as fast as possible. I said we can fix it later. Getting tickets closed asap is top priority.

Dev: …

Root has standup.

Root: I had no ticket yesterday morning, so I followed up on <TicketA> with <PersonA> and updated it in Jira and linked its related tickets; talked with <PersonB> about <TicketB>, and reviewed code review comments on <TicketC>, and thought about those while looking into the CI spec failure on <TicketD>. I collapsed for 3 hours before fixing it. Halfway through the collapse, I talked with <PersonC> on <TicketC> CR comments and the spec issue in <TicketD>, then went to lay down again. Afterward, I solved the spec issue in <TicketD>, and started on the new ticket <TicketE> before calling it a day. Plans today are to <…>.

Manager, in private: I need you to proactively let me know if you’re taking long breaks and aren’t working as this impacts business flow.

—————

Yeah.

My update was four times longer than the others’ despite her not giving me a ticket to work on. I responded to slack while I was collapsed on the floor and discussed tickets. And, after I recovered, I went back to work to finish my 8h shift. But this isn’t good enough? And I need to let her know in advance when I’m going to collapse and be a bloody mental zombie for hours? It would be amazing if I knew. I barely have a few minutes notice, and that’s only if I’m really paying attention and looking for signs.

And (conjecture) she probably still thinks I’m not performing well enough. “Affecting our business flow” probably means she’s angry I didn’t talk to other people about low-priority <TicketE> yesterday while I was laying on the damned floor.

Goddamn I hate her.

Once upon a time, there were a restaurant called "iEat.tech.com".
It was a small single-location place, where the sufficient number of patrons could be served by the cozy number of employees.
In fact, headcount was so lean that the cook was also the one who washed all the dishes.

But then came the suits and their "VC"(daddy) money and scaled shit up.
Soon, there were so many patrons that the dishes started to pile up the sink, never washed.
"We need someone to wash the dishes!" said the cook
"Fuck you, you wash the dishes!" said the s*its
Naturally, the cook left soon after.

The s*its had a problem now. They could not replace the cook fast enough - all other cooks were either young, inexperienced and mediocre (but did clean the dishes), or refused to waste their time on the sink.
So the suits did what $*its always do - they got a fucking consultant. Who told them to get a fucking dishwashing machine and billed them the GDP of Ireland.

The s*is, of course, did not want to buy a dishwashing machine. "Our fucking process is too fucking disruptive for us to use a fucking store-bought mass-produced metal servant!" (s*its don't know what "machines" are. For them, it's all in terms of "servants", employees and machines alike).

So the s*its hired an engineer to "solve the fucking dish problem, once and for all".
The engineer quickly started measuring and drawing and calculating. The engineer was about to prepare a budget when the s*its came screaming "What the fuck are you doing? There is a fucking pile of dishes in the sink!"
The engineer replied that "I'm designing the machine!", to what the s*its responded "don't bring me fucking problems, bring me solutions!" (or some other s*it blabber)

So the engineer quickly designed an efficient dishwashing assembly line to be done in half the time most people would. And then went back to designing the machine.
But the s*its were having none of it. They kept expanding and expanding and doing what they could so that the engineer never had a moment to work on the machine. They dit it so surreptitiously that no one barely even noticed, but one day they were paying a team of engineers to be fucking human dishwashers.

Now replace "dishes" with "Jira tickets" or "quick fixes" or "tiny changes" and fix other terms accordingly.
Fucking s*its.

Why write any specs anymore? The juniors don't read them, nor do the product managers. I'm just talking to myself at this point.

So, I waste time writing these nice detailed tickets, then when I go to review the pull request, the whole pile of horseshit is half done, and when I ask the product managers for resolutions, they don't have a clue either.

So just give me the whole fucking app, I'll do the whole damn thing myself. See you on Mars in 2025 while you and your pleb asses serve me fries and burgers.

There’s a junior on my team, who has an ego problem.

Within 6-8 months, they have not progressed much, up to the point they still struggle with language and framework syntax.

Yet, they want to get the credit for doing big and important tasks, the ones they have no clue at all how to execute.

Our team tried to break more the tasks and tickets almost to the point of a tutorial. Junior got upset and complained that they did not want the tasks to be broken for them.

If we give space, tasks take forever to get completed. If we try to pair, Junior does everything in their power to cut the meeting short and again take forever to complete anything.

If we prioritize our own tasks, Junior complains that nobody pairs/assist them.

Took one for the team and started to work on finding ways to get this wonderful person to learn. Junior does not learn. In fact, almost feels like things enter from one ear and leave from the other instantly. Despite being repeated multiple times. Chewed. Presented in all sorts of way. You name it, I’ve tried.

Yesterday was the last drop. They fucking rolled their eyes while was explaining something.

This person is dead for me and I will make my personal crusade to not go out of my tasks to help them.

Thanks for coming to my TED rant.

Do managers not fucking understand that Jira is meant to eliminate all this stupid "What's the status with X?", and "Is Y done yet?" chatter. Our communication channels should be on business logic and other global updates about the company, not about fucking workflow status updates because you have nothing else to do with your day but ping me every 5 minutes.

LOOK AT THE REVIEW COLUMN ON JIRA. I MEAN ITS LITERALLY CALLED REVIEW. SO REVIEW IT AND DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.

I swear the devs consistently have a better overview on timelines and project status than management does - which is sad, because this is literally the definition of management!!!

JuniorDev: <<moves bug ticket to 'done'>>

FullStackClown: Ah nice, let's see what they've written here as to what the problem was <<reads comment in ticket>>

JuniorDev's Comment: "👍"

FullStackClown: 🤦‍♂️

While writing up this quarter's performance review, I re-read last quarter's goals, and found one my boss edited and added a minimum to: "Release more features that customers want and enjoy using, prioritized by product; minimum 4 product feature/bug tickets this quarter."

... they then proceeded to give me, not four+ product tickets, but: three security tickets (two of which are big projects), a frontend ticket that should have been assigned to the designer, and a slow query performance ticket -- on top of my existing security tickets from Q3.

How the fuck was I supposed to meet this requirement if I wasn't given any product tickets? What, finish the monster tickets in a week instead of a month or more each and beg for new product tickets from the product manager who refuses to even talk to me?

Fuck these people, seriously.

Manager: Send me a MS Teams chat if you have any questions or updates, it's faster than email and you'll get quick feedback from me :) Let's get that feedback loop ROLLING!

Manager: *ignores my (multiple) requests for feedback on MS Teams for over a week.*

I just want to move my tickets into done :(

Fuck startups.

Back when I was an wee lad I interviewed for an startup, not knowing that startups are not real companies. The scumbag interviewer, who was also the owner of the outfit, asked me what I was looking in a company. I said "fair wages, a non-antagonic environment and projects with real roadmaps".
He asked me to elaborate. I said, "You know, if today your product is a sales platform, I do not want to come into work next week and discover it is now an air travel tickets marketplace, or come back the very next day and discover it is now an automated pizza factory, or in the next day and it is now a crypto exchange..."

The scumbag looked PISSED. "Sorry, but we are looking for someone who likes the challenges of a dynamic environment (read: we do not have a business model and we hate the very idea of trying to make money out of our company), and you do not fit the profile"

Startups are not real companies, i.e. they do not systematically charge money in exchange for goods or services in amounts that exceed the cost of providing said goods or services. Most startups are just tax fronts for money laundering schemes. The rest are just playthings for rich assholes who can't get a real output-producing job. Those two categories are not mutually exclusive.

Take Facebook, for example. The poster child of startups. The Zucker that owns it just announced they are setting impossible performance targets on purpose, not even attempting to hide the fact that it is just a way to lay off large quantities of employees without using the words "massive lay offs". Companies, real thin-margin, lots-of-regulation profit-driven companies do not do that. They are not some sort of "capitalist woke", real CEOs just know that if their companies largely miss performance targets on their tenure, purposely or not, next it will be their neck on the chopping block. Because they can be fired if the KPI charts say they suck. But the Zucker cannot be fired, not even after commanding their beanbag and tap beer offices to be heated exclusively by burning hundred dollar bills.
So the Zucker is not interested in performance. Not even in lay offs as expense cutting measures - investors are an infinite source of free money for startups. The Zucker just wants to project power, especially now that engineers are not so confident in the stability of they high-paying jobs.

So are irrelevant 500-souls-or-less self-aggrandizing startups. Their owners are there because it is in vogue to have a startup or ten. And will have that startup pivot to whatever sounds fancy that season. After all, only poor people care about things like EBITDA and profit margins repeatability - A.K.A. "getting more money".

Fuck startups.

Last week we made jira tickets to create jira tickets

Is this really what tech-startup culture is?

A year ago I wanted to make a change and joined my friend who is a VP at a startup. She and my team are great even up to the C-suite level. But after a recent encounter with the core developer team here… I’m at my
breaking point.

This dev team is extremely tribal. It’s as if they view other tech teams as “others” and it’s “us vs. them”. My team works on a different vertical so I’ve never interacted with them before and a timeline of events is below. Is this kind of behavior a normal thing at a tech startups?

/story
Here’s some highlights from the last month…

- Customer demands a deliverable because it’s in a contract signed a year ago.
- No one in dev can be troubled to lift a finger (holiday season). I get called in to support.
- This isn’t my code - I’ve never seen or used it before.
- None of dev’s documentation is up to date.
- Find out dev hasn’t touched client’s project in a year.
- Spend weeks working with it. Find fundamental flaws which could have put us in legal jeopardy.
- I realize dev never finished this project because it doesn’t even have basic functionality to do what customer needs.
- Spent entire Christmas/New Year working.
- Create dozens of bug tickets and merge requests.
- Barely squeeze by and save multi-million $ contract renewal.

So what happens next?
- Reprimanded by the dev lead. He tells me I’m “hurting people’s feelings” by pointing out so many problems.
- A PM in a public Slack channel told me I was “passive aggressive” for a Jira issue where I wrote (verbatim) “Can we enable code highlighting in this text box? It’s difficult to show steps to reproduce the bug.”
- get told by VP to stop talking to them
- a bunch of merge requests rejected without explanation
- weeks later I see someone in dev run into a bug I found. I sent him the fix. They accepted his MR in the same day and it actually added another new bug.
- I lookup the recent commits of the lead-dev who chewed me out, he’s been working on adding colors to his console log output for print debugging. This is a time-critical application and he adds 30% overhead with logging debug information in production.
- Meanwhile dozens of major bugs exist and are ignored.
- The CTO at this company loves these people - though he hasn’t brought in any new business (literally) ever.
- My team is about to close a new contract and we’ve spent 15 days to work on it.
- The CTO said my team is slow and doesn’t fit with the business model of the company.

My team has never dealt with these devs before, so I checked Glassdoor for other experiences, the dev team apparently…
- uses “vulgar slurs for women”
- talking about technical issues “resulted in a lot of resentment”
- has an apparent “desire for revenge”

/ end story

This last month really shocked me because for my career so far I’ve never dealt with this kind of behavior. I could see a startup accepting this kind of culture if was bringing in a lot of revenue but they aren’t. They dropped the ball so hard we all lost our bonuses this year. It’s made even worse with the fact that they are constantly producing complete dog poop code (I’ve kept that opinion to myself though).

I’m really left wondering if this is just how it is in the high-stakes startup world.

Sorry - this started out as a question but ended up another dev rant.

Manager: What's your time estimate on that latest ticket?

Dev: It's literally written in the "time estimate" field on the ticket, even in standard human units like "hours", "minutes", and "seconds"

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

An old company contacted me, seemed remorseful and said I probably didn't want to work there again but kept pushing. Eventually he said a high salary and I figured ok they had easy projects and the overpaying would beat the underpaying they did while I was there, right?

The new lead dev at the place took a month to give me work, tried to pressure me by saying she was going to tell management they are behind because of me, and then progressively stopped assigning tickets to me and assign-then-reassign them from me according to my schedule/predictions I revealed during the daily stand-ups. Why hire me at all. Then they said they changed their business direction at 3 months and let me go. What a waste of everyone's time.

Screw the Chief Technology Clown role...

I'm now officially Chief Babysitting Clown...

Skills I can teach you include the following:

- How to read JIRA tickets
- How to write JIRA tickets
- How to check colleagues' calendars
- How to define requirements in English and not some sort of technologically challenged caveman language
- How NOT to do any programming (since I don't have time for that anymore)

And many, many more! Inquire within!

customer: "hey, feature X is broken!"

me: *asks for details

customer, one week later: "feature X contains information about Y, that *must not* be"

me: *looks at code, at git-history, at related tickets

customer, one year ago: "hey, feature X *must* contain information about Y"

me, all the time: :-|

Why do managers always want to fucking "discuss"? If you had literally a first-grader's education in basic electronics, you could define tasks and tickets by yourself and not have to fumble around all day and fuck it up,

I manage a team of engineers.

Toxic Culture Post #2:

Manager: Everybody on your team needs their own swimlane in Jira. Each person's work should be their own lane. When I have a ticket for <Project A> I want to make sure that <Bob> always gets it, all tickets for <Project B> must go to <James>. You'll need to figure out which team member will handle <New Project C> and create their personal swim lane.

Me: That's not really how SCRUM works. Actually, that's not how teamwork works. You're creating silos and we all need to learn how to do these tasks. We're a cross-functional team, and each team member brings their own unique talents to the whole process.

Manager: So you'll create the swimlanes?

Me: No

Manager (to Bob): You'll be devoted to <Project A> from now own. It's the only work I expect you to do. All work for that project will be yours.

Likewise, my manager also reached out to each team member and assigned them specific tasks, furthering the silos.

You guys wanna know why I rage so much at the 🤡🤡🤡's I work with?

I shit you not, this is a ticket in our "to do" section of our Jira.

what even is ticket linking??!?!?

what even are tickets??!?!?!

or better yet.... what even the fuck is jira?!?!?! I've only been using it for over a year, give me some time to figure out how to use it!!!!!!

I don't know, maybe i'm the asshole. But at least I don't feel like a 🤡

Send help..

The project we're currently working on:

- an angular codebase that's broken beyond recognition - nothing's working as it should

- user stories are estimated in hours, but estimations are treated as hard facts. Since the app is so broken, everything takes longer than usual and it's almost impossible to consider every potential hardship during refinements, therefore, we constantly need more time than we have estimated

- retrospectives (intentional plural here, since one time isn't enough) are used to discuss why we cannot manage to finish tickets within the estimations

- the design was made beforehand and is extremely inconsistent and inaccessible

- if you open a new ticket, you need to add a reason for why this ticket is needed - in addition to the ticket description..

- The moment you move a ticket to QA, the "Scrum Master" breathes down your neck, shoving new tickets in your face. Despite having to finish up the other two you're still working on

- multiple teams are working on the application, but - of course - communication is overrated.

I could go on, but I'm too tired..
We were supposed to help the client for a couple of months - we're close to a year now and still nowhere near done.

Started at a new employer few days ago. It all started with:

'To become familiar with our tech stack and projects we've assigned some tickets to you, 'some' of these are tickets others weren't able to finish'.

The tickets (12):

Status: stuck
Added: 4 months ago
Notes: 12 (mostly negative)
Assigned and unassigned to different people 8 times

My tech lead keeps assigning me incident tickets in the company's worst legacy app because I solved some bug in it a while ago. I'm the only one who gets assigned these.

If this keeps going, I know for sure that I will be regarded as the designated developer for this application. Then I will be truly fucked.

Here I am trying to get some tickets for a theater, and I noticed an interesting thing. It seems that the website holds no session persistence. In other words it doesn't check to see if the user has stopped trying to order tickets, instead it holds the seats for about 30 minutes. This is kind of stupid because when you back out, your treated as a completely new session, you have no way of trying to get back the seats you had chosen.

Sooo, what does this mean? It means that I can start selecting a bunch of seats and continue selecting a bunch of seats. There appears to be no server-side checks to prevent someone from just booking the entire theater.

Soooooo, what does this mean? I could potentially spam the entire country's theaters (any that use this website as a booking system) and make it impossible for people to book seats through this website.

What do you guys think? Is this a bug or feature?

There are lots of words in this jira ticket. All real words that make sense on their own. However, put together, they are completely fucking meaningless. Now my brain hurts!!!

Me: “Hey boss, you assigned these things to me that I’m not qualified for and have no experience in. We should really hire someone with the specialized skills in this”

Boss “I agree. It’s a role I desperately think we should have hired for a long time ago”

Me “Ok so about these tickets the-“

Boss “I need you to write up a justification for this role, what kind of work the person would be doing and what budget implications we will incur”

Me “You’re asking me to write a job description for a class of work I’ve already admitted I have no experience or qualifications doing MYSELF?”

Boss “Correct”

Me “and I’m still responsible in the meantime for getting these other tickets done still aren’t I?”

Boss “Yes”

Me “Very well. I’ll email you a recap of this discussion then so we can come back to it later when we start hiring for the role”

(and so my ass is sufficiently covered when I inevitably bring down prod and people start asking why I broke prod)

RETARD MASTER: So how did you feel about this sprint DEV?

*nothing is planned, new tickets added each day and old ones removed - inconsistent sprint*

DEV: Well, it’s a bit chaotic, but it’s understandable. I’m used to it. Nothing’s to blame here. Client can’t produce their end of the bargain on time.

*3 week later*

DEV MANAGER: So RETARD MASTER gave a feedback. He told me you insulted him.

DEV: Can I please die now? Not funny.

Manager: (𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑡)

Title: Something something related to the dynamic display of a button on one of our screens in our UI

Description: Something something completely different related to how entities are filtered on a different screen

Dev: f*&$ing hell, do i have to give yet ANOTHER schooling in JIRA this week?!

I swear they're drunk every time they write tickets.

Let's say you have a MySQL database table for jobs. Each job has 1 associated ticket. You want to keep track if the ticket is closed or not. Every sane person creates jobs table, tickets table, keeps bool value for ticket state and relationship between them.

But because our database is designed by a half braindead amoeba, we have one table only, so each job has to be updated individually with a new ticket number and its state. Beacuse it sooo much faster to update (daily!) 13k jobs than just 100 tickets.
As a bonus - if the ticked is closed, the column "ticket_closed" is "No", if it's still open the value is "FALSE". Yes, both as varchar/strings.

<...in the style of linkin park's in the end...>

I DOCUMENTED SO HARD, AND MADE SO MANY TICKETS!!!

BUT IN THE END, NOBODY REALLY READS THEM!!!

I HAD TO DEV!!! AND BUILD IT ALL!!!

BUT IN THE END, IT FEELS LIKE I'M TALKING TO A BRICK WALL!!!!

rhymes are lazy / nonexistent, I know, but my rage is superseding my ability to rhyme right now.

Just startup stories:

Our backlog of tasks and bugs has officially reached 100+ tickets, all for me, the single software engineer at our "tech" company.

Huh, imagine that.

