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.

Receives email from warranty guy in work.

Warranty: "Hi, see attached scan in PDF form.
I normally fill the boxes in manually, scan as pdf to myself and then email it on to the higher ups, but they now say they need it in excel form from now on! Can you convert it for me?"

Me: "It looks like your scan's quality isn't good enough for a convert to excel.
Where do you get the original form?
Is it from a website?"

Warranty: "Hang on and ill send you an email with the file and give you a call"

*receives email and a phone call"

Warranty:
"There you go. Theres an excel sheet in that email. what do i do?"

Me: "So.... just so I understand the question... you just fill in this excel sheet, scan as pdf and send it on... but they want it sent as an excel form and not a pdf?"

"Yes."

"So.... Could you not just fill in the excel sheet and email it to them?"

"What do you mean?"

"....fill in the excel sheet as normal, and go to file, share and email... send the original one on."

"And what would that do?"

"...you... you'd be sending the form as an excel sheet, as requested??"

Warranty: *silence for 10 seconds* Oh, i see now. I get you! You're a genius! Well done for figuring it out. Thanks a million!!"

O.O

My employer has a dev studio in Cali.
The office is gigantic.
It has amenities.
It has a stocked fridge full of iced coffee, energy drinks, and apparently wine.
All the devs have totally enviable hardware.
And they probably earn twice what I do, or at least 50% more.

Yet they write absolute shit, never test their code, and push broken updates every day, often marked as "ready for final testing." Their codebase is full of hacks and guesses and stale cruft and worst practices. I wrote a rant recently about one of their fuckups, which involved 18 million Facebook errors per. day. So that should give you some idea as to the quality of their code, and their level of can't-be-bothered.

Again, they make 50%-100% more than I do.

Their whiny lead dev is bloody lazy when it comes to building things correctly, and totally prefers to half-ass everything and complain instead. He probably makes 150% of what I do, doing like 25% as much work, and maybe 10% as well. Doesn't quite compare though, as he's a Unity dev, not a backend dev. So his work isn't as critical.

akagdkdafavskakeuxbfh.
Bloody pisses me off.

"But their cost of living is higher!"
THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE EMPLOYED.

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

Not sure what Linux Desktop to use? Use this handy guide:

- GNOME: when you want no tray icons, themes that break every minor GTK release, and extensions for basic features (that are buggy.)
- KDE: pretty go-Segmentation Fault
- DWM/Awesome/i3/etc.: when you feel like the time you spent learning Vim wasn't wasteful enough
- XFCE: when you want one update per decade and poor Systemd support.
- LXQt: the biggest positive is that it doesn't use GTK.
- Cinnamon: when you like GNOME 3 but you want a different menu
- Deepin: when you want a desktop with the build quality of an HP laptop.

Aren't sure whether to use Xorg or Wayland?

- Xorg: if you want to absurdly fuck up your touchscreen, pick this one.
- Wayland: if you want to screw up most of your apps, too bad; this won't work with your proprietary drivers. If only it did.

What distro to use?

- Ubuntu: if you want to break your system with PPAs, check out this one.
- Debian: when you want Ubuntu except with more out of date packages
- Redhat: when you want Debian except with more out of date packages
- ElementaryOS: wait, someone actually made a properly designed Linux UI?
- Arch Linux: the only thing that doesn't make me sick anymore.
- Slackware: "that exists still really?"
- Gentoo: when you hate systemd more than waiting 4 days to compile Firefox on every release.

... I love Linux. I do. But it is very taxing to get things comfortable for me anymore. I feel like the Linux Desktop is in a period of flux and it's painful to be a part of right now.

I always prefer to work alone 😂😂😂
Ps:- sorry for img quality

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

"I am not happy with the quality of the product"

*Ignores

"I dislike how I am forced to work here"

*Ignores

"The team does not understand software design and is writing 2000 line single functions"

*Ignores

"I am starting to think the product cannot be saved unless we start focusing on quality"

*Ignores

"I am not happy in my job anymore because I want to work as a professional..."

*Ignores

"All I ever do now is put out fires"

*Ignores

"I quit"

The university system is fucked.

I've been working in this industry for a few years now, but have been self taught for much longer. I'm only just starting college and I'm already angry.

What does a college degree really mean anymore? From some of the posts I've seen on devRant, it certainly doesn't ensure professional conduct, work ethic, or quality (shout out to the brave souls who deal with the lack of these daily). Companies should hire based on talent, not on a degree. Universities should focus more on real world applications or at least offer such programs for students interested in entering the workforce rather than research positions. A sizable chunk of universities' income (in the U.S. at least) comes from research and corporate sponsorships, and educating students is secondary to that. Nowadays education is treated as a business instead of a tool to create value in the world. That's what I signed up for, anyway - gaining the knowledge to create value in the world. And yet I along with many others feel so restricted, so bogged down with requirements, fees, shitty professors, and shitty university resources. There is so much knowledge out there that can be put to instant practical use - I am constantly shocked at the things left out of my college curriculum (lack of automated tests, version control, inadequate or inaccurate coverage of design patterns and philosophies) - things that are ABSOLUTELY essential to be successful in this career path.

It's wonderful that we eventually find the resources we need, or the motivation to develop essential skills, but it's sad that so many students in university lack proper direction through no fault of their own.

Fuck you, universities, for being so inflexible and consistently failing to serve your basic purpose - one of if not the most important purpose on this earth.

Fuck you, corporations, for hiring and paying based on degree. Fuck you, management, for being so ignorant about the industry you work in.

Fuck you, clients, who treat intelligent people like dirt, make unreasonable demands, pull some really shady shit, and perpetuate a damaging stereotype.

And fuck you to the developer who wrote my company's antipattern-filled, stringy-as-all hell codebase without comments. Just. Fuck you.

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.

That's it. I fucking quit.

Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.

First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.

An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?

"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.

2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.

🖕

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

Freelancing website be like: I need a Rolls Royce with high-quality leather and with perfect temperature control. I will also need a mini fridge for my champagne bottle and two wine glass holders. I don't think there's a lot of work to be done in it. It's an easy job.

Budget: $30

First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

I'm hiring and I'm fucking done with recruiters buttering up skills etc and sending me BS candidates.

Interview earlier today...
CV: MySql skill level 10 (out of 10)
Reality: Can't write a simple JOIN!

Yesterday...
CV: PHP 6+ years exp, self proclaimed ninja/jedi/oracle.
Reality:
[Me]: Write me a function to map an array to x.
[Ninja]: What's an array?

I've come to the conclusion that the type of dev I want on my team is highly unlikely to be looking for work much less using some piece of shit shady agent to find work so I need to hunt him / her down personally and can use the phenomenally large recruiters fee as a hiring bonus / incentive.

Only problem now is finding quality full stack devs in the area (Johannesburg, South Africa).

I'm thinking of posting a 'challenge' job add to filter out good candidates - some kind of code challenge to be solved that gives them my contact info. Any one have any creative ideas I could try?

!rant source: LinkedIn;
Yesterday I met with a potential client who wanted a website. I gave him a quote of X. He said, do this work for X/2 as I have lots of projects and I can keep you engaged for months.

If it was 2 years ago, I'd have happily accepted his proposal. But in the past 2 years I have learned this lesson hard way. Don't work for clients who don't pay well, because when a developer is not paid enough, the quality of work degrades. Hence the portfolio is degraded and so the future projects are also of low budget.

And before you know it, you will be surrounded by low paying clients who see you as a Skilled Labour.

Today, I don't negotiate, not even a single dollar. To justify my cost I make sure that no stones are left unturned while delivery.

It's better to work for 10 hours a week for 40$/hr then to work 40 hours a week for 10$/hr.

KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.

At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.

Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).

Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.

Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.

Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.

Worst experience with cs profs? Oh boy....

Databases lab: "You'll need to work of this snippet, if your IDE tells you it's deprecated you don't need to care about it"
If you want to imagine the quality of the code base we were expected to work upon just think about that attached xkcd comic, basically an undecipherable black box.

The instructions where at the same time micro managing everything (he gave us frickin variable names to use, and no good ones, no the database connection had to be called datbc, yeah very descriptive) and yet so obfuscated that I'm not completely sure he didn't resurrect Kant himself to ghostwrite for him.

He also didn't like us to use any Java feature that was to 'modern', for example for each loops since "they offer no benefit over normal for loops".

Further, everything we wrote had to be documented with a relationship diagram and a uml. So far no problem if he hadn't invented his own flavor of both (which can be read about in his book).
Oh, and he almost failed me because I used a lambda expression in his 'code on paper' exam and this "arrows are a C command" I "must have been confused"... which is glorious coming from the guy who can't get operators and commands straight.

WTF is up with open-source projects using emojis in their commit messages... FUCKING emojis..

I get it, programming is fun and a hobby to many, but can we also keep at least a minimum level of professionalism here.

WTF is a wheelchair or bento emoji at the beginning of a commit message supposed to mean? Why the hell even bother to use it in the first place? There is no fucking reason for this retarded shit.

Is this what happens when activist developers get out of their way to make programming "inclusive"?

It is your personal project and so if you want to use emojis it is OK, I respect that (not really) but I can't trust your code, your commitment, or the quality of your work if I see those dumb Unicode characters there.

Git commit messages are not a game. Be playful with comments in code or your readme.md file but git messages should be a clear reflection of the changes not what a teenager's phone vomited on the keyboard.

!rant

Some days ago I finished "Ray tracing in a weekend" (Peter Shirley) and I'm learning a lot :D

In the new year I will start with "Ray tracing the next week", but there are still some things I want to tackle before that (improve code quality, optimize... it's my first project that is bigger than a codeforces problem solution, a part from the projects at work).

Any sources of wisdom and recommendations are welcome!!

I joined a company 6 months ago.
No CTO.
No development process.
Spagetti code.
Takes loads of new requirements on top.

Later
I advised the software head and managing director on how to improve our software development process.
New tools
Less requirement good quality software
New products and micro services.

Both of them agreed but they said they are waiting for new CTO to confim as an authority and responsibility.

Well I cant do much just to do my work.

1 month ago new CTO joined
Revised whatever I advised and implementing it right. I like it.

Got my confirmation after 6 months instead of 3 months.

CTO called me in for review and gave me 2/5. And said you need to improve more.

I asked him, in what do I need to improve.
He replies in technologies and development process.
And he takes credit for all changes and implementation.

I argued about it. I already suggested what you did but was ignore because we didnt have CTO.
Hes like ignored me.
Fucking you CTO.

I received a shiny new pair of Bose QC 35 II's for christmas -- bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelling.

They're similar to the $500 pair my previous boss lent me at work. Lower quality, but much newer, and rechargeable! and bluetooth! Yay!

I paired them with my debian machine, and... it failed. No explanation given. I tried everything I could htink of, but nothing changed. Well, okay; bluetooth came out within the last decade or so, meaning it takes some extra effort in Debian. truth. So I did some reading on bluetooth connection issues, changed some configs, learned how to use the bluetooth cli, and used that to pair and connect them. Worked like a charm.

But! No audio.
Damn.

Cue more research (on pulseaudio this time) and more configs. Did some fiddling, etc. No progress. Also discovered `pavucontrol`, a gui-only (😕) utility which lets you select audio output devices, among other things. It doesn't list the headset. Nor does `pactl list`, but that does list the correct bluetooth modules. It also lists Lennart Poettering's name many many times, for all the good that does. Bragging about building something as needlessly complicated and crappy and buggy as pulseaudio? I will never understand that egotistical doucheballoon.

