Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

An intern made a very bad impression on the first day.

This was before I become a developer. I was working in commercial art sales. One day, I had an appointment to onboard two new interns together.

Intern 1 shows up and I ask her for her signed confidentiality agreement. The boss had sent it out a week before and told me the interns were bringing the signed paperwork on their first day. I see the surprised look on her face and she says she forgot. She’s lucky I had access to another copy. If I didn’t, things could have gotten pretty awkward if I had to contact my boss, who was out of office. If there’s no signed agreement, I can’t onboard her and I’d have to send her home. The appointment was made with intern 1’s availability in mind, so intern 1 could have spent her time coming to the office for nothing and being turned away because of a stupid mistake she made.

While we wait for intern 2 to arrive, I try to engage in small talk with intern 1. I try to get to know her a little better and I ask “are you still in college/university?” She word vomits that she thought she had graduated, but six months later she hadn’t received her diploma and she called the school and they told her her pre-college credits had not transferred, so she’s finishing those credits now.

Oh, intern, you should have just simplified all this to “I’m finishing up my degree” or “yes, I’m still in college.” This is TMI. You don’t want to give out information about yourself that could put you in a bad light. You need to know to be discreet about yourself. You’re 22 years old. It’s really bad judgement to say this to your supervisor (me) and we’ve only known each other for ten minutes. I’m not your friend, I’m your supervisor. Honestly, I thought the explanation didn’t make sense because she would have found out about the credits when she tried to transfer them and when she applied for graduation. I didn’t prod for more details.

I did have to tell my boss about intern 1 forgetting the paperwork. It’s not something the intern would be reprimanded for, but it is something that’s not a good sign. The paperwork had been sent by the boss a week prior. It’s troublesome that an intern would forget to complete an important task that was sent by the boss. This was never a problem with prior interns.

Boss did freak out because boss thought I onboarded intern 1 without intern agreeing to the confidentiality agreement. Boss hadn’t considered an intern would forget the paperwork and didn’t tell me what to do if this did happen. I reassured boss that I had printed a new copy and had intern 1 sign the agreement.

I didn’t say anything about the word vomit. The content was troubling, but I was concerned this would be gossip and I wasn’t out to sabotage the intern.

Forgetting the paperwork and the word vomit were signs the intern wasn’t reliable. Intern had trouble taking direction even when it was written down. She’d do stupid things like invite her boyfriend to the office for hours and let BF sit at the boss’s desk—boss caught her and boss’s office is visible from our public viewing floor, so visitor did see this too. I suspected she might have an diagnosed learning disability.

In the end, intern didn’t ask for a reference letter. Boss said that if intern asked for one in the future, the answer would be no.

Intern 1 is the reason why I don’t want to be in change of interns ever again even though I’m not in art sales anymore.

I was working with my embedded systems friend a few days ago on a website, and since we work with electronics, it was something new.

I then went home and started learning web development.

Holy shit I love it

I will continue to until it’s time to know about JavaScript

I work in a big corporate world where I felt really out of place at first. I didn’t enjoy working there, I could not understand why people would work so hard to keep all the systems happy. No one thanked them, no one gave the smart people maintaining the important systems any credits. I did not understand. Why did they care so much for these systems?

My team split. We were too many with too many systems to care for. After this my team was a lot smaller and therefore I ended up in a more important role. I was forced to do these tasks the more senior engineers had done before me, in the previous team. This was the greatest thing that could happen to me, and I started to like coming into work. Now our team is big again but I’m one of the senior people in it. Not senior as in years active in the industry but senior as in knows the most about our systems and our work environment. I work hard to constantly share my knowledge and try to put the newer members in situations where they also have to take responsibility.

Don’t be afraid to put important tasks on junior or new people. They might fuck up but they will learn, as will you. Don’t hog your knowledge and your team will thank you.

It was around for a while but I didn’t realize it was it for a long time. I was fixing computers for cash and spending in on booze while in primary school. Making websites for cash and for fun while in high school. Some guys wanted to buy my databases at the time and sending me emails that my websites rocks. I didn’t cared cause I party a lot and I didn’t need money.
Sex drugs and rock and roll was my life not a fucking computer.
Since I never had problems with math I passed exams and got myself to university and dropped out cause of those 3 funny things above. Turned out to pass exams after second year when math and physics disappeared you need to study more then 1 day before exam and party was more important for me.

I failed tremendously. My girlfriend left me I was out of money I got back to my hometown with my laptop and I somehow between depression, drugs, alcohol and killing myself reminded I was getting money from websites and I can try to follow that movie.

At that time I didn’t read single book in english in my life. I know some basic english so I decided to try to read some actionscript2 pdf. Why actionscript ? I liked those simple games. Those were fun and there was nothing better. I was reading first book at least 10 times with vocabulary that took about a month until I remembered whole book and second book was faster like 1 week third was 1 day and from then thing moved a little faster. I discovered flex just before adobe acquired macromedia and started writing in it. Started answering to some questions on forum and build some portfolio website with fancy 3d animations and stuff and finally applied for 2 jobs.
They both were amazed by my website and one of them sent me some task to do and I did it overnight and sent them back. They wanted to hire me and I need to respond to them.
Second job they invited me for talking and asking about math, if I’m ok with 3d and stuff and they offered me job closer to my home town so I picked them. The code was amazing, 3d equations, quaternions, complicated stuff bit very well written by some company that dropped project before launch and my first task was add some small feature.
I remember first day in elevator with my former boss who told me to not to get scary and take it slowly I was trying to do my task as fast as I can worried I will be fired if I don’t do it and nobody else will hire me and I won’t manage to recover from second failure. It was even more fighting with myself that I will fail again then with this task lol.
I’ve done the feature third day and when they said it’s cool and I can commit my changes it appeared to me that It might be this shit that will get me out of trouble.
I was never again wrong about programming and so wrong about trouble but that’s a different story...

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers