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You start new job and take over huge codebase without tests and documentation.
It turns out programming language is custom language made by previous developer who was the only one maintaining project.
There is no source version control.
Language runs in vm developed in Fortran.
No one cared to this day cause everything was working.
Project is critical for multi billion dollar corporation that sells medical equipment that keep people alive.
You can’t test your code on real devices only on virtual ones that were made using same custom language but you can’t find source code for it.
Previous developer accidentally died before you were hired.
You signed contract with penalties that will ruin your life.
Your first task is to add “small” feature.
Good luck !12 -
Dev from other team asked me for a code I had previously written. I emailed it.
Dev: Thanks, I received it but am not able to open the .py file
Me: Try using Microsoft Word.12 -
Working for an indian code sweatshop. The job you've got by bribing the University headmaster to give you a degree without ever attending class. Your uncle who worked at the sweatshop as a manager already gave you the job by bribing his boss.
After a half a year on the bench you've beeing sent off for a contract for the USA. You moved to Seattle where you've "coded" the software for the Boeing 737 Max Airplane. Your code downed 2 airplanes. You're responsible for the death of 350+ people. You're alone and the US is foreign to you and you're missing your mothers indian food. And you wish you could soothe your pain with some freshly pressed sugar cane drink and a jalebi from your favorite food joint back home.8 -
I'm currently 40h/week meeting attender. I'm not enjoying my life right now.
Today I have a meeting about the legal requirements of an invoicing system, in my role as database administrator — the meeting will mostly be lawyers bickering over what the addresses of subsidiaries look like on invoices and which taxes should apply to services provided across borders.
Wait, I can play Factorio during this meeting and say "yeah that sounds OK" once in a while. Not the worst job after all...10 -
"I want it looking and working exactly the same in IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9, Chrome, Safari and Mobile...."
Oh wait, that happened...9 -
Worst job I had as a developer:
Convert all Python2.7 code the team wrote for the last 5 years to Python3 alone.9 -
Maintaining a legacy Apache x86 PHP application that is coded in a way that it requires windows as an operating system.
Oh wait thats my job2 -
Worst hypothetical Dev job... hmm 🤔 well I think I have the right scenario for you. A medical company stores patient charts and critical life saving information in a database. This database makes medical decisions for lifesaving incubators and if there’s a bug it means 10,000 newborn sick babies will die because of your fuck up (oh and you’re criminally liable too so good luck!). But beyond the high pressure job that sounds at least somewhat normal, the database is written in a special form of assembly for a custom undocumented CPU where only one copy in the world exists so all tests and development are on production. Google and StackOverflow is banned so your only resource is your brain. Good luck🍀9
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Having a big legacy project written in good ol' vanilla PHP 5.4, running not in a server but in a desktop PC powered by a Celeron CPU.
Turns out that old buddy serves the tools everyone uses to work.4 -
Frontender, social media manager and windows (server) admin!
Frontender; being paid to do something I couldn't care less about and find very frustrating (as for developing it)
Social media manager; being paid to use mass surveillance engines 😷
Windows (server) admin; I don't think I have to explain this one...7 -
Anyplace that places a higher value on being "woke" and "inter-sectional" than actually doing the job.9
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Q: Tell me about the app you made
Candidate: ahh...umm..tooot.toot
They make me feel like they just copy paste code to get the working version.
I feel bad when see people like this, collage costs a fortune and yet they don't teach students how to start and organize requirements5 -
[worst hypothetical dev job]
You know how theres a dedicated person in porn whos job is blowing the actors so they are hard? That, but with writing all the boilerplate code and nothing else.1 -
Company makes you doing end user support additionally to your (dev) job, so you have no time to do the latter.
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Have a big legacy project which should be updated to current technologies,
but when it's done, these current technologies are outdated already, so you
Have a big legacy project which should be updated to current technologies, -
Hand over from another developer who handled our internal data pipeline. I tried to set meetings for the handover he kept canceling them. When I asked him why? He replied I'm writing a documentation so that you won't the meeting. After 3 weeks, he emailed me with an overview diagram for the data pipeline.
My reaction: Woooooooooot? You built this in 3 weeks. WTF
3 -
For me the worst job would be to develop front-end stuff as the sole dev in a design company.
Imagine having to go to great lengths just to have everything done perfectly down to half pixels.
I've had to develop a couple of projects for an external design company and their lead designer was an absolute cunt about quarter pixels. I'm glad they fired him and working with them had become somewhat sane again...
Some things in front-end are either impossible or near impossible to get perfectly and nobody will pay for those wasted days anyway.
Oh and by the way: Please get rid of IE. I fucking hate it almost as much as my ex's mom.3 -
Anything related to UIs or data science
That, working with a spaghetti codebase, or unhelpful and not nice teammates -
Having to do 10's of ElasticSearch v2 -> 6 client requests migration manual deploys of a 10-year old PHP/ Javascript codebase where the gulp build's plugins no longer work, the package dependencies have been .gitignore'd (who does that!), and dev cowboys have frequently bypassed version control by making changes directly in production.
Also, no one knows anything about it because the only dev who was supposed to maintain this app left 3 months ago due to unbearable management.1 -
Being the smartest guy on the team so spend most of the time cleaning everyone else's shit up in prod because they can't recognize what they wrote as shit.
O wait..... Hypothetical.... Hm...
I guess if you replace the proverbial shit with actual shit that would be worse... Smartest guy being a janitor...2 -
1. When you ask the rationale behind simpler programming concepts. Some are writing they are Java expert(5 star in some interface) and when you ask questions deeper than what is polymorphism.
2. When you ask them to show their work on one of online repositories. I aint taking your word on your msterious projects.5 -
Having to debug a program on a batch of 5000 punched cards and needing days to get them to the data center per mail.
Then you wait days to get the result just to see that it threw an error so you begin to debug what basically means that you change something in your 5000 cards, send them back, wait days, get an error again, make a change... send them back and so on...2 -
I work in a fairly small company which provides services to other small companies. So I get to interview freshers and few experienced people who have worked in other service companies.
Most of them choke on the part where they have to solve problems using data structures.3 -
Working on a security testing tool that's purpose and use has been overstated by the staff engineer and product owner but no team wants to use it and everyone else in security second guesses if it should exist. Oh, also no documentation on how to use it, and you have to figure out how to use it. The tool has been developed and passed down from multiple people who each developed it differently and have all left the company now. No code reviews exactly exist so every functionality has been assumed to work my PO, SM and Staff Engineer, thus questioned when you bring up something that you're not sure works. Constantly redeploying to production at a timezone that's too early for your country but done to proviide minimal damage to the application for customers in case something goes wrong.
Upside is, you're leaving the team in a week and feel sorry for whoever is going to handle this next.
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