Anyway.
I paired the headset with my phone in about six seconds. I'm now controlling my phone's music via spotify on my computer. yay. Doesn't work for games or movies, but I can always just plug them in.

But woo!
Noise canceling!
Yay, silence! At last!
and music! How I've missed you!
❤💜🖤

(systemd and pulseaudio can still die in a fire.)

Manager: We will be building a new app. THIS TIME EVERYTHING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, ANYTHING LESS THAN TOP QUALITY WORK WILL BE REJECTED!!

*Not even 2 days into the new project*

Manager: Ok that’s good enough, we can fix it later. Can you go quicker on the next feature? Just sacrifice a bit of quality so we get these tickets closed as fast as possible. I said we can fix it later. Getting tickets closed asap is top priority.

Dev: …

"We are expecting you to start working asap..and complete the frontend (of a webapp that's​ expected to take 2 months to develop) in 2 weeks "

" So do I expect to get paid X amount for this ?"

" Let's make that X/2"

Fuck off you dipshits.. You expect quality work and fast work ..then get ready to pay at least by market standards.

I think having the wrong job can really bring down the quality of life.

My friend has to drive two hours each way to get to and from work. That's four hours wasted commuting.. and his job is service desk agent.
What are the consequences, you ask? He never has a spare second to talk to me, he's quickly developing gray hairs and he has no time awareness.

Having the wrong job is unhealthy and results in a cascade of bad side effects.. When most of your day involves work-related things, that's just wrong. There is no Yin-Yang there. I know because my work life is somewhat balanced.

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 strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

- Go to sleep early
- Get up at 5-6
- Drink quality coffee
- Work at your desk not from the bed or couch
- Don't start new projects until the last one is done
- Have a good and healthy diet
- Excercise frequently

Essentially don't be like me... Be like anyone else but me and you'll do fine...

Everyday single day I have to give time for family, personal work and office. Prioritized in that order.

End result : low quality family time, pending personal projects. Office work - well that one is OK I guess cos the time is dedicated.

Solution : made a deal with wife - one day on weekend dedicated for family (she can plan anything she wants) and I will not do any work. Other day dedicated for my personal work/time (no family plans).
Divide weekdays similarly. On family days I checkout at sharp 4pm from office and come home straight spend the rest of the day with family alone. On the other days I stay either at office or go somewhere to work or hangout with dev buddies.
*Wife agrees*

End result: Quality family time. No interruption when coding (a dev would understand the importance of this). More productive work.

When will people understand that you can't get quality software made for $5 by some random from Fiverr? Just as I'm about to confirm a quick Freelance job they tell me they've found someone on Fiverr that will do it for a fraction of the amount. It's happening more and more. Don't get me wrong, I'm still getting plenty of work but I see it as a bit of an insult. Comparing the quality of work I do with someone who pumps out 5 programs an hour.

And yes, I do realise there are people on Fiverr that do care about their work, there just doesn't seem to be many of them.

Not a rant about anything in particular. Just a summary of some feelings stored in the hateful part of my heart.

Developing for Android: Add this third-party library to your Gradle build. Use (this) built-in Android class to make the thing work.

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version SUCKMYDICK-7. Use (this) instead

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version LICKMYBALLS-32. Use...

Developing for Windows: Please use (this) API call. It was literally already available before Bill Gates was born. Carbon dating has placed this item to older than the universe itself and it is likely the entry point for the big bang. It is also still the best way to accomplish (task).

Developing for Linux: "Hmm, I wonder how to use this"

> > > Some shitty mailing list in small blue monospace font tells you to reference a man page that is three versions behind but the only version available.

What? Those three sentences didn't explain it enough? Well, maybe you aren't cut out for this type of thing.

JavaScript: you know how it is.

SQL: You expect a decent-quality answer from stack overflow but you always get an outdated and hacky response and it's using syntax from Microsoft SQL. You need MySQL.

C#: A surprising number of Microsoft forum results ranking high on Google. You click on one in hopes that it will be of any sort of quality. You quickly close the tab and wonder why you ever even had hope.

Literally any REST API: Is it "query" or "q"? "UserID" or "user_id"? Oh, fuck, where's the docs again?

You thought you escaped JavaScript, but it was a trick!: Some bullshit library you downloaded to make your other library work redefined one of the global variables in the project you inherited. Now you get 347 "<x> is not a function" errors in your console. Good luck, asshole.

FontAwesome/ Material fonts/ Any icon font pack: You search "Close" for a close button icon. No results. You search "Simplified railroad crossing sign without the railroad". You get a close icon.

I think that's all of my pent up rage. Each of them were too small for an individual rant so I had to do this essay.

What I was supposed to do today:

Finish up some homework and code for a bit

What I actually did today:

1. Boot up my laptop to get started on homework

2. Open Spotify and try to connect my headphones

3. Reinstall Bluetooth and pulseaudio to connect to headphones

4. Connected! But the sound quality is shit

5. Spend an hour or so learning about codec sinks and how Bluetooth is the definition of an overengineered clusterfuck

6. Install some package from the aur to get AAC codec support

7. Now we have high fidelity audio, but the headphones still connect to the crappy SBC sink, so I spend another 45 minutes writing a shell script to automatically switch to the AAC sink when a Bluetooth headset connects

8. It’s finally working! But now I have no motivation to do my actual work. Fml

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

Yo, is this devrant or spamspace???

Like, do you even fucking work, mates? Are you a dev? How doesn't a fucking legacy code piss you off on a daily basis? What are all the ways you want to respond to your customer's/PM's abuse? Does your lead dev even know jackshit?

Where did all your quality rants go? Why do you all sound like second graders writing essays for school? Have some passion for your job, and hatred for the incompetence for others!

Now, go produce some quality rants! Funny ones too! Bonus points if it's angry-funny.

The code is a freaking mess. Shared behavior, terrible variable/method naming, misleading module naming, dynamic polymorphic spaghetti, whitespace errors, no consistency, confusing even if you understand what the code is doing, ... . It should never have passed code review. It probably wasn't code reviewed.

The comments are sparse and useless. Quality level: // This is bridge.

The documentation does not exist.

Testing steps for QA are missing several steps, including setup, so actually using the feature is bloody challenging. If one thing is wrong, the feature just doesn't show up (and ofc won't tell you why).

The specs for the feature are outdated and cover only 4 of 19+ cases. And are neigh useless for those 4.

The specs for the report I'm fixing don't even check the data on the report; it just checks for one bit of data on each row it creates -- a name -- which is also the same on each row. gg.

The object factories (for specs) are a mess, and often create objects indirectly, or in backwards order with odd post-create overwriting to make things work. Following the factories is a major chore, let alone fixing or extending them.

The new type has practically zero test coverage.

The factory for the new type also only creates one variant -- and does so incorrectly.

And to top it all off: the guy who wrote the feature barely ever responds. If he does, he uses fewer words than my bird knows, then stops responding. I've yet to get a useful answer out of him. (and he apparently communicates just fine, according to my micromanager.)

But "it's just fixing a report; it'll be easy!"
Oh, fuck off.

1. Slack. Pretty good chat app for dev companies, I use it to prevent people standing next to my desk 40 times a day.

2. Unit testing tools, especially when fully automated using a git master branch hook, something like codeship/jenkins, and a deployment service.

3. Jetbrains IDEs. I love Vim, but Jetbrains makes theming, autocompleting & code style checks with mixed templating languages a breeze.

4. Urxvt terminal. It's a bit of work at the start, but so extremely fast and customizable.

5. Cinnamon or i3. Not really dev tools, but both make it easy to organize many windows.

6. A smart production bug logger. I tend to use Bugsnag, Rollbar or Sentry.

7. A good coffee machine. Preferably some high pressure espresso maker which costs more than the CEO's car, using organic fairtrade hipster beans with a picture of a laughing south american farmer. And don't you dare fuck it up with sugar.

8. Some high quality bars of chocolate. Not to consume yourself, but to offer to coworkers while they wait for you to fix a broken deploy. The importance of office politics is not to be underestimated.

We made a software for hospitals in my old department. The senior Dev kinda gave me the software, because he thought it sucked and was perfect for a newbie like me. I really loved my work and gave everything I had to improve the quality of software, introduced tests, refactored old smelly code and talked with the product manager to overhaul the ui. Several months later this little shit project the senior gave the newbie, was a huge success and better than any thrash that the senior has created. The senior was really pissed, so everytime I had some days off, he tried to sabotage me in any way. I couldn't take that and many other things anymore, so I left the company. The most tragic part is, that my software could become a massive foundation for the company, but after I left they abandoned it. I still had some good contacts within the old company and they said, that the senior dev told everyone how bad everything was, that I have done through the years and that they can't even describe how bad the architecture of the software is. tl;dr fuck off!! I've done so much things for the company and they never appreciated it. I'm glad I quit that job. Best decision ever!!

I'm working in a blockchain company for $180 as a junior programmer and there is a mid-senior guy who get ~8 times more than me. So we got a project to make a backend API with its tests. When I was partly completed my part of the project I asked that "mid-senior" to share his code with me. Nothing was done, and he asked me to push my changes to git so he could start to do something (view at my code and start copying). BUT. He couldn't even pull from git. He couldn't use that fucking Visual studio's team explorer and even the solution explorer. Ok, he was working with VS for the first time, but I did too. I cloned the repo gave him the environment to start "working" and get back to my work. After that nothing changed, he was writing each one-lined if block for half hour and the code was very dirty. Finally I've got his laptop and started to writing his part by teaching him all the programming. You may say I'm mad. I really do, I think that I did all project. This is sad... How can people get this much by being this far from the programming? We need really high quality programmers.

Several rants ago I promised to drop a bombshell about Android. What took me so long was my research.

I wanted to measure the extent of Google’s background data mining. I put Android at a significant disadvantage — it was Redmi 6, a device with a 5-year-old half-dead battery that was heavily used by my partner. The only change was me installing Lineage OS + microG — a private, degoogled combo that has no quality of life ramifications. Google Play Store opens, apps download. MicroG emulates Google Play Services — maps, banking and other Play Services-dependent apps work flawlessly. This made a huge difference.

Before degoogling, this phone lasted one day tops on standby. Now, with Wi-Fi connection enabled, apps auto-update working (one game I had installed auto-updated during the test), and no battery saver engaged, I was able to pull ELEVEN DAYS on full charge. Battery saver promised even more uptime, but I considered that cheating.

Modern phones have modern screens that drain battery quickly. Yet, they also have 4000+ mAh batteries. If your Android smartphone performs worse than mine in a test like this that doesn't use screen, kiss your privacy goodbye.

My teachers use the number of commit you do as measure for the quality of your work.

I've the least number of commits this week since I spent most of the week doing encriptions algorthims instead of UIs and unit test as the rest of my team.

But, by their logic, I'm the worst of the group. It's simply stupid.

Our CEO suddenly wanted to work with an outsourcing company to build the product. On one of the "sale" meetings I asked a guy from that company:
- Can we interview developers before they join our project?
- Our company is responsible for the quality of the service we provide, - the guy replied
- What are you going to charge us for?
- For all the hours developers worked
- So your service is developer hours, and we'll be obligated to pay for all the hours they worked regardless the code quality or the performance, right?