*me and my manager, during my appraisal meeting

me: *talks about work done in previous project, and the current one under him

manager: but your JIRA throughput is very less.

me: the tickets which I pick are more research oriented and almost always take more time than the other config- fix type ones, and due to me being shifted from another team, there has been an increasing learning curve, I realize that, but...

manager: look at Jack, his throughput has been consistently high.

*me, after realizing my appraisal has obviously gotten affected and this discussion will lead nowhere

me: I would like to have a chat with HR before I sign the form with the percentage increment you are offering.

*me, with hr the next day
hr: your manager tells me that your throughput has been less than satisfactory.

me: *goes on to explain about the type of tickets I have been working on, along with other enhancements done to make people's lives easier

hr: but the throughput...

me: where the f**k do I sign?

Another day, another shitty set of JIRA tickets.

In this week's edition, we run into an issue you'd think is a meme, something you couldn't even make up: three tickets with IDENTICAL titles, but miraculously, they actually refer to three DIFFERENT tasks! (Also comical, they're not bugs, they're tasks, but mouth breathers don't really know the difference, and at this point I just don't have the energy to attempt to explain what could be explained to elementary school children.)

I present a rare look into our national archives!

This document features two exhibits:

Exhibit A: product owner's original ticket titles

Exhibit B: translated-into-competency-because-i'm-not-mentally-deficient ticket titles

Just more proof that 'product owners' don't own shit, the devs are the real ones who actually know what is going on.

I mean just LOOK at Exhibit A's titles. As a big smart manager, do you write those tickets, smile, and say to yourself "Ah, yep, that's very clear, I'll definitely remember what each of these mean literally 5 seconds from now!"

Is asking for literally 30 seconds more of thought too much to ask for? Apparently.

Just kill me

Happy friday ☠️

"What do you do for a living?"

I go to meetings, write Jira tickets, and occasionally I code

Joined a new team at work 6 months ago. Immediately set upon by a useless PO who was somehow set in her ways while still being around 30 years old. Absolutely refused to change the broken team dynamic or processes in any way whatsoever. Made terrible tickets, never did refinement on tickets so they were always missing stuff and constantly blocked. Generally unlikeable and difficult to work with, incompetent at her job and resolutely refused to change literally anything to make the team function better.

She finally leaves after 6 months and the team dynamic changes immediately. Suddenly we are improving our processes, getting stakeholder input, refining tickets, taking reasonable amounts of work in a sprint. We have discussions without her butting in and getting frustrated when you bring up legitimate concerns. No longer do you have to tiptoe around and appease her ego if you want to point out the obvious flaws in the work she drew up or even just examine it from a technical perspective.

It's insane how much things can improve once you shed the dead weight of people that are just determined to be difficult and won't budge an inch to change their ways. Good riddance.

I often wonder if our clients seriously think we have an all-knowing crystal ball of wisdom when they send tickets like "Cannot send emails - please check" while they have like 10 servers and email delivery is a complex matter on its own already.

If I didn't care what our clients think, I'd reply with equally informative email of "Maybe, who knows"...

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

Getting "bug" tickets from customers complaining about EXACTLY WHAT I DESCRIBED WOULD HAPPEN. THATS NOT A F&)$*(%$(*# BUG, THATS LITERALLY WORD FOR WORD WHAT I WROTE IN THE TICKET LAST WEEK YOU F&#*(@#$() NEANDERTHAL PIECE OF SH$%*(#(*)!!! WE AGREED ON THIS EXACT BUSINESS PROCESS WEEKS AGO. DO YOU EVEN READ THE WORDS THAT I WRITE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I absolutely love being micro managed by my team mates and QA. I also love being blamed for the other developers shitty code that breaks other crap in the front-end for when my tickets get checked by QA it's my code that becomes the problem. The part I love the most, is when I get slack messages "quick call" and the same thing gets explained to me by 3 different people.

FUCK!!!!

Got tickets to jbcnconf. Got all the flights in order. Got a place to stay.

And apparently someone decided to have a strike in the airlines on the day my connecting flight was supposed to happen. And ofc the flight got cancelled. And ofc there are no alternatives.

So now the whole ~1k€ conference deal will go down the gutter. FUCK!! I soooo wanted to visit Barcelona and attend that conf!!

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!

P.S. I hate you, Ryanair

sprint started two weeks ago, it's due today.

yesterday, most tasks for the sprint were done, but was still waiting that whole two weeks for updates on two new tickets, guess they'll be in the next sprint...

project leaders yesterday: oh here are those updates for the sprint! (not to mention the meeting was at 5 PM yesterday, not even the BEGINNING of the work day)

project leaders today: what's the status of the sprint?!

...it's a joke, right? do you think I'm a fucking magician?

its always the same no matter where you go, slowly starting to realize...

tl;dr; adding new feature requests the day before a sprint ends and then having the nerve of asking the "status" of the sprint the following day.

How can I make my manager understand that performance should not be measured by how many tickets we have resolved?

If the ticket is an easy one then sure 1-2 days is enough, but for some complicated shit or dealing with models that I have never touched before, I am gonna need several days just to understand the requirement.

For some fucked up reason, our story point is in hours, instead of days. So when we say 24 hours, then it's only 3 days.

Another fucked up reason is that my colleagues doesn't seem to mind. I am the most vocal one objecting when got assigned too many tickets. They just joke around and seem to accept it.

FYI, I am just 6 months in and bouncing between 3 projects.
Am I just too lazy or slow?
In my previous company, the devs seemed to be pretty chill, and the project manager only complained when an issue has been dragging on for weeks.

"We're a team!"

"We need to work together!"

...product managers, sheesh

Saw new issue on jira. When look, they are like my computer is slow or I cannot any buttons in Excel.

For fuck sake, don't send stupid tickets, we already got stupid projects the company took from the others without consulting to the IT team.

There are about 600 tickets every month and most of them are issue because of their stupidity not the software (they never read the error message). And no we are not IT support, go ask those ppl for your computer issue.

The feeling when you crush like 15 tickets in one day

Can someone please write a plugin that automatically translates bug tickets into startup-ese? It would make it very easy to present the most common offenders to higher management on quarterly reviews.

Example:
-
$< "screen A is all messed up"
$> "We are disrupting the establishment in screen A"
-
$< "API B is not responding, giving timeout errors"
$> "We are facing logistical challenges in API B"

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

everytime i buy a new phone ,i feel this sense of extreme regret :(

i bought a moto g 5g phone last year in feb, it was so good . it didn't had any out of the world cameras or some funky stuff, but it gave a decent performance and i couldn't want any other phone.

