Uncle : What do u do?
Me: I am a computer programmer
U: Like Einstein?
M: No, he was a physicist, I am more like Bill Gates.
U: The billionaire?
M: Yes
U: But u are broke as fuck.
M: It was just an example
U: a highly unrealistic example

😢😢
😤😤😠 Fuck u uncle.

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Me : So how's the deadlines here?
Coworker : There are none.
Me : ?
Coworker : if they are unrealistic, we push non-working code. Prod comes up with bugs, and we get a new sprint to resolve those bugs.
Me: ╰[ ⁰﹏⁰ ]╯

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

Classes are classist.

Objects are objectifying.

Race conditions are racist.

Foreign keys are xenophobic.

Functions are ableist.

Thin clients are weightist.

Bitmasks perpetuate heteronormativity.

Code beautifiers promote unrealistic beauty expectations.

Test-driven development is victim blaming.

Forced commit pushes are rape.

Motherboards perpetuate gender roles.

And don't get me started on white space.

string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };

Well, a job offer valid for Charles Babbage.

Me : We have 3 guys , 850 hours of content to develop, and you want this by mid Feb...
Account Manager : Yes
Me: ... (Doing math in head)..
Account Manager : This has to happen , what do we need to MAKE THIS HAPPEN..
Me: A time machine....

- awkward silence -

After months and months of unrealistic deadlines, pulling late night shifts coupled with an insane commute and two very small children at home I had a total burnout. Turned up to work one morning, and stared at the Java code I had been writing for the past couple of days and it might as well have been written in Martian. The more I stared, and the more I tried to keep things together internally the less I was able to make sense of anything - just a random jumble of characters on screen that were as intelligible as the green scrolling lines from The Matrix.

My office manager saw that I was obviously in some distress and took me into a meeting room to have a quick chat - and there I was, a grown man of 35 bawling my eyes out like a two year old. Not the most edifying moment of my life.

However, the company couldn't have been more supportive afterwards; one of my colleagues drove the 100 miles to get me home in my car and took a train back up to the office; my GP signed me off work for six months and treated me for severe depression; the office instituted stricter working policies - not on the developers, but the sales/PM teams that were handing down ridiculous timescales simply so they could get a sale.

For my part, I've learnt to push back and say "NO!" - work is not your life, it's an important part of your life, but my no means everything. Don't feel beholden to a company to meet unrealistic targets that you haven't agreed to. Talk.

🤠:Hello, I need a website for my professional website. But anything more than $500 is unrealistic.

Translation

🤡:I am a stupid assclown that the future will leave behind and time will forget.

When a company emails 8000 + employees asking 3 people not to be disturbed in DevOps for 3 weeks. You know those 3 people have been screwed over by unrealistic deadlines.

Is just mine or every project manager thinks that developers are magicians and can actually develop stuff in a very unrealistic timeline.?

How much I love these idiots for being dumb fuck idiots.

These are the assholes, who are responsible for ruining this generation and creating the 'Move fast, break things' mindset.

Now every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to be a zillionaire over-fucking-night.

Why? Because the loser has attend a stupid workshop and now thinks that their idea is ground breaking and will change the world.

So they update their LinkedIn with all the stupid buzzwords and expect a cock sucking VC to fund their arse hole with money so they can take over.

FUCK SUCH PEOPLE WHO ARE UNREALISTIC.

1. Promise anything, everything to clients
2. Set unrealistic deadlines
3. Devs can't meet deadlines
4. Blame the devs

Anyone?

I can finally play the role of my adversaries:

I will be that Client who makes unreasonable deadlines and unrealistic demands.

Let us see how the A.I. devs can keep up with me ;)

Motherfucking WordPress coupled with motherfucking sales people.

If you promise the client something, please fucking relay it via the correct process (i.e the fucking ticketing system that took me a month to write for the company - it's seriously just a click away on your desktop.). "I told your boss" is not a fucking apt excuse.

My boss forgets, and well, doesn't give a fuck about procedure either.

Now you phone my boss and he phones me, on a fucking Sunday evening, telling me that the client was promised a website by tomorrow morning at 10AM. You tell me this at fucking 9PM.

Why didn't you tell me earlier? How the fuck am I supposed to shit out something I would be proud of in a few hours? Nevermind me fucking up my sleeping routine; how the fuck?

Conversation went like this:
"xyz was promised this site by sales person fuckTwit, I need this live by Monday morning. I have sent you a few images. Make it in WordPress, client says they want a 'tangy looking theme'.

Me: it's a bit unrealistic requesting this, is there no way we can extend the time so I have time to create this?
Also, what do you mean by 'tangy'?

Boss: don't know. Make it happen. No excuses.

What the fuck is a tangy theme? When I become a webDev at the company? More importantly, fucking WordPress?!

Now I'm sitting on this shit, tired as a manatee in mating season, and using goddamn WordPress.

I have to halt my irritation, because I get severely irritated when I'm tired, I have to restrain myself from telling the involved parties tomorrow to install the FuckYourself WordPress plugin, coupled with a resignation letter.