So it seems outsourcing company is only responsible for their time sheets to correspond to real hours worked? :-)

We call such a companies in Ukraine - a galley

I was having dinner with two girls, one a project manager and the other some finance reviewer or something like that. We were discussing our line of work and I was talking about how bad quality code affects everybody and the finance reviewer girl goes like (and I quote) "In our company we use polymorphism, inheritance and encapsulation so it's not a big problem. So our database has a parent class and we only use the parent class". I was at a loss for words. I mean, if only more programmers just did that, right?

Manager: Could you create the UI for the new feature? The client wants to test it. We need it in 3 days.

*1 week later*

Client: IT DOESNT WORK

Me: This is just a visual demo... but everything will work when we realse the feature.

Client: okay but can I see what it will do?

Of course you can! Just wait until we relase it!

*2 weeks later*

Manager: What are you doing?

Me: Working on the UI for the new feature.

Manager: Wait, hadn't you already done it for the demo?

Me: That UI didn't really work. It was basically a bunch of HTML, without reactivity or abstraction or any functionality.

Manager: Okay, how much where you able to re-use?

Me: almost nothing.

Manager: So... you wasted those 3 days?

Oh so I'm the one who wasted 3 days.
Me: Kinda, yeah

Manager: Why couldn't you have done this when I asked you to do the UI?

You can't expect good quality code in 3 days. Pls stop wasting it on demos.

I forged a katana once, under the supervision of a swordsmith. Nothing super special like damascus patterning or anything, but the cutting edge was pretty sharp.

Ugh sorry, lame word jokes.

In terms of software...

Microsoft Office Ribbon (cutting edge at the time, lol). Only as a maintenance drone on a bunch of manual search-and-replace work and merge conflict resolving.

Ariane 6 family of rockets (Welding X-rays and other DICOM quality assurance).

Software for continuous flow chemistry, developing microfluidic PCBs to perform Elisa immunology assays during the Mexican flu outbreak. Idea was to eliminate the need for microplates, expensive robots, microwell washers, etc — just have blood plasma, enzymecoated nanoparticles, antigen, conjugated detection reagents and substrates flowing programmatically through a PCB with a spectrophotometer built in.

I just found out at my company it is policy to perform random drug and alcohol testing of all employees. I guess this makes some sense for other parts of the business where people use heavy machinery, etc. but they also test office workers.

I don't take drugs and I never drink during the day but I don't want to be tested. I am a professional person and I am trusted with development of our software and valuable internal and client databases so why cant they trust me with this? There are many developers who produce poor quality work even without any drugs, etc. Surely the quality of my work is enough.

Apparently here in Australia if I am asked to take a piss test and refuse they have the right to sack me. If they ask me I think I might resign.

y'know, if your coworkers annoy the shit out of you, sometimes it's worth looking at how the company is treating them.

a lot of what i have to deal with spans from an environment that demands speed at the expense of quality and won't reward developers for their effort, cause they simply don't understand the effort it takes. we have a tiny team responsible for a nation wide program, and people are just shocked when they hear this, because the work we do is in fact amazing for a group of 5. everyone is just tired, overworked and badly recompensed for it. this shit will hit the fan pretty soon

Switched jobs one month ago.

Used to work overtime on complex features, every engineer was 10x, learned a bunch, worked my ass of everyday. Switch due to overtime and because I wanted more personal time.

Anyways, at the new job I’ve completed two tickets in a month, code is shit, no one cares about the quality, scalability, etc. I’m payed 2x more and I currently work max 3 hours a day. Feels weird AF. I guess I got what I wanted, but didn’t know back then that professionally I’m going to degrade. Didn’t happen yet, but I can see that in the future.

🤷🏻‍♂️

So working on the Android for work, and go to add in images for parts of the app. I add in images and load the app up and it crashes, I thought hmm maybe I missed something for the imageview.

The exception was an out of memory exception and from looks of it, it exceeded my phone memory by quite a bit (OnePlus 3 has 8gb LOL), I was stumped since I don't typically run into this.

Turns out this time around it wasn't my fault lol, I had some images outsourced to a company our company uses for doing design work and well Android doesn't like 2000 x 2000 super high quality for logos.

I mean sure it's good it's high quality but to have 3 images eat up a lot of memory (I assume my phone won't allocate all 8gb to one app lol).

Today I started work on a new project that contains a lot of legacy. I asked the developers about unit testing javascript and was told that not only is there none in place, but it's not worth adding any in.

At first, I grimaced and thought fair enough. This is their codebase, it's their choice. I've now been thinking about this for a few hours and have instead decided that screw those guys, I'm adding in a testing framework, a module pattern that's compatible with the existing code, and unit testing the crap out of it. If they don't want it they can refactoring it out, but I can't bring myself to intentionally deliver code I know is crap.

I WILL FORCE CODE QUALITY ON THEM.

Hired a designer below me.. guy never wrote a full back nor frontend... Used npm shit for all his solutions and worked his way above me just by kissing ass and polluting the codebase in such a way 70% would be open source shitty plugins for shit he could not do by himself code wise...

At some point he assigned some of his tasks to me and I couldn't work with his patchy framework that was non existent within the codebase I worked on ...

At some point between npm installed tantrums I got pulled up to HR because my code quality dropped... And it was this fucktart that accused me of this saying I could not do modern development...

In the end I either had to butkiss after his butts or just quit, so I did the latter... I told him and HR I owned alot more code quality than this asshat but just not his way of working and therefor it was more an issue of code equality I was never aware of ...

A month after that the company got overtaken by some silicon valley bullshit company buying up competition, and he is still working within that shithole dealing with 90's tech...

Was the best thing that happened to me, after that I grew alot in skillset and such by investments from other jobs and projects... If I would still work there today I would consider myself a caveman

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

I remember a bad freelance experience.

It was a sophisticated mobile applications (many UI, many customization, many APIs to integrate with). since the client have many future freelance projects, I give him 3 weeks as estimation time, and one day per week I work on its place to evaluate the progress and sync our work.

I worked hard, the quality was excellent.. but he kept ask for "small" changes and "small" features.. at first it was OK, and I was planning to give him a good example to profit from his future projects.. but he toke advantage for that and the same app extended from 3 weeks to 2 months and more.. he barely added a little to the initial price..

So what I did? I uploaded the code to a private repository in Bitbucket, added him to the team.. I wrote few lines how to sign and publish the app.. aand disappeared.
his luck, I disappeared from the country, I immigrated to another country for best job opportunity.

I recently joined a new company where work is quite different than my previous company.
Every day at work is challenging for me. There is good exposure to learn technology in depth. But time constraint to deliver module like under 3 days does not let me learn my work, also I am not satisfy with the quality of my code that I provide, it more looks like a patch. In my previous company I was favorite developer of my team but here I feel like a fresher who doesn't know from where to start.

Even I feel like my presence does not make any impact in office as I am just like an extra player of the team. I am slow at my work because I learn then I code due to which my manager does not consider me for any new work. I feel like left out in my team.

Once I overheard one of my colleague he called me helpless and were making fun of me. With every passing day I am losing my confidence.

I have no github reputation. It's like I am jack of all trades but master of none.

Every day is like big fight day in office.
I know our only way to survive in this industry is to keep on learning but in smart way. I am not sure what's that smart way?

Any advice would be helpful.

For me, the worst co-worker is one who works by the principle of quantity over quality or a person who thinks quick and ugly fixes are a valid way to solve problems. Also: If there are unittest, don't fucking dare to change or remove them, just so your code runs without errors.

But in general, I just can't work with people who don't really think about what they are coding, people who just code straight ahead without making the simplest plan about how to solve something. Most of these people realize too late, that their approach was rather shitty, unreadable and unmaintainable.

I often see memes about "I forgot what I coded last [insert timespan here]". Though it is kind of normal, if it takes you too long to find out what you wrote, you should consider overthinking your coding approaches.

Just my 50 cents.

Damn I miss coding... 4 weeks of learning & exams is too long...

One day I felt sorry for my PM:
He was on the way to present an application to a client.
The PM showed me the mess the app was while asking with sadness how he should present that buggy thing.. he and I were new to the project.
After that day I told myself I would put all of my efforts to develop for excellent quality and change the app road.

This days all he did was pressure the team to develop fast.. all my "quality work" at half. Why I care for this guys? All PMs are the same

When your home's infrastructure runs better and is more stable than some of the shit that's actually running enterprises because you actually do care about industry best practices and product quality.. it's a weird feeling. A very disappointing one, if anything.

Post-meritocracy, it very much seems to be a thing. And when you call people out for it because yes I do want to *be* the change that I want to see, they get all defensive and shun you. Yeah, let's make the world burn in inefficient, dysfunctional bullshit. That's a much better idea.

Are we humans really that far apart from the chimps that we descended from?

Worst part of it all, those incompetent bastards that can't possibly admit and work to improve their mistakes are the ones that are behind the companies' steering wheel. That too is such an excellent idea. I bet that half of them got employed only because they took the lowest wage and could (barely) turn on a computer. Fucking morons...

So a little story about finding your way. I worked at an IoT software firm, very well established. I had a hard time with the on boarding process due to some factors, and I must have lagged behind their mental schedule for my growth. It was clear nonetheless that I was a quality coder and had made some friends there.

It wasn’t enough for the ensuing corporate bullying. It went by and I took it. I became the yes man just so I don’t frustrate anyone enough to turn away my ask for help. This made things worse and before long, I a grown man went to visit my mum and all but cry at how small I felt, after all my hard work getting to the company.

I felt sick with failure but I knew I couldn’t go back. I emailed my resignation and dropped off my company laptop.

4 months later I am working at a medical startup with my own projects, that I have 100% control over. And the quality of my work and ethic is pleasing upper management in all the right ways. I’ve never been happier, and there are barely any perks on paper. No free lunches on Thursdays or discounts at the local high street. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life because I said NO to feeling or being treated any less than I worked and progressed to be.

Don’t let other people stop your potential for their own ego, or any other reason. 😊

Me and my manager throughout 2020

January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.

February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️

March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...

April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!

May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool

June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing

July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m

August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me

September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work

Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar

October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?

Online applications are so much worse than the classic snail mail ones, because some companies just don't seem to give a single fuck about the quality of their application application (hehe).

This results in such joyous things like:

• "Allowed file types: doc, docx, pdf, jpg, zip"
• "Max filesize 3mb"
• "One of your files does not meet the requirements" (doesn't tell you which)
• "Upload timed out, please try again"
• 403 forbidden
• "Your account does not have the necessary permissions to upload more than 4 files at once"
• clicking the submit button leads to a 404
• "Please explain why you want to work for us." 500 character limit
• Google forms

As a developer, I'm fed up with companies that expect us to work miracles in impossible timelines. We're not wizards, we're not magicians, we're not even superheroes. We're human beings who need time to develop quality software.

It's frustrating to be given a project with a deadline that's completely unrealistic. It's even more frustrating when the same company that gave us the deadline is unwilling to give us the resources we need to meet it.

And let's not forget about the endless meetings, emails, and phone calls that eat up our valuable time. We need to code, not attend endless meetings that never seem to accomplish anything.

And don't get me started on the non-technical people who think they know more about coding than we do. Just because you know how to use Microsoft Excel doesn't make you an expert on software development.