In October my mom's phone started giving issues so i bought a realme phone for her that was half my phone's price. i couldn't spent any mor e because otherwise she wouldn't take it. she accepted the cheaper phone and within 4 days sue was cursing it. the phone had decent specs but would lag in certain apps like zoom, and won't run some call recorder apps. at the end i swapped my phone with mom's since i didn't cared about zoom or the recorder.

now this shit realme phone's memory has gone around 60% full of my stuff, and its showing its limitations. this shit auto relaunches insta after a few minutes of usage, probably because its runtime memory gets short( 4gb 128gb device gets memory shortages. nice). its video quality is shit and camera also takes rarely good pics.

the worst thing i like about smartphones today is how they over optimise the ui. this insta issue and auto call recorders not working is simply because of the realme skin running over the stock android. i had similar issues with a xiaomi device i bought for my dad sometime ago. (fortunately my dad is more medieval so that crap has not came back to me :'/ )

so overall i am buying a 3rd phone in 17 months.
This time it's Samsung f23 and am worried that it's also going to suck. i was this 🤏close to buying a pixel 6 or even an iphone coz i can afford them.

but the regret of buying such an expensive phone that will need replacement in 2 years made me rethink.

the only android os that have suited me the best is stock and as of now only 2 companies are making it : google and moto(* it's 100% aosp with 3 extra apps but they can't say that, so they also state that they are not stock os) . one plus is also a brand that i have heard makes a good os . but recently i also heard that they have completely scrapped their os and using oppo's softwares . plus the amount of tickets we get for notifications not working in oneplus, am sure their optimization is extremely aggressive.

so everything between a moderate price phone ( that will need a replacement in 2 years ) to a flagship felt unnecessary to me, so i went ahead with a Samsung's shit phone. f23 has almost same specs as moto but it's again a heavily customised os. i wanna waste my money on trying a custom os and declare it shitty.

most of my friends that use Samsung are fan of it but they are also not very techy so i guess it suits them well. i am the guy who first installs nova launcher in his device, so let's see what it brings on the table. from the 3rd person p.o.v, i felt its screen and camera images to he nice whenever i used their mobiles, so let's see what this brings to the table :(

so i am on notice period and suddenly my manager has realised that there are a lot of tasks that i have to pickup. well fuck this guy.

i was initially dumb enough to think that i leaving is a bad thing,and i should be doing everything to make the transition easier. the task was also interesting enough , as we were trying to add a new and complex feature and i was the main dev there.

so i started at full pace. i would work on my tasks for hours , even missing on my personal projects. but since last week he would keep adding new tickets in my jira boards every few days , followed by a quick huddle telling how this is a very small and high priority ticlet and i should look at that first.

and me being me, i would not only just finish those small tickets in time, but have a progress on my major feature, as well as answer doubts of other team mates and attend meetings.

--------

i always forget how hypnotising this work culture usually get. the above scenario that i explained? i have no problem with that in a general day. i love to work, solve problems and help others. but these are no normal days, this is my fuckin notice period.

And i am here coz of a reason. if they rely on me so much, why did they forced me to relocate when i just can't? why don't they gove me a lucrative salary + worthy relocation benefits ? fuck them. i even have to serve for a fucking 60 days coz they are not willing to reduce my notice period .

fake promises everytime.
"you don't worry about different office mentioned in your offer letter. we will always keep the environment remote" ~ lie

"even if we go wfo, our company will open an office in your city too, your city is the capital and we had an office there before" ~ lie

"your notice period will get reduced, dont worry about the 60 days" - another fucking lie

______

notice period experts, i need some devil advice to not get exploited by a lier corp. how to utilise my notice period and what should he the excuses to not attend any nloody meetings?

I took some days off and they are almost over but I still feel like shit and the idea of going back next week makes me anxious. But I work from home, earn more money than everyone I know outside the company (despite the equity politics that makes them pay me like a junior instead of a senior) and have more benefits than the ones I’m offered via LinkedIn, so quitting would be stupid.

Our team is only 3 members because the company fired too many people. Most tickets are max priority bugs and we can barely work on our team goals, which are also max priority, and when they say the clients with problems are getting angry I feel like they are going to get angry at me. That and I’ve been getting after hours messages during my time off telling me to hurry up because the client had been waiting for more than a week, and I didn’t know if I was supposed to work or to explain I was on vacations (feels like sick days) or apologize for leaving before solving the ticket.

Well, our board dedicated to On call has so many tickets that given the rate our team is going, it'll take 30+ years to finish them all.

Oh and it keeps growing

If you're filling a ticket on a team, make sure it includes EVERYTHING that is needed to complete the ticket so anyone on your team can complete it, not just the people with institutional knowledge.

I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.

There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).

Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.

So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.

The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...

... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.

I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.

In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.

I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.

Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.

I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.

RAAAAAAH fuck fuck fucking shit!!! Fuck jest Typescript "on the fly" compilation esModuleInterop typeroots, missing definitions jest ts-ignore and xtest everywhere, manual npm linking with different pkg mgrs & pub to a private registry, building docker images locally and doing tag management across git, docker & kubernetes then cross fingers that prod which has 0 common setup with local & test somehow works, open architecture "tickets" and wait months before they resolve, then repeat ad infinitum. How the fuck can I be productive when I need to be all over the place all the time and deal with these meta-code shenanigans. I just wanna code, damned

I'm getting tired of coding. Not really the coding part, the dealing with people who tell me what to code and why part. Sort of considering making a move into a scrum master or PM role just so I can get fired when I say "No, we're not changing everything they've been working on in the middle of the sprint" or maybe "Yeah, no we're not going to put in a bunch of tickets to change the UI/UX without first talking to the designers, because that's what they do. Yes, I realize we aren't Facebook, but do you realize we "compete" with them because a huge number of people will compare our usability to theirs? (even if just subconsciously)"

Just keep getting the dumbest tickets from a client as a Frontend dev.

I told them I am a backend and even my contract says backend but I made the mistake to help them with some themes.

So fucking ready to take other interviews where I don't have to deal with bullshit colors and fonts anymore.

i am i such a shitty situation. i have recently started to love my job as i find the work to be lesser and lesser stressful. i finish my tickets in 2-3 hours exch day, and i am almost free after 3 pm and officially free after 6.30 pm every day (kinda officially, as i have set an unavailable notice on my calendar for 6.30 to 8.30 and after that no one really is online).

i get time to go out, jog, play with my pets do home taks, and even study sometime.

everything is going great except 2 things: they are ending the remote work policy in 2022 and giving esops instead of appraisal/promotion :'( will have to either switch or go live in the city where my office is, which is the most expensive city in my country ( and maybe in top 10 most expensive in the world) + very unsafe. and its obvious that my boss won't be letting me code lying flat on a mattress with a bag of cheetos and in just boxers and flip-flops

Time to switch to offline and hide in some dark corner to get work done. Tired of all the IM’s and coming over to my desk from 1 person for “critical” work. If they’re all critical then none of them are truly critical. If you sit on the data for 2 months, and then today is the day it becomes critical and the compliance issue is because of your ineptitude then its a you problem not an IT problem. Then on top of that you submit your data to be loaded in the incorrect request form and spreadsheet format you can go fuck yourself asking this be done in an hour. It could be done in 15 minutes if you had it in the correct format as specified in the 20 meetings over the past year which removed all manual analysis and automated the entire process you idiot. Now I have to get it into the correct format in that hour so I don’t have to do the analysis for you.
I have other things to do besides your etl tickets, like finding the actual problems in our actual critical applications. You know the ones where the VP’s of this giant corporation start calling if they go down.
Sorry for the rambling guys.

Why they are keep assigning tasks (new features as minor fix) till release date. And want me to complete it a week before release date.
HOW?

Go assign a super simple ticket to your "product owner" or "manager" or whoever the hell claims they "work so hard" and "have the vision" or whatever blah blah blah when in reality YOU'RE the one working 12 hour days, completing the features used by THOUSANDS.

Just try it. They'll never complete it. I guarantee it. Here I am looking at one that is three weeks old asking to update the f&*(@#$ credit card credentials for a simple log service to be reactivated.

So sick of this backward world where us devs never get any credit.

Who wants to start a software union with me?

How is it that 4 years after the start of this project we still have to tell people that their dedicated cloud storage is for their projects and not their 8TB server backups or 600000+ vacation pictures…
We literally have processes sending you mails that keep telling you should sort your crap and you still manage not to listen. And then we get support tickets like “cloud storage abnormally slow” “bug in performances” etc… The last gem being a small company CEO that contacted our CEO about this “problem”, he had syncd his entire workstation and told his employees to do the same…

I’m not sure how to convey the stack of feelings I have regarding all of this. I want not to care but I can’t. I want to get angry but what’s the point.

!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.

However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.

I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.

I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.

I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.

---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs

Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.

Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!

People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.

And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!

I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?

And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!

The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.

--------

This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.

But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.

2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone

3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .

i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money

At my new internship I am have to work in Magento. I come to FUCKING hate it.

From the phtml files, the choice between caching or having to wait 20 fucking seconds for a page reload to the huge file structure and the "documentation".

The whole fucking thing is a mess with a shit load of bugs and confusing git tickets that never seem to be added as updates!!!

Fucking hate this shit

Product manager keeps fucking with my Jira board, changing names of tickets that he's not even the reporter of and none of his names make any sense. I keep thinking my tickets have disappeared. He doesn't understand how Jira works and confuses the shit out of me.

Why are we even using JIRA?

It's clear from the behavior of the rest of my team that nobody ever has it open, looks at it, or thinks about any tasks that would improve the product other than sputtering out the occasional "mArKeTiNg HyPe" with incomplete horrible tickets that are at best barely decipherable.

Honestly, we can save the $50 a month and I'll just use my own personal trello board, the outcome would be the same.

I mean my life is a joke: we had to have a near hour-long google hangouts for literally dragging and dropping the 'demo/review' tickets to 'done' because my colleagues are so incompetent they can't read the tickets and realize which tickets HAVE LITERALLY ALREADY BEEN SHIPPED TO PRODUCTION WEEKS AGO.

returning from 2 weeks of PTO, the haiku

what was I doing?
*Looks through tickets in jira*
gives up. plays halo.

Own before you do it.

Create user stories, fill tickets, draw diagrams, send approval mails, fill docs, write in the company blog and then some, before you even think about writing a line of code.

I think my next remote job is going to be at least 500 miles or a minimum of four states away to make it harder for someone to spring a “everyone local to the office has to come in for this day of corporate training and indoctrination” on me at the last minute.

“Oh sure I can come in. I’ll be on the lookout for my flight tickets and itinerary”.

Usually makes them scurry off.

A large pool of application instances' is writing logs to the same physical file. No way to distinguish which instance wrote which line.

Welcome to hell

We're being asked questions. We're replying that we cannot help unless logging is fixed. Noone's bothering to fix this mess and instead returns tickets with requests to investigate more.

F.U.N
/s

Stakeholder: Users are unable to buy tickets on the website. IT says Azure’s health check is showing an unhealthy status.

[It’s Sunday. Web Engineering is not on call so no one sees this right away.]

Stakeholder: IT restarted the Azure website twice, but users still can’t place orders.

Me: There was never an issue with the Azure site. That health check is inaccurate. There is a rewrite rule that sends the Azure supplied domain to our custom domain. The Azure health check doesn’t like that so it returns an unhealthy status. The problem is the ticketing server that the website has to communicate with. The ticketing server is overwhelmed and can’t handle more requests. IT should have checked the ticketing server’s logs. This has happened before and it’s never been an Azure issue. It’s a ticketing server issue.

Stakeholder and IT: Oops 😅

—-

JFC. Stop trying to make this web engineering’s problem. Stop trying to make it look like engineering dropped the ball. The ticketing server has experienced this issue multiple times. The ticketing server is maintained by a different team. The website’s symptoms are always the same and there are steps you need to take before you make the decision to restart the website, which will cause the website to show a blue screen of death that says 503 service unavailable for a few minutes. And we have a switch to shut off all transactions. Why do you not want to use it when it’s clear the website can’t process transactions???

So ok, today was a crazy day.
New sprint, new ticket.
Work on the bug tickets first he said ….

Sure can. Oh had I just known that this very first innocent looking ticket is the way to coder‘s hell ….

‚Access of undefined‘ it said. Easy to fix, I thought.
Until I found the very same code twenty-fucking-two times over about 50 files!

