I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?

Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?

For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:

1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.

2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.

3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.

4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.

5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.

6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.

7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.

Spend half the day setting up a dedicated server at work (including getting all the hardware together) and installing CentOS and tweaking around.

For a client? Oh no, there just literally wasn't anything else to do and I didn't want to sit around doing nothing or working on shell scripts AGAIN. (working in support (+ linux server management) and due to the holidays hardly any support requests come in)

*Hmmm, lets install nginx for fun*
"yum install ngi..."
*wait, let's compile from source and make it more fun!*

So yeah, that was my day, I guess.

My PM: I don't like when you get up and help out other colleagues with their problems on their computer. You're not at their service.
Me: okay, I'll refrain from doing so.

The next day, I arrive 5 minutes before 8, I get myself a coffee, talk with a few colleagues, and:
PM: Hey, can you please come and help me review this email?
Me: ** fuck it, I still have 2 minutes ** Yeah I'm coming
PM: Now please.
Me: ...

Also my PM, 5 minutes later: Hey I don't manage to print my document, can you help me?
Me: ...

10 minutes later, I get a call:
PM: did you call XY about ZX?
Me: Yep, sent you a mail about it 2 minutes ago
PM: Really? I don't see it
Me: I sent it.
PM: Can you send it again?
Me: ...

Later that day:
PM: Hey, what are you up to?
Me: Well, I'm working on our improved websi-
PM: Can you please create a new campaign on Mailchimp? We're all under water here and a bit of cooperation from you would be great
Me: ** huh? ** erm, ok?
PM: Do it now
Me: Yeah yeah, don't worry. ** click ** here, done. Now, where was I...

----- PM on holidays

Other colleague from another department: Hey Phlisg! I have a small problem on our platform, can you help me?
Me: ** writes a script to help her out **
Her: awesome, thank you!!
Her own PM, 5 minutes later: Hey! Thank you very much for your help, it helps us out a real lot, very much appreciated :)

I lost my smile at work since the beginning of the year, but that little help I gave my colleague just gave my smile back to me :D

Best: Got a job at a rather big company, totally unqualified. They wanted me to start working on an android app to help maintain safety in their manufacturing halls using beacon/ibeacons technology. I had never made an android app, nor worked with gui. All by myself, I created the app and its necessary back-end logic. They were so impressed they wanted me back during the holidays or whenever i have the time, as I'm still studying.

8:30 - get into office, boot windows
Windows: "Oh man, here's this update. If you're not doing it now, I will start in 15 minutes. No questions asked!"

9:45 - checking update status
Windows: "Well i'm nearly finished, just give me a sec..."

9:55 - whats's my pc doing
Windows: "Hey mate, I did it! I also restored those neat shortcuts to MS EDGE for you. Please use my browser"

10:00 - Well i can finally start working
Windows: "Yeah... you would. But i had to remove theese few applications, because they are not compatible anymore."

11:00 - Okay, installed all my stuff, did some coding. Time to test it. Lets boot up my VM.
Windows: "Oh so sorry mate. Not gonna show my network devices to Virtualbox anymore. Have fun reconfiguring your connections without them."

Fuck this fucking Windows 10!

The only reason we have Win10 on our machines, is because people in my office panicked the last day of the "free upgrade period" (and i was on holidays)...

I was once working for a company as a part time dev in the centrum of my city.

After working there for almost 1 year I noticed that I didn't get paid the last 2 months. I think it was about 500 euro's. (1 day per week).

So I went on my bike to the company to see whatsup. I came into the store and told my boss I hadn't been paid for 2 months. Even tho I did work.

He then got so angry! Just started yelling "YEAH BECAUSE THE PROJECT ISNT NEAR COMPLETE, NOTHING IS WORKING" I explained him the panel still had to be configured and that everything he asked me to do had been programmed and he then fucking told me he wanted it a different way even tho we clearly discussed it WEEKS AGO and he clearly said what he wanted. so he wanted dont revisions. I told him that this is not possible at this moment because holidays are around the corner and I want to go om vacation. (and he too!!!)

He then got so fucking angry he said "come with me for a second" we walk to the door of the building and then he just pushed me out of there and kicked me in my back.

I got so fucking pissed, I opened the door and asked him if je thinks this is a normal way to discuss. He closed the store door again, and I couldnt hold back anymore. I threw my full can of Red Bull against the glass door. The can exploded, and his whole fucking window had energy drink on it. He took some fucking steal pipe, so I walked back. But while trying to get away I jumped on his store sign. Which broke into pieces (they are quite expanasive). He came outside with his fucking pipe and he was trying to hit me. We had a crowd and people started yelling at him. I walked away but the asshole took my bike and put it inside his store. So that I couldnt leave.

