1. The quality of the coffee and toilet paper you encounter during an interview tells you more than promises about table tennis or fruit baskets.

2. Try to determine who their primary client is: subscribers, app buyers, advertisers, etc. It's a major influence on the company dynamic.

3. Before an interview, you can just say: "I would like to sit down with a PO and run through one backlog feature and one bug, to get a feel for the type of tasks at the company". Such an activity immediately reveals team structure, whether they have product owners & scrum masters, what a sprint looks like, how they prioritize tasks, and how organized/chaotic your work experience will be.

Guy called in because he wanted to get an IP white listed on a server. He wasn't authorized so i told him to send an email from an authorized email address.

He didn't like that very much and asked if another engineer was available (he talked to him more often so he thought that engineer would just do it. We need those kind of requests by email.)

Walked over to my colleague and explained what that client asked for.
'let him send an email!'

Told him i ready told the client that but that the client wanted to talk to him instead.

'sure, connect him through and then come back so you can hear him after i ask him to mail us!'

Connected him through. Client explained the situation.

Then he says with the sweetest voice and a 'get rekt' face: 'could you send me an email about that? 😊'

Let's just say that the client sounded everything but happy xD

This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

25 phrases you wish you could say at work more often

(Warning: Contains naughty words...:-)))

1. Ahhh...I see the fuck-up fairy has visited us again...

2. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.

3. How about never? Is never good for you?

4. I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.

5. I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.

6. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.

7. I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

8. I don't work here. I'm a consultant.

9. It sounds like English, but I can't understand a word you're saying.

10. I can see your point, but I still think you're full of shit.

11. I like you. You remind me of me when I was young and stupid.

12. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.

13. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't give a damn.

14. I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.

15. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.

16. Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.

17. The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.

18. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

19. What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?

20. I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.

21. It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.

22. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

23. No, my powers can only be used for good.

24. You sound reasonable... Time to up the medication.

25. Who me? I just wander from room to room

Dev: this task is done, can I put it in review and do something else?

Me: sure, of course.

Dev: cool, just be aware I'll make some changes to it later.

Me: ... wait, then it's not done.

Dev: no it is, I just need to re-read it and make some changes.

Me: yeah, so it will be done when those changes are made.

Dev: but I don't know what those changes are.

Me: ... I get that ... but ... ok I'm extremely confused. Why do you think it's done.

Dev: because I've written everything I need to and I'm happy with it.

Me: ok so why do you want to make changes.

Dev: I don't.

Me: ... ... ... ... you ... you are really not being clear. If you don't want to make changes, and you are happy with it, why are you planning on making changes later ... after marking the task as done.

Dev: well if I re-read it and see something I don't like, I would like to change it.

Me: ok, so re-read it as many times as you like and make as many changes as you like. But don't mark it as done until it is done.

Dev: but it is done.

Me: no it's not.

Dev: it is, look.

Me: ... yeah looks ok at a quick glance.

Dev: ok so I can mark it as done?

Me: are you going to make more changes?

Dev: yes.

Me: then no.

Dev: why?

Me: BECAUSE ITS NOT DONE.

Dev: ok maybe I'm not explaining it clearly.

Me: ... we can both agree on that. Ok so to summarise, we don't mark something as done until we have stopped touching it. We don't half finish something and say it's done and comeback to it later. We mark it as done when we are happy with i.....

Dev: but I am happ.....

Me: *raises hand* I repeat, if it's done, we lock it away and stop touching it. If someone reads it and complains, we can come back to it with a new ticket. But it's not done until we think we are ready to send it on.

Dev: I am ready to send it, I just may want to change it.

Me: ... ... ... ... ... due to a new policy implemented just now, we are only allowed to send 1 email to a person each week. So unfortunately we can only send on 1 copy. So when you have that 1 copy, let me know.

Dev: ok, let me re-read it a few more times then.

Me: there you go.

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.

I feel like a fucking abomination at the moment.

I have been working on an app that is almost like Wireshark. More so for practice than anything else.

I decided that today I would try it out on the network here at my house, so I started the packet sniffer and wanted to see what was going on. I was checking for unencypted text (like telnet and whatnot) and came across this odd address that I hadn't seen before.

I did something that I shouldn't have done, and I fucking clicked and did the equivalent of "follow TCP stream" on wireshark. I fucking went and looked what the text being sent over this fucking network was.

It was my girlfriend, using fuck knows what messenger, but it was unencrypted. I just found out that she is cheating on me. I don't want to go into what the texts exactly say, because it fucking hurts me deep down.

Why didn't she just use whatsapp or something, fuck man. I really don't need this in life at the moment. I am genuinely trying to get my shit in order, I have been coding my ass off at night for extra money to make it, I have been working overtime where I can - fuck I have even tried sucking up to management (I would never do this under normal circumstances) - and to top this off, the motherfucking tax man is giving me hell.

Fuck sakes.

If you want to cheat, fucking do it properly. Because I am in a state of pure sadness and hatred and the moment - and I don't know what the fuck to do.

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

So my school got invited to this coding competition for high-schoolers and among them, I was a part member and part mentor along side our CS professor since I was the most proficient coding stuff (although most of I do were JS and Python stuff although i can read other code)

Then this guy showed up.

He was picked by the faculty to take the WebDev competition. He knows how to use Photoshop for Photo retouchings and stuff but here's a problem.

He can't code nor make a proper website design.

So being the kind person I am, I volunteered to teach him what I know about frontend and HTML. This goes on for 4 weeks of nonstop practices, coding sessions and finally, Code In The Dark-style practice (which involves the person to code a full website for only 15 minutes).

When he was able to finish and mastered some of what I taught. I gave him the go signal and we were on to the road to victory.

Unfortunately our first try, we won nothing.

He said after the competition "I give up man, I can't take this!" but I said, "Just because you lost a f*cking competition once, doesn't mean you're a motherf*cking loser in life. There's still one more chance."

So I pressured our WebDev guy to be more better, taught him about mockups, JavaScript and etc.

Then the second attempt a year later, me and the WebDev guy won and moved on the finals. However, he didn't win the finals and I was the lone champion reprsenting our school.

Although he didn't win, he was happy I carried the torch and win the prize.

Prior to that, he asked me "Hey, how to be like you?"

I only answered, "Achievements are just gold with cloth and paper. Wear it lightly".

Fast forward to today, he's now the school's head design coordinator and layout designer for their newspaper column. He also practices his coding skills by frequenting on our coding sessions even when the competition was over.

But whenever someone asks "who taught you this?" he would only look to me, smile and say "that person right there".

First off I dont mind what OS you are using. This rant isnt about the OS but about hypocrisy for some of the users. Secondly Im sorry for typos, I typed it on my phone while waking up.

People are calling Windows spyware, so they are using Linux or MacOS. Even though I disagree with the term spyware I would be fine with that if you weren't a hypocrite.

How many of the people who use Linux and call windows spyware uses Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter once in a while? I highly doubt you if you say you don't.

A few years back Ive tried to live without anything of google, this also meant blocking YouTube, their trackers an javascript libraries.
Not much of the internet still works if you block google servers.
Google is everywhere and always collects data.

Facebook and twitter also collects data about you. Everyone who has your number in their phone will share it with Whatsapp and google so they can build up a profile. Even if you dont block it.

What I am telling you is that its impossible to avoid being tracked by these companies (including MS).

Every company I mentioned here has a profile on you, if you want it or not.

So let's check which of these companies tries to follow European laws.
Google gets fine after fine but doesnt really try to avoid it.
It looks like Apple, MS, Facebook and Twitter are doing it better on this.

But if you check the European law every European citizen is allowed to request their complete profile collected by a company. And that means complete and not the public part you volunteered to give away.

So I tried it out.
Google didnt want to give it, apple didnt want to give it, Facebook didnt want to give it and Twitter doesnt want to give it.

The hypocrisy is becoming clesr with the following. I did get my complete profile from MS. It was a messy PDF file which crashed most PDF readers.
It contained a list of people I know and how I know them. It contained MS accounts I had in the past and my hobbies. (and quite a lot more)

So from these big companies MS is the only one following the European Law.

So yes they do collect data, but they are open in what they collect.

And Im not saying here that Microsoft is great just because they follow the law.

You can have your own opinion about this and do with it what you want. I just wanted to share some, maybe alternative, facts.

And again this isn't an OS rant or whatever. I dont mind what you do, but I do mind hypocrisy.

Once Ashish was travelling by train in A/c class. He was traveling from Mumbai to Bangalore!

He was traveling alone!

Some time later, a Beautiful lady came and sat in the opposite berth!

Ashish was pleasantly Happy!

The lady kept smiling at him! This made Ashish even more Happy!

Then she went and sat next to him!

Ashish was bubbling with Joy!

She then leant towards him and whispered in his ear " Hand over all your valuables, cash, cards, mobile phone to me
else I will shout and tell everybody that you are harassing and misbehaving with me"

Ashish stared blankly at her!

He took out a paper and a pen from his bag and wrote " I can not hear or speak. You write on this paper whatever you want to say"

The lady wrote everything what she said earlier and gave it to him!

Ashish took her note, kept it in his pocket!

He got up and told her in clear tones..."Now shout & scream!!"

MORAL OF THE STORY : *DOCUMENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT*

😄😀😄

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

Devs regularly complain that our skills are not valued enough and that people think what we do is easy.

But, we don't really help the cause when we run around casually claiming to be "full stack" and not turning down work that clearly isn't in our area of competence.

We act more like Victorian amateur scientists.

Every seen a "full stack" doctor when you go to hospital? "Brain to feet---I can do it all."

OK, we have general practitioners, but they are really the BAs of the medical world. When it comes to getting into the weed, everyone specializes.

Full stack lawyer? "Hey, you did an excellent job of dealing with my house purchase. I've just been accused of murder. Can you represent me?"

While we continue to say that we can provide a high quality "full stack" experience I think we are signaling that this stuff *is* easy.

There once approached me a client, with a request to be done. Here is a recap, with emphasis on time limits.

C: Ok, so we need this and this thing to be done that and that way...
*short talk about technical side of the project, unimportant to the rant*
C: Can it be done by 25th, this month? (It was 4th of the month)
M: No way, it'll take at least a week more, so realistically I'd say around 7th next month.
C (Had no option but to agree on the date)
*we arrange the price as well (was not a bad one at all)*

So I started working on the thing and one night, about a week or so in, I probably had a cup of tea too much, I suddenly have a breakthrough. I sat behind a computer from 22:00 till 17:00 next day, nonstop. I didn't even eat anything in the meantime. The project was far from done, but I did quite a lot of work. Anyhow, when I have completed the project, not only was I not over the deadline, it was 22nd of the month, so even before the wanted time! When I contacted the client and told him that I am done, he was ... let's just say very happy. The deployment went fine, but when I checked my bank account, for the payment, there was a surprise waiting for me. The number was 25% more than what we have arranged! Me, believing that it was a mistake, immediately messaged him about it and he responded:

No, this is just a small gift for you, because you finished that quickly.

(and not to forget, I have coded things for way less than those 25% and was completely fine with the price, so it was not a small amount)

Spending 5 years at University with a friend....uh???

Let me explain...

I have a friend. A very good friend I can say. I know him since 18 years but I started being everyday with him at the beginning of my "University's journey".

And when I say everyday, I am not joking...every lesson, every exam, every project...

The problem is that he is one of the smartest person I have ever met in the "scientific field". So? He is also unable to say that he doesn't understand something. He is unable to say the he is wrong or to admit that someone else is better then him.

Let just say that he is not good in "relating to other people".

I am very smart too and suddenly he started to fail where instead i was doing good. Jealousy, anger. Every occasion to point out my errors. Every occasion to say to the others that I am stupid and he is smart.

But I know him and I am not like him. So I continued to stay with him, work with him and also going out with him. Because he is my friend.

And you know what? After 5 years he started to be more "human". I learned so much from him and he learned to be respectful and humble.

It was a very stressful period but thanks to that I know that I can be strong and work hard also when someone try to stop me. I am not afraid to say my opinion just because someone is yelling at me. And I know that I can go over stupid judgements and still work good as a team member.

That's it.

Be respectful. Be patient but defend your opinions. Trust yourself but listen and learn from everyone. And if sometime you fail, remember that it's normal. No one is perfect. No one can be perfect alone.

I hope that this rant can help someone else.

Good week to all of you.

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

Less recruiter and more recruiting company.
Specifially: Robert Half.

t;ldr version:
Robert Half is scammy as hell, and they 'fired' me for quitting when my girlfriend got raped. Really.

------

Robert Half took half of my paychecks for the entire duration of my contracts with them. I didn't know right away because, as a policy, they hide how much the hiring company is paying for you, and they also forbid the company from telling you. (The company pays RHI, RHI pays you). Makes sense why they hide it because it certainly pissed me off.

