Scene: Senior developer left, 3 Junior devs(including me) are now loaded with work.

*Intern asks for help*

JuniorDev1: I have 2 projects of which i'm the lead on one. I don't have time to help anyone.
JD2: 2 projects as well dude, speak to me after work, much easier then.
Me: 3 projects, lead on two. Sure how can i help you.

Took less than 5 minutes to help the intern.

2 hours Later. Check in meeting

PM: Our Junior devs are really busy and can't always help you guys. JD1 are you overloaded?

JD1: Yes, is their anyway we can split the one projects work?

PM: Sure. JD2 are you overloaded?

JD2: Not really, but i agree on splitting the projects between the three of us.

Me: *Are these fuckers serious? i have three projects, they have 2 and they wanna give me more work because they are overloaded and don't know how to manage their time*

PM: Ok cool, i'll update it. CooCooK4Choo, i see you building your own game during lunch time. You definitely not overloaded.

Me: Actually! what i do in my lunch time is my own personal work because it's the only time i have to work on personal projects. I actually do feel overloaded with the 3 projects and now more work from them, could we split the work load evenly please.

PM: I thought you said you could handle the 3 projects?

Me: I can, i have been, but with more work coming my way i don't think i'll be able to.

PM: Unfortunately i need the other Junior Devs on demand, so i won't be able to split the work load evenly.

Me: On demand for what? Why not let the interns help?

PM: In case i need their help. The interns are helping the other Junior Devs with things that don't require too much out of them.

Me: *This FUCKEN BITCH!* Cool, I'm done with the 1 project, expect the business rules at the end of the day. I'll see if i can get the other 2 near done by Friday so i can have time to look over the code of the new projects that i'll be splitting with the other Junior Devs.

PM: Cool, glad we all on the same page.

You know what? FUCK this stupid shit of favoring people in the FUCKEN work place.
This is my first full-time job ever, I've been here for a full year today and i can honestly say these people are just giant children with money. I should know, out of work i am a giant child, but from 8:00 - 16:00 i'm a FUCKEN adult.

Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):

1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.

2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:

3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.

Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.

- "Finance are too busy to look at this"
- "Finance have too much to do"
- "We can't this sorted at the minute because finance are overloaded"

Finance just sent me a request for "detailed description" for each business trip i've made. Attached is a spreadsheet report with 122 columns detailing every facet of my travel expenses that they have recorded so far. Not even just one row per trip, but one row per item, like:

- Trip 1 - Airport parking: .....
- Trip 1 - Airfare Outbound: ....
- Trip 1 - Airfare Inbound: ....

This is way you are too busy, because this is fucking ridiculous. Fix your shitty process and stop bitching.

FYI, your "detailed descriptions" can be found in the contracts we've signed, which outline all the travel needs, which you've already reviewed and signed off on. Get your shit together and stop bugging me

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Team quarterly capacity planning:

- Confluence document created with a big table (+100 rows) by product / business. Each row is something that needs to be worked on for the coming quarter.

- Row 1 could be an Epic with 15 tickets attached. Row 2 could be adding a single log to our analytics. No consistency.

- For each row, we create a separate confluence document with the "technical details". 75% of the time these remain blank. 1% of the time there is something useful, the rest its a slightly longer version of the description from the bigger document.

- Each row gets a high level estimate by the leads. 50% of the time without sufficient background info to actually do get it accurate.

- These are then copied into the teams excel spreadsheet, where it will calculate if we are over/under capacity.

- We will go backwards and forwards between confluence and excel until we are "close enough" to under capacity without being too much.

- Once done, we then need to copy them into the org/division's excel spreadsheet. This document is huge, has every team on it and massive 50pt text saying "Do not put a filter on this document".

- Jira tickets + Epics will now be created for each one, with all the data be copied over by hand, bit by bit, by product. Often missing something.

- Last week, at the end of this process for Q2 (2 weeks late), 6 of the leads were asked to attend a 30 minute meeting to discuss how to group the line items together because we had too many for the bigger excel spreadsheet.

- This morning I was told business weren't happy with one of our decisions to delay one line item. Although they were all top priority (P0), one of them was actually higher than that again (P-1?) and we need to work it back in.

... so back to step 1

- Mid way through Q2, a new document will be created for Q3. Work items that didn't make the cut will be manually copied from one to the other. 50/50 whether anything that didn't get done on time in Q2 will make its way to the Q3 doc.

- "Tech excellence" / "Tech debt" items (unit/UI tests, documentation, logging, performance, stability etc) will never be copied over. Because product doesn't understand them and assumes therefore that they are unimportant.

