Worst dev I've interviewed?

"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).

Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."

Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"

Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.

The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")

After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."

Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."

After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

oh man... I just spent 12 hours in the zone and made what was originally meant to be made by 4 developers in close to two weeks(coding in free time)

Aaand I also drank too much coffee...

And I've done it in Node.js which I basically never used before :D ...I applied my coding standards and habits that I use when writing Java and it went like butter... ES2015 is pretty ok actually 😊

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

My friend after five tries:
<p>yeuahhhhh bitchessss</p>

Also my friend:
Whew, that was hard. At least now I'm officially a hacker

YOU. If you can't be arsed to change the default wallpaper, the terminal/gtk theme on a fucking laptop you use everyday, turn off Intel graphics screen rotation shortcuts, move the taskbar somewhere, install a Vue.js/Augury (Angular tool) Chrome plugin so you can actually debug stuff, Git for Windows or even this fucking trash of a player that is VLC, comb your hair the other way for once in your fucking lifetime if you have it, buy a different shirt than the same one you already have, fucking anything at all - fuck you!
BTW Don't be surprised when I don't take your fucking advice about the layout of the site I'm working on.

Also I secretly FUCKING HATE YOU just because.
Nothing personal kiddo. Except it is.

Fucking go out there and make the world around more suited to your tastes, every fucking human has them! Just change the fucking wallpaper, so I'll know you have at least a little bit of fucking personality in you! Slap a pic of some hi-rez tits on that screen! ANYTHING AT ALL.

Whew. That's been brewing in me for a long time.
A motivational doggo for you lads.

Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.

Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.

Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.

Yikes - head down ranting and almost missed train to the city. Whew - next one in an hour. Rants getting too good 😀

A couple of years ago I was working on a fairly large system with a complex (by necessity) access control architecture.

As is usually the case with those projects, it's awkward for developers to repro bugs that have to do with a user's accesses in production when we are not allowed to replicate production data in test, let alone locally.

We had a bug where I ended up making myself a new row in the production database for a thing I could have access to without affecting real data to repro it safely. I identified the bug so I could repro it in dev/test and removed the row and ensured everything worked normally, whew scary.

Have you ever walked into the office one day, and everyone is hunched over in a semicircle around one person's workstation, before one turns around to look at you and says - after a pause - "... ltlian?.."

Turns out I had basically "poisoned the well" with my dummy entity in a way where production now threw 500 for everyone BUT me who had transitive access to this post-non-entity. Due to the scope of the system, it had taken about a day for this to gradually propagate in terms of caching and eventual consistencies; new entities coming in was expected, but not that they disappear.

Luckily I had a decent track record for this to be a one-off. I sometimes think about how I would explain testing in prod and making it faceplant before going home for the day, other than "I assumed it would be fine". I would fire me.

People at work found out Teams in a nightmare and really screws with your normal email address processing. They also found out it isn't free with the shit tier of Office (or wherever it is bundled). So for everyone but sales there is no Teams. Whew... However, for the tech dudes: electrical and software we made a custom Discord server. Of course my avatar is "trolling DiCaprio".

Some technical and some not work stuff has gone on with this server. Kind of gives the tech people a place to talk and joke.

devdude: Apologies that I saw this (some question I had) too late to prevent you from walking upstairs.
me: oh, the exercise trauma!
devdude: it's 2024 and we still have to walk up and down stairs
me: I was expecting flying chairs like on Wall-E
devdude: Me too! that's why I put on this much weight so I can be prepared for when the chair finally is here.
me: That is the exact opposite of helping this tech along.

Another thing I noticed about my work place. The BMI of employees seems to increase the closer to a break room you get. The company is fond of bringing donuts periodically. Coincidence I am sure. The problem is I am right next to the break room... Yes, my BMI went up a bit when I moved to my new desk. Before I was much further away. Now I am on a low carb diet. I am going to break the stats damn it!

Recruiter bot just emailed me with some offers, let's take a look...

"Hand-on Experience with SQL and NO-SQL Databases preferably Redux"

Whew! I was worried for a second, thank god they are using a Redux database and not one of those really crappy React databases! I'll really consider applying now.

smh

Trying to use authenticate a JWT token from an Azure service, which apparently needs to use Azure AD Identity services (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure AD B2C, pick your poison). I sent a request to our Azure admin. Two days later, I follow up, "Sorry, I forgot...here you go..."
Sends me a (small) screenshot of the some of the properties+GUIDs I need, hoping I don't mess up, still missing a few values.
Me: "I need the instance url, domain, and client secret."
<hour later>
T: "Sorry, I don't understand what those are."
Me: "The login URL. I assume it's the default, but I can't see what you see. Any shot you can give me at least read permissions so I can see the various properties without having to bother you?"
T: "I don't see any URLs, I'll send you the config json, the values you need should be in there."
<10 minutes later, I get a json file, nothing I needed>
<find screenshots of what I'm looking for, send em to T>
Me: "The Endpoints, what URLs do you see when you click Endpoints?"
<20 minutes later, sends me the list of endpoints, exactly what I'm looking for, but still not authenticating the JWT>
Me: "Still not working. Not getting an error, just that the authentication is failing. Don't know if it's the JWT, am I missing a slash, or what. Any way I can get at least read permissions so I don't have to keep bugging you to see certain values?"
T: "What do you need, exactly?"
Me: "I don't know. I don't know if I'm using the right secret key, I can't verify if I'm using the right client id. I feel like I'm guessing trying to make this work."
T: "What exactly are you trying to get working?"
<explain, again, what I'm trying to do>
T: "That's probably not going to work. We don't allow AD authentication from the outside world."
Me: "Yes we do. Microsoft Teams, Outlook, the remote access services. I can log into those services from home using my AD credentials."
T: "Oh yea, I guess we do. I meant what you are trying to do. Azure doesn't allow outside services to authenticate using a JWT. Sorry."