So than I called the cops and reported him. For minor assault and some other things. Shortly after I deleted the entire project from his stupid server.

I really dont know this kinda shit happends, he probably felt like I didn't deserve that money even tho I did everything he asked for within deadline. Trying to solve it after vacation was also not an option. I signed him up for a few news letters after that.

I've been working on a single reliable computer at work for a year now. Yesterday I booted it up after the holidays...

OS not found....
My hard drive failed
😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

That moment you realise you’re on holidays and you’re still fucking working 🤦‍♂️

I think I need a raise for this shit,

I fucking hate holidays. Every goddamn time when it's a holiday, that's when I need to go to the store and get something, only to find out that they're closed. And what for.. holidays are - to me at least - no more than an excuse for people to not go to work for the day.

So, now I ran out of booze, and can't continue developing and testing my breathalyzer until Monday.

Then it hit me.. what if I take all my Arduino equipment (laptop, jumper wires, ...) to the café and deploy my build environment on a table there?

Eh, no no no. I don't want some idiot to come up to me saying "YOU EVIL HEKORMAN!!!" and have to explain that just like when you call a banker who's working with the money vaults a thief, it's wrong to call someone that's developing shit an evil hacker.. one should strive to not throw mindless accusations out of unknowingness. Not that I'm a good example of that though. But still.

It's probably that or some stupid bitch coming up to me asking to hack her boyfriend's Phasebuk.. that said, that could probably be an opportunity to get in her pants. But then, I don't wanna insert my meat in an idiot like that... ._.

So, no booze it is then? Thanks national holidays!

"Ok Google, remind me every day before a holiday because I really couldn't care less about them!!"

What would you do?

2 job offers...

Job #1 a big sports betting company as a junior software developer with a salary of 22k plus a yearly bonus of 10%

Also uncapped holidays

Or

Job #2
A small IT company with 2 other developers with a salary of 19.5k working on multiple projects and being instantly promoted to mid level developer, also a signing bonus after 3 months of a high end surface laptop.

Wtf is going on with developers these days?
I just applied for a job (through some online job thing) for the holidays and they had questions like "Do you have relatives working for our company?" and I'm like noooo. So when I wanted to submit the form the field of my relatives name working for the company was marked with a notice "pls fill me in". And that was not the only field behaving like that. There were like 10 of them.

So now I wanted to install mono develop to learn some c# and gui development and they give me this

Christmas reminds me of my favourite development team ever. I first visited the team for a quick hello, before I started working with them, at Christmas time. Unlike the rest of the the company they had decorations and Christmas treats and the radio was on with Christmas songs. This set a very good impression.

When I did come to join them after the holidays I discovered that this team like having treats, would often sing songs together randomly and even make up new ones about their code on the spot. They had a great attitude to work and made the working environment a fun place to be. We did get lots done but I also learned so much being with them. When I left they wrote me a card filled with raps they had come up with reflecting my time with them. I still have that card.

I miss you guys dearly. Merry Christmas xxx

- Be me
- Been in a new job for 2 months
- Was excited because of 50% salary increase and better position

- Have a new team of 6 devs including me. All new guy
- Market crash
- Top management demands a trim down to all divisions
- Will be left to 3 devs next month

- All the while being asked to
- Deliver a shopify like marketplace from end to end
- Deliver integration with partners for data inventory tracking
- All within 2 months

- Furious when target is not met
- Demands a micro management to every single person on the team on what their day to day schedule
- Demands everybody to live by hustle culture and ready to work non stop even nights or weekend

- Be me
- Been working non stop for at least a month
- Sacrificed weekends and holidays

Beginning to think that maybe the money and position isn't worth the hassle

Quick reminder: don't deploy to production on you last working day before holidays :)
Wish you all happy new year)
GG!

These postings on angel.co

I swear to God it's like I've uncovered a conspiracy theory.

I had been searching for a side project now that holidays are coming and I really don't wanna get bored.

Applied to a few companies. About 5 of them "responded" with an acceptance. I write them my interview timings and all that's required.

Nothing. Nothing for like a solid week and a half.

Meanwhile I applied to more companies and still the same thing.

I decided to manually mail their companies regarding the process, so that I can, preferably, move on to other ones if they have rejected the application (which they obviously hadn't)

I get mails from almost all the companies with some or the other variant of "We were waiting for your reply to proceed"

I tell them I had replied over the conversations and they said they never got a message.

Now feeling that this might be angel.co at fault. I wrote a request to look into the issue. Meanwhile I tested the system using a friend's account as a recruiter and testing myself.

Unsurprisingly it was working flawlessly.

Narrowing it down to the companies then.

I sent a document with my findings to each of the companies and pretty much 50% of them stopped with replying.

The rest confirmed that they hadn't received any mails regarding the same and they saw no mail resembling the one I tested with my friend.

Kinda confusing but I asked them to look into it.

Meanwhile mail from Angel returns saying that their system is working perfectly fine even around my region. So idk what was the problem

I got a mail 3 weeks after the first mail to the company. They had been using a utility to auto-accept/reject profile applications. This util sent a lot of mails, even for rejections, to their mailboxes, filling them.

So they decided to remove these emails automatically by marking them spam. Apparently, the interview confirmation messages also count as these emails and were automatically archived. Thus removing my responses to those companies.

Idk if this is widespread issue because only one company has responded to me yet.

I'm still livid with this shit.

Not sure if this is necessarily a prank, but I was working on a team that was split in 2. We had a group of senior devs in one country, and junior devs in another (god only knows why, and yes I complained about this a lot).

The "lead" of the juniors was very stubborn and refused to adhere to the official standards, as his way was better.

I was working on an app with him, I was fed up with how badly the app was working, how hard it was to find files etc. So I waited for him to be off on holidays and pulled some extra hours to completely re-do the folder structure, rip out his persistence layer and a few other things.

When he came back he lost his shit and complained to the architect. The architect (also fed up with his shit) told him that we don't have the time to invest in reverting back everything, and loosing all the new features I added on top, especially since the app is now adhering to standards.

Never felt such satisfaction in my life.

Whenever Facebook decides to do one of its fancy animations about all the things you've posted pictures of in the past month etc. I'm sure they expected people to be posting pictures of parties, holidays etc.

I only post either pictures of my pets or something I'm working on (running cables in walls, cutting up bits of wood, decorating etc.) So it looks utterly ridiculous when one of those animations plays.

Just before the holidays started I was given a task by my manager, $M.

$M: "Kyntak, while I'm away I want you to look into this new way of starting $important_service"

$me: "Okay $M, is there a bug for this that explains what is needed?"

$M: "Yes, you should be able to find it"

Goes looking, finds someone else working on something connected but not the same, finds the code change that makes this available... It doesn't explain how to use it, when the async events fire or (well, to a junior engineer like me) really anything.

Message the other (very experienced) eng.
$me: "Hey I've been asked to make $important_service use the new starting API, can you tell me about?"

$eng: "Yup, here's a bug for that and I'm happy to answer any questions you have" *goes offline*

I read the bug. It doesn't mention the original problem I was trying to solve, it doesn't even mention $important_service. There's no design doc mentioned. The bug has a higher priority assigned than any of my other work. It has an expected completion date only days after I get back from holidays (which $M told me to take).

I try to contact $M and $eng. They've already left for holidays.

"Hmm"

Implements as much of the fairly inevitable boilerplate that I can infer from the bugs and surrounding code.

"Hmm"

So, I'm into my second week of holiday and am starting to think about the potential shit storm I may return to.

I hope the bug's priority was wrong.

I need a project. I am on holidays, I don't have a computer at hand and can only code small things on my phone, mainly in python... Sad thing is I don't have any idea what to code.

Give me your challenges (please), so I can keep mental health!

P.S: if anyone has a working way to use Node.js on Android, I'd be glad to take it :)

Fml
Friday: I just finished a project with someone and I went and told my boss that I'm done with this some other work can be allotted to me. He told me that I can start working on another project with another guy. This guy told me that we'll have to start working from tomorrow.
I was mentally taken aback because I thought Saturday's are holidays. And I had a feeling that maybe Saturdays are working but I wasn't just showing up(sidenote: I'm an unpaid intern here who started a month back). So I asked him one more time whether I should come tomorrow. He replied with a ya.
Saturday: I get ready take a cab to office only to realize that Saturday's are not working and what he understood from my 'tomorrow' was Monday.