==================

PS: I'd like to say this was a rare event for Q2, but no. Q4 and Q1 were so bad, we were made assurances from the director of engineering that he would fix this process for Q2. This is the new and improved process (I shit you not) that has resulted in nothing tangible.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two years ago I started a small online business. It was not a long term investment and it literally ended up being a one man business. The idea was to provide a service to a small group of people who will benefit from my idea and to offer it to them at a very cheap price. (It being the cheapest helped its popularity a lot).

However, never once did it actually make any profit. (and i never wanted it to make a profit) I wanted it to be self sustaining business and it was.

This was a project for my University by the way, I started off in my first year because of my extensive knowledge in the particular matter, and I only sold to people on campus.

Now that its been 4 years, my batch is graduating, and so there aren't many people to spread the word about this project. It's finally the time to actually say goodbye to this project.

I leased a dedicated server two years ago, and I am finally saying goodbye to that too (can't afford to keep it live anymore). And seriously, it feels sad to shut this machine down haha, I've had so much fun playing around with the configurations (even though it was a production server).

It's clear that this downsizing will continue and I will be closing the service in the near future.

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

I hate the old people in my company. FUCK THEM!

First I'm telling you a bit about me, so my story makes sense. I'm currently employed as IT-Tecnician in a Helpdesk as 1st & 2nd Level Supporter. I'm working for the current company since 2 years and already sweat too much Blood and Tears for the Old farts.

Now to the Story:
I'm currently planing to make a three year study as IT-Business Engineer, because I was orginally a Real Estate and Account Manager. That is the highest schoolar degree I can currently get in IT with my background. After that I would get the pass for BSc or CAS.

Two years ago when I took the Job I told them, that I would like to start my study in the next two years. Back then they agreed and told me, they will support me.

After that I got a very good reputation in the company and also took part in projects, coded plugins and evaluated requierments for programms. I got still payd with a low Supporter income for my work.

In february this year I told them I want to start my study in May. They boss told me I should do a way lower degree for two years and go into infastructur segment. I told him that my wished degree would be higher and also include infrastructur. Boss told me, that I will need to prostpone my study a third time to autumn.

The reality is, that they want to underpay me as supporter and keep me without a degree. I should keep working on projects, which a high degree tecnician does and gets better payd. In everyway thats unfair and just a hit into my gut. They try to ruin my career and keep me cheap.

The joke is, the boss is over 50 years old and is egostic as fuck. He just wants to profit from my knowledge and wont pay me for it.

I already got the knowledge and just need to have a higher IT degree, so I get payd a fair sum for my work.

My only option is to quit the company or stay as a lowly supporter.

Even my other coworkers asked me, why I'm still a supporter with my knowledge. When I told them my story, they all shugg there heads and told me, I should get the degree.

"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.

Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.

During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.

I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.

It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.

I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.

After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.

We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.

I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.

I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.

I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.

I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.

I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.

This is what burnout looks like.

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

My new favourite commit message:

"All changes as of 18th Sept"

How tremendously useful? There I was looking to know what changes were made to enable a feature / service, thought I could look for that in the commit message, but no you've given me a much more efficient way of finding out.

I simply need to download the contents of your memory, find out what date you made a change, and then dig through the massive commit to find the piece of info I need.

Forget experience using Git features, managing merges, following Git flow, or even any other SCM ... how can people be so tick when it comes to recording what they've done.

Heres a little cheat sheet for those struggling:

- Commit message
Describe what you actually ****ing did. Don't tell me the date or the time, thankfully Git records those. Don't tell me the day of the week, if I need to know I can figure that out, just tell me what ... you ... did.

- Feature branch names
Now this is a tricky one. You might be surprised to know that this isn't in fact suppose to be whatever random adjective or noun popped into your head ... I know, I too was shocked. The purpose of this is to let other people know what new feature is being worked on in this branch.

- Reusing feature branches
Now I know you started it to add some unit tests, and naming it "testing" is sort of ok. But its actually not ok to name it testing when you add 3 unit tests ... then rip out and replace 60% of the business logic. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create a new feature branch, given you are now working on a new feature.

A few months a couple of my colleagues, a business consultant and a developer, worked on a big project. The project capsized because the client is an A-hole and the developer was way over his head.

To save the project I was brought on board. The entire code base was a fucking mess of duplicated code. Shortly after, the developer called in sick with stress, simply because the whole thing was too much.

Fast forward to now; we just launched. The client is expressing concerns about the quality of the work because of the bumpy road (rightly so). I try to explain why my way of doing things is better, but to "paint the picture" I had to compare my approach to my predecessor. This results in the business consultant shooting me down, right in front of the client.