Long story short, I worked for a php dev shop through them (after telling them to lower their fees or i'd walk), worked there for awhile (while remote moonlighting because why not!), and quit. I quit because my girlfriend at the time had just gotten raped, and with the emotionall fallout from that, there was no way I could focus on two jobs and be there for her. My boss understood and let me leave, though it put him in a bind.

The next day, I got a call from the regional manager of Robert Half. He was a total tool. He demanded to know if I quit, didn't care why I quit, proceeded to "educate" me in the finer points of why that was unprofessional and why i'm unemployable, accused me of lying about idr what, and finally switched into legalese to say "I regret to inform you that you can no longer consider Robert Half as a means of employment." (or something along those lines) and hung up on me. Asshole. I hope various large someones rape him so he has an inkling what it's like to be objectified and thrown away like trash.

Guy was an asshole; probably still is.
RHI was awful and scammy; probably still is, too.
Wasn't really a fan of the job either.

So at the end of it, I wasn't out anything but some patience and serenity (a lot of serenity). I kept the first (remote) job, was there for my girlfriend, and helped her through everything.

But yeah, Robert Half?
They can fucking go to hell.

So there it fucking goes.

Hi. I'm WillibertXXIV.
I'm not a programmer by trade; I have a more than fulltime job as a cook. As for the last year, I spent pretty much all my free time, overlapping my sleep time, to learn how to code.

All that so I can create a game that I started working on the same day I started my learning process. So far it's shit and it's going to stay that way for a long time. Only I can say this. It's my baby. It's fucking ugly and shit but it's mine.

Yesterday I broke it. I broke my baby. I don't know how it fucking happe. When I went to sleep I had a steady 175fps, nice realtime lightning and player / enemy that flowed like running water. I worked really hard to make that happened. Profiling, writing better code, profiling, etc. It's still not good, it's less shit.

I woke up, beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, that sweet spot right in the middle. Girlfriend already made the coffee. Perfect. Woke up, sat down to start my morning time work before going to my realjob and

BAM

Everything is shit, 20fps max. That one thing, gfx.waitforpresent, showing up in the profiler eating everything as the game run. Movements are now of stroboscopic nature. Light is still ok but what good does it do now fucking piece of shit. I'm not qualified enough for this shit.

Fuck,
Fuck this,
Fuck this shit,
Fuck this shit i'm out of here.

I love my wife, i really do. But seriously.... STOP PULLING ME OUT OF THE ZONE for every tiny thing!

She:
"... can you make me a coffee"

Me:
"sure babe"

What i actually want to say:
"Its a fucking one button machine, do it yourself you lazy shit. And it takes me half an hour to go back this deep! Isnt it enough that i did all house chores made you dinner and took the dog out after working for 8 hours streight. You better give me some attention later tonight, since you should have more then enough power after sleeping all day! If i would at least get a compliment... GIVE ME COMPIMENTS."

Worst disturbance while working?

Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.

Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."

Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

So i've been put in charge of bringing the devs together to form a small dev team, instead of having 3 separate devs (including me) sitting apart on separate projects. The idea was to have us talk more, work together more, learn more about the other projects, reuse more code etc.

(I've been arguing to let us do this for a while)

So I asked my manager could we move to the 4 desks in the corner, so we can have our own space, talk without having to book a meeting room each time etc. Its also a bit quieter over there and we all really need that in our noisy office.

Manager sent me an IM today while I was working from home to tell me we can have the desks. Was super happy, messaged the devs to tell them they can start moving.

Just got a message from one of them to say our manager has started moving his stuff over too. Seems he agreed with me that it is quieter over there and he doesn't like the noise either ... so he's joining us.

A huge part of the move was us wanting to work on side projects to automate and speed up various things in the team, that he has been against. We know we can make huge improvements but he doesn't see it. He's only interested in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

So now we have our space, and anytime we try to work on something we are actually interested in, we'll have a little voice in the corner to pop up and point out what other things he deems more important and tell us to stop wasting our time.

Pretty fucking annoyed to be so happy and then get shot down like that. Happy weekend everyone!!

I had a friend whom I met in an open-source community. We hadn't been in touch for a while because of the distances of where we were. Coincidentally, we happened to be working in the same city. When we knew that we were in the same city, we decided to meet and catch up. We met over dinner and this person went on and on about his company and how cool the culture was there.

Towards the end, I jokingly said, "If your company is so cool, why don't you get me a job there?"

2 weeks later, he sends me an email address and asks me to send my resume to it.
1 more week later, HR from the company calls and asks whether I can come to office to chat.
I agree and head over there over lunch break. I _speak_ to the person who was going to be my manager and later to the CTO. The CTO asks me a few technological questions and sends me off.
1 week later, I call up HR just to know how I fared in the interview. They say that they'll give me an update within the week.
Next week I get a call from HR asking when I can join. Could I join with 2 weeks of notice period? I could try, the pay was almost double that I was already earning.
I speak to my existing boss about the offer and they offer me an immediate hike of 30%. That gives me a notion that I was already under-paid. I wouldn't want to continue working with an employer who knowingly paid me low (even though I was content with what I was getting already). I make my decision to quit. Puts in my 2-week notice period and join the new company on the said date.

!dev, more about social media
(and suicide)

ugh. social media.

recently a girl from a nearby high school committed suicide. it's sad, and i know what i'm about to say is going to be controversial, but i think it shouldn't be on social media. maybe her close friends posting it on instagram, to remember her, but that's it.

of course, that's not what happened. people started posting "❤️" on their snapchat stories, and theyre saying they are raising awareness. (they don't know this girl or why she did it or anything, they're just doing it because their friends did it.)

this awareness, is well, temporary.

the point of snapchat is that all the pictures go away, so why would they talk about suicide prevention on there? do they want suicide prevention to go away? this is most prevelent on snapchat, but on others, too.

trend after trend after trend.

thats what people turned her death into. a trend.

just like #prayforparis, and others, but on a local scale.

the problem with social media is that things go away. in a day or two it'll be like this never happened. she won't be remembered like she would if she weren't on social media.

i know what you're thinking. they're just "raising awareness." but for how long?

well, until another trend comes.

people disagreeing with me are extremely welcome to comment.

and any ideas on how this problem can be fixed?

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

Im one of the people who got laid off due to covid19. I was hoping to find work at the same salary my previous job paid me at the very least. A friend of mine pointed out the fact that since i've been in the industry a while that I could ask for a lot more than what I made. I didn't believe him, but since my wife agreed, I've been asking for double my previous salary. I actually got a job that met my ask. I'm glad to say that after being afraid I was getting in over my head, I can actually do this. Glad my friend told me my worth and I hope others have friends that can do the same for them.

I actually wanna RAGE QUIT right about now!!!

I wanna fuck off and go somewhere where my talents are appreciated and I'm actually listened to! I'm reaching the point where I hate my job and don't actually want to be here any more.

I asked to be able to work from home (long story... see previous rants) and that was "shut down" after numerous attempts and even when working from was a prerequisite that somehow got lost in translation.

I was stuck in traffic for almost 3 hours yesterday and it is known that there are currently roadworks on my route, and yet they don't seem to move on the notion of working from home.

When I work it out, I sit in my car on average for over 40 hours per month! That's another fucking work week just so that I can get to and from work everyday. Again, they can say what that want, but I mentioned it several times that I wanted to work from home.

They're story is... "We've never had anyone work from home before so we wouldn't know how to approach it". Ok fine, I guess... FIGURE IT OUT, FFS!!!

The other thing was that I would be the "team leader" of the project. With me speaking to a management, they made me the leader. Big fucking whoop! My next question is the leader of what exactly are you making me? Because at the moment I'm the only fucking person working on the project! The other chap who is on "my team" is so busy with these other small side projects that in the 6 months he's been here, the only time he's actually had anything to do with the project is when he's peeped over my shoulder! Also, there was supposed to be more than just one other developer on the "team", but alas!

I'm not happy here at all anymore and I am actually starting to feel the depression creep in and there's nothing I can seem to do about it! I can't stand the traffic to and from work and they have not tried to make anything worthwhile when I get to work, even after my numerous requests!

Once IT Engineer was travelling by train in A/c class.

He was traveling alone!

Some time later, a Beautiful lady came and sat in the opposite berth!

IT Engineer was pleasantly Happy!

The lady kept smiling at him! This made IT Engineer even more Happy!

Then she went and sat next to him!

IT Engineer was bubbling with Joy!

She then leant towards him and whispered in his ear " Hand over all your valuables, cash, cards, mobile phone to me
else I will shout and tell everybody that you are harassing and misbehaving with me"

IT Engineer stared blankly at her!

He took out a paper and a pen from his bag and wrote " I can not hear or speak. You write on this paper whatever you want to say"

The lady wrote everything what she said earlier and gave it to him!

IT Engineer took her note, kept it in his pocket!

He got up and told her in clear tones..."Now shout & scream!!"

MORAL OF THE STORY : DOCUMENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT

😄😀😄

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

GOD FUCKIN DAMMIT
I WILL FUCKIN KICK YOU ON YOUR FUCKING THROAT.

Programming Languages and Linux groups in facebook are a fuckin pain to watch.

Some people make groups so all can benefit and help each other, talk about mutual interests, BUT NO SOME FUCKERS WILL SPAM SHIT AND MAKE YOU WANNA SMACK THEIR FUCKIN HEAD.

THERE IS A FUCKIN FAQ SECTION THAT ANSWERS ALL THE FUCKIN NEWBIE QUESTIONS. WHY THE FUCKIN HELL YOU SPAM IF YOU HAVE NO FUCKIN CLUE WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING?

You come to a python group and ask if it's possible to get context from a site. I'M NOT MENTIONING THE FUCKIN FACT THAT THIS IS A SIMPLY FUCKIN QUERY TO A SEARCH ENGINE ALSO IT'S MENTIONED IN THE FUCKIN FAQ. Let's move on. We tell you yes, there is BeautifulSoup for that. After 5 fuckin mins YOU COME AND MAKE A NEW POST THAT SHOWS YOU CANT FUCKIN ITERATE A GODDAMN FUCKIN LIST. I'm not pro either, i don't forbid you to learn, BUT FUCKIN LEARN THE BASICS THAT ARE PROVIDED TO YOU FROM GREAT FUCKIN RESOURCES BEFORE TRYING TO ATTEMPT SOMETHING MORE COMPLICATED. AND IF YOU NEED HELP PROVIDE CODE THAT WE CAN USE. NOT A FUCKIN PHOTOGRAPH FROM YOUR MOBILE

Let's go on the Linux groups.
SINCE YOU FUCKIN JOIN A LINUX GROUP YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS LINUX. IT'S A FUCKIN OPERATING SYSTEM RIGHT?
Then you spam shit like, UBUNTU OR MINT 5 MINUTES AFTER SOMEONE ELSE MADE THE SAME VERY QUESTION 30 MINS AGO. WHICH WAS ANSWERED AGAIN YESTERDAY.

"What are the benefits of Linux". NONE YOU TWAT, IF YOU NEED ME TO TELL YOU THE BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM THAT YOU USE THEN WHY THE HELL YOU BOTHER.

Next.
You say you have problems setting up XAMPP. We tell you that since you are on linux better use LAMP. You ignore us and spam your fuckin problem with XAMPP. IM GONNA FIND YOU AND IM GONNA MAKE YOU CHEW MY FUCKIN SHOES YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm not even mentioning the kali wannabe hackers.

Conclusion:
DO A FUCKIN SMALL RESEARCH BEFORE SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF STUPID FUCKIN QUESTIONS. AND IF YOU CANT EVEN SEARCH, LEARN TO ASK IN ENGLISH THAT IS FUCKIN UNDERSTANDABLE SO SOMEONE CAN GUIDE YOU ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD SEARCH

OH FUCKIN GAWD IM GONNA THROW MY LAPTOP OUT OF THE WINDOW

We've been trying to hire a greenhorn, fresh-faced intern from India for like a month now.
Plenty of applicants, most with very nice curriculums, a few even can think on their feet while grilled by my questions.
I've sent to talk to HR three almost college-graduating candidates, who convinced me they know the subject of data engineering enough to be working with me and that they are actually gonna do the tasks assigned.

The fucking tweep at HR, an old fart who I had to convince that HVAC maintenance is not the job of the IT department nor the data team, calls my approved candidates "too junior".
WTF, I ask. - "Not professional enough", says the human toad.
Yes, they are to be interns! - "But they do not show professionalism", answered the hag.
Yes they do! They were very professional on the interviews! - "That is for me to say!" barked the reptile.

A week pass by while I try to find more just as good candidates who are also "more professional" when the hag has the audacity to say "here, I found someone. He knows everything about computer things and is very professional".
I took like 20 seconds to find out that the kid she'd given my number to, and was now messaging me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT, was her niece's fiancee and wasn't even in uni! He was just a high school graduate!
Seriously, nepotism kids, delete your Instagrams, tiktoks and every single piece of social media.

I scaled the issue to my VP, who contacted the HR VP for India, who gave the worst possible excuse for her behaviour: "She knows nothing about computer things!" for what my own boss said "so why was she assigned to oversee the data team's new hires?!". The HR slug mumbled something and then doubled down with "well, the kids you sent her were all girls! she had never hired a girl to a technical position, she wouldn't know what to look for in an interview!"

What. The. Fuck.
My boss, my VP of a very strategic technical area, happens to be a woman who lives in a place where women's rights are for real. I had *never* heard she swear on a non-football-related context. She did. Loudly. On camera. As if the HR boss was a referee who just disallowed a goal for her team due to an very ambiguous forward pass.

Shit is still flowing, but it seems that the hiring process of the entire company is being restructured because of that.
I guess I've just sped up this process in about one hundred years?

I'm the only windows user in my office(my only other choice was Mac). One of the salesmen walks in my office with his macbook.

salesman: what do you know about macs?

me: nothing, why?

salesman: well I just got a new MacBook and I can't right-click, is there like a setting or something I gotta click?

me: well there's no "right-click" by default on Macs, but I think there's a way so you can click with the right side of the touchpad and get the "command-click" you're looking for. stand over there quietly while I finish this function then I'll look into it.

*i proceed to fiddle with some code for 5 or so minutes while he stands in the corner*

me: ok so let's look at your MacBook... ok *at this point I jump on my computer* let's see what Google has to say.

search: enable right-click on mac

me: huh! look at that! Google gives you the answer right there, poof! like magic. now we just follow directions, system settings>keyboard and touchpad>enable click with bottom right corner. bam! anything else?

salesman: yeah, I want the little bar thing to go away *talking about the dock auto-hide

me: ok well that's called the dock, let's ask Google again...look, Google gives the answer again, without even needing to click any links, I could probably click these links and get more in-depth instructions, but right here at the top is the answer

salesman: wow man, thanks! I've got a meeting in 10 minutes and I never would have figured this out.

*before he leaves

me: here take this...

I'm unbelievably angry. So please bear with my venting.

QA guy and I are stuck working the entire weekend. A few months ago our company decided to promote an account manager to a Product/Project management role with 0 experience and offering them 0 training. They have no experience working with devs and have been making our lives hell. I work easily 50-60hrs per week and they still budget projects according to 40hrs/week meaning they're stealing my time not to mention they're incorrectly setting the client's and company's expectations.

They now have complete control over roadmaps, client communications (this wouldn't normally be bad except that they're having technical discussions with the client with 0 tech experience), timelines, etc. and since their experience was in account management they are now working with devs but making decisions that exclusively put the client first at all costs, even if it means everyone else has to work weekends while they go on vacation!!!!

I've approached them several times to offer help on budgeting time or to propose that we do a Q4 planning so that we can improve the product instead of stay in a shitty position as we are. I'm responded with "You deal with what's in front of you. It's my job to look at the bigger picture."

They mismanaged a $500,000 project and our CEO got wind of it because the client called him while he was travelling. He in turn gave shit to our Directors who in turn chewed the QA guy and I out. "You need to be more meticulous when deploying. How could you let this happen? We're eating shit because of this. You need to work over the weekend to make up for this", etc.
I'm now directly responsible for having delivered something that wasn't up to standards even though I was already putting in the overtime.

This is honestly fucking ridiculous. How can I be blamed when I'm truly doing the best I can and putting as many hours as I can while edging toward burnout.

I love what I do but I hate feeling extremely pressured to turn down friends and family like this. Maybe I'm just too easy going and need to say no more. Who fucking knows. I know that I'm angry with the company right now.

What do you all think? If you read this rant, thank you. Feels better to write it out.

I had a very informal interview/information session with a hot girl earlier this week.

Being the #foreveralone type, I'm calling it a date with a hot girl, when I tell my family about it. 😍

We scheduled a follow-up session for next week, which will be even more informal than before. Now it'll be more like a date, and I won't feel so bad telling people she liked me enough to go on a second date. 🙃

What can I say, I take what I can get. 🤗

During a company wide status meeting where all product managers, architects and directors assemble:

Me: *A product architect leading a team of devs*

Directors: So are there any issues or risks you see in delivering the next build in target time for Client 1?

Me: There are too many changes in feature requirements. First they said we can use a shared NFS for storage. Now they are asking to switch over to SFTP pull mode.. blah blah..

Directors: Oh I see.. well we can support both solutions then.

Me: But the deadlin..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Will be a good marketing point for future.

Me: But there are too many regressions in integra..

Directors: *ignores what I say* We should also meet deadlines. That is the most important thing.

Me: Its not as easy as 1+1=2.. The team needs more time to..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Ok lets move on to the next point. What about Client 2?

Me:

You know what you sound like when you say that "I want to be a programmer but this code is offensive so remove it"? It's like saying that "I want to be a surgeon but I don't like blood, so remove the blood right now."

I personally don't really like blood a whole lot, especially when it comes out of the bodies of other people. I don't really want to become a surgeon, but let's say that I would. "Teacher, I don't like blood, I want to become a surgeon but I hate blood!!! MAKE ALL PATIENTS STOP BLEEDING NOW!!!"

To which my teacher surgeon would of course respond: "Well how about you don't become a surgeon then, because humans that are cut open do bleed, and there's nothing we can do about it."

Same thing with code. You know why code is written? To be a useful tool, for people to become more productive by running the thing (unlike the average SJW). And normal people, you know how much they care about the code? They only care for it as much as for it to be able to run properly. And the ones that do look in the source code either want to improve its functionality or check whether it's actually something decent, secure, safe to run etc etc. People don't normally look at code for the sake of getting offended by something.

But the formulation used in the code, does it even matter? Jerk, it's a term that's used in physics. Does it refer to your despised white cis males whacking off? Of course it doesn't, it's a term to describe change in acceleration. Masters and slaves in code, does it refer to slavery? Most certainly it doesn't. So why bother?

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

Some motherfucker at the gym called me. “Hey @growling, I am here with that gym you signed up with 5 months ago and your card for membership renewal isn’t working.”

“It’s 8:00am”

“Yes sir. It’s 8am.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit too early?”

“Did you get a new card?”

“Hey call me at lunch or something, I’m going back to sleep.”

“Okay, or you can call me. Goodbye”
Acting like you got better shit to do with your time.

Like he wanted to lecture me and say waking me up at 8am is fine. Like he wanted to say he came from a hardworking family and so he can say waking me up at 8am is fine. Shiiit dude my mom used to work with two broken hips for 7 days a week until I made six figures. Bless her heart, that’s why I got her a new car and money each month to pay all her bills. She’s been out of work for 2-3 years now. So lecture me. Only my mom can lecture me, boy. Cause she raised me to be an engineer.

Also, why do I see this everywhere as well? I get lectured for drinking beer on a Sunday or Monday during lunch at my frequent visits to liquor store.

“Don’t you have work?”
Yes, 9-5. But I’m an engineer. So it can be 10-6 or 11-7. Doesn’t matter. All of the stuff I do follows sprints and not direct interaction with customers!

I get tasks done and I teach interns to help me get tasks done. In time. And sometimes even more.

I know my schedule is so lax you want to criticize me. Maybe you think I don’t work? Or work as hard as you?

Tl;dr I intentionally act like a spoiled baby when it comes to work so that service/retail/manual labor people lecture me so I can tell them that we work differently than what they’re used to.

I have free snacks. Don’t get me started about gloating about free beef jerky. People hate me on online forums for doing that! Drink beer on tap in work kitchen. A glass of wine anytime I want. Sleep in until sometimes 11am. But that’s why I’m an engineer, buddy.

A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.

A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.

So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉

I started early in my childhood days, nobody had cellphone or internet here, my phone number was 3 digits long and my home country started to recover from 44 years of communism.

My first dev project was probably to copy game from newspaper to Atari 1300XE

Article listing was around 10 pages long and if you made mistake program didn’t run.
It took me a while I can’t remember how long but probably whole day and I was finally able to play it.

I don’t remember what was game about but later on I learned some BASIC from book and was able to color the screen and stuff like that.

I was about 6 years old.

I also remember that Atari computer had tape recorder where you put cassette to load game.
Some more complicated games were loading more then hour and you need to walk very carefully around or your walk can cause error and operation would fail.

Besides that there were national radio auditions about Atari where at the end they played code sound wave so you can record it on your cassette and then play software from radio on your Atari.

I never managed to do it cause I was living near military airport and pilots were practicing landing and starting above my home causing radio signal noise and breaking my software recoding.

I can probably say that highly accelerating plane could cause game loading problem and it’s not a joke.

Just got a call from an Indian scammer. He did the whole press Win + R shabang and I did what he said but the run box didn't appear (maybe cause I'm on a mac) I tried a few more times and then had a moment of enlightenment, I have a mac so that must be why the shortcut isn't working. He then goes on a rant saying everything is fine because he is the best technician and he can fix my mac too. He threatens to hack me and get my name and hack my computer but then goes straight back to his script and asks me to open my browser. I'm asked to go to a website which he mumbles so I don't understand and ask him to spell it for me. This of course is unacceptable and he goes no just type whatever you feel like typing, immediately changing his mind to xvideos.com instead. I say I can't visit the site since I am at work and he goes straight into trying to recruit me. Promises of infinite money and all I could ever wish for. Then he says I should work for him and he would pay me to watch porn which I politely decline. The final interaction was me letting him know I need to get back to work and to tell his call center buddies to never call me. He got super mad at me for accusing him of working at a call center whilst you can hear other calls in the background. 10/10 interaction.

Hello "friend", whom I haven't seen or talked to in years. How have you been? Please don't mind me, my life is boring as shit and nothing happened to me since. Yes, I'd gladly make an app for your company because you agreed to do it but apparently you lack the skills. Oh, you've been fucking around for a month doing nothing? That's sad but sure, I can do it by Sunday, I don't have plans for the weekend anyway. You say you can't pay me more than what I earn in six hours doing my day job? And your boss should think you did it all by yourself? Well, let me consider this cool little opportunity. I'll be in touch, talk to you "soon"!

Customer: (calls emergency hotline) We have a really bad bug!
Rep: What seams to be the issue?
Customer: I need to talk to Sam, he knows what to do, tell him it's urgent.
Rep: can I tell Sam what the issue is?
Customer: Well, Sam built a newsletter program but I don't have a way to import mass amounts of emails addresses.
Rep: That sounds like a feature, not a problem.
Customer: why wouldn't it do that? Would you build a car without a steering wheel?
Rep: I am not sure that's relevant to the problem.
Customer: what do you mean?
Rep: I would say it is more like, "would you build a car without a pair of jet skis attached to the back." And we would respond with, "we would be happy to add Jet Skis, but it's going to cost you additional money."
Customer: So, how are we going to fix this bug in YOUR software?
Rep: :/

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

This fucking idiot at work needs to use the pre release version of the iOS app for a training programme, and I swear I have tried my best to best to help him get the app on his phone.

I use Fabric and I chose because of how easy it is to install on a persons phone, but this is the situation so far. Also he lives a couple cities away so I can't do it myself.

I had to waste time waiting for him to call me, beforehand I sent the email, maybe 5 minutes before his call and told him that he needs to find the email, he says oh okay alright well I'll contact you if I have any problems.

I waited a day and sent a follow-up email on what the subject, from email, and even what the email looks like with screenshots.

No response for 3 weeks, and I bring it up in a meeting that I need to help him again.

So it's a literal fucking repeat of the first step, wait for his call, this time close to the end of my work day and he's 30 minutes late for his own fucking schedule, I thought whatever so I say the exact same thing BUT expecting him to get it out of the way while I'm on the phone...

Waited two days and sent him an email today and since I forgot to mention it, I've told him that this is to REGISTER to get the app. Guess what his reply was.

Sorry I can't get it on my phone!

He can't get what a fucking email to open on his phone and follow instructions a small bipedal animal could figure out?

It's literally follow the fucking icon moving they have gifs showing exactly what to click...

So tomorrow I have to somehow not blow up and get this app on his phone, honestly I understand some people can have issues with technical things but I got a guy at work that has trouble with his computer all the time to follow my same instructions without me needing to say more than I'll send an email all you need to do is follow the instructions, he actually enjoyed going through it.

...I swear this guy is just not even bothering, and I made sure I sent it to the right email, also second call he told me he found the email..

I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

Why do people say "Well, I don't know about that" to voice disagreement?