FRACK FRACK FRACK!!

Whew! Putting the flamethrower away.

Thanks devrant for letting me rant.

My Ubuntu VM just work fine for consecutive 217 days without restarting.

Need to change some config
And... I forgot the application access key... Damnit!!!

Lucky, I kept the access key in the password manager. Whew.

Mini witch hunt going on with broken builds last couple of weeks. Change satellite assembly/project A, breaks random unit test that hasn’t been changed for months and the TFS nazi sends out emails demanding the “broken” projects be fixed. Doesn’t matter the unit/integration tests are likely out dated and team responsible for the tests needs to fix it.
Yesterday I deleted some logging code out of a security assembly, broke an integration test that hasn’t needed to be ran since January (test database didn’t exist anymore).
I would have had to re-create the database, re-import the test data (not trivial), re-deploy a service using the test database…blah. All because I removed some logging code.
I deleted the gated check-in TFS build definition. Code check in … no sirens …whew! I win!

Ok lucky I backed up - whew. Uh oh, how do I restore it from the 20th century 😬

Fantasizing about stabbing SharePoint in the throat, I'm being forced to contact Microsoft tech support, so I need to obtain our software assurance account info.
Our company's rep sends me our SA account numbers (assuming that was all I needed) and the link to create an incident.

Step through Microsoft support ticket 'wizard' which ends with requiring a login with a Microsoft account.

Me: "What login account should I be using?"
Rep: "You shouldn't need one. Just use the SA account number and access ID I sent you."
Me: "There is no entry for those values. I step through a support 'wizard' and the final page redirects me to the Microsoft login page."
Rep: "Use your work email address."
Me: "I can, but I shouldn't have to use my personal outlook email address. Can I just send you the issue and you submit the ticket? After the ticket is created, all the correspondence will be through email anyway."
<30 min. later>
Rep: "I just linked your work email address to your company's account. You should be able to login now."
Me: "Same error. I think you're messing with me."
<30 min. later>
Rep: "Select the option to create an account with your own email."
Me: "Now I know you're messing with me. Already tried that and received the error 'You cant sign up here with a work or school email address'."
Rep: "Weird...I guess Microsoft changed their policy."
Me: "So now what?"
<1 hour later>
Rep: "You might have to send me your SharePoint issue and I'll get a ticket created. After the ticket is created, I'll change the contact email address to you."

WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THAT TWO HOURS AGO!

Whew! Thanks devRant...that's better. I put the knife down and now only want to punch SharePoint in the face.

#Suphle Rant 9: a tsunami on authenticators

I was approaching the finish line, slowly but surely. I had a rare ecstatic day after finding a long forgotten netlify app where I'd linked docs deployment to the repository. I didn't realise it was weighing down on me, the thought of how to do that. I just corrected some deprecated settings and saw the 93% finished work online. Everything suddenly made me happier that day

With half an appendix chapter to go, I decided to review an important class I stole from my old company for clues when I need to illustrate something involved using a semblance of a real world example (in the appendix, not abstract foo-bar passable for the docs)

It turns out, I hadn't implemented a functionality for restricting access to resources to only verified accounts. It just hasn't been required in the scheme of things. No matter, should be a piece of cake. I create a new middleware and it's done before I get to 50 lines. Then I try to update the documentation but to my surprise, user verification status turns out to be a subset of authentication locking. Instead of duplicating bindings for both authentication and verification, dev might as well use one middleware that checks for both and throws exceptions where appropriate.

BUT!

These aspects of the framework aren't middleware, at all. Call it poor design but I didn't envisage a situation where the indicators (authentication, path based authorisation and a 3rd one I don't recall), would perform behaviour deviating from the default. They were directly connected to their handlers and executed after within the final middleware. So there's no way to replace that default authentication scheme with one that additionally checks for verification status.

Whew

You aren't going to believe this. It may seem like I'm not serious and will never finish. I shut my system down for that day, even unsure how those indicators now have to refactored to work as middleware, their binding and detachment, considering route collections are composed down a trie

I'm mysteriously stronger the following day, draw up designs, draft a bunch of notes, roll my sleeves, and the tsunami began. Was surprisingly able to get most of previous middleware tests passing again before bed, with the exception of reshuffled classes. So I guess we can be optimistic that those other indicators won't cause more suffering or take us additional days off course

Wow I just thought I had lost my good old friend forever - my laptop did not want to turn non anymore and since the main fan is somewhat broken, I thought I'd never see him alive anymore and that he died from overheating thus I opened it, plugged it to the power connector and voila, it works again - whew, that was a shocking moment for me and I guess it's finally time to replace that fan.

Was about to post a pic of my mobile sites certificate from Google, and then I realized that my real name would be revealed to possible co-workers who might use this app.
Whew!!!!! Dodged a bullet.