I fucking saved your job, your project, and about $1M in profits. I'm allowed to tell the story of why my incompetent coworker messed everything up.

I'm so done walking on egg shells because some just don't realize they are not cut out for software development.

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

So recently I installed Windows 7 on my thiccpad to get Hyperdimension Neptunia to run (yes 50GB wasted just to run a game)... And boy did I love the experience.

ThinkPads are business hardware, remember that. And it's been booting Debian rock solid since.. pretty much forever. There are no hardware issues here. Just saying.

With that out of the way I flashed Windows 7 Ultimate on a USB stick and attempted to boot it... Oh yay, first hurdle to overcome. It can't boot in UEFI mode. Move on Debian, you too shall boot in BIOS mode now! But okay, whatever right. So I set it to BIOS mode and shuffled Debian's partitions around a bit to be left with 3 partitions where Windows could stick in one more.

Installed, it asks for activation. Now my ThinkPad comes with a Windows 7 Pro license key, so fuck it let's just use that and Windows will be able to disable the features that are only available for Ultimate users, right? How convenient would that be, to have one ISO for all the half a dozen editions that each Windows release has? And have the system just disable (or since we're in the installer anyway, not install them in the first place) features depending on what key you used? Haha no, this is Microsoft! Developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!!! Oh and Zune, if anyone remembers that clusterfuck. Crackhead Microsoft.

But okay whatever, no activation then and I'll just fetch Windows Loader from my webserver afterwards to keygen my way through. Too bad you didn't accept that key Microsoft! Wouldn't that have been nice.

So finally booted into the installed system now, and behold finally we find something nice! Apparently Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate offer a native NFS driver. That's awesome! That way I don't have to adjust my file server at all. Just some fuckery with registry keys to get the UID and GID correct, but I'll forgive it for that. It's not exactly "native" to Windows after all. The fact that it even has a built-in driver for it is something I found pretty neat already.

Fast-forward a few hours and it's time to Re Boot.. drivers from Lenovo that required reboots and whatnot. Fire the system back up, and low and behold the network drive doesn't mount anymore. I've read that this is apparently due to Windows (not always but often) mounting the network drive before the network comes up. Absolutely brilliant! Move out shitstaind, have you seen this beauty of an init Mr. Poet?

But fuck it we can mount that manually after every single boot.. you know, convenient like that. C O P E.

With it now manually mounted, let's watch a movie! I've recently seen Pyro's review on The Platform and I absolutely loved it. The movie itself is quite good too. Open the directory on my file server and.. oh. Windows.. you just put db.thumb on it and db.thumb:encryptable. I shit you not, with the colon and everything. I thought that file names couldn't contain colons Windows! I thought that was illegal in NTFS. Why you doing this in NFS mate? And "encryptable", am I already infected with ransomware??? If it wasn't for the fact that that could also be disabled with something as easy as a registry key, I would've thought I contracted ransomware!

Oh and sound to go with that video, let's pair up some Bluetooth headphones with that Bluetooth driver I installed earlier! Except.. haha nope. Apparently you don't get that either.

Right so let's just navigate the system in its Aero glory... Gonna need to flick the mouse for that. Except it's excruciatingly slow, even the fastest speed is slower than what I'm used to on Linux.. and it's jerky as hell (Linux doesn't have any of that at higher speed). But hey it can compensate for that! Except that slows down the mouse even more. And occasionally the mouse driver gets fucked up too. Wanna scroll on Telegram messages in a chat where you're admin? Well fuck you mate, let me select all these messages for you and auto scroll at supersonic speeds! And God forbid that you press delete with that admin access of yours. Oh maybe I'll do it for you, helpful OS I am!

And the most saddening part of it all? I'd argue that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft ever released. Yeah. That's the best they could come up with. But at least it plays le games!

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

A loooong time ago...

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

Kind of.

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

Fast forward three months (yes, three months).

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

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

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

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

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

This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.

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

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

Haha. Oh no.

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

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

And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.

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

Hm.

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

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

This doubles the strangeness.

I want over to my colleague's desk.

I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.

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

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

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

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

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

You. Did. What?

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

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

Yep

It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.

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

Hm.

Project Management.

Karma's a bitch, right?

Oh my, never was i triggered more. Of course i can only speak for my experience. I study software development as focus.