It's time for companies to start treating developers with the respect we deserve. We're not just code monkeys, we're skilled professionals who can create amazing things when given the right tools and resources. So stop treating us like we're disposable and start investing in us. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

My company’s upper leadership is sooo focused on the NUMBER of defects that are open on our project and only the number. We give each defect a priority of P0, P1, or P2. You would think this would help prioritize and strategize our plan to fix them. But nope. Every week we have some arbitrary “goal” to hit. A number purely made up by clueless leadership as to what makes a “quality” product.

On Friday’s, managers start harassing devs to merge their fixes and for QA to close out defects. So effectively rushing to hit that arbitrary number or else we’ll have to work Saturday.

Meanwhile they want more test automation coverage to reduce the incoming defect rate. But when the fuck do we have time to develop said tests when all you want is the defect closed to bring down your precious little number?!

They’d rather us close 25 P2 defects to bring the number down rather than 10 P0 or P1 defects. These leaders are so incompetent it kills me! Without any back story, they’re ultimately the reason we’re in this position in the first place! Argghhh!

!rant

Got back into android development recently and while everything was pretty flawless ( I managed to get the basic concepts implemented in a day) something wasn't right.

For some reason I was not happy with the code i wrote, although I took examples from google and tried to adapt their code style. It looked aweful. I hated my code.
But the code itself wasn't the core of the problem. I could easily add new features and replace components with new implementations without breaking the app. All those "good code quality" identifiers were there.

Turn out the problem is Java. Or to be more specific: Java 1.6
Every listener which only calls a single function once a worker has finished needs 6 lines of code. If you implement the inferface in the class it gets messy once there are multiple workers and you have a generic interface. And there are no lambdas!

So I made the switch to Kotlin.
The app was converted to kotlin in 30 Minutes​. Android studio can convert the classes automatically and very little manual work is needed afterwards.
After that I spent 2 hours replacing the old java concepts with Kotlin concepts: lamdas, non-nullable types, getters and setters in kotlin style (which in this case is c# style) and some other great thing.
The code is good looking now. I like it. I like kotlin as it has a lot of cool things.
Its super easy to learn. It took me about 2 hours to get into it. It combines concepts from java, javascript, c# and maybe a few other languages to form a modern jvm 1.6 compatible typesafe language.

Android dev is fun again!

The devs I work with. One more so than the other, but seeing as this is my first dev job, and I have no formal training, they've been my mentors. Yeah, we disagree and argue - but they're bloody good quality, and I'm very lucky to be learning from them.

So recently my open source project took off and got trending on GitHub (680 starts and 225 forks). This was the first time a project of mine really gained some traction and invested more of my time and weekends to maintain this project - I wrote comprehensive docs, contributing guidelines and reviewed PRs and made sure I commented on every single one of them. Sure, it isn't easy to review 50 PRs a day after coming home from work but the excitement of seeing this project becoming trending fueled me.

First 2 weeks it was good. I would come home from work and have dinner and sit down to maintain the project. Whenever contributors would be stuck, I would help them and write comments on each PR.

But the problem started since last week. People just really want to see their contribution activity graph get populated and hence they would make stupid PRs and literally no one followed contributing guidelines - I mentioned in that that the code should adhere to Pep8 styling but no one gave a shit. Each day I would spend reviewing PR with crappy formatted code and no sign of Pep8, and even some will just file PR and add a fucking docstring to every function or add paragraph of comments. Also, the PR quality was bad with unsquashed commits amounting to 10 or 20 or even sometimes 50.

I wrote the contributing guidelines doc and in that I mentioned every source that contributors could find helpful like how to squash commits, how to file a PR and Pep8 and not to write useless comments. Seriously people, grow up!

Attention Software Engineers!

Quit shooting yourselves in the fucking foot! And this ESPECIALLY goes to new grads. I get that you have just finished school. I get that you need a job! But don't fucking settle for a $30-$40k salary because you're "entry level"! The only reason why there are employers who offer that type of salary is because they know that there are enough idiots who will settle for it!

On average, an entry level software engineer's salary is between $50-$60k at the very least! For Senior developers, it is at least $80K/year (although an argument can be made for why they shouldn't settle for less than $100k/year).

Each time a moron low balls his/her salary, that brings down the market value for that talent. And keep this in mind! They don't have a choice but to hire you. They could choose to outsource their work to poorer countries but they don't want to do that due to obvious quality-related reasons so they HAVE TO hire you if they need the work done. And since the ball is in YOUR COURT, demand your fair salary. You went to school for 4 fucking years. You dealt with that stress for 4 fucking years. Why settle for a salary that you could've made without going to school?

I guess I've just got the ideal dev job. Working from home, with nice people in my team and enough time to deliver quality work.

Let's start by saying: God do I love programming and hate work!

My dream job would be a place where I get to write quality code for something that's actually useful and makes sense to people (or a group of people) without all the usual job bullshit; all the politics, fucking useless hours of meetings, the pretentious ass holes, and the useless mindless product owners with good pay to live comfortably and some organization (not being a complete disaster). It's only a dream though...

I dont know what to feel anymore.

Got hired directly without an interview into 'Data-analytics' department in fortune 500 company. This is my first job. Got hired because this company want start a website that cost millions.

Even though I am junior, I can see that this company has no idea about software development at all. No git server, no code review, no quality assurance and no proper workflow. No senior developer to guide us (junior dev) too.

There is one 'senior' consultant that work on automation project here but he just focus on his work and don't help us directly too.

The contract is about 1 year. Still got 11 months to go :/

why do i feel like sOfTwArE cErTifiCaTiOnS are the biggest scam in the world

literally zero prediction of the quality of work you will produce, cuz you could float through them anyway

i guess even more 🤡 is companies that request certain "certifications"

correct me if i'm wrong; are there certifications of the equivalent rigor like the fundamentals of engineering (fe) exam? in this sense, our industry is far behind... though to be fair 90% of software is non life / operational critical like building a freaking bridge is

Ok here's the story,
There is this girl older than me by 5-7years and I worked with her for 2 years in the past...
She's fun to be around, and lights the mood in the workplace...
However one day I found her CV in my machine so I went through it. (It's no crime and it was there in my machine idk y)
And as I went through the list of projects, I was surprised and taken back to see she listed one of my solo project which I managed and developed from scratch as if she contributed to it. 🤯
The management specifically handed me the whole project and I singlehandedly carried it out and finished it and that was one of the projects I was super proud of and elaborated in my interviews.😎
But since she was sitting beside me and she knew basic requirement and the solutions I developed she had the knowledge on the project.
I was bewildered to see she has mentioned that project in her CV which she had zero contribution. I didn't feel like confronting her thinking when someone asks full details on the projects she would have to lie in the interviews cz she wouldn't know much details on it. And hey not everyone has my ethics and lets see how far she goes with hers.(may be this was stupid but I just thought hey we go our own ways lets see how far you go with lies and I forgot about it completly)

But now she's trying to apply to my current workplace where I dreamed of joining and finally succeeded and happy, here they value trustworthyness and quality work ethics above anything else... and without even telling me she has added me as a reference person to get more points to get an internal recommendation.
I certainly don't want to put a good word on her work ethics. Her team spirit and everything is fine but I just CANNOT with correct conscience ignore her bad ethics and recommend her.
What should I do? I don't want to loose her as a friend but I will not and do not want to recommend her to any place knowing she cannot be trusted with work related stuff. I know if I just tell the truth to the company when they ask she will definitely will not be chosen and I might feel guilty knowing I stopped it from happening.... but I don't want to recommend her truly knowing her bad qualities which in my openion cannot be overlooked also.
Should I just overlook it and help, or should I just tell the truth to the company... errgggh

Today I wanted to buy a printer. I spend hours researching on inkjets, inktanks, laser, cost per print, print quality... and then I realise that I print like 10 sheets in a year.
Wtf am I doing? Guess I'm just going insane with all the work. Maybe I'll feel better when I get my printer.

Work of a my co-workers good work! It's called colspan you dumb fuck! Best part is that no way I'm changing this coz I work in place where they don't give a fuck about code quality! So fuck it!

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.

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

So, I've been working as a developer for 15 years almost. I recently started what could reasonably be described as my dream job. As in absolutely fucking awesome. Really interesting product, sane technology, nice co-workers, decent salary, 100% remote.

So, why am I suffering from motivation issues? I find it difficult to get started on the simplest tasks. and looking at the check-ins from my coworkers is intimidating. I had a phase of burnout previously so I'm watching that in myself too...

So far the best solutions I've found are.
1 Coffee, lots of coffee.
2 quick catch-up calls so that I'm reassured I'm actually doing the right work and the quality is good enough.
3 following TDD strictly and not thinking too far ahead on each iteration. (I recommend "99 bottles of OOP")

Just had my first insomnia night, I simply could not fall asleep! While laying in my bed I had great ideas for work and for my home projects, like new features, infrastructure and even implementation details. Now that I'm up I can't remember most of it, of course!

Worst part about it is that when I got to bed I had about 5hrs to get some quality sleep, now I got non it feels like. Fuck.

Can anyone relate? :/

I am a senior Android dev, and I have an old colleague (iOS senior dev). We work on the same project, but in every estimation session he pushes a lot on the lower side: he estimates 4h a task that normally takes 6h or 8h, and the reason is that he has no social life. Right after work he starts working again from home (I can see all his commits), he also works almost entire weekends. I would say he works as average 12/13 h per day.
I don t want to work extra time (unpayed).
About him, it is his life, so I don t care...but at the same time this makes me pressure. I care a lot about quality of code, and I don t want to sacrifice it just for catching up. Most of the people in the team know that he works a lot extra time.

How would you handle this?

Fuck unreasonable deadlines. Just do your stuff as if you have the time of the world. Stop compromising the quality of your work and things are going to be done when they're done. Good quality stuff that's worth the wait.

I started to tell this to myself this week. For months now I took the bait that everything is urgent. And whatever crap management want has to be done yesterday. But.... Well... They pushed it too effing far.

Redo this module that took the former team about six months to finish. You have 10 days.

Well... What? Everyone is saying yes?... Everyone going full code monkey making no progress?

This is the moment I stop compromising and stop listening to your suggestions. I am going to do what I know how to do, the way I know it works, and I will not cut one corner based off your suggestions. I'm sorry, I've been dealing with this shit for too long already, and I don't want to suffer the consequences of degrading the quality of what I write anymore.

Random thought of the day. I'm sure I've been told the "common wisdom" is that you can take a job with a lower salary and enjoy a better work-life balance, or go gung-ho for the inner city jobs and earn way more but sacrifice your quality of life.

Anyone else found the complete opposite? The higher the salary I've had over my career, generally the *better* the working environment and the more the employer seems to care for, and value its employees. Not universally true I'm sure, and perhaps I'm just lucky about where I pick, but I've certainly had way more "high stress" situations in some of my lower paid, rather than higher paid roles.

I've taken a year's break from university to work on projects using various languages. For the first half, I've been trying to produce as much as possible. Now, I'm taking my time and producing less. I've gotta say, I'm enjoying it far more now. I feel like I'm learning more and producing better quality code.

God I miss Stack Overflow Jobs. Put tech you want to work with, put tech you don't want to work with, get relevant results. Now? Search "frontend" in LinkedIn and you're getting "sugar production quality assurance". Fuck that noise.

If you only pay your junior web developer $11/hour to handle projects by themselves, what kind of quality of work do you expect to have?

Holy crap, I can't take it anymore.
I know that user acceptance testing is supposed to be done by the end user but it's as if they entirely skipped UNIT TESTING and QUALITY ENGINEERING.
Does their API work? Yes. It does.
Are their endpoints working? Sort of... why are query parameters required again?
Is it good overall? No, there are CORNER CASES ALL OVER THE PLACE (are they even still corner cases at this point?). It feels like it was made by amateurs!
Why am I doing quality testing on their services??? holy crap, they should pay ME for doing this

My Chromebook Pixel 2015 died yesterday. *sniff* I really liked the build quality and using crouton for Linux.

My 2nd work laptop ever was a IBM Thinkpad and I really liked that back in the day.

Now I'm looking at the Thinkpad 25th anniversary edition. Anyone have one? Thoughts?

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

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

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

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

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

I was eating my oats happily when, suddenly, Boss called because clients complained data duplication in reports, and asked why I removed DISTINCT in the query. So, I stopped eating and obliged to answer the call because I so loved my work :) <3

How is it my fault now, when the QA just told me to make the data transparent and to not display them distinctly by name?

I gotta say, I actually admire the work that content creators must go thru to make quality content.

So as I stated before I’m working on YouTube channel, under the name “TheSoftwareSage” ... to create tutorials and a way of me teaching software the way I believe it should be taught, not how the mainstream methods of today are.

Bottom up approach rather than top down

(Must start with a firm understanding of the foundation.. and build upon the knowledge as we go thru the layers of abstraction but the key concepts must be understood first)

Anyway, I’m working on this in my spare time and I was not aware of how much effort I would actually need todo this right haha. At first I figured I’d just screencast a monitor and have a ppt or text editor or terminal open and that stuff and just do it.

As In person with my interns I never have “planned” lessons or content is all impromptu based on the need at the time and I just go with it, with their computers and a whiteboard lol.

I was wrong for video recording lol... maybe it’s OCD... or perfectionism, I’ll make a video, review it like 5times and then be like shit I forgot to mention this or that or I didn’t like how I explained this or that
OR
I keep worrying too much about colors, and sound levels and quality and transitions and video angles and all this other shit.
And then post editing fuck.... I’m about ready to say fuck it and “do it live .. one shot” and just upload the end result.

I guess this would be in the content world similar to our “paralysis analysis” notion.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

Been 122 days since my last post, since then I have been working on a game engine on Vala using SDL2 in my free time (Lol I have none)

Decided to put that on ice or just work on it when drunk (very common occurrence) and teaching myself C while working on a game or game engine, hopefully will have some quality rants inbound!

This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.

I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.

Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.

I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.

Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon

a very polite recruiter in linkedin after our connection asked me why i choose this kind of career. I answered this and i hope i did not ranted a lot :)

i was trying to figure out what profession would make me more happy than others. I was always felt comfortable with computers, i was installing cracked games, exploring folders to paste the cracks etc. later in school when i learned the first algorithms like bubblesort i was knowing that i liked it. I also like working in silence while searching for solutions. That is the first part, the second is that i made a search about what industries would give me a safer future and international opportunities without having to be stuck in my country only. By working and getting more experience i felt in love with my job and trying to learn everything i missed and give to my boss or customers professional results with quality. I like it as a lifestyle, it combines a magic feeling of spells with the logical procedures of science. So why not? it combines all my loves together: creative thinking, technology, mental work, internet, music at the workflow, job demand, opportunities, and money! I hope i helped you my friend i am at your service for every question you have :)

I've found a job as a junior developer several months ago, but I really want to find another job...

I know, my knowledge and skills aren't superior yet, but I am tired of that feeling of being useless.. I constantly self-educate myself after work and university, but still, I often need to ask co-workers "where's this form?", "wtf is that", "how do I access this"... Plus, their projects are HUGE, but no matter how big the project is, there are 2 to 4 people working on each at a time. And 1 person may work on 2-3 projects. And we are usually late for deadlines :/

Also code quality is meh..
Me: Why do we implement it here?
Co-worker: oh, we don't actually use it, it's just to hide warnings and pass the test.

Holy shit, wtf, I've spent half day trying to figure out wtf is this and why is it not working :/

[Half question / half rant]

Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?

Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.

So a few weeks back guy I used to work with contacts me for some dev work on a UK project he is working on, it's the Thursday and they need the thing the coming Monday. I tell him it's totally impossible, and it was so he asks what can done and how much, as well as how much for the entire project.

I stipulate exactly what can be done, with exclusions and say 7.5k and them mail over a detailed quote for 30k for everything.

I get told it's all fine, I must go ahead. I get through a bit more than expected by the Monday, but they still needed something to demo and I set I can get enough for demo in place by Thursday.

They demo to business and money and all that and everyone is happy and tell me to finish up along with some changes, and I don't even adjust the price as it was more work they wanted outside of the original spec.

Get to probably 80% done and they say we need to pause they need to look over other feedback.

Next thing, the PM come back, no they were never actually happy with the quote and they found some other guy willing to do the entire thing for 7.5k and they willing to only give me that for the code I have written so far. Cunts.

Anyway, he tries to take some blame for it, even though I know it's BS and says he will pay in another 7.5k from his share if I am willing and we call it quits.

This people, is why I don't freelance.

I feel sorry for this new kid, he clearly under quoted, and yes I am expensive, but with decades experience having worked on international projects for one of the largest digital asset management firms, my countries leading fintech dev house and now the lead developer for my countries largest insurance software dev house, you damn fucking strait my free time comes at a premium, as you are getting top fucking quality, 100% tested, high performing code.

They can go fuck an entire flock of ducks when they come back after this half ling fucks up the diamond I coded up for them.

Even funnier, they a UK based company, so for them this was a 1.5k project. Cheap cunts.

My senior and I started pair programming to improve my code quality. He likes it and I find it fun (and convenient that he helps me) but it feels like I'm making him do my work. I also fear that I am too horrible to be trusted with code alone but if that was the case they would kick me out right?

Building an interface for a client between industrial power quality meters and a database that serves a webapp of data.

Client had heard of a way of sending data between meter and raspberry. From some manager in a big firm.

Currently we where using modus to connect the meter to a raspberry. This method was tested and proofen to work. Both devices could talk to each other in modbus.

Client kept demaning to use mbus, and was nog listening to any reason because the firm suggested it. In the end we end up going modbus to mbus to send it to the raspberry. There the mbus was converted back modbus. Because the meter could not communicate in mbus.

Really weird experience to program something so useless. But protesting about it was going nowhere and taking more time than the changes would take to implant.

Fucking cant solve productivity problem. Since I was working as programmer, about 8-9 years experience, constant complaints about my productivity and some jobs even fired me for this. Only one job did not complain and I worked in it longest time but still I was worrying very often about my productivity. It is fucking annoying. Why others are productive and I am not. How the fuck to find biggest bottlenecks to know which to work on.
I know I am not knowing technology perfectly, and from time to time I get stuck and so I ask other people help, or somehow manage to find solution myself but it takes more time. But dont know if that is the biggest issue. Should I intecify my learning? I am regularly studying, and working with symfony about 2 years, so I think I should know enough to be productive even with those strugles from time to time. But maybe they are too often?
I have listened book "deep work" and basic thing I think from this is - to minimize disctractions and learn to focus very well. But to minimize like in this book, I should work alone in my room. And even then I would like each hour for few minutes to read some new or smth, which this book says is bad, but a lot of people do that and they somehow get away with it. Plus if I work alone in my room, my social skills might get worse, and we all need social skills, even programmers.
I so envy to others who know how to be productive. I would hate if the only thing to be more productive is to reduce quality of the code, make more bugs. THats fucking cheating system.

Not so much in my work but more my career.
My dad has been a great role model, still is and always will be.

He was an hard working metalworker. He loved his job. It's not a 50k job but he could easily manage his life.

My dad showed me that doing what you love, working with passion, makes your life easier and more fun. You deliver high quality products, because you care.

Since I found out that I love programming, I made it my life goal to do it as my career.

I've never been happier before. After all, I make money with my hobby.

“We mob every thing so that means we don’t need pull requests, because by the time the code is committed it’s had plenty of pairs of eyes on it”

Well, I beg to differ.
Today I read through some of this spaghetti mobbed code to look into a performance issue. Wasn’t supposed to but bored stiff so I ‘went dark’ and did it without the mob.

After about an hour I figured out it runs a few lines of dubious code and if there’s an error it tries many times over with an exponential back off.
And each run of the methods will fail for sure because of how it’s written.
Someone must’ve seen this problem but instead of realising it can never work, they’ve wrapped it in retries and back offs.

So many back offs and retries that it just sits there doing this for 25 minutes.

But yeah. The mobbing works great guys, keep churning out this quality code. 😂😂😂
Can’t wait to see the back of this joke job.

So I got this new job as Java developer, the people are really great but is the kind of companies that only takes care for fast results and not for code quality.

Because this I have to deal with libraries updated 4 years ago, classes with 8000 lines, methods with 500 lines, a WHOLE lot of work arounds because there is no time to really fix the issue unless it affects directly the customer (something not working or being really slow) aaand we use fucking svn.

Some of this practice's they know and encourage it (+1000 lines classes for example) and every time I try to talk about good practices in the code everyone seems so interested but there is always no time.

Sooo I will stay here for at least two years, I hope I can make a change for good in their code smells.

During 6 months I updated myself day and night on java, springboot and AWS.

I failed most of the technical interviews on my preferred stack, however I got a job, where the probable stack is C#, dotnet and Azure.

So, I have a couple of weeks of very good quality rant ahead.

I just started.

hmmm let's see, should I use Visual Studio or Visual Studio CODE. I spent the morning before understanding they were different. I could have spent the morning Studying how To Visually fuck you, lame name chooser.

Now I'm following a tutorial.
I need .NET 5.0, but guess what, I have .NET core 3.1.
But wait, fuck, .NET and .NET CORE are not the same thing! Will .net core 3.1 work for a .NET project or not?

And there goes the afternoon. Is he the same guy who choose the names?
I'll tie you with a barbed wire net and fuck you to the core, you asshole

So this post by @Cyanide had me wondering, what does it take to be a senior developer, and what makes one more senior than the other?

You see, I started at my current company about three or four years ago. It was my first job, and I got it before even having started any real programming education. I'd say that at this point I was beyond doubt a junior. The thing is that the team I joined consisted of me and my colleague, who was only working 50%. Together we built a brand new system which today is the basis on which the company stands on.

Today I'm responsible for a bunch of consultants, handle contact during partnerships with other companies, and lead a lot of development work. I'm basically doing the exact same things as my colleague, and also security and server management. So except for the fact that he's significantly older than me the only things that I can think of that differentiates the seniority in the team are experience and code quality.

In terms of experience a longer life obviously means more opportunities to gather experiences. The thing is that my colleague seems to be very experienced in 10 year old technologies, but the current stuff is not his strong side. That leaves code quality, and if you've ever read my previous rants I think you know what I'm thinking...

So what in the world makes a person senior? If we hired a new colleague now I'm not sure it'd be instantly clear who should guide and teach them.

Sick and tired of this country. Is it a fucking crime to try to be a good dev in here? I mean, nobody gives a shit about quality and the learning process, it's all about the money, 'making it work', and salaries. Don't the guys have any honor?

Oh great...
I am slowly beginning to realize that my boss/manager doesn't care about refactoring at all. He cares about features and resolved tickets and thats why the code is a pile of spaghetti filled with hacks to fit every clients desires.
Also all of my coworkers work for themselves, ticket by ticket, either because they just don't care or because they are so frustrated that they don't care anymore. And here I am, an intern, and they expect me to cope with this deformed clutter of legacy designs, buried under hacks and workarounds, while implementing some new feature which in the end I have to put on top of everything else because nothing of that codebase can be reused. Fucking shit, fucking irresponsible managers who dont think about the quality of their product.

So I spent over 200 hours recovering a raid array because the the business that hired the company I work for tried to do all the work in house. Now I'm to the point of trying to quote a new server setup to the company because the last one got hit by lightning. My quote $8000-$20000 in just hardware alone. If im going to do this I want to do it right. Twin servers running xenserver holding virtual machines with a high-quality Nas to hold the virtual machine. Then have the vm's being imaged to two off site backup devices in two different locations and a cloud backup. My boss comes in after me talks to the guy in charge and tells him all that is needed is one server holding all storage on it just like the last server that died and one off-site backup for $4500. How stupid can someone be who has been doing this for over 20 years? Oh btw the software running on this server will be 911 dispatch, jail records and the database for fine payments. The sheriff making the final call me and my boss are meeting with him tomorrow if my boss tries to undercut me I'm going to tell them both that if the same shit happens next time they can spend the time themselves trying to recover stuff because I done the over 200 hours in just short of two weeks.

There's this thought that keeps popping up in my head more frequently recently.

We are people who do heavy mind work. Our quality of life directly depends on our ability to come up with solutions. We've been training our minds for years, for decades, to get to the point where we are now.

Now stop for a moment. And imagine. You wake up one morning and you realize you can no longer code. You forgot all of it. You still can copy-paste answers from SO, but you don't know what questions to ask to get to those answers.... Your mind has pulled the DROP TABLE PROGRAMMING;COMMIT; stunt. From hero to zero in just 1 night.

You have no clue what happened, no idea whether you will recover. How does that affect your identity? Would you still try to climb the programmers' tree to the sweet spot you are in now? Would you choose some simpler profession instead, considering your age and time required to master that other profession? If you choose another profession - what would it be?
What would you do with your personal projects? You can't continue them yourself obviously... Would you let them die with the loss of your skills?

How closely is your profession related to your identity?

Now that I consider myself a person who's quite good in the field, this is becoming one of my fears. Sadly, it'll most likely come true someday. Either some accident or just old age, or even diseases/conditions at younger ages - there are so many things that could mess up your mind - the sole tool critical for our profession [to the picky ones: lumbers can't swing axes w/o hands, postman can't deliver mail w/o legs, politics can't lie without tongues, and we, engineers, cannot build with our minds even slightly off].

I don't have anything to say about getting a dev job in some company. But I can give some tips on attracting clients for your freelance work.

* Have a few projects of your own hosted on Github to show off your quality code.

* Contribute to others' open source projects if possible.

* Get yourself a nice website and showcase all your work.

* Ask your current clients to write testimonials on your work and post it in your website.

* Be nice to your clients. Chances are they'll refer you to their friends and family.

That's pretty much all I've done and I get more freelance dev requests than I could take.

Last week I received an invitation to lead the development of a e-commerce redesign, replatforming and data migration. I was excited to work on it, and started the analysis and planning, glad to spend time focusing on quality. But Murphy's law is never asleep - this Monday, I was asked to speed things up and reduce a 4 month project to 1 week.

I searched for a song remix on YouTube (NewPipe). The first result was a "nightcore remix".
If I knew that adjusting 3 sliders is all it takes to "remix" a song, I would have thrown away all these useless documents about programming, become a dj and live of other people's work.

Let's not even talk about the fact that the song I search for is meant to be a slow one. Judging for the quality, scaled it was down to 32kbit

Worst experience?
Fourth semester. Programming project.
We were 4 persons, I did almost all the work (including fixing the stuff they broke) but that's not the point.

One of them somehow killed our git repo at least once per weak. It was really annoying, because I had to fix it.

Also he named *all* of his commits 'Pfuschpush' (Pfusch is German for botch). And the code had exactly this quality. I often had to rewrite everything he did (or simply revert the commit).

Since graduation, I have worked in IT for 2 years, mostly in testing and implementation side. Finally I got a developer position in the field I wanted (Data Engineering). I had never thought that it would be such a soul crushing experience. My current company is very notorious for its bad management practices, but there is indeed a bigger picture to this. The IT industry in general has devolved into a gigantic ponzi scam built on exploitation and BS. Quality of solution and quality of work was replaced with a ‘Does it work now?’ approach with zero contingency. And the fact that geeks and nerds are naive only helps the white collar crooks to exploit them as code monkeys. Fuck all of this!

!rant
Does anyone else derive great pleasure from creating quality of life/small utility programs?

So I'm learning python in between projects at work (plan on slowly moving new projects to it) and damn, my coding buddy and I have found a package/import for almost anything we can imagine. Heck, we canned ourselves laughing when we started googling random things and still found python packages that do it. I plan to use the language to automate a ton of things when I get a new PC.

Aside from that, I recently in 2 days (1 day building, 1 day bug fixing) made a tiny utility that shaves a good 5 minutes off a certain task for my colleagues at work, and in bulk use will save even more time. It's a textbox and a button only but it felt so nice to make something useful like that so quickly.

"excellence" is the greatest trap to leave you miserable. i wish i just didn't care about quality and meaning in my work, i think I'd be happier

Don't you just love customers?

It al began when they showed us the flyers they were printing for their new products, an some one at our company who doesn't work here anymore had the brilliant idea of copying it to their webshop, as a fucking gimmick... Ooohh man the customer didn't seem to understand it was only visually

They wanted the 3d layering effect to be dynamic, so each product would have its own with custom colours

So it was made

A few weeks later they didn't want the informational text, they wanted links to each product that the layer uses

Sounded like logical so it was made

Again some time later, they noticed that the layers were not textured, but just plain

I argued against it because it would add unnecessary loading time for some 300 by 400 px element but they insisted

So they got what they wanted

A few days later they said that the textures were of low quality, and that we had to create ones with higher quality

Again our management said, yes

We made ~ twice the size of the element in image pixels to create a higher definition image

Then the customer wanted that the layers should change based on some selection menu above it

(At this point we realized that it would no longer be just a fun little gimmick)

So we tried to refactor/rebuild it to remove most if not all the hacks we did just to make the customer happy, that took too long for them (the customer) so we had to revert back to the hacked together version because otherwise we would not be done on time (commanded by management)

But again, we ... I say 'we' as in the company but realistically I've been the only one who has worked on the fucking abomination

But I digress...

A few stupid requests later, some layer images are almost fully transparent PNG images that are almost 1mb in Filesize each (some products have 5 or even more layers) and the god damn thing now has to account for optional layers...

I AM FUCKING SPENT... I'VE JUST CAME BACK FROM VACATION BUT I ALREADY NEED IT AGAIN... FUCKING WORKING 60 HOURS A WEEK JUST TO KEEP ONE CUSTOMER HAPPY WHILE OTHER PROJECTS BREATH ON MY NECK

> do you feel sorry for freelancing contractors
> whose previous client abandoned them
> they ask you to help them fix some trivial bugs in the shitty code
> you believe you can change the world by going overboard by also improving the code quality, along with fixing the bugs
> initialize an empty file where you'll translate the shitty code into a more organized one
> start creating variables and generic functions which can be used in a modular and organized fashion
> meticulously document the first function you write
> realize this is not worth your time
> insert some glue code into the original code which fixes the trivial bugs
> glue code has hard coded values so it adds to the shittiness of the code
> submit the work
> get $$$

What do you do when your client WANTS a shitty website?
If it's considered a UI anti-pattern, he wants it.

I'm pretty frustrated because I keep bringing him what I consider professional-quality work and he's disappointed, asks for something dumb instead. I made the mistake of giving him Photoshop and encouraging him to try to design some of his ideas. I thought he would be frustrated and decide, okay, Patrick knows best. But that backfired. Now I'm forced to answer basic questions about "how to delete the pixels" and end up on TeamViewer for hours trying to explain vector masks.

His current bright idea is to advertise his product with a comic strip. And let me tell you, it looks really, really awful. Not tasteful material-design-esq vectors, he thinks those are dumb, he prefers crude clipart. But he loves it.

I've kind of dug myself a hole here. It's what the client wants. But the client wants a steaming pile of shit. What do I do? Also forgot to mention, dude is my landlord and I'm behind on rent. FML

pic related; it's his comic

Got a senior dev at work.

The guy is good at his job, no doubt, but his insecurity drives me up the wall.

- Constantly double checks work done by non-seniors.
- Setup a policy where only seniors can code review.
- Tells non-seniors not to give out advice as they don't know what they're talking about.
- Edits pull requests for you.
- Demands unobtainable quality for insignificant pieces of work.
- Patronising teams messages on the regular.

We're all just trying to get work done and he's always acting like we haven't got enough stripes on the badge.

For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."

Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.

Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.

You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

*embedded rant*
Boss finds new chinese supplier for the lcds we use and tells me to make one work so we can see the new quality. All is good.. the lcd works. But at some point I start seeing some defects. Pretty annoying defects.
Boss tells me to explain the defects to the chinese engineers so that they can either fix it or tell us if we did something wrong. So I do it. I explain everything in detail as one engineer to another.
An hour after I submit the email I get called. The boss is furious that the email is bs. His reasons .. " We are working with cheap-ass chinese. None of their engineers know english. How do you expect anyone to understand all that stuff you said?!"
ffs.. i had to dumb it down to 5th grade english..

After reaching the pinnacle of my latent burnout and mental overload lately I quit and managed to get paid leave for the rest of the notice period through hr as I told them I'm not able to work for them anymore and else had to go on sick leave. My brain just had to have a clean cut and blocked me from
getting into their overcomplex and shitty, unplanned projects as I see no value in doing anything for them anymore. I gave them all my access keys and a small handover, but it was clear that they would run into problems without me, cause I've been doing like 5 jobs there due to developer shortage. Now I still get requests from my manager even though I had an operation and spent last week in the hospital and am still recovering for the next two weeks. He's still trying to build pressure as if it was my fault that we never got time to document stuff properly and automate things that have to be automated. He ignored every recommendation I made in past to ensure that things keep running when I leave, as I always knew that I wouldn't do this shit for long. It was always more important to please bosses ever-changing requests and stupid whims as fast as possible at the cost of quality, pressuring us into putting projects live at 80% to meet random deadlines we had no say on. What a fucking asshole trying to put the responsibility on me now. Not my problem anymore. Have fun finding someone else taking over that shithole of an underengineered software-architecture. I'm out!

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.

I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.

Many "purists" love to piss on JavaScript and web development. And to an extent I can understand ostream’s frustration with these people.
It’s easy to criticize because yes: many web projects are indeed shit.

But I’d like to argue that the reason why so many of these projects are crappy is because of bad management:
- unrealistic deadlines
- no clear testing strategy
- or no testing at all because of deadlines
- no time allotted to catch up on technical debt
- etc.

This type of management is far more commonplace in web projects because things need to get delivered quickly and if they’re delivered with bugs, it’s no big deal as lives aren’t at stake.

I doubt this type of management is tolerated in projects where you’re working on software for welding machines (for example), where the stakes are that "you’re expected not to kill anyone" (to quote demolishun)

So in these types of projects, management can’t tolerate anything much below perfection and thus has to adapt by setting realistic deadlines that take into account the need for quality processes and thorough testing.

If this type of management was more common in web development, I can guarantee that web applications would be much more reliable and of better quality.
I can also guarantee that poorly managed non-web projects as outlined above would be just shitty as many web products.

My point being that’s it’s really DUMB to criticize fellow devs that work with web technologies on the basis that the state of websites/web apps is a mess. It just so happens that JS is the language of the web and that the web is where things are expected to be delivered quickly (and dirty … but we can fix it later mentality)
Stop acting like you’re the elite. I have no doubt you’re super smart and great at what you do. So be smart all the way and stop criticizing us poor webdevs that have to live with the sad state of affairs. ❤️

Anyone here making big bucks working for a small company? I've interned at startups and worked full time for fortune 500's, but I'm considering looking at smaller companies in the future just because the corporate environment kind of burns me out. What's it like being a senior level developer for a smaller company? Is the money typically there? And in your experience, what about quality and expectation of work? I would love to have some more say and passion into what I'm building and take home a big chunk of what a business earns but I don't know how realistic that is.

I'd also like to start my own e-commerce company but as a web developer with 0 business / marketing experience that seems far off lol

Just when I had almost fallen in love with this new job which I started 8 months ago, this happens.

My “manager” had conversation with me. He was complaining that my work is of poor quality (objectively speaking, it is not). I don’t even directly work with this manager anymore. He “leads” this big project and he really wanted me to get involved in it but I struggled because it’s a big codebase and I was a new joiner. Months later, a new project was started and I worked on the backend for it. And I really liked that project more as I literally wrote it from scratch. And even the “mangers” for that project was a bit chilled out.

Now, the first “manager” kept trying to involve me in the first project but new requirements kept popping up in the second project and I was happy to work there. Somewhere down the this, this irked the first “manager”. Also, the company is known to be very cheap with salaries (a good work culture though) and they are paying me more than others since I switched from another company to work there. So they are probably expecting more output for the salary they are paying me. That seems to be the main problem here.

Obviously this first “manager” has never worked a development job before, let alone reviewing my code or something. So I was confused after this conversation. He’s asking me if I noticed these issues in my work and how I can do better and I bluntly replied no, I don’t see any issues in my work. He said he’ll speak to me again on Friday (2 days from now) and expects me to give an answer about how I can improve and stuff. He seems to be power-tripping do so I’ll probably be firm about my position. Will probably mention the money part as well.

It sucks that I left a corporation because of work culture issues and joined this smaller company. And I see the same corporate disconnect cropping up here.

So, we (I'm the backend guy and work with a UI dev) are building this product portfolio management tool for our client and they have a set of 250 users. The team has two point of contacts for the 250 users who maintain the master data, help users with data quality, tool guidance, reporting and other stuff. So one day one of these two support users come to me and say : Hey I'm not able to add new transactions coz a customer is missing.

We have the provision to create / maintain customers.

I check the production DB, application code, try creating the customer and then the transaction, everything works perfectly fine.

I ask the user for a screen sharing session, the user starts reproducing the error like this :

We have a 3 system landscape - Dev / Test and Prod

U : Logs into the test system url, creates the customer.

U : Points out the toast saying customer creation is successful.

U : opens a new tab, opens the production system, tries creating the transaction, searches for the customer and says " see !! cant find the customer here ! the master data management apps never work !! "

FML?.

Im a software developer, and make games as hobby and sometimes as actual job. Recently I started looking into game design, through my work I can can do a study for free.

The main thing I would like to learn is Character development and using GDD's

Would you recommend doing such a course or is the quality of these things way to low to actually be of use?

Is there reading material I should read?

I do own a digital copy of "A theory of fun" already which Im gonna read the coming days.

I feel like a lot of us write code without thinking it through beforehand. I spend more than half my day working everything out via diagrams on paper or lucidchart or with a coworker/previous maintainer (if applicable) before line #1 of code is written. Ideas are to code as source code is to build products - the latter is made (essentially by rote) from the former.

I'm glad I work from home thanks to 'rona, but before that, gah. Everyone else was visibly grinding away, and here I am staring into space thinking about the problem/project I'm working on. I'm not gonna sit there all day debugging code I once rushed. There's a reason the sites I maintain stay up and untouched by hackers (I think, you can never be sure...).

Today I finally experienced the power of something I learned in university: propositional and predicate logic.

Many developers I know think that such education is useless. Well, today I have proven that it is very useful. On a day to day basis, working on banking software, complexity in purely logic is very low. However, we have a screen that must show or hide elements based on some input values and conditions associated with certain elements. How hard can that be, right? Well, there are many variables to take into account and as such it's absolutely not trivial.

This screen didn't work properly and maintaining the code is hard as there is a lot of logic to show/hide, enable/disable things and so on. After quite some time and attempts by fellow developers, I decided to refactor the whole thing. I'm responsible for the quality of the software and it was quite degrading, so I had to do something.

In order to get things working properly, I defined collections of constants (ui elements) and predicates. Then, I defined for which element what predicates must be true, in order to hide/show, disable/enable etc. I then translated these predicates into code. And guess what? It works! Of course it works. It's logic. But I'm very pleased I finally could actually use some of all the math I studied!

My colleague told me today that companies with shit code quality, complete chaos, no tests of QA of any kind, and poor security practices still make loads of money and are extremely successful so it's all a waste of time.

I detest this idea and I refuse to work like that anymore. But I also think he's right :(

Node: The most passive aggressive language I've had the displeasure of programming in.

Reference an undefined variable in a module? Prepare to waste your time hunting for it, because the runtime won't tell you about it until you reference a property or method on the quietly undefined module object.

Think you know how promises work? As a hiring manager, I've found that less than 5% of otherwise well-experienced devs are out of the Dunning Kruger danger zone.

Async causes edge cases and extra dev effort that add to the effort required to make a quality product.

Got a bug in one of your modules? Prepare yourself for some downtime because a single misplaced parentheses can take out the entire Node process, killing unrelated pages and even static file hosting.

All this makes for a programming experience that demands much higher cognitive load, creates more categories of bugs, and leads to code bloat/smell much more quickly than other commonly substituted languages.

From a business perspective, the money you save on scaling (assuming your app is more compute efficient under Node) is wasted on salaries and opportunity costs stemming from longer dev time, more QA, and more frequent outages.

IMO, Node is an awesome experiment, a fun language, a great tool for specific use cases, and a terrible fucking choice for an entire website.

So, I move house with my amazing, already configured and stable router with built in VPN, DDNS, Port forwarding and DHCP addresses.

Received ISP shitty router at new address and want to use as modem only, so I go read the manual.

"Bridge mode requires you to configure your other router with PPPoE and the ISP's credentials"

Landline is not working, so I cannot call the number to retrieve my password. After 2 days of waiting, engineer visits, installs master socket, dial tone yaaay.

Call number to get password, automated voice message has such a bad sound quality that I cannot figure out if it's saying F or S, and there are two of those letters.

Put ISP router in bridge mode, set other router to PPPoE and put credentials, nothing. Try with F and F, S and F, F and S, S and S... Nothing. Put it back to dynamic IP address, it works.

I resign myself and manually configure everything I had on the good router to the ISP one. A few issues with my server and DDNS, but hey, internet works.

Start missing the other functionality, try the password idiocy again. Nothing.

Next day, go to work, talk to a colleague that lives close and has the same provider: "I just put it into bridge mode and it worked".

Go back home, bridge mode on ISP router, Dynamic IP on good router, no credentials. It works.

Why do I always overcomplicate stuff?

More rants coming up.

1st

Working with a guy who I am not sure has the necessary experience to begin with.

The person who hired him told me to teach the guy for him to catch up to our project and its pace. He has some experience with Java. Which our project is being developed in java in a linux dev environment in a full stack way. So we handle front to infrastructure.

First day working with him and I saw this guy is trouble.

1st - doesn’t know effing git commands. Who doesn’t know git nowadays. Ok i can forgive him for that. But damn this guy’s learning curve is so slow. After s month of joining, he still has to look up the commands in his photo cheatsheet.
2nd - doesn’t know linux basic cli commands like cd, ls, rm. not an ounce of knowledge. He told me he is used to developing in Windows. Now this. I can’t forgive him for not knowing this shit. cd (change dir) even exists in windows command line. He even has guts to say to everyone he wants to try working in our servers. The HORROR!
3rd - not sure if knowing junit and matchers of hamcrest, if you are working with Java is a must. But this guy doesn’t understand Matchers of Junit. How the fuck did he ensure effing quality in his prev work.

All in all, seems like this guy doesn’t understand the basics of current development tools.

I HATE YOU STREAMING SERVICES! FUCK YOU!

Here's the setup:

I work in a rather small office, where we are like 7 people (including me). Now, there's one person in charge of putting music through speakers (obviously, not everyone enjoys the same kind of music)

Well, we have a hell of a small bandwidth (1.5MBPS tops), now, add to that that every single fucker here uses "Spotify" and it's streaming their music...

WHY!!!!

Good side: I have my earphones and ~30GB of my music on my phone, so it's not an issue for me, also, I'm kinda audiophile, so Spotify quality sucks.

Bad side: I can't even fucking load Google because those fuckers are eating the bandwidth.

Set some dev goals..

TLDR: spend less time at work coding

No, really..for what I do at work, I am happy. Would like to learn more recent stuff (partially stuck with vb.net), but I don't even know where to start googling.. sooo... get more free time I guess to figure this out..which is a dev goal on it's own too, come to think of it, this translates as don't spend so much time at work coding.. and spend some of it learning new (dev related) things outside of work..new/different js frameworks, python (been fixing/adding some code here & there, but never learned it properly & to check it's full potential, I heard it is awesome btw), read up on algorithm time costs (learn how to fuckin spell this!!)...

And kinda dev related as I will have to spend less time at work is to get back in 'sort of' shape and climb (more)..and spend more quality time with my husband, who is too good, totally supports me & my work, so I never get to hear him nag I was working late, which leads to 'stop working so long' goal I rly need to get in order or I'll burn out again, and I'm bitchy and horrible whe BO..and we don't wanna see that again..

Sum up: work less, learn new things, climb more, be happy/content.

I too got my $1 unix sticker pack (thank you very much whoever posted this by the way) and thought posting a picture of them would be redundant
First thing when I brought them to work to show them or to my colleagues I stepped out of my car and they all fell to the soaking wet ground (it was pouring down at the time)
Luckily they're of very high quality and still intact 😊

Watched a co-worker configure a new "MacBook pro" as a replacement for the four-year-old one this personcurrently has. A replacement machine is justified as the old one is on the fritz... Naturally because MacBooks aren't any better than any other machine, build quality or otherwise. I still cannot fathom why anyone would even consider budgeting over $3000 for a single machine, only to then buy several adapters just to make the thing work.

Apple is off the deep end. People who fall for that BS are off the deep end.

I feel like showing the manager several alternative models at half the price just to make the point that MacBooks are a pointless waste of money.

As a new freelancer I didn't have much clients , so I paired with a web designer +10 years exp. who work with me as a pm and that was a bad decision.
Although I am a back-end dev , half of the projects were frontend/WordPress theme (less price than back-end projecrs) - so 30% of the projects were cancelled .
sometimes I receive project's which have requirement, like magento, I don't know anything about ,
I tried to push myself but I burned out after six month.
he deals with clients, partner with other companies ,and I don't know anything about the terms.
at the end I was like an employee without any benefits from his company .
moreover I get my money after 45 day!!!
and not all my money .
this is a project I work for another company through him
A requirement for mobile back-end server was integrating with parse and that was my first time working with Facebook parse so ....
after two weeks ..
we received email from parse that they'll shutdown their service after a year .

so we moved to Amazon sns again my first time working with aws .
at the end I can't charge for extra money but my pm became a gold partner for that company .
the only thing that made me hold is that I need some high quality projects for my c.v.
-----------
he didn't show on hangout because I need my money .
this will be my last project with him.
wow I write too much ... I feel better now .😥

I read this rant on Quora. Is this true ?

“The IT industry has devolved into a gigantic ponzi scam built on exploitation and BS. Quality of solution and quality of work was replaced with a ‘Does it work now?’ approach with zero contingency.
And the fact that geeks and nerds are naive only helps the white collar crooks to exploit them as code monkeys.”

An UI guy which actually complimented my will to work with non-dev professions in order to deliver quality features.
Spoiler: I am willing because you are awesome and are not offended in me asking questions outside my area of competence in order to be sure what I do is what you want, so if you happen to read this post kudos on you M. , not on me :)

Honestly someone really enjoys the stupid company bbq and team building bulshit? Man, I'm with those people all day...to increase the quality of the relationship the solution is definitely not "let's be 5 hours extra together after the work"...

This is PART 2/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering course years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 6: After the previous drama MT built the groundwork for the project without allowing us to intervene for a week. When he finally disclosed his code he gave us tasks and I was stuck unable to run the new project, due to the friction with MT I asked SR for help which took a couple of days. MT accused us of not wanting to work and claimed he’d just do everything himself. I continued working on the task improving MT’s code and committed the work, which surprised MT and told me I didn’t have to do it. He ended up complimenting my code and complained less about me as a result.

Rant 7: MT kept giving SR flak for not working and took him out of the repo, which I promptly forked just in case he tried anything scummy. SR was indeed working on certain things, but he wasn’t listening to MT’s demands, there was no team coordination. I had to act as a proxy and push some of SR’s changes myself while informing him of the state of things.

Rant 8: When MT finally added SR back and some of the tasks were cleared up, FT didn’t cooperate. She seemed to have zero initiative and always relied on MT to tell her what to do, which didn’t include coordinating with SR to get the front-end templates running. I tried getting them in a group chat but it didn’t work, she just ignored him.

I learned a few things from that.
1. No matter how smart or experienced someone may seem, sometimes people are just petty or take things too personally.
2. Top students are sometimes too focused on their grades and disregard depth of knowledge and work quality.
3. A bad team at college can somehow make something acceptable if everyone works on things that add some kind of value.

One of my bad dev habits is that I tend to take up too much work because a lot of devs I had to work with seemed not competent enough. It's a bad habit because I get way overworked which influences code quality and deadlines.

I have to learn to trust more in others and give up some responsibility... it's hard though.
I think a big influence on my mindset has been that I never worked in a team bigger than 4 developers and I had way more experience in web dev than the others.
I sometimes may appear as an arrogant prick, but it's not intentional.

Wk33:

Best experience of 2016 is probably just realising I'm a pretty good programmer. I have a physics undergraduate degree and a 1 year masters in CS, I'm working on back end algorithm stuff so pretty mathsy at times, but I've found from working with others that I write good quality code. I've still got lots to learn but I've got a solid foundation, am reading, learning and coding outside of work.

Worst experience of 2016 is working with people for whom it's purely a day job, only about the money, get things done in whatever hacky way works.

I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.

Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.

While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us

Last week I got 2 offers to work remotely which is amazing for me and both of them sponsorship me to their respective countries.

I finally resign and finally I'll going after some life quality which I was looking for at this point of my life.

My app is finally on the Apple App Store.

The rant: how bloody difficult was it to get on there?! They scrutinise EVERYTHING. My promo copy, my screengrabs and also it seems that there is code that works on iPhone that doesn’t work on iPad.

I thought it was designed to be the same for ease of development? However I found a function that works perfectly well on iPhone but breaks iPad.

Anyway I guess in the long run this keeps the App Store’s quality level high and it isn’t the Wild West like the google play store. However it’s still pretty annoying. I can see why devs get angry about Apple’s process.

I spent about an hour writing my own password generator at work... (And probably my item password safe) because my company doesn't allow using Keepass...

But require super complex passwords... That need to be exactly 8 characters...

And they expect us to somehow think of and remember them... And change it every 6 months....

As a developer, isn't it a given that if we can't have something, we'll just build one ourselves... But one that is lower quality since it is adhoc and with by a single dev... That doesn't have time or the experience of a domain expert...

They also blocked GitHub/Sourceforge so I can't just download from my own repo... And basically need to do it on company time... For better or worse.

So I was rejected by the management today for promotion to Senior 2 although I have done several major feature developments + infra design and basically end to end ownership.

Reason for no promotion? That's the best fucking part, according to the feedback, the work I performed on the service I created is well-designed,
and the code quality is commendable. However, they pointed out a notable difference in code quality between the micro-service
I built and the rest of the project developed by others. This, apparently, suggests that I lack a strong sense of ownership over the broader product.

First of all, we have super tight deadlines (almost 996), and I burned midnight oil to make sure the service I am in-charge of is designed really well.
Also, how in the flying fuck the other how the inability of others to maintain good code quality elsewhere in the product is being used as evidence against my sense of ownership
and initiative in ensuring high engineering quality for the repository I wasn't even working on

What a delusional management, the entire feedback feels like just an excuse to fuck off, we are not promoting you...
May be instead of doing actual engineering work, I should have just do minimal work and write more design docs / technical artifacts

It is very demoralizing after I worked hard for so many months, product went out really well.. yet when performance review comes, rejected with a petty reason

I really miss having a team. Don't get me wrong, right now I do what I love and I got into a position where I can actually do Quality Assurance instead of just testing and I enjoy being able to actually change things instead of just repeating what problems there are and acting surprised when the same processes produce the same bugs over and over again but I really hope that we'll interview anything else than mouthbreathers soon.

I'm aware of the fact that QA isn't sexy and that few people who could become "Software ninja Rockstars" choose to go into it but can it be that hard to find at least two or three people who can write and read code at least on a junior level and understand how web protocols work? I get the feeling my entire branch is nothing but shit talkers clicking around blindly on pages.

I just want to exchange ideas again, come up with innovative tools, tweaking processes, learning from and teaching each other while we watch the entire operation get more and more efficient.

Lol I remember deleting half a production database 6 months into this job. Now a little under 2 years my boss lets me do whatever the fuck I want as long as my quality of work stays high and I complete a regular number of jira tasks a week

If you just want to answer my question, skip to the bottom. For those who cares, some backstory:

So...I seemed to have finally caught a break; a friend of my dad owns an IT company and also makes websites...used to. It was becoming too much for him alone so he decided to discontinue, but that's where i come in. We talked a few days ago and it sounds like I'm finally going to have a decent dev related job--even if it's only mainly websites, at least I can work from anywhere once the ball starts rolling since I'll just get direct deposits. Meaning I'd be able to visit my gf in Florida and sustain myself over there while I look to build my own client base or even get a job offer, who knows?

For you guys and gals reading this, what's your favorite/preferred static site generators and css frameworks? I know that I'll be doing mostly static sites first, and i want to deliver quality work as quick as possible. I'm cool with learning a new language once it's not too obscure; i mainly do JS and I know a bit of Python, PHP, and just the basics of Go and Ruby

Quality != more work + less talk

Quality = more talk resulting in less work.

That makes no sense mathematically.

“Let’s talk more about shit before we create shit”.

That’s a little better.

“Let’s talk more so we don’t create shit”.

Getting closer.

“Let’s talk more about what is needed till we all know what is best before we program a damn machine?”

...This is going nowhere fast.

Okay fuck it. Let’s just code some stuff. It’s more enjoyable.

You would think that one might get used to the following scenario, but it still pisses me off every time it happens. I'm getting a design created by the customer that is specific to a pixel-level. The product I create in turn is very close to a 100% match visually and functional. And then a few days later, the work already done, I get renewed versions of the same designs. Just like that. With all those nooks and crannies replaced and new ones added, as if it didn't took time, effort and experience to make them functional in the first place. And no one blinks an eye. Not the customer, not our project managers. So after having me built you intricate card board house, you just smash it and tell me to rebuild? It's not always a huge deal but it happens so often and I guess it's part of the "customer is king" mentality, but it's bullshit. If the customer hands in a final design, then that's it. Any changes afterwards need to be paid extra. Otherwise it feels like I'm wasting my time and those changes will not get the same quality treatment for sure.

Overall, pretty good actually compared to the alternatives, which is why there's so much competition for dev jobs.

On the nastier end of things you have the outsourcing pools, companies which regularly try to outbid each other to get a contract from an external (usually foreign) company at the lowest price possible. These folks are underpaid and overworked with absolutely terrible work culture, but there are many, many worse things they could be doing in terms of effort vs monetary return (personal experience: equally experienced animator has more work and is paid less). And forget everything about focus on quality and personal development, these companies are here to make quick money by just somehow doing what the client wants, I'm guessing quite a few of you have experienced that :p

Startups are a mixed bag, like they are pretty much everywhere in the world. You have the income tax fronts which have zero work, the slave driver bossman ones, the dumpster fires; but also really good ones with secure funding, nice management, and cool work culture (and cool work, some of my friends work at robotics startups and they do some pretty heavy shit).

Government agencies are also a mixed bag, they're secure with low-ish pay but usually don't have much or very exciting work, and the stuff they turn out is usually sub-par because of bad management and no drive from higher-ups.

Big corporates are pretty cool, they pay very well, have meaningful(?) work, and good work culture, and they're better managed in general than the other categories. A lot of people aim for these because of the pay, stability, networking, and resume building. Some people also use them as stepping stones to apply for courses abroad.

Research work is pretty disappointing overall, the projects here usually lack some combination of funding, facilities, and ambition; but occasionally you come across people doing really cool stuff so eh.

There's a fair amount of competition for all of these categories, so students spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff like competitive programming which a lot of companies use for hiring because of the volume of candidates.

All this is from my experience and my friends', YMMV.

Quality work, Fast work, Happy Engineers. . . Pick 2

I work as part of a small international team in a big corp , we work product quality of sorts but work closer to dev than qa , last week we found several giant issues and reported them in . Dev and Qa teams of said project are Indians . Meeting starts , two of my colleagues are indian as well , so dev , qa and all the other involved parties from india decided they should join in from the same conference room . My manager(he's a brit) presents the issues . Dev manager starts talking , qa manager talks over him , they start to formally yell at one another . One of them (couldn't figure out which one) started asking my two colleagues which one of them found these issues . At this point I had already passed a headphone to my ex-colleague who still sits next to me , he looks at me when he hears the question . I panic . Colleagues say they don't know (*phu* I didn't CC them in emails and my manager didn't tell them ) . My manager tells them to calm down , take responsibility and find solutions else he'll veto the product back into fullblown development . Other managers start growling and fighting again (more than 10 people were in the same room arguing) me and my ex-colleague decide to go take a coffee since I didn't have a saying in the meeting . We get back 10 minutes later , indians are still arguing over my manager trying to explain the issues a 4th time . I IM my manager and ask to drop the meeting , he gave me the ok and I dropped out, my head was hurting after an hour long meeting of angry indians arguing in a conference room and it kept hurting the whole day...yeah...meetings...fun time...