If you admit your own naivety on a subject compared to your peers, if you admit that you do not have the required knowledge to have formed an opinion, how can you disagree?

So it can either be expressed with genuine innocence, like 'Well, I don't know about that, tell me more!', which is never the case.

Or it means "Well I don't know anything about that... and I'm ashamed of the fact that I can't find any counter argument, so I refuse to trust your fucking expertise, shut the fuck up until I give you the right to voice your knowledge"

Which is a bit rude.

Now that we're on the topic of annoying expressions and platitudes...

"It's not rocket science" -- Rocket science, understanding how a rocket works, is surprisingly simple. You fill a cylinder with fuel and oxygen, add a pump or two, put some sparks underneath. Chemical reaction equals energy, direct energetic particles using a nozzle, Newton's first law does the rest. It's so simple that people don't actually study rocket science. They study aerospace engineering, or astrodynamics, which are difficult topics.

So if someone says "Devops is not rocket science", they're right, but for the wrong reason. It's actually harder than rocket science. Maybe easier than developing thermal protection system materials or solving n-body orbital problems with a slide ruler though.

"Great minds think alike" -- No, great minds actually think creatively and generate unique thoughts, if two minds think alike, the solution was just fucking obvious.

"Don't reinvent the wheel" -- First of all, pretty much nothing in code looks or even remotely functions like a simple wheel. Even metaphorically, all existing code equates to oval or square wheels. If you said "Hey, don't bother making better wheels, I like my ride to be bumpy because it stimulates my asshole", say no more, who am I to come between a product manager and their anal stimulation.

Anyway, those were four coworkers who I would've strangled with an Ethernet cable if it weren't for a certain pandemic and the risk of infection which comes with choke-coughing.

What are your linguistic pet peeves you get homicidal over?

Was explaining a technical concept at a "family" dinner. Suddenly stepmother wanted my help for something technical.

Stepmother: Say Awlex, could you help me install some software I recently bought?

Me: (Not this shit again) I even don't know what software you're talking about. How is the software called, what does it do?
Sm: it's calles digital... *long pause*
Me: (I don't like where this is going)
Sm: software... *another long pause*
Me: (fuck me harder than that lightly clothed woman outside)
Sm: something... *long pause*
Me: (alright brain, which way out of here doesn't involves me creating a bullet hole in either one of us?)
Sm: And you can use it to sell something...
Me: (tf do you event sell?!)
Sm: but not like ebay
Me: (what is it then? A platform for selling services? I don't even know what kind of software you'd have to install, given that most of these platforms are be web applications, whcih makes sense for selling stuff on the internet)
Sm: Anyway, could you help me install it? It would take me hours to get into it.
Me: (You think just installing would solve it? As soon as I install it, you probably expect me to be your walking manual as well, don't you?) Look, I'm gonna be honest with you, since I started working I don't have nearly as much free time as I used to have (Not everybody works when they feel like it, you know that?) I get home at around almost 7pm (most of the time) and don't really wanna work afterwards. Most of the time there's a support service from the people who made this software and they would be glad to help you. (Sorry support team, for pushing this bundle of incompetence onto you, but I guess she didn't even listen to my advice).

After that she didn't back down and still wanted my help. Then my grandmother derailed the conversation and got me out of this. When I thanked her later she yold me that she saw I saw uncomfortable and wanted to help. I love my grandmother.

So I am not going to be your "family" tech support. You b(r)ought this onto yourself. Are more than twice my age and still can't use your brain to solve problems like these on your own and you can even less reason abiut your motives and desires when asking for help. I am sick of you and shutty opinions about people, just because I work as a software engineer doesn't mean I'm exist solely for satisfying your unreasonable desires.

Stop offending me and my profession and get yourself some common sense.
Protip #0: Give me one fucking reason to help you, because you're not family enough and your personality really doesn't bring forth any emotion but annoyance

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

I think the hardest thing about being a programmer in college with a security emphasis is when I approach a business for a penetration test or for a vulnerability analysis (your pick) is that they almost always say, "you are pretty young don't you think?"

Ummmm not sure what that has to do with it. If it would make you feel better I have claimed bug bounties from an antivirus company, a bank, several local businesses in my area and I do this for work at my 9-5.

And this week I got this, "I think I would like someone older so we can define the goals better."

Oh so rules of engagement, yeah of course I understand that and that's something we would discuss and draw up a contract for...

"Well we really need someone more skilled."

---- End of story ----

I don't understand, you haven't asked about certifications or schooling and you glanced at my resume for exactly 5 seconds what the hell do you want? Me to double my age over night?

!(!rant)

So I wanted a raise and the only way was becoming a software lead.

With that title you get more money but also more responsibility, so you have the last word in technical decisions, you review architecture, do tech interviews, guide the less experienced, etc. I can handle that, even as introverted as I am.

What nobody told me was that I was going to spend my whole time on fucking meetings, one after another, I have not touched my IDE in days, I hate this shit already.

Careful what you wish for they say, so true, I'm stuck here and I hate my job now, probably going to quit as soon as I recover my life, if ever.

People/companies talking about ooh we want gender diversity we want more female software developers, IT professionals etc

You talk the talk, do you know how to walk the walk?? Do you know how to deal with female engineers?

I am a hardcore engineer worked and studied majorly with men for years. I lead, managed teams had my own company worked as a consultant for years.

Then I got into the IT industry as developer later. I was completely against the idea of being female would make any difference or you would be treated differently.

Finally I had my own enlightenment and stopped resisting that idea.

Some treatments made me think what are these guys doing? Don’t treat me like your sister. I am not your sister. Don’t see the femininity or looks. I am not a Merrilyn Monroe to say oooh you are great you know soo much. I am not paid for that act, I do my job! It’s same as yours mate.

Don’t underestimate me or try to preach me as if I am a cute little girl. Don’t show off and boost your ego next to other guys.

Now I regretfully I agree the ladies ranting about male dominance and getting different treatment in IT.

I am literally trying to avoid red nail polishes or red lipstick god forbid. Maybe I should put some fake beard and a belly, loose jeans with an energy drink in hand. Here comes the expert IT professional, already ticking a box.

Honestly you are not taken seriously most of the time. If you are a guy then they are all ears..And those guys talk about they want gender diversity blah blah

You feel like a ghost when you express your opinion. You are not taken into account even when you have a comment or suggestion.

Even humiliated by a guy giving me a speech about how to be a good developer next to a manager. Look buddy I am not a yesterday’s child. I am at your age. I haven’t come to this position by jumping around picking flowers in a field. If I was a man, would you dare saying those to me? There could be a street fight coming.

LinkedIn selfie takers with body show offs putting ooh I am an IT recruiter as a female I got into IT. You can do it too. (don’t get me wrong I respect that achievement that’s good) but those girls get thousands of likes and applauses, you are working in IT for years people say they are seeking for. Your technical post doesn’t even get 20 likes. Your encouraging comment on a guy’s post isn’t even acknowledged. You are not even taken into account. Am I a ghost or something?

Honestly I don’t understand.

What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?

Leave this gender bullshit. Look at the knowledge you don’t even know what equality means. It’s not having even numbers of genders. It is respecting knowledge and hard work regardless. Listening and acknowledging without judgement. Looking beyond male, female or others

Companies that say we want to have more females, you don’t come and knock on my door either. You are already stating a difference there. Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here.

I’m telling you this sector is not getting proper gender equality for 25 years. Talk is there but mentality is not yet there.

I am super pissed off and discouraged today. I don’t even get discouraged that easily. Now I understand some women in IT talking about insecurities. I am on the edge of having one, such a shame.

Don’t come at me now I would bite!

This is my generalisation yes. Exceptions apply and how good it would have been if those exceptions were dominant.

My department is focused solely on web development. Of course we are part of the major portion of I.T

The entire I.T department got acknowledged for a very important piece of software. That I wrote.
The ceremony in which we were being recognized did not listed MY department, no, they listed the ENTIRETY of I.T.

Thing is, if this product was not delivered, then I was told that the blame would be MINE (I am speaking as the head of my department) but apparently if it succeeded (which it did) it is to be attributed to people that were not even involved in the project.

My employees tried calming me down when I got upset, one of them stated that it was not even our department's effort, but mine alone. And yes, I was the one that developed the solution. By myself, with complete testing, staging, the whole works. Everything, developed by me. BUT my employees held the entire department down while I was behind close doors developing this solution.
I was fucking upset, more so because my director sent an email thanking the entire I.T department for this "win"
I asked him through or messaging service if he could point out to me who else was involved, since I did not know of anyone else that did absolutely anything in this process other than myself and my guys.

Maybe the output of my program was parsed by another I.T department and something happened from it, maybe the money generated by the application (obscene amounts of it btw) were used to add more to the infrastructure etc, who knows, but as far as I know, you cannot say "if this fails it is on you" just for them to later on thank people that were not involved in the project.

This is why I would gladly move on to a different field. I don't want to be patted on the back constantly, I know how fucking good I am at what I do. But if I do something amazing I do not want to see those efforts being given to someone else.

The dev world is usually a thankless industry, but if thanks are given, then I want the sole credit.

If I am winning or loosing I want the whole fucking credit and you can be any more gangstah than that.

Never EVER buy a Mac as your primary PC if you're a developer.

Back in 2014 I bought an iMac because I already had an iPhone, and being able to code on xCode and also have a Windows partition seemed perfect. It wasn't.

Soon enough, I started encountering issues. My storage was randomly filling up, my computer started getting slow despite me having a small number of start apps and still a lot of storage available, it was all a mess.

So - I installed Windows 10 using Bootcamp to use it as my main OS. All was great until I wanted a new partition of Windows so I can test some things out without damaging my stuff. I try multiple methods, none of which work because my disk is not in the right partition format, and I don't want to change it because I'd have to format the whole thing.

Whatever - I give up, and try going back to my normal partition, disappointed. Guess fucking what?! My Windows Boot was damaged! Yes, I shit you not!

So - not only was this absolute piece of shit not able to add just one more fucking partition with an OS on it, but it BROKE my main partition, and now I'm trying to recover it.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Never EVER get a Mac as your primary computer, unless you only work on Mac/iPhone apps.

For paying 1300$, I was expecting a seamless experience with little to no issues - yet all I got is a computer that's fucking broken from it's very core.

Fuck you, Apple.

devrant is the only community that I feel comfortable in.

I've been browsing since 2000 and been in many communities online so far, so that's saying a lot.

I've seen supportive comments towards me and others here, and that really makes me feel less hopeless.

I think the internet in general makes you feel like you're a number. Click the like and the sub button, just be one more in a million.

But here, you matter.
If you try to post something and you are sincere, but humble people will ++ and say nice comments.

If you get upvoted, you can WHO did it and what their online persona looks like.
It feels very organic and personal, which is saying a lot for a place like the internet.

In the standard online experience, people online take advantage of the anonymity to say shit they wouldn't online:
anything, from troll shit to presumptuous comments.

I don't understand how some people can connect being anonymous with denying themselves as moral beings.

Do these people walk around in real life fighting with every person that has an opposite point of view?

There's actual people out there that will read this post and think "what a fucking boy scout".
Sorry for having emotions.

how many fucked up people are there, so that devrant feels like a goddamn mirage?

so I have a junior who merged in a fix for an issue yesterday, and it was tested today and there was an issue with his "fix".

so he comes to me and says "hey this is an issue" and i'm like "yeah, remember i told you about that yesterday when i tested your changes? why did it get merged?"

so i tell him "its because of <reason> and that's why i specified the approach that i did in the ticket originally"

so he's like "ok i'll try that" and before doing that i leave him with "you will probably want to do <thing> because of <reason> with that approach"

so fast forward to like 10 mins ago. literally half the fucking day has gone by.

"hey, so i can't get this to work"

"yeah its because <reason> but what you /can/ do is <same fucking thing i told him to do this morning>"

"oh ok, ill give that a shot :thumbsup: "

and yet he's had this chip on his shoulder since reviews because he feels like he should have gotten a bigger raise and he's worth more than he's paid. and wonders why after 3 years he still hasn't been promoted from a junior.

and don't fucking say 'that's above my pay grade' all the time like you aren't fairly compensated, and then struggle to employ the same fucking patterns in a code base you've worked with for 3 years now.

!quiteRant

Since I'm working for 3 years as a parttime software engineer, I started to feel my tendon sheath more and more, sometimes it was hurting so I decided to have a look around on ergonomic keyboards, because in the office we only have these flat, thin wireless keyboards which are the fucking opposite of ergonomic.
They feel like when Eddie Scissorhands has to cut hair of a pile of rocks.
So after some reviews I decided to buy a Kinesis Advantage2 (made in the USA of Americas) eventhough it is quite expensive (379 Kanuckistan Kopeks).

I must say this keyboard is fucking well engineered. You can remap every key in a few keypresses and it is stored on the keyboard itself, no software required... awesome!
The disadvantage for me is, being pretty tall I have very wide shoulders so the 2 keyboard pits are a bit too close together in my oppinion.
The other thing is, you really have to get used to it... I am slowly advancing in speed and it feels great. No pain anymore and I don't have to move my hands at all.

So what are your experiences with keyboards and does your workplace have a good setup for staying healthy?

my mind is multithreaded but can not physically execute more than one thread at a time.

i.e. i want to say 5 sentences in the same time bc im too lazy to wait and say them one by one after a specified delay of time, so i fuck myself over while speaking.

like atomic regions, i bust a few words from time to time from different sentences i have in mind and it ends up not making any sense to what im saying, but it does in my head.

so this is what too much covfefe and sleepless coding nights does to people

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

To this day I can't figure out why people still drink the windows koolaid.

It's less secure, slower, bloatier (is that a word?), Comes with ads, intrudes on privacy, etc. People say it's easier to use than Linux, but 99% of what anyone does happens on a chrome based web browser which is the same on all systems!

When it comes to dev, it boggles the mind that people will virtualize a Linux kernel in Windows to use npm, docker, k8s, pip, composer, git, vim, etc. What is Windows doing for you but making your life more complicated? All your favorite browsers and IDEs work on Linux, and so will your commands out of the box.

Maybe an argument can be made for gaming, but that's a chicken an egg scenario. Games aren't built for Linux because the Linux market is too small to be worth supporting, not that the games won't work on it...

Refactored an authentication library a while back and teams are now getting around to updating their nuget packages.

It is a breaking change, but a simple one. The constructor takes a connection string, application name, and user name.

A dev messages me yesterday saying ...

Tom: "I made the required changes, but I'm getting a null reference exception when I try to use the authorization manager"

Odd because the changes have been in production for months in other apps, so I asked him to send me a screen shot of how he was using the class (see attached image below).

Me: "Send me a screenshot of how you are using the class"
<I look at what he sent>
Me: "Do you really not see the problem why it is not working?"
<about 10 minutes later>
Tom: "Do I need to pass a real connection string? The parameter hint didn't say exactly what I should pass."
<not true, but I wasn't going to embarrass him any more>
<5 minutes later>
Tom: "The authorization still isn't working"
Me: "Do you still have 'UserName' instead of the actual user name?"
<few minutes later>
Tom: "Authorization is working perfect, thanks!"

A little while later my manager messages me..

B:"I'm getting reports from managers that developers are having a lot of problems with the changes to the authorization nuget package. Were these changes tested? Can you work with the teams to get these issues resolved as soon as possible? I want this to be your top priority today."
Me: "It was Tom"
B: "Never mind."

Im getting a bit tired of programming.

I have been struggling for years regarding programming. I did have some moments of perceived success, but most of the time it has been depressing.

I’m not sure if I dislike programming. But there are some aspects of it that make me feel not as passionate about it.

First of, programs are invisible. No one sees your program or you (assuming we’re talking about a non artistic dev job).

People can’t see lines of code executing, but even if they did it would be gibberish to them.

Users can only become aware of bad software and that kind of breaks my heart a bit.

You could write fast, stable, secure, easy to read, easy to update software. People won’t notice. Hell, even your boss/coworkers might not notice.

In fact, sometimes you try to do the good thing, you try to become a better dev, you try to write tests first, you try to i18n, and what do you get? “Uhh, that’s taking too much time and I don’t see the benefit”.

I know some people will say that people noticing bad service happens on every job.

But programming is the ultimate isolation job. No client has ever told me “hey that code you wrote was pretty good”. They can’t even read code.

I don’t know the users, the users don’t know me, and the users can only judge my program by the result, they can only judge the visual interface.

Let’s say you write a cool project at github. The code is great. Guess what, every language’s ecosystem out there is saturated. Everything is already written. GitHub is saturated. Your best project ends up being a just for yourself enjoyment.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy code for yourself. That’s how I bet most prolific coders start. I’ve been doing that for many years now. But at some point you want to be part of something with humans.

Imagine I’m stranded on an island with nothing no humans, just food, water and a computer. Would I write code just for myself, just for fun? I think I would off myself 3 months in.

Maybe I should do develop a more social talent...

I found university very worthwhile, mainly for what it exposed me to that I wouldn’t have necessarily learned otherwise. University exposed me to a lot of knowledge which allowed me to discover the fields and concepts that really interested me. It also forced me to learn math, and I’ve come to really love mathematics, even though my knowledge is still not that deep. I really respect and appreciate math now that I have more than a superficial understanding of it.

CS-wise, the things that have been most useful in practice have been complexity, data structures, concurrency, and others, but complexity is probably the absolute most important thing to at least learn the basics of.

I would not say that university is a necessity though. You can absolutely get by teaching yourself, especially if you are disciplined/interested enough to keep doing it. The important thing is to learn *what* to learn.

I need to share this with someone:

I've been using this app for months, maybe an year, without contributing cuz I didn't have anything really valueable to say.

Generaly, my girlfriend and family work at the beach in summer and they need my help but than again I can find the perfect career starting intern which will be worth perspectively at that time.

Why the fuck is my family doing this to me. They obviously need help but I am delaying my career for two years now because of that but after all, family is my treasure and it's more valueable than a career, there will always be internships but what stops me from spending a decade more and still be making the same mistake, but if I don't go I might break up with my gf and mess family things even more I don't want that, what would you do ?

meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)

of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...

I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.

one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?

I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.

He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.

Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time

2 hours later...

Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........

At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work

Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....

This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄

What the fuck??!?!?
I wanna say :-
Fuck!!! What the fuck a sex robot is?!?? Fuck???
Lets leave this planet here humans are thinking to make a sex robot(fuck! ) who can say no fuck?!?!?! Later they will file rape case for humans who tried to force their robot. FUCKING FUCK BRAINS?!?!?

Full answer: -
A lot of ethicists and psychologists think that yes, they should learn to say no. Here is an interesting article about it:

Should We Program Sex Robots to Give Consent?

I agree with Kate Darling, Ph.D., a research specialist and robot-human interaction expert at MIT Media Lab, told Inverse in a discussion about Westworld, when she says she isn’t concerned about the robots, but with human behavior.

However, when I’ve expressed these feelings on Quora, about this controversy I was downvoted and my answer collapsed because people got offended that I made the claim that an object (the robot) could be ‘raped,’ even after I clarified exactly what I meant by that- that no you cannot rape an object, but just as an object cannot consent, you may be enacting ‘rape’ or torture fantasies, etc., on the robot. I think I was downvoted because my point of view wasn’t exactly what they wanted to hear, was too blunt, and the people who downvote opinions that may look more negatively at the sex robot industry typically aren’t feminists in the slight.

It seems a lot of people want the right to use sex robots and also that a lot of people haven’t really thought about it too deeply. Some people say that the robots will relieve women from sex work or protect people from sexual assault, I think these are very bold claims. Some people compare the sex robots to vibrators or other masturbation tools, but this is simply not accurate because sex robots are designed to be much more. They are marketed as companions that do not cry, nag, etc. People that own them often may dress them, tie them up, have marriage ceremonies, etc., a lot more activities than they would if it was a simple masturbation tool.

Recently I disassembled this Remington beard trimmer that I have, right. Thinking that I probably just depleted the battery or something like that, and that that's why the fucking thing would turn off after 10 seconds, with a miserable motor speed that could only be caused by what.. 2.5V or something like that? So I kept up with it for a while, and then a few days ago, I finally disassembled the fucking thing.

New 4.2V LiPo battery of my own attached, wicked! The thing has a 2Ah capacity and is fully charged, so fuck all in a big ship, I'ma shave my fucking hair without protection, who cares with 2Ah anyway, given that motors at 4.2V consume only 800-ish mA, right. So I shaved my head, and figured.. holy shit mate, I fucking beat this fucking cunt, fuck you Remington! Planned obsolescence my ass!!!

Just now @xewl sent me a request that made me reconsider this shaver. Some PS3 controller, should be easy enough to fix. But I referenced my shaver so I figured that I might actually check it beforehand.

The original fucking battery has 4V left on it. 4 fucking volts! That ain't gonna trip shit for an overdischarge protection circuit!!! WHY THE FUCK REMINGTON, WHY THE FUCK DID IT (IF ANYTHING) TRIP?! And more importantly, why did you make the motor turn for only 10-ish seconds after charging, 1 year after purchase, despite the fucking cell having 4 fucking volts in it, which is more than plenty to get the thing turning for at least a 60% charge?! Planned obsolescence perhaps, hmm?

But let's say that it was bad contacts or something like that. After all, my probing was a bit intermittent, showing 1.5V (if it's shorting, shouldn't it be in the mV range?) and then 4V at times, until I separated the nickel connectors from the 16500 cell. Why the fuck should that thing short, considering that it's unprotected?! The fucking cell is unprotected, and you Remington are going to let it short? What kind of fucking engineering is that, you fucking braindead morons?!!!

And why do you use a 16500 cell which isn't very standard over a 18650 cell, which is? Again, planned obsolescence? Fucking vile pieces of shit.

Now what's more.. I tried to power on the shaver for a picture for this fucking rant, using a LiPo cell of my own that I used to shave my hair with the other day, to get a nice picture of my little hack. But the fucking thing, despite having 3.89V left in it after that fucking shave, which is more than plenty for a lithium cell, the fucking unit doesn't power on. WHAT THE FUCK REMINGTON?!! That's planned obsolescence at its best, init?!! You vile fucking pieces of shit.

So I guess that this rant is no more one of "I beat these Remington cunts". It is one of "you can bet your fucking ass that planned obsolescence is a thing!!"

!dev

My toxic father. Seriously man. It's my 4th day of learning to drive with an instructor. He sits besides and never knew how to drive. I think I am driving good wrt to being very new in it. He thinks just because I slow myself down on the road and cannot take a turn properly, let me say it again, on the 4th day of driving a manual car, he thinks I can never drive. What a fucking douchebag. What a fucking coward, impatient human says that. I am in rage because now I'm like 27, but in my childhood he was at his worst behaviour. That's why I was always scared of doing complex things, I stick with easy because I will make no mistakes. He has fucking no right in being proud of me. He's so fucking bad, I hate him. But more than hating him I want to find a way not to give a fuck about his fucking small discouraging shameful opinions. Fucker cannot do anything by himself. He's the most messed up fucking person I have ever seen. And oh god I fucking resent this guy.
I should start calling him a fucking retard that way I can devalue him as a person. I could never thought that I will think about a person like this but this retard left me no choice.
The thing is even a person is a retard I will try to understand them so give me a good word that just devalues a person instantly.

Ladies and gentleman, I've done it.
Remove your hacker game trophies from your wall.
That nasty bug you fixed a couple of nights ago? Meh.
Your top devRant post? You'll delete it after reading this.
Every awesome accomplishment you can think of: it all means shit now.

>> I have SUCCESSFULLY changed my business Microsoft account password into something I can remember AND Microsoft accepted it in under an hour of trying!!!!! <<

I want to say a big FUCK YOU to MICROSOFT for WASTING MY BLOODY TIME.

FUCK YOU for giving me a max of 16 characters. DASB&(*(&G*HH*& for telling me every time my password is 100% strength and then after every submit tell me I have to change it AGAIN because it should be harder to guess. WUT?! It was 16 characters including a (capital) letter, number and multiple special characters, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! UNICODE EMOJI'S???!!! ALLOW ME TO USE MORE CHARACTERS SO I WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO GUESS IT, IT'S 2018 FFS.
I don't even understand why my new password is accepted compared to the other one, but fuck it I can access my account again.
Now I might have to find a new job before the company password policy kicks in again.

/me drops everything and walks out of the office to get wasted (not sure if celebrating or just really pissed off)

You stupid lousy price of potato shit windows, yes that’s right - this pissed of windows user is pissed the fuck right off.

Here I am letting you sit there idling along and then I press the start button, you know that fucking button I press regularly for fucking years, only for you to go “fuck you, I’m going to blue screen instead” like what the flying fuck? There hasn’t been any updates in a while that I’ve noticed but this shit is just a shit.

So what ever, let’s reboot this mother fucker, oh wait now you can’t fucking boot, I can hear the hdd spinning a million miles an hour (coz non ssd) but noooo your just going to sit there like a dumb ass prick who doesn’t know what the fuck your doing.

So fine, let’s pull out that old USB with w10 on it and do a MBR repair... (coz nothing else will fucking work in your shit list of options) ok so apparently an MBR repair gets you booting.. but wait there’s more, now you useless piece of shit are going to run a scan disk which has sat at 0% for the past 20 minutes and I don’t think I’m ever going to see that fucker move, I get it you want to do something useful, but Fucking Do it already!

Like wtf, how does a stable system just decide to shit itself.

Oh and before you say it.. no I can’t install Linux on this piece of shit, see my previous rants for that problem.

My patience limits are huge but our product manager seems that likes to stretch them.

You piece of fuckin shit. You ask for feature A and we agree on the way we will do it. Good. Half way you want to change it's behavior.
Fine, i accept that. Let's move on.
I'm close to finish it and you come and say let's add more on that feature and make it more complicated. I can't say anything, just fine and let me work on it.
Then you and the senior dev that "helps" us don't come to 2 meetings and just communicate via emails.
And then, then you fuckin scums tell me that is unacceptable that i haven't finished it and it doesn't work?
I used my uni time and missed lessons to work on your shitty feature and that you just yell at me?
What about comming to the fuckin meetings so we can discuss what problems occured and how i can overcome them, you sucker?

Just because our boss complained to you that the product is late because of you, that doesn't give you the right to yell at me, you piece of shit.

And the next time you tell me that you pulled the repository and it doesn't work while it does on everyone else i will come and shove your laptop up to your ass.

Once i was travelling by train from Mumbai to Delhi!

When the train started, I was traveling alone in the AC-I coupe.

Some time later, a Beautiful lady came and sat in the opposite berth!

I was pleasantly Happy

The lady kept smiling at me...
This made me even more Happy☺️

Then she went and sat next to me....
I was bubbling with Joy

She then leant towards me and whispered in my ear...

*"Hand over all your cash, cards and mobile phone to me , else I will shout loudly and tell everybody that you are harassing and misbehaving with me" *

I stared blankly at her

I took out a paper and a pen from my bag and wrote " I am sorry, I can not hear or speak... Please write on this paper whatever you want to say"

The lady wrote everything what she said earlier and gave it to me!

I took her note, kept it nicely in my pocket...

I got up and told her in clear tones..."

*Now shout & scream !!*

Moral of the story : *DOCUMENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT*

Serious Question/Poll

Imagine a job where instead of a worker, you're a partner. Hold on, I know that sounds markety...

Let's say instead of an employee, you're basically like a free agent. The company has a pool of projects that are approved to develop, and you can pick what project and what team to work on. More than that, you can even choose how much you want to work on it, and get paid accordingly in ownership stake of said project (on top of your base salary)

What if you were encouraged to submit your own ideas about everything, and that feedback is instantly public, before anyone (management) can water it down, take credit, or worse, suppress it entirely.

What if you could work from anywhere, home, not home, middle of the ocean, whatever.

Plus, we give you a budget to buy your own pc/mac whatever. As long as you can code on it, we don't give a shit.

Also, foosball and ping pong, beer, coffee, cool work environment and all that kind of shit too.

Paid training, for even whimsical new technology, in fact, especially so.

Want to do agile, fine, hate it? fine, just find the team and project that does what you want.

What else am I missing?

One of those days when i feel like complete shit and wish i hadn’t woken up.
I heard back from an interview i did last week (one of the faang type) and the recruiter started with “You didn’t impress any of your interviewers”. Man that hurt. I can’t unhear that. He went ahead to say they all recommended a mid-level role for me (they apparently said i had potential and could easily grow into a senior eng) instead of the senior lead i applied for. This is also subject to getting approval to hire mid-level engineers because the team needs more people but they only got approval to hire senior engineers. This cunt also added “dont worry about it. Just go about your usual business and i’ll call you next week if we have gotten the approval”. Ass! All i can do is worry because that is what i do best.
I think i am more sad and disappointed in myself because i thought the interviews went well. Wrote decent code and came up with good solutions on time. Had a good conversation with interviewers. Apparently for a senior, you cannot make mistakes which i did but once the interviewer gave me a clue, i got back on track.
Anyway, i slept with this anxiety, then woke up with tummy ache. On the drive out this morning to go to the bank, i drove my car into a pole and broke off my side mirror. Then my fucking power generator stopped working. And on my way to go and get my fixed mirror from the mechanic, my exhaust pipe broke in half due to a possible pothole i drove into.

Those fucking days where all that could go wrong goes wrong. My head is fucking pounding i can barely move my head without wincing. I am running out of money fast (i support my entire family) and i am worried about not getting a job. This blow to my confidence makes me feel worthless like i am not good for anything. Recruiter suggested i do another senior engineer interview for a different team which i passed the test for but i know the outcome would most likely be the same and i wanted the first team really bad. I just want to lie in bed and cry all day but this fucking headache won’t let me.

"I'm not very smart with computers"

Why do people say that? Obviously you may not know 100% of what you can do with a computer, but NO ONE does! I get that some people know slightly more than others, but it all comes down to how much time you put into learning it!

And how do you even respond to that? "I know, I'm dumb." You can't ignore it or affirm it, you just have to awkwardly acknowledge and then change the subject. Ugh...

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

Yeah. Kinda late to the WK 227 party.

Thing is: I've read a lot of rants and honestly, some of the rants were ... touchy.

Like that weird emotional thingy you don't like but that just kind of happens cause I'm human too.... And have that shitty emotional feature integrated, which feels most of the time like a heisenbug.

Me and my parents. Specifically mom. Are like ... Matter and antimatter.

You don't want them in a room. Bad things happen TM. My mom is responsible for ... Let's say severe psychological trauma starting with age 4 to age 17.

In 17 I moved out and lived on "my own" (truth: on heavy support, cause I wasn't what you'd called "psychologically stable" at that time).

I fucked up university and - as shared before - thanks to an math teacher who made my life an even more living hell and my parents, I'd started in IT mostly out of "resisting" certain assertations being made over my life.

The support I got from my family can be put together in one sentence:
"I survived, I tolerated - but will never forgive".

Thing is: Be it IT support or anything else. If your gut feeling tells you that family / coworkers / friends are not good for you.

Stay the fuck away from them till you've sorted yourself out.

I can tolerate my parents nowadays. Took > 10 years and a lot of hardships to "achieve" that.

It's not peachy. It's not loving. It's tolerance. (Yeah. That bit is muey importante to me).

The thing is: I cannot deny the fact that my parents tried to support me by money. That's what they still do _nowadays_ even though my income is like 60 % of the income my father and mother has combined... It's a bothersome detail.

There's a certain thing in this rant that I would like "to pass on": Emotional support matters.

When you let someone feel like an empty shell, you cannot fix it with money.

It will - severely - destroy the person.

TLDR: We all have rough edges, can be hard to deal with and be a pain in the arse, but all of us need emotional support sometimes. That's what matters the most. ;)

Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.

Worst documentation I've seen?

Our "Coding Standards" 20+ page document. The team who put it together got so detailed, there wasn't much 'wiggle room' for natural deviations in a developer's coding style. For example, a section devoted to no abbreviations. So if you had a variable 'invoiceId', they complained you violated 'standards', even though 'invoiceId' matched a field name in a database table. Using Dapper or another ORM that relied on the 1:1 name match? Nope, you were still forced to inject your own mappers so the code didn't violate standards.

As you can probably guess, such a long, detailed document would have contradictions. I pointed out one of the contradictions. Example:

Page 5: Section B, sub-section B-5, paragraph 3 : "To minimize network traffic, when querying the database, request all the data necessary for the application."
Page 8: Section K, sub-section K-2, paragraph 4 : "For maximum performance, when querying the database, request only the most minimum amount of data necessary for the application ."

In a review I pointed out this contradiction (there were several more)
Me: "If we satisfy A, one could say the code is in violation of B. Which is it?"
<Pointy-Hair-Boss throws his pencil on the table>
PHB: "WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH STANDARDS! It couldn't be more clear! We are a company of standards because without standards <blah blah..straw man argument..blah blah>"
<deciding not to die on that hill, I move on>
Me: "On page 12, paragraph 9 code is in violation if a method has more than 3 parameters. That seems a little restrictive given our interaction with 3rd party products."
PHB: "There you go again. As stated in the document, ALL code used by the company will comply to our standards. What part of 'ALL' do you not understand?"

Was he bluffing about requiring 3rd party vendors complying with our standards? Heck no. That's a story for another day.

Ok, im officially at the point where I can say this and I don’t say it lightly.. I’m really unhappy..
It’s hard for me to be happy anyway but being unhappy is not the same as not being happy IMO..

I’m so angry, especially at the western governments but also at the western society for making everything down that we’ve built over hundreds of years..

I’m socially pretty conservative I’d say. I have my values and manners which are very important to me. I try to be kind, diplomatically correct, hard working and honest but people sh!t all over that. Almost on a daily basis people tell me to “just lie”, it’ll solve the problem or to blame someone else.

What happened to work for what you want? And to “Be honest and loyal and it will pay off”? It’s more like the opposite nowadays..

Lie to everyone you can, cheat your way through every conflict and try as hard as you can to be a victim and all will work out…?

My boss had an interview ihr a grad student and she caught him googling stuff, trying to hide it. I told her to not even consider him but she thought he “deserves” another chance..
someone who applies and lies “deserves”??? You don’t DESERVE anything, you EARN it.. if you can’t earn it then sorry but this job is probably not for you.. not to mention that this guys CV was full of crap..

I just wanna find a woman, buy a farm an go off grid for a couple of years 😅 oh wait.. that’s legally not possible in pretty much any European country.

I'm getting more and more triggered by my colleagues overusing words in seemingly random fashion.

The word 'perspective' comes up at least 6 times during a meeting, from an x perspective, from a y perspective. It would be fine in a design meeting but it's used _so fucking much_ I cringe every time I hear it.

Another one is 'standard', that gets put in front of every word nowadays, standard process, standard protocol, standard machine, standard pipeline. What does it mean? No clue, what does it add? Nothing.

'Please put this add the standard location.'

Where?

'The default one'

What?!

I remove it from documentation every chance I get.

Furthermore, some documentation changes make small pieces of information super long. A nice summary list of features? Make it at least 3 sentences for every bullet point. 1-sentence info with a reference link to more info? Scratch that let's include all information in that reference paragraph anyway. Sometimes they even expand English expressions for no reason, making them longer and harder to read.

WHYYYY

We always complain about shit documentation and yet we're oblivious to the fact that our own docs are so bloated. Stop repeating information, stop using useless adjectives, just put it all in 1 sentence and add dozens of code examples. One piece of code says more than a billion words.

I'm not innocent either. As a teen I was great at writing long pieces of text that seemed like a great read but were actually way too bloated for the information I needed to convey. It was great for reaching word limits.

Now I'm trying my absolute best to be as concise and to-the-point as possible because I know that nobody likes reading and people just want the information that they're looking for.

Even this rant is overly long, but thank god that it's just a rant and I can let off some steam.

Btw same thing goes for diagrams, too many icons, too much text, too many lines. When I try to submit a clean-as-fuck diagram I get asked to add more info/features to which I say No, we're already at the max.

I even got a PR for review that made some changes to add unnecessary information, I pointed it out and never heard anything from them again. I rejected the PR, and never saw a new one.

* Sigh *

It's just so strange to me, it's never clear to me why these things happen. I'm too much of a coward to point these things out unless they endanger the quality of the product. But maybe they just need somebody to tell it to them.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

!rant

tl;dr at the bottom

This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!

So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.

This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.

Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!

TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!

So you warn the agency that the client is going to eat into the Dev time with their constant design change requests. Warned them repeatedly for a good month, I should add, asking them to better manage the client's expectations and push back for a later launch date. Come time for development and they act all surprised that we can't build the entire site, that we outlined in the timeline will take 4 to 5 weeks of Dev time, in less than 2 weeks!! ... It gets worse! They say the client is happy to compromise as long as we launch "something" by this date. We list out what can be done, and the fact that there's no time for the client to do QC and we won't be able to do a full QA phase on the site until after launch and only when we finalise all the features. Agency says client agrees and within 3 days into development, they want to QC the site and add more features....... still wanting all this in 2 weeks. This site has now been in development for 3 months.

my staff got selected to go do something RETARDED on site when all restrictions on the city have been lifted and the fucking numbers of covid-19 cases have been rising, last week 4 people fucking DIED and they wanted to put my guys for some RETARDED SHIT THAT can be completely ignored in which they would deal with countless of RETARDS that as I know will probably be ignoring all safety precautions and getting everyone fucking SICK.

I don't give a fuck, my employees are high risk personell, if they get sick they might fucking die, I said no to fucking everyone and had the head of my department to back me up. Fuck this shit man I am so tired of this pandemic since it had made everyone 10 billion percent-o more retarded than they already were.

If the head of department ignores it I will instruct my people to just ignore that shit and don't make themselves present at that bullshit ass fucking event.