Same sales person got me in shit a while ago, because I refused to give him access to the network to download fucking cartoons. Sales director went and moaned that his bitch (the sales person) needs this for a presentation. Yeah fucking right.
Go Snorkelling in a sewer truck you egotistic, megalomaniacal, indecent, outrageous, horrible motherfucker of a person.

Time to develop a fucking website with, oh, a company profile pamphlet.

Times like this I keep telling myself, "my time will come, my time will come".

How to politely tell your client that their request for the new 'little' feature is unrealistic and fucking absurd?

$rant = [
'long' => true,
'super_pissed' => true
];

Oh where to begin... I have to post this here, I can't keep it to my self and I need to rant, god damnit.

I spent the last year working for a company, on minimum wage(my own choice... I know). I have been slaving away on a project that should really have a 5 man team backing it. My boss is completely on another planet, and has unrealistic expectations.

He got me to work with a client after work during this year, which I basically spent 8 of the 12 months, after work... also slaving away on the clients project.
I was supposed to have been paid A LOT of money, yet, every time I asked, "the client hasnt paid yet". One day I get an angry message from the client, asking why her shit is taking so long, why theres still so many bugs, why we dont have testers, why she cant bring clients on... and so on.
I then find out, she has paid my boss all of the money over the last 8 months, and my boss is still asking her for more money. He has lied to her and told her that I needed the money for things, and pocketed the money for him self, god knows what for.

Yesterday, I finally left the company, because I also haven't been paid wages for the last 2 months, my dickhead "boss" now refuses to reply to me on any platform, via phone etc.

I now have the client spamming me daily, asking where her updates are, when they will be done etc. My boss also ignores her.

I'm a good human being, I have lots of patience and worked 8 months for free, but now she expects me to work a further 1-2 months to fix, and add EVEN MORE features she never fucking mentioned.
I worked through a couple of the fixes, out of the goodness in my heart, with the fact she already paid for the project... after all, it's not her fault, nor mine....

A couple of days ago, she messaged me she found a new "great developer friend, with lots of experience and great analytical thinking" for me to work with, to get her shit complete. So I jump in a call with her friend, to talk about her PHP/Laravel experience, SHE DOESNT KNOW A SINGLE FUCKING THING.
The client demanded I give her friend access to the codebase, even though I told her, she's not going to be able to do anything at fucking all. Now this "amazing developer friend" of hers, is supposedly going to fix all of my issues, and tasks "I struggle with", bare in mind, I've worked with PHP for just over 6 years now, Laravel about 2-3.

I FIND THIS EXTREMELY FUCKING DISRESPECTFUL AND INSULTING, IF ANYTHING. Not only is this "developer" not going to be able to do shit, but make it worse. It's going to make my life even more fucking hell. On top of this, the client just has really fucking stupid expectations, she thinks HUGE updates can be done in fucking hours, she thinks she can message/call me a thousand times at 6 FUCKING AM. (Shes from the US, I'm from the UK) and she expects these updates instantly.

I dont even know where this is going anymore, or what else to say, but I'm extremely fucking pissed off. I'm now out of pocket by about 10 fucking grand. And now I'm living like a fucking peasant. I had to move back to my parents, and now I'm stuck in the fucking living room and cant even concenrate. I'm probably going to have to sign onto fucking job seekers, and be told how fucking worthless I am daily.

And ALLLLLLL OF THIS, because my boss is a greedy fucking cunt. I have no fucking idea where that money went, or what the fuck he did with it. But fuck me, I hope you accidently crash your car and die.

No more deaths at the hands of unrealistic deadlines! #ProgrammerLivesMatter

Surprise surprise, that unrealistic deadline you set even when the engineering team told you that it wasn't going to work has backfired! Maybe you wouldn't be so stressed if you learnt to listen? It's a pretty basic skill, or at least I thought so.
Oh and when you say "we have two options, stay late or work weekends" you have a critical bug in your conditional. Your missing option 3, go the fuck home. Time to enjoy my weekend with friends and family.

*Sees Unrealistic hacking on movies
*Family thinks i can trace anything
*No one at work wants to touch my flashdrives

I didn't pay hundreds of dollars for a degree to be portrayed this way.

My former team opened two different positions to replace me: senior computer vision engineer and senior computer graphics engineer.
If you combine the required experience years, it's roughly my age 😂
Talk about unrealistic and unnecessary job requirements....

I applied for PHP Developer

Interviewer: What is interface?
Me: it is class with unimplemented methods?
Interviewer: But why we use it?
Me: it acts as a contract so you can assure that
on implementing interface developer will follow
the same architecture.
Interviewer: that's okay but why is the need for an interface at first place?

I was irritated with the interview process as he was smirking
every time I answered.

Me: I never get a chance to do that kind of research. Truth is
even if you hire me your manager will declare the unrealistic deadline and won't care if I comment the code or know why we really need to implement an interface.

After he did not smile and I left the chair.

My most intense day as a dev was when we had a product announcement day (with 70 engineers from dozens of companies invited) and the night before the app still didn't run all of the way through.

My team and I worked all night and had our first successful run-through at 10am when the announcement presentation and demo was at 1pm. All I can say is that I didn't breath when that demo was running live... But it worked flawlessly.

After that experience I realized that I had enough of non-tech management setting unrealistic deadlines, quit that job, and am now helping to build a startup. It has been so much more fulfilling and now I set the deadlines. 😎

I never made a friend due to code.
Either I fucking hate people if I see their code or I respect them.
But getting a friend because of code seems to me rather unrealistic.

Maybe I could get a female code groupie, if I write code little bit more lovely and sexy.

Ask me again in a year.

So I am at the client's location for onsite consultation of their projects.
The HoD asked me to create an application to accept feedbacks from multiple points urgently. Although I was there just for consulting, I thought why not, I am anyway getting bored here.
So after explaining the functionality, she asked me, when can she accept a working app. I told her that it would depend upon a lot of factors, so give me till evening to figure it out.
When she insisted I told her, that it can take at least a month with all the APIs, logins, UI, QA etc. She was surprised and told me that she expected it in 4 days since the requirements can be fit into a single page of her notebook. (That's how she measures project duration).

I told her it's impossible, given that I am the only one working on it. So she told me that her team can do it in two days. I probably have more experience than her entire team combined, but still I thought they might know some simple magic or faster way, that I might not, so I asked her to discuss with the team and then decide.

After explaining the requirements, when she mentioned that it should be done in 2 days, everyone was kinda frozen. One of them said that it's going to take at least 4 months.

I couldn't hide my smirk 😉

I hate when manager wants an Android app supportable all the way to GinerBread .FUCK YOU ASSHOLE how about I tell you to work 24/7 .PM Shitholes doesn't know shit about coding and make some unrealistic promises and when things don't work this bastards are all over your ass and want you to fix things . How about asking a developer before making such unrealistic promises . Let me tell you PM are the most useless kind of people's in the world who has failed to prove their significance in the company. Fuck you....PMs

!dev
So I finally registered on this great community to rant about something - now I forgot what to rant about.

Instead have a picture of Ubuntu Mate showing an unrealistic battery time.

"What we can do to get all on time? ", manager asks
"Can we have 4 more developers on the project?", dev asks
"No, that's not gonna happen. Let's be realistic", manager says
"Is it realistic to ask 3 devs to ship 20 features in a week, reviewed and tested?" dev asks
"Actually 2 of you, because our contractor goes into a vacation. But you can do overtimes, can't you?"
"I prefer not to but even in that case I can't guarantee that as it's not realistic. But at least can I leave earlier and work more from home more because there are severe delays on the train lines and if I have to commute 4 hours a day it won't help", dev says
"Well, I'm not sure if that's a good idea. You have to communicate with people, you know. We have to ship things. But we can discuss this tomorrow as I have to leave early today. I have to take my kids from school"

Really? Wtf?

How are these EU-Upload Filters even practical for anyone except google? This seems like the most unrealistic specification by non-tech bosses in history to me 😭 What do these people expect the upload filters should compare the uploads to? How the fuck should, say a blog website, ensure that none of the uploads are copyright inflicting? Are quotes copyright inflicting? Or only when I copy paste an entire book and write my name under that? How will that get detected? Do we have a database with all the copyrighted works somewhere, that every company has access to? This shit can basically only work for companies like google which have enough data to implement such filters and thats why they already had an upload filter on youtube anyways. This entire amendment is so fucking ridiculous that it basically has to fail, no doubt. In a few months still nobody is going to have upload filters, watch...

In a UAT meeting with representatives of our project partners,

The account executive, who set up the project, said to my PM in front of everyone just before the test started: "I hope your system won't fail, because everyone here will be watching"

My PM: "No it won't. But in that case, I believe it's your fault for setting an unrealistic deadline without consulting us, the development team, first"

All the representatives, being also developers from multiple companies, proceeded to stare at her with disgust.

Unrealistic deadlines, incompetent managers and most importantly lack of motivation in a soul sapping demoralising environment.

After refusing to work over 40 hours a week and refusing to work last Sunday, today I was fired. It's been the 2nd time in my life and it's been the same deal: totally unrealistic timelines and totally unrealistic work expectations.

No big loss. Fuck that place.

Last week, a company(start-up) came for campus recruitment.

This company was known for its long working hours, giving unrealistic deadlines to the employees, less recreational activities, etc.

Even though the pay was very good, some of them were there just to experience the interview process. All those waiting for the HR round, were half-hearted into the process.

This particular guy(a friend of mine) was so determined to be rejected from the company, that he intentionally screwed up his interview (final round).

Towards the end of the interview, the HR asked him to draw a map/path from his hostel to the building in which the interview was being taken.

Once my friend finished making the figure, the interviewer said “Take this same path, and get back to your hostel”.

SAVAGE!

Even though he was successful in getting rejected, the way he got rejected really crushed his ego.

boss gives me a new task that requires to rewrite quite a lot of the code to accomplish.

me: "it will take some time, I'll have to rewrite x, y, z... and it will require some rigorous testing too..."
boss: "so it'll take you 2 days?" (serious face)

you gotta be f-ing kidding me right?!

Client:
So we need to implement this entire eCommerce API so we can use this webshop in two days.

Me:

One shitty thing about working in a Japanese company is that they make you write personal goals/targets (目標). These goals they expect you to achieve don't actually relate to your work most of the time and it's not about personal growth, but more about what you did to improve the company.

Another thing is their expectations that you can achieve all this within a year on top of your work is kind of unrealistic. Plus even if you achieve such goals, it does not equate to good performance review and/or salary increases.

I hate white boarding sessions. They feel unnatural to me. I simply don't work well when put on the spot and I have 3 ogres staring at me waiting for me to fuck up in front of them. Fight or flight engages, the adrenaline rush, my mind freezes. Suddenly it's like I forget how to code at all and I'm expected to solve a problem at once, correctly the right time, or I'm out.

I can't work like that. I need time to process a problem on my own, with my coffee in my one hand and a pencil and scratch paper in the other, not with some demanding employer standing over my shoulder the whole time scrutinizing my every key stroke. I get things wrong the first time sometimes, and more often than not have to google things I can't recall spontaneously. But I always figure it out, test it, make sure it's right before putting it into use.

I've been through several "probationary" periods when first starting a job. They just tell you, they're giving you a month to see if you can handle the job. If not, sayonara. I don't see what's so hard about evaluating candidates in a real world scenario.

So many employers have totally unrealistic expectations.

I wrote my first line of code at 12. I fell in love with it and continued. I'm 25 now and I'm a software engineer. I don't even have time or energy to work on personal projects anymore. Writing code isn't a hobby anymore. It's a means to survive. Why/how did this happen? When will building things be fun again? Before landing my first job as an engineer, not once did I consider salaries, equity, atmosphere, nor any of the other amenities (or lack thereof) of code as a profession. But, I don't even know when any of that fell into the picture and they've managed to suck the novelty out of a really cool pastime. I'm essentially a well-paid robot. Who did this? What's happening? What can I do to find the freedom I once had? When did I become just another cog in a machine? Should I try my hand in business, bent on making a lot of money so I can retire early and have time to experiment again? Is that unrealistic? Should I buy lottery tickets every paycheck? We only get one life and I realized this. I'm panicking because I know I'm not enjoying myself and that I'm not on track to leave the world better than it was when I was born into it. So much loss. I'm grateful, but this is not cool at all. I want my hobby back.

Realistic:
Get friends.

Unrealistic:
Be able to get an internship (later on a job)

I dont work weekends ever. And I dont bring my work home with me, once I finish for the day, Im finished. Even if there is a deadline looming or something is due for a weekend release. I will only work when Im in the office. And I wont work extra unpaid hours. All that does is create unrealistic expectations from your employer and clients. I did it once and learned that there was no point and I could have just gone home and it would have been fine. Im never doing it again.

PM: You can cut corners it it's necessary.
Me: Thanks for giving me permission to move faster.
*But as you know, I wouldn't be in this position if you hadn't made us agree to such an unrealistic deadline.*
..
...
*after completion*
.
.
PM: There are bugs in the code.
ME: There are bugs, because you asked me to cut corners. *fu#k you* *wtf moment*

Ideal job?
The one that give me a roof over my head.
And pays my bills.
And bring food on the table.
And give me a lot of free time for my hobbies.
And avoids me to discuss with stupid clients.

Ok, maybe the last one is a bit unrealistic..

Boss: oh so you are working on that unrealistic 3week project ? Let me also assign you some completely unrelated office work.
Me: But I'm a programmer, researching other companies and contacting them looking for new projects is not part of my job descrip...
Boss: oh don't worry I'm sure you'll do great!
Me: that's not what I'm sayi...
Boss: ok I have to go now, have it ready by tomorrow!
Me:(crying internally)...ok.

As a software house, we have many teams on different projects. One project was due to a Thursday, and the PM asked the team 1 week before if they could work over the weekend since there's a lot of things to do.

On the Friday before, one of the devs showed up a bit later than usual (around 10am), but ok...

After lunch he asked to talk to HR and also the boss. They talked for around 2h, then he started to say "goodbye and good luck" for everyone.

The project was on fire and he just... leave.

On the next 2 months another 4 people leave the company. All from the same team/project (but not with a big surprise like him).

Apparently, the team was constantly complaining to PM and boss about unrealistic deadlines and constant requirements changes, but they didn't did anything about it. Just when more than half this team had left the company they started to rethink this actions to this project and the others on the company.

The worst part of being a Dev is that moment when non devs find out you're a developer they expect unrealistic things from you. No I can't hack your damn Facebook and I won't fix your shitty computer!

Caught up in a deathmarch project with buzzword driven, childish architects who treat devs like insects and brag about their non existant experience and achievements while imposing completely idiotic requirements and unrealistic milestones. I feel shit right now.

Actually I feel I am prety lucky about the relationship between my yamily and me being a dev. My dad is a developer as well (in fact, he was the one who taught me most of what I know today; not as in general coding, but good and bad programming practices, tips what to do next ...) and my mom just started learning Python.
So they know prety well what it means to be a dev and have quite realistic image of what to expect.
To be fair, I am still the one who usualy fixes broken printers and replugs unplugged ethernet cables. but that is because I enjoy doing that. I take it as a challenge for myself to figure out what/how/when went something wrong. Most of the times I try to figure that even without touching the broken things.
Anyway, getting off topic.
Alltogether I don't think that they have too unrealistic expectations, but if I had to chose one, it'd be my learning capabilities. I can't learn complete java in 2 days ...

-Management puts unrealistic deadline as usual-

_Tries his best but fails to deliver on time_

*Puts a clearly visible bug in code*

~Tester finds it and creates a issue~

*Solves the issue, wraps up the remaining things and closes the issue*

**Wakes up from dream, cuz he is the tester as well**

How certain clients view coders regarding unrealistic deadlines.

Yup, sure our team of three devs will build you a fully functioning e-commerce site from scratch that grabs data from several APIs and uploads it to several more.

You need it in two weeks? No problem.

Me: Wait...what the...?!

One week in and I only have access to test one of the four necessary APIs as the client hasn't signed the necessary paperwork with other providers.

Just beeing here and reading stuff that happens to other developers makes me feel that I am not alone with unrealistic wishes amd useless constraints from customers.

My Teacher wouldn't understand the responsiveness of UI I designed and gave me 10pts for that.

I was told that my design is too unrealistic and idealistic for it to implement..
I used some css framework(to reduce the amount of work to be done) and javascript.

My dream is to become a web developer and make Desktop application with a use of ElectronJS(Currently devRantron is using).

One last thing... FUCK YOU, FOR GIVING ME A LOW SCORE FOR MY DESIGN.

I used to think the "hackers" in movies were so cool, with the scrolling matrix like text. Now I just laugh because I know how stupid and unrealistic most of it is 😆.

Just wrote an angry email about the unrealistic demands towards my team. Got a call an hour later from [product owner] where he had the most worried voice i ever heard because we are the only data scientists in the research. I expected an email reply in 2 weeks, seems like we are somewhat important here.

UNREALISTIC FUCKING DEADLINES.
FUCK.

PM: I need a brand new feature that we haven't had before and it has to have a framework backing it so that we can extend it to anywhere in the future. It also has to have X, Y, Z, it has to be able to tell the future, cure cancer, fly, and have a return on investment for us of 1000x. How long will that take?

Me (or any dev ever): Umm... well, that's kind of asking for the moon. The first few pieces will take as least 5 sprints. When do you need it by?

PM: Tomorrow. When can you have it?

Me: ......

Unrealistic employer:
Looking for a Full Stack developer with 8 years experience in Swift and 10 years experience with PHP.

Learn to say no...more than anything I just want to help my fellow engineers. Now I am so loaded with so much work that 3 people couldn't poorly do my job. No relief in sight and all I get are unrealistic deadlines and poor criticism when my work is better than anything that was done previously.

Someone tell me why the hell I wanted to do this line of work again?

At a previous job, boss & owner of company would waste hours of my time to show me, at his own desk, every small detail of some random feature he had fallen in love with on some random webpage he found, while saying "I don't want to disrupt your plans or anything, this is just something to keep in the back of your minds, as this would be a really nice thing to have, even tho none of the clients have asked for this and I have asked no one else for a second opinion, and I will most likely ask you to remove this feature in the future because I will finally have realized it wasn't that good an idea anyway."

Ok dipshit, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this information? Every week from this moment on you will ask whether we have found the time to implement this feature, even though you are fully aware that our schedule has no room for random, unplanned features and that we are already not able to meet the unreasonable deadline you pulled out of your ass two weeks into a development process that would end up taking 8+ months.

We are already overworked, we already work hours upon hours of unpaid overtime, and yet you still think it reasonable to pull us away from our work every other fucking day to talk about random extra features you want added, but don't want added to the roadmap because you want no delays... Fuck you, fuck your toxic attitude, fuck your meetings where you spend half an hour complaining about features we are still in the process of developing the backend functionality for (on test servers) not having the right font colour for the text, and fuck your legacy desktop software originally written in COBOL that you now want moved to "the cloud".

I would rather be unemployed and live as a hobo on the streets with a "will code for food" sign than work for you ever again.

TL;DR: my boss is a dick and I don't know what to do.

Been working at the company for a month now, I enjoy the atmosphere and the culture (startup btw) but I really cannot stand my superior - there's only two of us in the team. Any screw up he blames it on me without a second thought. First week in he assigned their new website project to me and honestly they have quite unrealistic deadlines. I mean they didn't even have the infrastructure for it nor the manpower to build one yet it needs to be finished by the end of this month. On top of that the spec keeps changing literally every 2-3 hours.

Also since I've forgotten to mention the guy I'm working under is one of the founders so I can't really go and talk to someone about it. I feel pretty screwed over, anyone has any advice or been in a situation like this? Is it too early to quit?

From an actual job posting I found this morning
**software performs as documented and it can not be broken once it gets into the hand of the customer**

I_AM_NOT_GOD!!!

(but if I were you would have to pay me better)

Giving an unrealistic timeline for a project. Got reprimanded a few times because of this. Oh and my procrastination habits do not help..at all.

My C# class loves to come up with weird/unrealistic scenarios to teach a specific language feature... I feel like the more effective way to teach would be to mention a real life scenario where it makes more sense to use the feature and give it some context rather than coming up with some arbitrary series of classes to represent departments and employees and then say "write extension methods for them to write them out"

If you tell me that I'm going to go, ok this works, but is there a specific reason I should do this instead of using a for or foreach to do the exact same thing? Don't get me wrong I see the appeal of extension methods as well as LINQ but this class never gives any sort of context as to why we're doing stuff. This class could be good, I've had classes that focus on language specific features taught in ways that make sense... My Java prof did a great job...

Also all the slides are terribly written...

Like I attached an example of the description for extension methods... The slides then go on to explain how the syntax for them works and gives an example...

Like ok I guess technically you told me what they are and how to use them, but gave zero context...

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I go to MSDN for their definition of extension methods, and it is much more clearly written and gives context to where/why they're used... and this is supposed to be a 5th semester course...

A lot of people have some very unrealistic expectations when it comes to cheap technology. You just can not expect to pay bottom price and get high quality results at the same time...

Some stake holders have unrealistic expectations.

Ideally

UX designer:
User oriented, design stuff that fullfill actual needs of user
Engineer:
Focus on utility, how to execute designer's desin

Reality
UX designer:
Personal oriented, design stuff that "they" think user will prefer. End up design some unrealistic functions.
Engineer:
Working overtime to fullfil designers' fantasy thought

When you and your team invested a lot of their weekend time into the project to meet the clients unrealistic deadline and get not even a simple "thank you" from management...

There are too many things to get started in I don't know what field to choose.

There are so many technologies listed on job descriptions and it feels like I need to know them all.

Most of them are a huge reach expecting a new grad to have experience with.

Good knowledge of ORM tools like web services and XML? Really?

More and more declining respect for programmers, unrealistic expectations from managers, and worse and worse code as everyone becomes dependent on taking modern hardware for granted.

"agile" teams, changing scope, unrealistic deadlines, non-tech PMs...

So much fits into this category.

I've been reticent to chime in on this weeks group rant, feels too personal...but it is what is is.

Most emotional was losing a dev to cancer, and an analyst to an allergy, and an engineer to an accident...ugh.

Most intense was probably losing servers and hard drives without recovery, not being able to get databases back online because they went down so bad, websites being down, not meeting some quarterly goal, shit not building, email campaigns that go sideways...fuck...anything involving reactionary leadership...unrealistic expectations.

But all that shit, while seemingly important or "stressful", pales in comparison to someone you fought with in the trenches not being there anymore.

restore -if friends

Fraking unrealistic deadlines, man.

If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.

The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.

Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).

The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.

To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.

Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.

Smart contact lenses and the appropriate software. It would be the ultimate AR experience. I have no idea how to produce them, as they would need to be super high resolution, lag free, completely wirelessly powered and connected, safe to use and to wear and useable 24/7.
My current concept is a ultrabook sized block that can be taken around in a backpack.
Oh and wireless handoff ...
meaning everything I grab and throw in your general direction becomes available to you, kind off like they do it in Avatar. This should also work with PCs, tablet and everything else.
Speaking of grabbing you would also need some kind of minority report glove so every bit of hand movement can be tracked precisely. But probably a bit more elegant meaning only small stickers on the back of your hand.
Did I mention that sharing stuff should enable working together on the same object in real-time?
Also this system should integrate seamlessly with a smart environment, meaning looking at the light, opening its context menu and changing its brightness or colour should be no effort at all.
And of course all of it should be open source, highly scalable and either hosted on public infrastructure (funded by taxes or smt) or by each individual for himself to protect his or her privacy.
So who is with me?

I fucking hate working for/with large corporations.

A whole bunch of new features were added mid-sprint without ever consulting any of the development team. They dogpiled on devs from other projects who had no prior experience with the code base, so naturally I lose traction because I'm tied up answering questions and explaining things.

This sprint I'm not getting any feature work done as I'm stuck fixing bugs and awful half-ass implementations (by well meaning devs that were thrown at unrealistic expectations).

Concerned at the burn down rate, next week they're planning on dogpiling on more guys to play catch up.

I'm so sad

My sis wants to career switch into being a dev.

Sis is a kindergarden teacher (great credentials, went through a rigorous program for all the best certs), divorced last year, has a 5 year old. She's a single mom making less than 30k, in Portland, OR -- not great. She's also just started her career/finished school this past year.

Trouble is, sis can be a bit unrealistic about plans at first. She "heard from some people" about making 50k+ starting wage after a coding boot camp. She wants to do this by the end of the summer -- she's never coded in her life.