First off, the starting languages and or concepts you learn.
Why the fuck do they start with java and don't even really explain how instances actually work? Of course they don't. Because it would be way too fucken much for a semester to go over garbage collection, Instanciation of stuff, allocation in such an advanced system, etc..
How about starting with something not 50% managed by a vm?
Good ol' C. And now don't tell me thats a rough start. We all know about these subjects or exams where it's all about sorting people out. Who will be able to manage a whole bunch of shit or who should consider something else.
Yo dawg sick idea: how about sorting it via the will to achieve the skill of coding?
Nah but we make the exams around coding (by the fucking way done on paper, what the hell) such a fucking breeze, asking you how to convert hex do dec.
Meanwhile maths will make you cut yourself in a dark corner, after you nearly shot yourself because of some lame-ass business-subject.

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

Needed money for my company, not enough clients to support business on SaaS alone. Took on a 5k / month job building a platform that competes with my SaaS (more niche, less generic). Also sign up new client who that company's owner is part owner onto my current SaaS. Win / Win?

I do a lot of custom work to my platform to fulfill their needs, which is why I ran out of time for the 5k / mo project. I did these customization for free. Losing money to keep client, but also improving my system.

Work gets busy, I need to drop the 5k project. Client is upset I am working more on his other company (he is not majority owner). I return 1 month of funds to the owner and say I cannot continue.

Owner threatens to make other company that he is part owner stop working with my software if I do not complete project. Blacklisting...great. I agree to work with an overseas developer to do it and PM it for 3 months at least. Making nearly nothing from it (now 1k / month for PM), working nights to deal with India, losing sleep...

Other company suddenly folds due to conflict of egos with that SAME owner. Users drop from 16 to 1. I drop the project, no more strong arming me. Everything is a loss, all effort and money lost for nothing. Bad bet..however...

Owner becomes 100% owner of the other company, and of the software company. I transition him to PM his own project, he still uses my software because It doesn't, nor will it, ever do what the one he is building does. Also, partners from previous company break off and use my software again. New Client. #profit.

But holy hell was it stressful in the interim. People's business tactics are disgusting. Stay calm, play it neutral. Win. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to succeed...at least for a little bit.

I was so scared that how he screwed his partners he would screw me over as well if I built one of the modules I have planned for my System, but haven't done yet.

If I did it for him first and then built my own (totally diff codebase) I really didn't want to run into any legal issues considering the schematics he has now are mine, but I didn't finish that part of the system for him. He is obivously highly competitive. Even though he wanted me to, and still does, want me to run his company for him.

Who knows, maybe in the future. To be CTO / COO of two SaaS CRM's in the same space may make sense. But I will never sell my software to him or partner with him. Too much drama. Avoid the drama. Be careful out there fellas.

If you are a creator, people will take advantage of you in every way imaginable. Read the fine print, read the people, document everything. Don't put yourself at risk.

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.

Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.

So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.

Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.

Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.

I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.

Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.

Get a load of this bs.

In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.

Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.

Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.

Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.

Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠

I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.

Serverless and death of Programming?!

_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.

_Long Rant_

Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.

_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.

So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...

_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.

_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...

On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.

On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...

It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

I'm really trying my best to improve but the work I'm doing (both the code and the business theme) is so god damn boring that I feel like I'm torturing myself just trying to keep up. How am I supposed to learn and build myself when everything is so dull and gray? I can't even talk semi-passionately about the work I do, its all just picking up user stories with lengthy business specs on them updating old code or writing up some new code to fit some business / API standard I know nothing about. Occasionally I'll review other code from a developer doing the same thing and sift through trying to find some way to improve a project I don't care about. Hold down the nausea that comes from fighting off the mental fatigue as I struggle to find the words to explain how a component I made works in terms I don't understand too people that know and care much more than I do...

I'm exhausted, I'm burnt out. This isn't me, and every day I wake up and tell myself that my salary makes me happy because it gives me the ability to do the things I enjoy and live on my own and provide for loved ones, and then struggle to swallow the lump in my throat as I drive in the cold to a giant corporate office with a thousand other Me's doing the same shit but better and improving.

I honestly love what my company offers me as compensation, I'll likely not find any better. But once I have some experience under my belt and some debt paid off I have GOT to find a jobs somewhere that doesn't drain the will to live out of me

I'm just fed up with the industry. There are so much stupidity and so much arrogance.
My professional experience comes mainly from the frontend and I feel like it's not as bad on the backend but I'm still convinced it's not really different:

I'm now about to start my 3rd job. It's always the same. The frontend codebase is complete shit. It's not because some juniors messed up not at all. It's always some highly paid self-proclaimed full-stack developer that didn't really care somehow hacked together most of the codebase.
That person got a rediculous salary considering the actual skill and effort that went into the code, at some point things became difficult, issues started to occur and that person left. If I search for that person I find next to the worst code via gitlens on Linkedin it's somebody that has changed companies at least two times after leaving and works now for a lot of money as tech-lead at some company.