This year has been rough. No programming. 3 great job applications snuffed. Currently unemployed, and all my recent job experience in a field I don't want to continue working in due to not making my 3 career options. (Military and policing sort of thing)

So since I'm off for the holidays, and looking to really get back into computer work, I've come back to devRant. Missed you guys. <3

Now I've got to actually get good at something, and preferably employed in doing it. Any advice or stories are appreciated :D (but my mom said not to listen to strangers on the internet, so...)

!rant + !story

I hate every human on the planet that says WFH is just people pretending to work or are slackers looking for an easy way out.

Now the story bit.

In 2021, I joined a company (I really wish I could name-drop the company), where the micromanagement was OFF THE CHARTS.

The company got a client who pitched a product they wanted built and gave us a super reasonable 3 months to complete it. I was really happy about the timeline and kept working under keystroke monitoring, which I didn't really mind at the time.

3 days into the development, the client informed us that they are pulling the funding i.e. they don't have money to pay us.

So at that point the client gave us two choices:

1. Stop the development right away and get paid for the time that we put in already.
2. Finish the project under 9 days. We would still get paid for the 12 days total, mind you. Not the original budget set.

So the motherfucking boss chose the second option and then the chaos ensued.

Devs screaming at each other on calls/slack. The boss yelled at us all the time about the completion. It was wild.

I had to wake up at 7:30 AM and start coding and log off at 11 PM for literally the next 9 days including Saturday and Sunday. No holidays allowed for the timeline. This was all at a WFH job.

So fuck anyone that says WFH is easy and just for slackers.

I am starting to get really annoyed by shitty devs and tech leads from other teams that ask me to fix urgently a "problem" with my project they rely on, but turns out they did not even debug the fucking thing in the first place to understand where the problem comes from.

Turns out someone used the wrong parameters on his duct taped jenkins CI and instead of finding the reason for the failure, he just assumed my code did not work.

This is the last time I'm helping you fucks before a release while I am on holidays in my country. Worst thing is you guys are paid twice my salary in US dollars but you still can't code and debug for shit.

How about telling me truth when I asked you guys if everything was working fine before I took my vacations? Do you fucking test your shit for fuck's sake? Nah you guys just suck ass.

I will turn off my computer when off work from now on and uninstall slack and emails from my cell phone. These guys are not competent enough to use those tools properly.

Took company's laptop to vacations, because it's lighter then may gaming laptop rig.

VPN works seemlessly, all my intranet work is accessible even away from the country >.<

I guess I'm a bit of a work junkie / bitch ?

My team and I are working on a huge project that's been in development for years.

First deadline was in the fall last year. We were never going to make that.

Then we were supposed to be ready just after the summer holidays (months ago). We didn't make that either.

Then we were supposed to launch last week. Didn't happen, still too many critical errors and unfinished, untested features.

Now we are having daily meetings to discuss whether we'll be ready to release... that day!

Meanwhile, stability issues and other critical errors keep popping up. The product is barely finished and has not been through rigorous testing with all the latest features and bug fixes. Not to mention that we don't really have a deployment pipeline either.

And here's the kicker: The customers don't know this is coming. It's highly anticipated, but only internally. It is a replacement for an existing product, which strives towards not changing the frontend too much.

Why do we rush it so? I get that a deadline can help motivate you to reach your goal, but how motivated will we be if the launch fails and we get buried in bugs and missing features?
Would it not be better to launch it with at least the confidence of knowing that we've tried to test it properly?

after few months of working in the company, I was offered to trade off my weekends in exchange for increase of salary. I said hell no, I would go crazy.

winter holidays we had removed... thankfully for money increase.

all next holidays were often just removed... without money increase.

next week is going to be official week of holidays. all in our country are going to have paid days off / vacation. It was declared by our president. 2 days of holidays were extended to 5 due to COVID break.

I wonder, how hard it would be for us to get those days as vacation %
we would have to ask for VACATION days in OFFICIAL HOLIDAY DAYS!. Hell, we had never had real vacation yet, and we are just wishing to have official holiday days remaining being holidays.

Urgh. I understand that I get pretty good salary for my first work, but still wishing quite a lot for holidays, should I press for it? *sigh*

on another hand I don't really want salary decrease, which can come if I would press for it *sad face*.

Actually, it happened just before my current holidays.
I had prepared a whole system to feed and use a machine learning model. My colleague and some others had been working on a great thing, all encapsulated, all abstracted for my system.
My last day at the office, they had it ready.
I install their thing, load one model and launch one dummy prediction: error. I try with other input data: error
I try debugging a bit more, errors all the way. Knowing them, I asked if they wrote some unit tests.
"Sure we did"
I find the tests, yes there are some. And I notice:
"Hey, I see that in all your tests, you're making more than one prediction at a time (=aka using a matrix with more than one row)
- yeah, and it work fine
- in the project, we're doing one prediction at a time, did you try it with one prediction?"
He tries: error, that was totally what I said.
I started ranting on loosing the scope of the project, why we do tests in the first place.
Then, I grabbed my coat, said "see you in one week" and let them rework their code.
I was so angry at them, it seemed so basic to just check that 👹

If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.

The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.

Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).

The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.

To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.

Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.

Long Holidays == Working on my pet projects thats going nowhere...

Tldr: boss needs his priorities sorted

So as I already wrote about this issue earlier (in a comment) now it's time to actually write the rant...

I'm working between the holidays, not much just doing planning with the boss. Mind you, startup company, so limited resources and all, that's why I'm on planning as well.

So he goes to the whiteboard and draws a line in the middle, writing headings to each side: Need (Panic) and Nice (ASAP). It's starting off well.
We add about 10-ish items to each side, which is kind of okay - then he starts highlighting with different colors within the Need list saying okay, red circles we need NOW, green circles... "Now but later".

How do I not laugh? And now he wants to do even more priorities within these sections and a Soon list just as last time...

This is getting really ridiculous.

Send help (and coffee)

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

I got the logic for the time off rules wrong .. or rather the people who wrote this didn't bother to have the functions make sense. There's an `effective()` function .. which also includes all the holidays for previous years (how the hell are they still effective?!).

I'll just ask in the time-off room ... oh look ... no one has posted any chats in here for months. It's all just log messages. I bet everyone has it muted.

I hate working on this shit.

Working on cool emerging technologies such as VR, AI or robotics. Or all of them combined. International environment with developers from all over the world. I find myself working at different locations, yet I'd spend all weekends and holidays at home. 6 K €/month + all travel and lodging expenses paid. Plus a culture that encourages innovation and, of course, ranting! :D

my employer moved our company to the UAE. we were in a dying and collapsing country. Now we are in a stable and great place to be. We are even paid about double the average salary here.

But...

He now seems to believe we all owe him. so every time a long weekend / holiday comes up he tells us you have a week to deliver X or ur career will be in danger.

I have been living the past 2 months with those continuous threats. In utter anxiety over possibly losing a job i love because of him.

Before the weekend started he tagged us and said you have 48 hours to fix X. and here i am on a weekend working 10 hours a day as a result.

But i have been pulling 2 day shifts in one day. spending nights, weekends and holidays working on the project he wants fixed. and he still seems very angry at me and my team all the time. very unappreciative. and just very hurtful.

im just scared shitless because i have a family i support and have Just moved to a new country and paid thousands of dollars to rent and furnish my new place. If i get fired now i would be ruined...

Yesterday, I had to set up a demo environment for a project, we are working on.
Everything was okay, frontend loaded, connection to backend is working, database is connected.
10 minutes before I wanted to leave for my well deserved weekend, PO came over: "I can't play any video, I uploaded"
Okay, couldn't be a big issue, it worked when I added this functionality 3 weeks ago, just before my holidays.
A bit under pressure, my girlfriend Was already waiting downstairs, I inspected the database and realized that a table Was not properly filled.
Checked the backend and everything seems fine, so checked the requests from the frontend and realized that the request was almost empty.
So some code, building the request body had to be wrong.
Already 10 minutes late, with a lightly annoyed girlfriend waiting for me, I found the issue but couldn't recognize that I wrote these few lines. A quick check of the git history showed, that my colleage changed my code during my holidays, so I just reverted everything.
After commit and deployment, I called my colleage and told him that I just reverted his changes.
"But now my feature is not working anymore, I had to change it like this!" he answered. I just responded that we will talk about that on monday and look at it together. While I hurried down the stairs, I was thinking why the hell somebody just changes stuff without checking if it affects other functionalities?
This should be basic knowledge for every dev, that if you change existing, working code to make it work with your feature, you have to ensure to not brake anything.
If you can't do that, then create a new function to handle your shit.

In the end, my girlfriend had to wait 30 minutes, because of 4 lines of codes, someone just changed without thinking what else could happen...

Fucking hate it.....
Almost everybody on holidays and I as a Junior have the responsibility that everything should work...
Now since 6h ago internet connection at the main office is down and I can't really log in from Home Office. Just reading and understanding a few tickets and trying to get our partners to maybe shift work to tomorrow so that they can actually work on our systems...

Now I get blamed that I don't show up at work (even though I called there and got said I should stay home) and testers can't work and stuff, although they can do other stuff and everyone should be able to work without problems. PL tries to call a wrong number while not having Teams, the company just switched to and further blames me for not being able to be contacted...
It's not even my fault...

Now I'm not even sure if I should get to Office now for 2h and do nothing there or at the earliest tomorrow morning to maybe fix some stuff, which are not important at all, cause they wouldn't be problems with a working internet connection...

So I'm currently working in outsourcing for a Dutch company. On the 24th several companies close for holiday and my company (so the one that hired me!) makes their employees to go to the office when their outsourcing client closes.

This really grinds my gears (family guy reference anyone? 😂). What's the F word difference of bundling dozens of devs for a day without nothing to do instead of letting them be in their homes??

PS: I'm home that day but I was forced to take a day off...

Cheers and happy holidays to all 🎅

so anyone can share their experience on living away from home in a shared flat and working remotely?

i will be in a similar situation in upcoming months . my office will be 2 day wfo nd 4 day wfh.

for wfo, i think i will be coming home back at 7pm , prepping dinner doing some additional stuff (house chores, refreshing, maybe gym, relaxing, tv etc) and be sleep at 11 pm. i still need to figure out a morning routine tho.

but problem will be in wfh days and Holidays. how do you guys pass that time?

👋 to all my fellows working on saturday.
Let's spill out the real reasons. I will go first :
Working because my manager wants to justify the salary. He wants the team to work more before going to december holidays. Although this one day doesn't make any difference 😑 😑😑😑😑😑😑

Hi Guys if you can share your opinion/experience in what I wrote below it would help me a lot, thanks !

Im a full-stack developer with 4 years of experience, worked with different technologies in backend, frontend, mobile etc.. so I have general knowdgele of how systems works and how they should be built.

So I work as CTO in a startup, Im for almost 2 years here I started here with minimum salary (I decided that, because they said to me we are startup and such things so I wanted to help) 2.2k Euros and it has been almost 2 years without pay rise, so last month I asked for pay rise, but they said to me that they dont have money and sent me +300 euros as gift.

One week ago I wrote to them again (co-founders) that I have a lot of pressure and I dont know if I can handle all of that for much time he told me that I got +300 euro pay rise (which it was gift from them in first place, I refused them to sent this to me), but TODAY CEO and Co-Founder wrote to again me asking if I accept +300 euro pay rise because they can afford to pay me 2.5k or if I dont accept this they can sent me 2.2k again (they think that 2.5k is maximum that they can pay me right now and that this is enough for me).

I want to ask you guys what would you do, would you accepting something like this, considering that right now Im only dev here (yes Im only dev) and Im taking care of these(yes all of these) :

1. Company Website (react js)
2. Web Admin Panel (that clients use to manage their data)(react js)
3. Web Application (that visitors use to see client data)(react js)
4. Widgets (some code that is integrated into clients websites it's same as application, but integrated directly to client website)(react js)
5. Backend of all 3 apps mentioned above (asp.net core)
6. AWS Architecture( some of services : Cognito,Lambda,RDS,API Gateway,CloudFront,S3)
7. DevOps Role

Also consider that I didnt take holidays for 1 year now working on weekends too :)

Started working on a project in january, knew nothing of the platform i was working on. Now after 4 months and multiple holidays and vacations(festivals and stuff). I have a "running" prototype of the app. BUT its not configured properly, i know this much. But i have lost track of the changes and files, basically i don't know how it all is working.

!rant

Not entirely Dev related so sorry 'bout that, but I have some form of vacation to spend, where I'll be at home working on my thesis project and preparing my last exam (wooo almost done with the shit). Since most of my friends are away for the holidays and I'm a huge fucking nerd and also somewhat a shitty weeb, can anyone suggest some anime related with tech or coding? I know of ghost in the shell but there are so many I don't know which might suit me. I kinda prefer modern/digitalised graphic styles (common in 2012+ animes to say). Also, girl-friendly to be able to watch them with my gf is a plus but not a necessity.

Eyup DevRant Devs - First off Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to everyone working hard on this platform - In the New Year, please, please, PLEASE can you fix the iOS App not repositioning when in Landscape Mode for iPads? Currently typing this sideways on my iPad Pro 2020 on the latest iPadOS version, and latest version of the DevRant App; cheers chaps!