Who would guess that exportSingleOperatorBooking, exportSeveralOperatorBookings, exportAllOperatorBookings (… and more) could in practically be the same? Nah, they all use different interfaces.
Oh wait, the alias type of the extended sub-interface of file misc.ts is the same logical content as a differently named interface below another different interface with the same content as in another ts file?
Wait that can‘t be. Riiiiight?? 😳

8h later I have barely scratched the surface of refactoring this shitshow of a project.
But no, I refuse to put the same error handling multiple times in different places.
I could have been done already. I could have saved my soul, my sanity. But I will be brave and strong to save the innocent developer that will cometh after me. For I shall be rewardeth for my sacrifice.
Amen.

Each day, I read the vast swath of ticket hell hole that is our JIRA.

I read tickets that are written by people with not just 0, but an undefined understanding of technology...

I read tickets that are technically impossible due to this 0 understanding...

And finally, I laugh in bitterness seeing the time estimates stack up to months and months worth of work for which the managers expect to be done in 2-3 weeks 😂

!rant
In the past 2 days I worked a lot, now I slept 12 hours straight. I don't have any tickets left, and the manager told me to have fun. I haven't felt such freedom in a while.
(The project will be late by a year in February, so until now I always had at least 2 urgent tickets related to topics that I've never heard of before.)

Just had a meeting about what our product's vision was going to be. Without actually talking about what that vision was. It was a statement of the business goal amd some nonsense about how we were going to pick tickets based on reaching said business goal.

Like, yeah. That's what we have been doing. You are not new here so why are you acting like it. And yet these people are the ones who make more money than me. I need to start saying more obvious things. Maybe I'll be made a director.

I completed 3 tickets in a day. Now can I do nothing for the rest of the week please?

"Just let me know when you're done (today) with that handful of JIRA tickets that are not reproducible, have no description, and include no error information. We need to get them into the next release."

Yeah. Yeah, I'll let you know real soon.

i have a very casual and boring job. it's a b2b company and you can get an idea of how less work we get (or how fast i am) that it's day 1 of the sprint and i have almost finished all my tickets. my manager always praises me as someone fast whereas i see myself as pretty slow and this company even slower.

i feel like quitting, but the relax environment and stability of the company on paper makes me wonder of that would be a correct decision.
It's a deep tech company (not just meat e commerce or car rentals, a proper b2b analytics giant startup with good profitability) , our sdks are used by major startups and yet i find it boring.

I am an android dev who would love to stay at top of the game. my previous company used latest jetpack libraries, kotlin, modular architectures and stuff. everyday was a hectic chaos of life where there were deadlines, new requests coming in every few days and i was becoming the awesome fast android dev that i am now.

in this company there is no challenge for me.But the amount of free time has helped me grow beyond a single domain. i am currently hustling in 3 areas : my body( i started working out regularly, got my tummy under control), my technical skillset( started taking web dev classes) and my physical skillset (started taking driving and swimming lessons) . the amount of self growth time increases since company has a good leave and PTO policy

it all feels pretty good but the constant feeling of being left out from the android domain makes me think if i should give interviews. am i being stupid or what? my friends are all growing up with better salaries and packages. i am way better than some of them and equally capable as a few of them, so i sometimes feel being behind in finances too :/

Are you content with your job or always searching for greener pastures?

I'm split inbetween. Current pay is very decent and working conditions are flexible. However, the work itself is not always that great. I find it to be comedically true how "hard workers" don't get promoted or bonuses, they get more work. There has recently been a heavy influx of what I'd like to classify as "shit tickets" since a guy who was the main "shit ticket doer" left the company after being burnt out.

I work with a small-ish digital agency as a BE dev, so I'm mostly dealing with small to medium scale projects built with WordPress/WooCommerce, with often custom API/ERP integrations on top. I'm not a big fan of the stack as a developer but as a contractor I can understand the business reasons why it is used. Part of me wants to find something else, part of me thinks I'm looking for a perfect company that doesn't exist and I should lower my expectations -- I might find better work for sure, but with the same pay and conditions? It seems unlikely at the moment. The company was recently acquired, so I'm hopeful for the future.

when you gotta do front end tickets but the mockups you received to implement aren't finalized

fml

My JIRA fanatic manager: log whatever you do during the day, even the smallest things are important. and you have all the material needed for next day's standup meet.

me, on a particular tuesday:
had lunch
peed thrice
bitched about an unreasonable bug raised by the testing team
listened to Rihanna's song Diamonds
had four mugs of coffee
, among various other things.

next day.
manager: so, ssup?
me: eh, didn't do much yesterday. was one of those down days I guess.

Guess who was asked to write "didn't do much yesterday" on all the JIRA tickets assigned to him?

Fuck ticketing systems man.. jumped from a good job that i previously thought was going to be a deadend and jobhopped to a new one with a significant salary increase. Problem is that The stress levels increased 5x, and there’s significant rush to complete tasks that have sub optimal descriptions to put it nicely. The problem with that is that the lead doesn’t have enough time to properly write them and catching him during work hours for him to explain them is sometimes impossible. Sitting in limbo with 4-5 tickets open, all of them with high priority and stresing the fuck out.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

If a developer was having a slump (unable to close tickets, find solutions, get mind to work)
What could they possibly do to fix it?

Seriously, I got given a project that someone else was working on, it's beind and they're on long term sick. I did the project as discussed. My manager has decided he wants it done differently, wasting about a week of work. This is the same manager that complained about my rate of closing tickets. 2 weeks ago.

Malicious compliance time, I'm closing the current ticket and creating a new one for the new work.

*last week, sprint retrospect meeting*
TL : "So next is dotenv . Hey dotenv, tell us what went well in the sprint, what went wrong and what could be improved"

le dotenv: "so all went good for me. i had just 5 tickets and i was able to complete them on time. i am grateful for team to provide support when needed in those tasks. no areas for improvement or wrong from my side"

*next sprint*
TL : "So dotenv, you have these 7 tickets with 3 being p0 priority. you also have 2 releases in addition to these tickets. also, since your senior is going to Malaysia for a nice fucking week, here is his additional 5 tickets with 3 p0 priority and 2 releases :)"

me : 🥲
----
I really need to push up my blame game :/

Product Manager: Is there an event in the staging environment that we can use for testing orders?

Stakeholder: [Out of his comfort zone because he’s taking over tasks that used to belong to his assistant and he doesn’t have a new assistant yet.]There’s an event for 6/9/2022 that still has tickets available.

[Today is 8/24/2022.]

PM: You do realize that the website doesn’t allow users to buy tickets for events that are in the past?

In a sprint planning meeting, tickets are supposed to be detailed prior right? Right? So why are people asking basic "what are we supposed to be doing in this ticket?" questions in this meeting? I proposed doing these meetings and as soon as the concept got hijacked I knew this was going to happen, but damn it I had hope.

And I am so sick of my product manager not knowing the product. These meetings go so fucking cock-eyed because this woman can't be bothered to know the damn product. At all.

My team lead wants all tickets reviewed but it takes them forever to review them. The 2 juniors (incl. me) have now 6 tickets in review each.

"Scrum master" (if we can call it that) assigns all tickets upon creation. There are currently no unassigned tickets left in the backlog that I can start with.

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market

Has anyone else ever been stuck in a 'doSomething()' limbo where your dev section has no tickets so you have to create your own tickets so that you still seem productive?

This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :

• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*

Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.

While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.

The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!

Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.

One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.

Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.

I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.

bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)

--------------------------

There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!

• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))

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

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

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

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

How do you focus in remote meetings? I’ve been pretending for a year or two, and then figuring out what I have to do by reading the meeting summary or the jira tickets.

Or proposing pair programming and casually asking the other person what she wants to start with.

I think it is easier to focus when the meeting is in my language, otherwise it is like the videos I play on the background when I do other stuff. But even if I’m not using the phone or another screen I zone out…

So I’m tryina put together a resume and I see a lot of dev résumé talking about increased revenue from x to y or user base from z to w.

What I don’t understand is while yes the user base did increase from z to w it wasn’t just you that caused it. The entire company was working hard at it to get there so why are u claiming that it was you. And apparently recruiters love these kpis that u make out of your ass.

Should I give in and just put them in there anyway?

I worked in a startup so my job didn’t really have a definition of what to be told to do and do I had to deal with building front end with vue to figuring out how to automate our deployment flow and it’s really hard to quantify my performance like sure 3000 tickets solved but u don’t know what portion of them were full blown features what portion was just a one liner.

never realized how much of a pain it is to try and write good jira tickets that other people who are unfamiliar with the project can pick them up

I'm a junior dev and my senior is not getting around to reviewing my tickets. Now there are multiple months-old tickets that still have to be reviewed. That feature should have been released months ago and it has not yet been reviewed.

Soon the (only) senior dev will go on a holiday and it feels kinda useless to continue to develop stuff that takes forever to be reviewed.

In the past 1 week, there is one ticket reviewed and there are 10 more in review. :')

It's not like it's a big team... 3 devs (The senior, me and another junior (who is on leave for the past 2 weeks for personal reasons).

My boss told me that he wants me to switch projects soon and I am not sure how to feel about.

Old project
- have been working on it for four years, mostly alone, sometimes with others
- i am more or less product owner and make most of the technical decisions
- i assign tickets to other when they get assigned to help me
- i inherited the code base and refactored a lot. Some parts i am proud of, others are a mess and others aren't touched by me at all
- one of my helpers would take this

New project
- kind of data science plattform, so I have to learn a lot in this direction. Will be very complicated though.
- my first big greenfield project actually
- i will be mostly alone with this
- tech stack is fixed; no more php.

* break it into elementary steps, small enough to fit into your "estimation time unit", e.g. days or hours.
* estimate those steps for "developing at a leisurely pace" if nothing goes wrong.
* think about "what could go wrong" (list everything!) and adjust values accordingly.
* adjust total amount with experience values, like:
* times 1.2 for every manager
* times 1 to 4 based on which legacy projects i have to touch

and finally:
* multiply with `1+log(t/u,2)`, with `u` being the amount of useful data in the requirement description and `t` being the total amount of data in the requirement description
* sample: with our current "favourite" customer, about 90% of all tickets is garbage, so t/u = 100/10 = 10 => log(10,2) = 3.3 => multiply everything with 4.3

In my case, the only way to stay productive is to task switch often. Suffering of adhd, I get bored of researching / developing a specific solution rather quickly, and then have a huge issue staying focused.

That's also why I can't imagine being a programmer. Being a sysadmin, however, is great! Dealing with many different tickets a day.

Having some lazy scrum team members and it is getting out of hand. For the past 1 week or so we have one dev who's daily standup written report is: regression. In our test case summary I can't even find her name, which means she is not doing anything.

Same goes for two of our new QA's who joined like 2 months ago. We have like 20 ready for QA tickets pending, but QA is saying that they are doing regression. Yet when I check how many cases they actually covered, it's something that even I as a dev during my first weeks in the company would have completed in a halfday. Right now we have one senior QA guy who is doing all the heavy lifting and I want to change that.

Wondering how to politely call out their bs during standup? It's kinda annoying seeing them covering their lazyness with "regression" for two sprints in a row now :)

Title: Error Popup Occurs --> To be discussed

Description: When I open the app -> I see the app screen -> then I see some text -> sometimes there is a popup showing an error message

We of course don't want any errors at all so we should hinder these error messages

No, this isn't parody, arrows and all its how some people write our tickets, why do they write it this way!?!? Where is the value!!?!? Where is the comprehension!?!?!? God I get so sick of it sometimes.

I swear to god, getting Chumsky to do my bidding has almost taken longer than writing a parser by hand. I'm not looking for operator precedence, I'm not looking for complicated rules or anything, the main part of my language is literally just S-expressions, with some top level bells and whistles.

I don't even have a working lexer yet because I wanted to use this piece of shit library which usually matches the fewest possible characters to parse significant newlines but the Padded combinator takes as much whitespace at the end as it can find, and a host of other atomics don't actually adhere to the library's lazy principle in their procedural implementation. I've had enough. I'm going to bed, and tomorrow I'm writing tickets.

Actually, I'll probably also write PRs because I actually want the fixes to exist and not just complain about the problems, but I also really want to complain before I get started on that because I spent about two weeks just on this bullshit.

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.

I know it made sense resource wise, but being on constant support/incident tickets, bug fixes, out of hours & weekend deployments for the past like four months really drains you.
Though, now I have the opportunity of completing half a sprint on my own, while dealing with the ongoing incident tickets.
Not exactly what I hoped for, but I guess it's a change.

how long should it take a new hire to be able to identify good tickets to work on?

Nice, JIRA is timing out right now.

See everyone tomorrow!

What should you do if the project manager is not assigning you any new work after the backlog already has been cleaned up?

I currently work as a junior front-end dev. For the past few weeks, the 2 juniors (incl. me) are lacking tickets. For example, I got 2.5 days of work assigned during our 3-week sprint. We already followed some courses, read some books & created some designs for upcoming features (that have no "functional specifications" written down).