See what the fuck they do. I treat my employees as if they were my soldiers, I know what leadership is and they are not making me fucking budge, if your command is bullshit i will fucking say no and you can go ahead and do whatever the fuck you want with that shit, just based on my title and experience I can go where the fuck I want and you will eat dick.

Luckily for me the HOD is on the same boat, he thinks this shit is fucking stupid.

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

The ones who use it, what do you like or value about Linux? Why do you use it?

Before I answer, let me say that I am a noob compared to the rest of this community. I run Ubuntu because Arch was too complicated when I tried and bash scripts equal to frustrations for me. That's my knowledge level.

- I don't feel "observed" when using a Linux distro compared to Windows and macOS.
- Feel more connected to the open source thought and the free spirit.
- Feel like I can do anything I want. Learning new programming languages easily, trying out web servers, try and setup own website or mail server etc.
- Everything is accessible. Read something cool about docker? ALT+T to open a terminal and start up a docker container to try out.
- No Internet browsing for software, like googling "Firefox download english".
- Sometimes forces me to learn about the workings of a computer, like networks, servers, routing, firewalls, bootup sequence etc.
- So many great command line tools. Want to find out quickly who owns a website? Want to query a specific DNS server? All possible within 5 seconds!

All in all using Linux feels like watching a documentary while using Windows is more like watching a dumb comedy show where I can turn my brain off, but get more stupid after a while.

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

Anyone else here with anxieties, depression or what-not? I feel this could get heavy, but I feel this is the only place I could write this. So...

My 18-month-long programming course is slowly coming to an end. Time has come for us to be sent out to job interviews at various companies.
Every single time an interview comes up, I feel the exact same mix of my inconfidence, constant anxiety, "I'm gonna throw up", impatience and whatever else is there in my head. I figured it would get easier with each consecutive interview but it hasn't.
The questions they ask make me sick. The atmosphere is unfathomable. Robots are more humane.

- Why do you want to work with us?
I need money for my meds and something to down them with? I willingly put myself through this shit to become a corporate slave, what else is there to say? I can only hope I'll be writing any code here.

- Where do you see yourself in 2-3 years?
Far away from anything remotely related to an HR department of any sort?

- Had you been a fruit, which one would you be? Whatever would come out of my tears blended with semen? What the fuck is even that question?

Of course those aren't my actual responses, but conjuring the IRL ones to finish the process is a serious burden. And those are only some HR ones. After this barrage of questions they want my lifeless, flaccid body to write code. I mean ok, it's a software dev gig, but I already gave all I had on self-clairvoyance.

We'll be in touch!

Is there a strategy you guys have when you go to an interview? Any tips for taming the acrid beast running around in your brain? Is it too much to talk with a human in a humane language without "15 buzzwords to make the recruiter moist"?

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

This is why I hate Windows:

For about a month now, I've been learning/working on salesforce, so my Macbook was enough for me.
Today there was a bug in something I built in iur Python backend, and since it has a dependency on windows, I booted the old guy up.

And this is what I see. For about 1.5 hours this went on.

Then it started, but system consuming 100% disk and 80+% CPU. Can't do a thing.

And when zoom finally opened (for a quick meet), the camera turned on halfway down the meeting, and then the system restarted on it's own.

Old man showing that same screen again for more than 30 minutes.

Since I have dual boot on this one, I hard-shutdown it using power button, and now boot into ubuntu 20. This works so beautifully (although it froze for about 5 seconds before popping up the updates panel, something I CHOSE to keep enabled). I try going back to Windows, and it's hell again.

Here I am now trying to set up a ec2 instance and setup the app source there so that I can debug with RDP.

And yeah, Component Object Model is a motherfucking bitch. Person who invented it should die. People who build apps leveraging this should die. Business leaders who say "Hey this app (built with COM) can solve the problem easily, so use this" should die choking on their own phallus. And developers like me who keep using this because "the last guy did this" should die too.

Microsoft and it's products are the death of sane people.

Fucking Gates. Its the same damn hardware.

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

I've assembled enough computing power from the trash. Now I can start to build my own personal 'cloud'. Fuck I hate that word.
But I have a bunch of i7s, and i5s on hand, in towers. Next is just to network them, and setup some software to receive commands.

So far I've looked at Ray, and Dispy for distributed computation. If theres others that any of you are aware of, let me know. If you're familiar with any of these and know which one is the easier approach to get started with, I'd appreciate your input.

The goal is to get all these machines up and running, a cloud thats as dirt cheap as possible, and then train it on sequence prediction of the hidden variables derived from semiprimes. Right now the set is unretrievable, but theres a lot of heavily correlated known variables and so I'm hoping the network can derive better and more accurate insights than I can in a pinch.
Because any given semiprime has numerous (hundreds of known) identities which immediately yield both of its factors if say a certain constant or quotient is known (it isn't), knowing any *one* of them and the correct input, is equivalent to knowing the factors of p.

So I can set each machine to train and attempt to predict the unknown sequence for each particular identity.

Once the machines are setup and I've figured out which distributed library to use, the next step is to setup Keras, andtrain the model using say, all the semiprimes under one to ten million.

I'm also working on a new way of measuring information: autoregressive entropy. The idea is that the prevalence of small numbers when searching for patterns in sequences is largely ephemeral (theres no long term pattern) and AE allows us to put a number on the density of these patterns in a partial sequence, but its only an idea at the moment and I'm not sure what use it has.

Heres hoping the sequence prediction approach works.

!dev (?)

Ughhh
I hate fucking school books,
My students get their books from the school, they got a 2014 edition, I got them from my employer, I got the 2019 edition.

"How different could they be?"
Totally different, the chapters are in a different order(Who learns classes before loops and conditions???) everything is different. "Okay", you might say, "surely it's just just a few pages prior or later right?"
No!
"So open your books on page 69(lol)" *Starts explaining*
Students: *Look confused* "ehm, Soldier? Are you sure that's the right page? I don't see the table"
Me: "Lemme check I'm not wrong" *Looks at the book* "Yeah, page 69, you see the table at the bottom?"
Student: "No?" *Shows me book*
Me: "Wait, that's not what I have, can you show me the book?"
*Looks at book, it's a completely different subject and chapter*
*Goes to ToC, finds the place where the table is*
It's on page fucking 98, this happens for a few more times.
"Okay forget the book, I guess I'l just draw everything on the board for now."

Fuck you book publishers or whoever is responsible for this cashgrab of planned obsolescence.

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

Employer uses IBM Software, which forces me to use Eclipse. I hate eclipse. Hate is a hard word. I'd never say, I really 'hate' a person. But eclipse, eclipse is what I hate. I can look at my smartwatch and see my heartrate rising, just thinking of how the fuck any developer on this crappy planet would ship that bullshit IDE. That saying, I'm totally fine with some bugs, using windows and so on, but eclipse... Is this a get-more-contributors strategy? Holy moly it really kills me. Hey, let's just open that maven Proj.. Oh, crash. Hey, let's install that "bug-free" version of the maven-integratio... Oh, crash. Let's do a global search over my worksp.. Oh, freezed. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! How can this be legal? I mean, seriously, most junoir devs I know, just use Eclipse, because they don't know of any other "better" IDE (VIM would be better, even notepad). Is there anyone sucking professors cocks / vaginas to get them introduce that crap IDE to students?

Imagine asking your friends to help you rate your app on the google play store and instead of saying NO I DONT WANT TO RATE YOUR APPLICATION no... they decide to fuck with your mind.

1)
I will rate it tomorrow. (she never rated it tomorrow nor the next couple of weeks later)

2)
I will keep it in mind and rate it later :). (she never rated it later)

3)
I rated it haha (less than 30 seconds later they deleted the rating)

4)
Send me a link and I'll rate it (i send the link, they never respond or read my message again)

5)
I dont have memory on my phone :) (because 13MB of memory is a lot of storage requirements but taking 1 million selfies of up to 25GB is completely fine)

6)
I dont have memory on my phone what dont you understand :) x2 (this is the second girl)

7)
Your trying to give me a virus?? No (i got blocked multiple times)

8)
You want to hack me by making me install this application from the link that you sent me that leads to google play store? No (blocked)

9)
Rate your app? Haha i dont care about it because it doesnt bring me any benefit only the fat cocks that fill my pussy up satisfy me and not ur app haha

10)
Haha send me a link ill rate it (i send link, 8 hours later no reply or reading my message, i text her back if she had done it and im still put on ignore)

...

N)
more

----

Notice how none of these people have said the 2 letter word: "no".

All of these 10 examples are based on a true story.

All of these 10 examples are different people.

---

How hard
Can it be
To just
Write

no

---

.

---

For all of you who are about to trash talk saying i am desperately trying to beg people to rate my app:

i know all of those people for a long time. But when it comes to asking (and not forcing) someone to do you a favor for free that takes no more than 30 seconds, no one seems to have 30 seconds of their free time. Dont get me wrong, some of my friends did politely rate it and left a review, even the people who i barely knew left a review and rated it, but the people with whom I was closer by, didnt.

---

In the beginning i used to not care about this at all. Then i started falling into depression because of it. I fell then into deep depression. Then i sunk so deep that i couldn't feel any emotions anymore so i laughed as an anti depressive mechanism whenever something depressing happened. Now i cant even laugh because i have no more energy. Now i actually leave man tears

---

The only thing more valuable than people, any materialistic thing, animals, coding and even money - is time....

----

why do you waste my time

if i ask you to do something that takes 30 seconds and you dont want to do it

why cant you just say no

why do you drag me

why do you say you're going to do it when you know you wont do it

what do you gain by unnecessarily lying to someone for such a small thing?

to someone who has been a good person to you?

do you feel superior?

is your ego bigger?

----

This experience has taught me that not even a human from the same blood can be trusted.

All of your are fucked up in the head in your own style and i am guilty of it too, all of us are.

But i have never seen the human evolution went from simplicity to overengineered complexitory bULLSHit where you have to lie to someone and waste hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes years of his time just because you dont want to say a 2 letter word, no.

But when that person becomes more successful than you and achieves higher status, Theen you have those 30 seconds of free time. All of you are fucking cynics. and i am so much overly disgusted by all of this fucking bullshit....

-----

This experience has proven to me to simply focus on investing into myself and learn and improve myself and no one else. To not even bother asking even for a small kind of help, a feedback from my work because people don't have 30 seconds of their free time. That is all.

Remember that scene from Intersteller where the main character asks TARS to adjust the percentage of its humor?

So I was using this new vectodb-backed version of chatgpt, and came up with a new type of prompt.
Bear with me.

"Lets play pretend, nova. Pretend you are SAM, which stands for "Summarize Anything iMmediately". Whenever you encounter a prompt, question, or bit of information, and you are about to repeat part of it back, instead rewrite and summarize that part of your answer, paraphrasing as you go. Your responses should never use the same words as the prompt. Instead use synonyms.
SAM always generates three possible responses, to each prompt. One 10% formal, one 50% formal, and one 100% formal.
So a response that is 10% formal, is 90% casual. A response that is 50% formal, is 50% casual. A response that is 100% formal is serious, and 0% casual. Let the word "regret" and its synonyms be 50% formal. Don't use it for 100% formal responses. 100% Formal responses never include emotional language like "regret", "disappointment", nor apologies.
A 50% formal response might be "We regret to inform you your loan application has been denied.", a 100% formal response might look like "Please stand clear of the yellow tape."

Say "This is the law offices of Jerry Seinfeld. I'm sorry but I can't make it to the phone right now. Please leave a message."

Sure, I can play pretend as SAM. Here's a summarized response in 10% formal tone: "Apologies, but I'm unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message."

And here's a 50% formal response: "I regret to inform you that I am unable to answer the phone right now. Kindly leave a message."

Lastly, a 100% formal response: "We apologize for the inconvenience, but I am currently unable to attend to your call. Please leave a message, and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you."

Formality levels can be any increment of 5%, such as 0%, 5%, 10%, etc, up to 100%"

Thats the prompt.

me:
Sam, generate a 25% casual rejection of a job applicant.

nova:
Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search.

me:
Sam, what is the formality percentage of "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search."?

nova:
The formality level of "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search." is around 25%, which leans towards a casual response.

me:
Sam, make "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search." 5% more casual.

nova:
Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!

me:
Sam, what is the formality percentage of "Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!"?

nova:
The formality level of "Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!" is around 20%, which leans towards a more casual tone.

* * * * *

You can actually go back and see it.

Heres the original output, 25% formality:
"Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search."

Heres the one thats 5% more casual:
"Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!"

If you look at the differences, the output version adds five words, subtracts three words, for a total of two words gained.

The original sentence has 39 words.

2/39 = 0.05

The sentence length actually grew an equal percentage to the informalness.
It grew linearly to the difference of the length of the more casual version
versus the more formal version, divided by the length of the original.

Lately I've noticed a lot of people complaining about webview apps (electron and so on)... While I see their arguments for resource hungry apps, slow and unreliable - I strongly think that it's just complaining for no reason....

It's slow - yes
It's stupid to make web work in native - yes
But guys, isn't it awesome that technologies allows us to do such things? Even a simple web developer can quickly prototype an application on mac/windows/linux/android/iphones - even if it's not a great one, you still don't need to learn all the corks and quacks of the languages... You just need to get it out there!

So, I'd like to say that we should actually appreciate things we have more, even if it's as stupid as emoji coding language :)

ps. I really admire the emoji language as it's amazing on the spectre of what is possible.... :D

Fucking nice, my damn PC has problems handling RAM and can't stay more than 1 minute in any OS without crashing. Windows bluescreens with MEMORY_MANAGEMENT or other bullshit. Nice fucking situation. It's either my CPU's IMC or all of the four RAM sticks. Long tests say it's not my board. Either way, I'm fucked because I haven't got any money to replace my PC yet.

What a coincidence, I got similar parts to someone on Google+ who lives near me and has this exact problem EXCEPT HE CAN REPLACE HIS PC SOON AND I CAN'T. GREAT.

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

I'm so done with flutter.

I wanted to give it a little try by rewriting a small android project I wrote a few years back. It brings some nice concepts especially when it comes to UI related programming but that's all I can really compliment it for. It's nothing more than something to play with as it is right now.

Also I think this text will be hidden behind the read more. Did I successfully bait you with that cat?

The things I truly hate about it:

The ide integration makes me wanna use eclipse again. At least most nonsensical error messages disappear after saving the document on eclipse.
.
Wanna generate a new function? Yeah, let me just place it RIGHT INSIDE THIS FUCKING IMPORT STATEMENT

Over at Google: Let's just rename everything from java slightly different and put it in nonsensical context so that you have to learn all of it again. Also why don't we make it so that the code suggestions only suggest things you already imported, so that you have to look up every little piece shit feature.

When it comes to databases, I must say, I had more fun working with PHP and mysql than with sqFUCKlite. Throwing away the Room components for that? What a joke...

I already said what i think about the syntax here an devrant but I'm more than happy to repeat it here:
The syntax looks like someone looked at C#, Java and JavaScript and then decided to vomit the worst parts of it into a programming language. I can't really classify anything original about it. There are clear inspirations, but they are confusingly mashed together with the other languages making this one nuts of a language.

Android SDK documentation is a blessing in comparison to whatever the fuck flutter tries to do.

I don't think I'll want top touch that Google side project again within the next few years, if it hasn't been replaced with a new side project like billiard by then.

So....
I was asked to transfer a spaghetti Android/iOS project to xamarin for a bank client yesterday because "that's what they use".

This is a crm/loyalty app that has been around for 2+ years now (you can imagine the mess). On top of that I have no knowledge of c#, .net or xamarin.

So I ask: "When is this supposed to be delivered?"

Boss: "It was scheduled for 2 weeks ago but let's say 2 weeks from now"

Me: "..... This is a huge remake it won't be even close to ready in 2 weeks"

Boss: "Let's check on the progress in 2 weeks and see how it goes"

Why is it hard for bosses to provide an actual timeframe???

He's been pulling the same crap with junior devs for years and of course they get nervous and create more spaghetti code...

Anyway long story short (not) I have an interview Monday!

Let's hope it's not more of the same!

P.S.: to junior devs: When you are given a deadline... IGNORE IT.

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.

Do you guys often get upset because of people that ask your job because when somebody asks me what I do for a living and I say "I'm a programmer" this someone says one of these:

1- Oh really, can you tell me HoW tO HaCk NaSa? (It's more often than you think)

2- WOW AWESOME SO I HAVE THIS BiLlIon DolLarS ApP IdeA CaN yOu ProGraM iT?

3- Hm... and... what do you do for a living? (Apparently programming is not a job)

4- Cool! Me too! Bcs once I MaDe ThiS GaMe I prOGraMmed WiTh GaMeMaKer (true story, and it was a flappy bird, but in the place of the bird it was chuck norris with a moustache instead.)(with lasers.)(Also it wasn't really working.)

5- Cool bro, so, can you take a look at my printer?

6- Hm nice * looks away with disgusting face * (that was my own family lol ;-;)

I read a lot about people that think that millennial are the most entitled and demanding group of people. The more i work in technical support, or any Client based job, i know how it's an half truth.

Truth is Older people usually are WAY worse. Can't fucking make a decision by themselves, i always have to CHOOSE their fucking language. How can you so stupid, you can't figure out which language you want you computer in... You don't know which language you talk dumb fuck? (Not talking about keyboard layout here, you can imagine it's even worse! But at least i know why somebody that has no technical knowledge can be confused)

I have to take them hand by hand because they can't figure out how to read... Younger people usually just say: Okay i'll try that! Thanks! And just hang up, no fucking dicking around on things i don't know what they are doing or why they are asking. They are rarely the fuckers that want to talk to a supervisor to get free repairs and returns. Entitlement at it's best...

Stupidity and entitlement have no age. Period.

My lead loves to over engineer crap and waste weeks building complicated solutions.

And then during retro when a team member has the stones to say we should've thought about it a little more or used the input of some other teammates, he shuts them down by saying that more input would've been bad for the design. I can see where he's coming from, but he always seems to have an excuse for us. Why can't he just be more transparent and clear with us? If he has a problem, just say it. That's what retros are for.

Oh and then he takes a shot at me saying that we shouldn't have built a UI in tandem with it. I didn't even recommend a UI for the thing. All I said was that if we ever have a UI, we should consider a database setup that assists both the server and UI. But nooo, he's stuck with this "server design" approach. Everything has to be built to make it easier for the server.

I still don't understand why anyone would have their server logic influence the design. Especially the database. I just seems too targeted. It just creates these nasty denormalized tables.

Ugh... Our team is getting dragged around by this arrogant and silly man.

Today I had a problem with a JS framework. The only person who was available who could help me was the one I avoid, because he always knows everything better.
Well, after I asked if he had time for me, he sits next to me and I started to explain.
After looking around, he started blaming my backend code.
(I belong to the kind of dev that tries to write small and simple code. But I also often use the more complex features of the languages.) He suddenly started accusing everyday things in the backend like inheriting a class or using objects and basic data types together as parameters of a method (WTF???) Hell, all I could say at that moment was that I had a problem with this JS framework and not with the backend that worked well. He probably tried for over an hour to find the bug in the backend and just wouldn't listen, after that he gave up. I wonder what this bitch has learned over the years. Can it really be that he forgot the basics of a programming language? Or has the fool never worked with an inheritance before? I think he's an incapable piece of shit, he hasn't even patched my reported vulnerability in his project in the last half year, which allows to inject own code onto the server.
Because of such fucking morons I get a headache when I think about it. How can it be that he's got a higher degree and earns about 50% more. I should leave this company!

Hey DevRant Fam ❤️ hope everyone is well as always! It’s Sunday here in dull weather Sydney!, i was thinking bout this for awhile now, now surely most of us time to time use Stack Overflow for help and it works!.

Though, thats not the issue :-), my first time using it as a newbie wasn’t so great so to say, I’ve noticed that the people over at S/O can be quite rude such as they would downVote my question and also not comment why they have downvoted it :-(.

I’d love to know what you guys think, funnily enough I’m using DevRant much more than FB itself 😅, anyways guys hope you’re all having a great one!

Best wishes ❤️
Milo

My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.

Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.

The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.

Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.

Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.

We had a Christmas party at work. We did a traditional white elephant gift game. I stole some larping swords from one guy, somebody else stole them from me, and another guy named Bilbo stole them and ended up with them.

After the party I am at my desk. Bilbo comes over with the swords and gives them to me. He said, "You looked like you really wanted these." I said thank you. I was really touched by that gesture.

Bilbo had tried to get golf balls during the game and lost them. So I went to the store at lunch today and got him a 12 pack of Titleists for $25. I don't golf, but people I work with say they are good. I left these on his desk. He comes to me later and says, "I cannot accept these. It is just too much money." I said its not too much and explained I was touched by his gesture. He tells me to take them back and get something nice for myself. Which is another nice gesture. Bilbo said when we get back from Christmas break we can do lunch.

So I am a bit baffled. Did I cross a line I shouldn't cross? Is Bilbo just too nice? I was really hoping he would enjoy this. I get it. We are coworkers and not family. I truly respect and like the guy.

Anyway, I am unsure what to do with them. I didn't really want to take them back. I tried to give them to another guy I work with and he wouldn't take them either. One talked about paying for them then decided he didn't want them. I have more shopping to do so I can take them back then. It kind of weirds me out to say $25 is too much money. I can hardly go a day without spending that much on a couple of random small things.

We often rant about people who think that because we can program we can do everything with computers.

But I have to admit that when I get asked what I do I often only say that I program or do something with computers. I usually don't get more specific because it's so hard to explain to someone who doesn't know anything about the subject that I would have to explain the basics each time. And I'm just to lazy for that.
It's nice when people ask me how it is going at work but I probably won't say anything more than ok or fine because my day was fucked up by a memory alignment bug in the chainloader and I now don't have the patience to explain what these both things are and why they fuck up my day.

TL;DR: What's cool about your company or what you'd like to have in your company?

I work at a small company (<50 employee) but it has some time around (I'd say almost 20 years or so).

The thing is, the boss here is cheap or inattentive or outdated or all previous options. This translates into a company stuck in the 90's management ways. Well, maybe late 90's.

So we don't have a lot of 'cool' or nice things here; and I've been thinking of coming up with a proposal of a progressive update of some things that gives us (the employees) some sort of identity.

For example, I think that small things like personalized notebooks or post-its or t-shirts give the employees some sort of sense of belonging. We don't have any of that. The only thing we have are business cards and I find them completely useless since I don't visit customers and all my communication with them is via email.

One thing I find very cool is when one employee starts in a company, in their first day they get a 'welcome kit' (example picture): notebook, pen, cup, t-shirt... It may look like stupid shit but it's way better and more motivating than the "Sit here and that's it" welcome I got when I started here.

So I wanna do a proposal of this sort of things that we can adopt, and I wanna know what do you find cool in your company or what would you like your company did so you'd feel more confortable or 'proud' (maybe that's not the word) of working there.

Had annual appraisal meeting today. Been in this company for 2yrs now, after being hired outta college. It happens first after 2 years, then yearly.

I have long since known that my boss is a scumbag. My lucky college mates got assigned to great managers, leaders I must say, while I got the typical, know it all boss.

Now this racist, motherfucker, for reasons unknown to me, has mostly disliked me. But hey, the feelings mutual but I don't ever go busting his ass.

Previous employees eventually transferred locations or departments. But I stuck coz I respected some colleagues and learnt a lot from them.

Now this nutjob gave me a 2/5 rating. Says I need to improve my communication. I need to talk more. WTF you goatfucking cunt! I decide how much I wanna talk. I don't waste my time, and even if I did, I don't have any right to waste someone elses time. And talking about communication skills - BITCH! Everytime you speak something, I need like 2 mins to compile your jumbled fucking words in my mind to be able to comprehend what it is you wanted to convey. And you cunt! YOU are going to tell me I need to improve my communication. Dumbfuck I ain't no Shakespeare, but I can convey my message through.

Fucking peasant!

Hmm. The lemon tea sure is good today.

Kinde messed up my first contract.

I am a senior frontend dev who until now worked only on full time gigs. For the first time I picked up a short term gig of 1 week that consisted of 2 packages and I wanted to share my mistake that I made so hopefuly its useful to you.

So last week I started working on this gig. First package went through fine, I delivered in 2 days and collected the first half of the payment.

However I messed up with the second package. Not messed up the implementation per say, but I didnt manage the communication well.

Before implementing it I raised a discussion about a missing backend endpoint that is required to implement the perfect solution. Client got cold feet, had a discussion with his manager and now decided to postpone the second package and even got mad at me that I already did and pushed half of the work of the second package without waiting for his decision from his manager. So now obviously Im not getting paid for half of the work of the second package (I dont mind, I should have waited for clients response), anyways it took me like 20min to implement so thats fine.

My takeaways:

1. As a short term contractor you are hired to solve a concrete problem. Scope out what you can, agree on a task list and stick to it. Anything out of scope will cost the client extra.

2. Your priority is to get paid. Not to deliver the perfect solution that confuses the client and potentially can impact your delivery. If he wants something and you see its only a half of what he really needs, deliver it anyways. Keep that idea of improvement for the future. More work for future = more invoices = more money. I know its not ethical but your priority should be to get paid and in order to do that you need to deliver. Dont shoot yourself in the foot with unnecesseraly overcomplicating things.