I can't advise her; I'm in my undergrad c++ courses and I don't know the industry, but my gut tells me this is a bad idea.

Please advise.

In addition to the programming language or theoretical concepts. It is also essential to develop good problem solving skills.

Concepts like design patterns and refactoring would be better taught using hands on exercises based on a long running example, such as having the students create a project in an introductory course on a programming language and then take that codebase as a starting point for the assignments on design patterns and refactoring.

It would be unrealistic to assume that developers would be working only on a single programming language in their entire career. So, a few pointers on how to go about learning new languages based on similarities with programming language(s) they already know would also be there.

IMAGE COMPRESSION QUESTION

lets say i upload a 100x100 photo from my android device. this image has a size of e.g. 2MB. not a lot. if i compress it then the size will be e.g. 300kB. cool. upload is thunderbolt for any internet speed.

lets consider this case. a random ass motherfucker decides it is cool to upload a 10000x10000 image that has a size e.g. 300MB. compressing this would be e.g. 150MB which is still a lot as fuck for one pic.

heres my question: where should the compression be handled? at backend (REST API server) or client (android image compression library)?

because if i try to send a 150MB pic to the server and their internet sucks but to be fucking honest even the best internet speed would take way too long to upload, is it better to do the compression on the backend or client?

or should i do compression in android? if i should do compression on client then should i;
1) do the compression on the main thread with a progress dialog to wait them until the compression + PLUS the fucking upload is done or
2) do the compression + THE upload in a background thread in which case it can be dangerous for verbose amount of fuckups (internet dies phone explodes etc) and the app crashes

which (one) option of the 2 suboptions from the second parent option branch?

of course this is an extremely unrealistic case, it is possible but thats not my point: my point is WHERE SHOULD THE COMPRESSION (as some kind of universal standard) BE HANDLED AT?

Programming an app for a friend = inevitable feature creep, unrealistic expectations and insane time frames. How do you guys deal with developing for non devs? It's like talking to a brick wall 😔

The thing i worked for last 3 weeks has been scrapped.

Knew it was coming.

I'm glad the real boss is not unrealistic and impractical like my boss.

I'm not gonna be greedy and unrealistic 🤫

1) good and long lasting desktop (equivalent or similar to i5 + 32GB RAM + SSD + Graphics Card 4GB + good cooler)

2) 1 ultrawide monitor

3) 1 regular monitor to use portrait mode

// I know that I could just ask great amount of money and ask two more wishes but meh. These are all I wish I could get for my dev career.

Making me stay late evenings to make up for shitty unrealistic sprints.

~16 hours. It was during the start of my career. Like every other project manager, mine had also made an unrealistic plan for the project I was on.

10/10 wouldn’t agree to work like that again.

That awkward moment when boss wants you to do data entry work with unrealistic goals on Monday.

Guys i need your opinion on this issue I've been working in a startup for almost a year now.. the product we are building is pretty awesome.. the only issue is the non technical managers are giving unrealistic deadlines to the clients and we the development team guys are under a lot of stress.. they are not ready to give us a raise as we have not come out beta yet.. should I stay or quit?

I like how hiring managers want everyone to have 5 years of Golang experience. I've been writing go since 2014. There were hardly any Golang jobs in the market 4 years ago. Where would be getting this enterprise Golang experience from? The only big companies that had full systems written in Go 4 years ago was Google and DropBox.

My year of extensive Golang isnt good enough. I feel year after year manager's expectations move further and further from reality.

Finished a project a few days ago with the coolest code I've ever written. Problem: It's a college project, with a totally unrealistic use case and it makes absolutely no sense to continue working on it now :/ How can I let it go?

These new pet options are nice and all. But why so unrealistic? I mean there is no way to put the cat on the keyboard. Nor an option for CRT monitors with cat on top. I am horrified by the lack of sense and mostly dissapointed. 5/7 would still choose a ground cat though.

I looked at an SQL server today from a customer, talked with one of their devs and he said that he's unable to understand why the server misbehaves... All (!) queries were optimized, but they have 'big data queries'... Migraine started, I had a very bad feeling. Monitoring? Nooooppeeee. Migraine kicks in. Connected to server. SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES...
After a bit of scrolling I found a lot of misconfigured variables (e.g. extreme large join buffers, unrealistic buffer sizes), high slow query count (nearly 60 % of COM_SELECT) and a few variables that were unknown to me.

Then came the version line.
5.0.46
Yes. 5.0.46.

Big data? Well... 30 GB of usage data.

I called the company back... The dev told me sternly that this was the production server (I had hope...) and that I lie - neither the version, nor the variables could be the problem.
A coworker had to verify it and our manager had to do the communication... Worst, most traumatic working day I ever had.

My manager is making my team fill the tasks' "completed work" field in TFS with the exact same amount of hours we were inside the company. This seems unrealistic and doesn't take in account our daily capacity of 6h. What do you guys think of this? What should I tell her to convince her otherwise? Please, help me!

I have been on crunch time for so long, with so many hours I don't even know what day of the week it is. I legitimately had to look it up. I also calculated my hourly rate for the last 3.5 weeks, and I was making the same as a grocery store bagger! Being salaried sucks in times like this. I am paid peanuts.

Last night I woke up every 30 minutes in a panic I was late to work. This job is killing me, and all because the sales team sold the product on an unrealistic deadline, for no money...

In addition, I am gaining weight, haven't seen my family for any significant period of time for ages, and Taco Bell knows me by name and order...

On that note, next Monday I am going to go into my boss' office, and demand like a 50%-75% raise! I am terrified! Haha

Migraines are fun though. THE PAIN PROVES I AM ALIVE!

Oh you have plenty of excuses why I shouldn't have any reasons (which YOU call excuses) but don't see that yourself -- you fucking hypocrite!

There is NO EXCUSE for your bullshit lack of facing reality and setting unrealistic expectations that no one can possibly follow! Yet you continue to have an excuse for every legitimate reason (proven by facts by the way) that I have when everything doesn't turn out the way you expected.

Well GUESS WHAT motherfucker?? YEP, YOUR FUCKING EXPECTATIONS ARE THE PROBLEM not my actions. Just fucking grow up you piece of shit micromanager who has to have his nose in everyone's face all the time! Fuck that shit!

Unrealistic expectations. Nuff said.

I felt unrealistic to learn react when my pay is 1/5 of the pay of an intern in San Francisco. I will pickup react / angular 2 or whatever till the day coding can be my hobby..

It's pretty hard to work with relatives in the family. They expect too much from you. More overtime work, no or less pay, demands are somewhat unrealistic because they want their project on top priority and the list goes on. 🤔

Upper management has a huge meeting and decides NOT to merge in buggy or incomplete or untested code just because it's the due date (you know, quality over quantity? And an attempt to cut back PM's unrealistic expectations)
2 sprints later: "So we're going to go ahead with the merge. Yes, we know the feature isn't complete, but we promised blah blah blah"
So much for that <.<;;

Working on dashboard with loads of charts and shit is frustrating.

Unrealistic deadline makes it even more fucked up!

I think it really depends on the person attending (why they want to be a developer, how they learn, their ability to apply what they learn etc) I think these bootcamps serve a good purpose by making helping people achieve their goals. I will say that pop culture has set some pretty unrealistic standards for what it is like being a developer, and a lot of the bootcamps are propagating that misconception

Have a question for more seasoned developers/techies in the industry. I started my first software development job 7 months ago and I am contract to hire. There’s only two developers (including myself) on my team and we’ve been working on two separate projects that’s apart of a bigger system. He was a contractor but because our company took too long to get back to him about converting he interviewed and accepted an offer at Amazon (don’t blame him). Now I have to take over his project as well as mine which would be overwhelming to say the least... our team is almost entirely remote so it can be difficult to communicate sometimes and our company is heavy in process so development moves slow. Should I start looking for other opportunities or should I stick it out and gain experience even though the workload is unrealistic?

Unrealistic deadlines, and my dev environment is lagging so bad I can barely type. I can't work like this!

The existence of my pm. He is extremely good at lose, unrealistic commitments and not giving a shit about the devs.

Here's hoping the interview goes well and I get to resign with grievance.

"we don't care about the statement of work or that you've fulfilled it. We want <insert massive list if unrelated and unrealistic requirements here>."

Yeah, we'll eat a bullet you ham-fisted, knob gobbling buffons.

I'm beginning to design websites using WordPress. The issue is, every client wants their website to be styled differently. ive looked into creating my own themes, but a new theme for each client is just unrealistic.

Somebody pointed me towards dopewp.com, which is a Bootstrap based theme with a page builder. I've settled for the idea that I need one theme that'll do the job everywhere, but there's more questions past that.

should I develop my own Bootstrap theme, or use freemium software (which I hate) like dopewp? another option would be to build my own Bootstrap theme, or a completely new Bootstrap CMS.

I just don't know...

I hear a lot that doing competitive programming is important to land jobs and that it would improve your ability to solve problems, however; I hate it and I suck at it so much. I don't see improvement except for knowing how to solve a certain problem and I forget about it after some time.

I can't stand doing any kind of abstract, unrealistic problem solving for whatever reason. I love solving real-world problems that actually matter and provide an actual value on the other hand.

First and foremost, keep clients and work colleagues (especially management people) out of your personal life as much as possible.

Communicate to the rest of the team and clients (if in a client facing role) when you will and won't be available. Also communicate your concerns about any unrealistic deadlines.

Most of the times, this is bound to be ineffective. So, keep phone on silent (or flight mode) at night and during weekends. Also don't call back in case there is a missed call from anybody from work colleagues.

I deviate from this only if there is a go live or similar activity going on.

Repeating story, here, isnt it? A dev dislikes a PM, a QA, a Boss. They don't understand, or have unrealistic expectations or say something "stupid"...

But it requires guts to work with other people, cause often the facts we devs have to tell isn't popular. But to lower unrealistic expectations with the bosses, isn't that part of being pro?

Wish *I* had guts...