Fuck China.

Fuck the U.S. government.

Fuck the UK and Australia and all the other governments for taking advantage of the crisis of the last two years to get more power and money for their elites.

Fuck them all for starting COVID with their unsanctioned and unethical “gain of function” lab experiments and creating so much chaos that nobody really has a chance anymore at living the life they had dreamed of or so carefully planned for.

Fuck them for the out of control spending and money printing and inflation and even messing around with trying to regulate and tax crypto so we don’t have any kind of escape valve to live a normal, happy life.

Because of them, I can’t even enjoy my time off work. Even if I could plan a vacation that wouldn’t have to be canceled due to an outbreak or resultant supply chain issues, I can’t travel without severe restrictions that make it miserable and not worth the trouble.

Fuck them for making everyone into stupid monkeys fighting over opinions about data that is incomplete, misunderstood, misrepresented, or downright fixed toward a specific pharma-fascist authoritarian outcome.

And fuck them especially for being hypocrites and going to parties and generally not following their own rules they made for us when they think we’re not watching, and then persecuting and prosecuting us when we dare do the same.

Fuck ‘em all. I’m so done.

I fucking hate it when developers don’t respect user locale. My phone language is UK English, my Discord app language is UK English and my region is UK.

Then why the fuck is Discord showing me MM/DD/YYYY date format? How hard is it to pass locale when parsing time?

No matter how hard I try I don’t think I’ll ever get American corporates.

I’m from the UK but I work for an American company and I can only describe them as fucking insane.

I’m sure they employ people to send the most pointless emails ever, I just opened one and there is literally nothing but a picture in it.

We have meetings about absolutely nothing. Whole company meetings where it’s just managers talking about themselves and they think it’s fun.

They also seem to have created their own version of the universe where they expect everyone in it to be disciples of the company, get excited about their crap and tell the whole world how great they are.

Those that go along with it must be struggling with major cognitive dissonance. Nothing is that great and spending a large proportion of your time making someone else rich so that you can afford to eat just sucks.

I’m not saying everyone should hate their jobs, I don’t hate mine but the complete lack of realism is just weird.

A rather happy/neutral post this time for a change. Lol

Firstly the good news: I have successfully recovered from the emotional/mental abuse and have been doing really well. My faith in myself has been slowly restored.

Secondly, I have started to pursue my hobbies again and find joy in them. I spend more and more time listening to music and play video games (CS:GO and AoM).

I have started getting more sun and also spend time outside socialising.

I can sense my happiness and joy get restored in my life.

Now on career front, I have started job hunting again as you all know. The interview process for Product Management is absolutely broken and taxing to go through all the loops.

During all my previous job hunts (three times), I was able to nail down at least one offer in a quarter.

This time, I started in October 2021 and still no success. I have much more experience and skill-set this time yet failures.

Fear not. My optimism is back this time. I am aware of where I am going wrong and sometimes I feel the situation is truly out of my control. The two major reasons I forsee are:

1. Relocation: it can take few months for me to relocate to UK/EU and hence, companies are preferring local candidates.

2. My duration with current employer is just 8 months which could be a potential turn off for many HMs. They might think I am a job hopper and maybe one of the reasons why I got so many calls and opportunities at my previous employer (I was stable with them for 7.5 years).

I feel it's just the matter of time for me now where I must hold my horses and keep the momentum without losing hope.

I will win.

Just found out that UK is blocking porn. You have to get verified through somethig called AgeID before you can access anything. What are they even thinking?

At the institute I did my PhD everyone had to take some role apart from research to keep the infrastructure running. My part was admin for the Linux workstations and supporting the admin of the calculation cluster we had (about 11 machines with 8 cores each... hot shit at the time).

At some point the university had some euros of budget left that had to be spent so the institute decided to buy a shiny new NAS system for the cluster.

I wasn't really involved with the stuff, I was just the replacement admin so everything was handled by the main admin.

A few months on and the cluster starts behaving ... weird. Huge CPU loads, lots of network traffic. No one really knows what's going on. At some point I discover a process on one of the compute nodes that apparently receives commands from an IRC server in the UK... OK code red, we've been hacked.

First thing we needed to find out was how they had broken in, so we looked at the logs of the compute nodes. There was nothing obvious, but the fact that each compute node had its own public IP address and was reachable from all over the world certainly didn't help.
A few hours of poking around not really knowing what I'm looking for, I resort to a TCPDUMP to find whether there is any actor on the network that I might have overlooked. And indeed I found an IP adress that I couldn't match with any of the machines.

Long story short: It was the new NAS box. Our main admin didn't care about the new box, because it was set up by an external company. The guy from the external company didn't care, because he thought he was working on a compute cluster that is sealed off behind some uber-restrictive firewall.

So our shiny new NAS system, filled to the brink with confidential research data, (and also as it turns out a lot of login credentials) was sitting there with its quaint little default config and a DHCP-assigned public IP adress, waiting for the next best rookie hacker to try U:admin/P:admin to take it over.

Looking back this could have gotten a lot worse and we were extremely lucky that these guys either didn't know what they had there or didn't care.

Honestly so fucking excited, been going through the application process to start a (UK) level 4 apprenticeship and I am through to the last round! Got my last interview with the programming team in January when I'll know if I got it or not.

Very proud to work at my company
They've just been voted for one of the best places to work in the UK. Hard worked studying paid off.

I was in a Meta workshop for PhD candidates, and they spoke about some of their programs. Meta is financing (paying the tuition fees + salary) for PhD students in Oxford and UCL. Could be interesting for people who wanted to go for a PhD in the UK but could not afford it because UK's higher education system sucks.
There was also a coding interview preparation session, and it was honestly nice to hear from them exactly what they expect from their candidates.
But maybe I have positive feeling about this event just because I went to a fucking Green Day concert an hour later, and it was the best day of my pitiful life.

In several occasions I run rm -rf * in the wrong folder (or wrong server!!).
No big deal so far, but I had to spent more time to redo my work since Linux has no fucking recycle bin like Win!
So I created this helper function to give my brain a few seconds to think before my finger hit Enter.

delete_all_files()
{
echo "WARNING:Delete all files? Type fluffycat to proceed"
read x
if [ "$x" = "fluffycat" ]
then
echo "Deleting all files..."
rm -rf *
fi
}
alias myrm=delete_all_files

Hehehe... I am a genius 😎

I was sad this morning, because my thesis supervisor being an asshole that I seriously considering to just drop out..
Then I checked my bank statement and salary of 2 months has been deposited today.

Who needs that fucking degree when I earn more than you?
Who's the joke now?! 🤜🤡🤡

I am going to give them a middle finger tomorrow.😉

UK/EU Devs: other than healthcare issues, is there any other reason keeping you from going to US? The salaries there are far higher and I've compared the CoL, you still have much more left over.

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.

Has anyone ever accepted an offer of employment and then changed their mind and "cancelled it" in the UK?
I have an offer starting 6 months from now and I am worried I might get another better offer in the mean time but I'll be bound to this one since I accepted it...
Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.