There's never any tests. At the same time the company takes pride in having decent test coverage on the backend. In the end this only results in pushing a lot of business logic to the frontend because it would just take way to long to implement it on the backend.

Most of the time I'm getting told on my first day that the code quality is really high or some bullshit.

It's always a redux app written by people, that just connect everything to the store and never tried to reflect about their use of redux.
Usually it's people, that never even considered or tried not using redux, even if it's just to learn and experiment.

At the same time you could have the most awesome projects on github but people look at your CV, sum up the years and if you invested a lot of time, worked way harder to be better than other developers with the same amount of experience, it's totally irrelevant.
At the same time all companies are just the worst crybabies about not being able to find enough developers.

HR and recruiters are generally happy to invite somebody for an interview, even if that person does not have any code available to the public, as long as that person somehow was in some way employed in the industry for a couple of years. At the same time they wouldn't even notice if you're core contributor for some major open-source product if you do not have the necessary number of years in the industry.

I'm just fed up.
By the way, I got my first real job about two years ago. Now I'm about to start my third position because my last job died because of the corona crisis. I didn't complain for some time because I didn't want to look like I'm just complaining about my own situation. With every new job I made more money, now I'm starting for the first time at a position that is labeled "lead" in the contract.
So I did okay. But I know that lots of talented people that worked hard gave up at some point and even those that made it had to deal with way too much rejection.
At the same time there are so many "senior" people in the industry, that don't care, don't even try to get better, that get a lot of money for nothing.

It's ridiculously hard to get a food in the door if you don't have any experience.
But that's not because juniors are actually useless. It's because the code written by many seniors is so low quality, that you need multiple years of experience just to deal with all the traps.
Furthermore those seniors are so busy trying to put out the fires they are responsible for to actually put time into mentoring juniors.

It's just so fucked up.

Into a bunch of open source hogging meat heads because no one likes paying for things their own peers toil days and nights creating and creating more under documented over expensive licensed stuff (because agile) while throwing buzzwords to clients just make business while simultaneously choking the life out of underpaid overworked devs and engineers with the skill of running away from responsibility trying to save their own skin with the inept ability to look like a hero/King at the end of the day with a single mail sent with psychic communication or the lack thereof with people who are slogging their asses off to fix a problem created to the vulnerabilities and bugs introduced due to the impatience of the same moron who couldn't afford to give his employees/subordinates more time to figure out an elegant solution to a non existent problem created in the confusion of improperly documenting unnecessary requirements of an ignorant or unknowing client who is way too eager to process way too much load with way too less resources all the while whining about lack of features theyre not gonna use.

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

Oh China, you still continue to amuse me... in that special way where i somehow both expect it and am hilariously, breifly shocked... then it's somber, confirming what we know is real/continues to be a societal and cognitive decline trend with no apparent rock bottom, without all-out demise as a near certainty... nor a hail mary play.

... but hey, what better way to digest the real-time info, indicative of something that should be terrifying, but is all too expected, than this unique type of format?

Seriously though, even if it worked amazingly, why would anyone be using it outside in public? Does it require several hours a day? If not, and it was a worthwhile result for you... wouldn't you just make it part of your morning and/or evening routine...even if it had nothing to do with aesthetics, that cant be sanitary... unless you also carry it in a water-tight container or disinfectant and typically bring/use your toothbrush and toothpaste mid-day or at unusual intervals.

I have sooo many more questions about this... and none are relative to who designed/mass produced this, nor the quality of the silicone. As it was developed/produced by the silicone factory ive done great, professional, no bs, business with for about a decade... which is why i waited years to publicly ridicule this contraption.

Fyi- their primary product lines are things like bongs and dab containers; im on the fence of it that makes this better or worse.

Creepy personal truth... i reeeeally wanna know how much that woman got paid... and do to my skill set (ie. Im near utter certainty that i could find her and ask her... likely easily abd definitely without being caught doing anything suspicious. Pro tip: publicly declaring things like this makes it a bit easier to not end up doing it... obvious premeditation adding significantly more to any sentencing.

Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.

I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )

The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

I've been studying a bit about business analytics and intelligence to diversify a bit from dev.

After a lot of looking around I've found it's all just glorified jargon which basically enables your decision to have backing of facts and logic. It sounds as if it's a great coverup tool but don't know if it actually helped decision-making.
Why does researching the market/competition need to have a thousand breakdowns/categories/focus areas.

I feel like an interpretation of business analytics is a very simple and intuitive solution but there is just too much random and wasteful metrics attached to it.

I believe it's just my nascent knowledge and experience speaking, but I never felt the same way about software development, financials, etc

Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.

So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.

2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.

So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?

Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)

3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?

4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot