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I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.
I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.
I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.
And looking for potential partners to outsource things.
Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.
They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.
Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.
I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".
The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".
Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.40 -
Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him
Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent
Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.
*2 weeks later and still no designs*
Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.
*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*
Boss: hurry up!
*1 week later*
Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol
Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it
*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.
* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*
*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol
*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*
*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*
New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(
Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...
*Silence*
Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested
*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*
Seems legit?16 -
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.2 -
On a holiday, Manager called for a sudden meeting to discuss an unimportant topic.
I pretended that my audio was not working. The meeting ended in 5 minutes and I went back to sleep.11 -
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!!"16 -
So everyone is complaining about working from home. Fuck it, I love it. My productivity was never higher than now.
I didn't have an office space before at home, so I created one. I spent money on it but that's good because this whole corona thing made me realize how much I don't miss:
- company politics, who said what said
- commute
- people bothering you in the middle of you doing something
- catching-up breaks with people I hardly care about asking about holiday I took last year but they "ahhh thought it was just last week! so did you eat anything nice?"
- answering forced "any plans for the weekend" questions
- participating in conversations about nothing
The worst thing is that I'm actually a very sociable person 😂 so working from home means I can go meet my friends at 1630 sharp instead of 19.
I just don't need those fake relationships at work I guess.
Im already discussing with my manager possibility to work from home most of the time and I think I'll soon start to search for something 100% remote.11 -
So , at my first day as an intern in the company that would probably be employing me, i heard some great lines that made me gain so much hope in humanity -.-
From HR :
- "your timings will be 10 to 7 , 6 days a week."(even though it takes 4 hours to commute to and fro from that place). "We have a 9 hour a day schedule, and anything between 5-9 hours is considered a half day"
- "we have a 1 paid holiday per month scheme. And that starts after first 3 months, and yes TitanLannister, that also applies to interns. You may take a leave but that won't be considered for payment"(even though the said intern's internship is of 3 months and he already notified that he would be needing a 10 day leave for his exams and a few other college related work leaves )
-"here is an official laptop you could work upon(has average specs but inferior to my laptop). Note that its already loaded with slack, and a browser history tracking software, so you might wanna log out of that if you want to use it for personal use. Also if you want to use your personal laptop, then these tools would still be added into your laptop"
-" all the things mentioned above are connected to this fingerprint card that will automatically upload those details on an hr software and enable history tracker "
-"take your time, but we need this task done by you in next 24 hours. There is no deadline, but we need this work done asap"
In the words on purgatony:
"This is hardly working
This is hardly living
This is my JOB"15 -
I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.
one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?
I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.
He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.
Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time
2 hours later...
Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........
At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work
Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....
This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄3 -
With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.
YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻4 -
So it's summer holiday now, and I'm working about 3 days a week doing some c++ qt stuff. Why does everyone I talk to tell me I should "take it easy" or "enjoy my freedom" instead of "working so hard". I'd be bored out of my mind if I didn't (no I do not have a social life, nor do I enjoy basking on a beach burning cancer into my skin in some foreign country). In short, I dislike the dutch mentality of throwing away your money each summer holiday to be bored in another country for a week and telling everyone who doesn't off.6
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When I was in college I was working on a game in Java using Slick2D. My folks were away on holiday so I had the ability to drink in the house (I was over 18). I worked on this coursework piece whilst drinking.
The next morning I went into college with my work and found that it had a massive memory leak that was included by the work that I’d done whilst under the influence.
The issue was fixed (quite easily tbh) but everyone in my class reminded me for the rest of the year...5 -
Once again I have loads.
My best teachers were...
The contractor that taught me C#, ASP MVC and SQL Server. Dude was a legend, so calm and collected. He wanted to learn JQuery and Bootstrap so at the same time as teaching, he was learning from me. Such an inspirational person, to know your subordinates still have something to teach you. He also taught me a lot about working methodically and improving my pragmatism.
The other, in school I studied computing A-Level. 100% scored at least one of the exams... basically I knew my stuff.
But, as a kid, I didn’t know how to formulate my answers, or even string together coherent answers for the exams. This dude noticed, first thing he did was said “well you’re better at this bit than me, practice but you’ll be fine” (manually working out two’s complement binary of a number).
Second thing he did was say “you know what man, you know what you’re on about but nobody else is ever going to know that”.
He helped me on the subjects I wasn’t perfect on, then he helped me on formulating my answers correctly.
He also put up with my shit attendance, being a teenager with a motorcycle who thinks he knows it all, has its downsides.
As a result, I aced the hell out of that course, legendary grades and he got himself a bit of a bonus for it to use on his holiday. Everyone’s a winner.
Liam, Jason, if you guys are out there I owe you both thanks for making me the person I am today.
The worst, I’ve had too many to name... but it comes down to this:
- identify your students strengths and weaknesses, focus on the weaknesses
- identify your own and know when to ask for help yourself
- be patient, learning hurts.
You can always tell a passionate teacher from one who’s there for the paycheck.1 -
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.4 -
I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.
So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.
As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.
On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose
I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.
The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.
The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.
Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.
I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.
Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.
What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?23 -
tl;dr
I am either the most responsible or the biggest idiot in the team
----------
TODAY.. oh boy.. fuck today. Like literally tuck this day and this shit. We ware doing releases for an integration we ware working on for ~1.5 months ... Aaand things went wrong - I guess we didn't make a sacrifice to the release gods - finally at around 8:30pm, being pretty much the last in the whole fucking office after a few last minute fixes I get my skinny ass on my way to grab a Corona and enjoy the public holiday tomorrow ...
Aaaaand I wish that was it, it turns out some things ware forgotten by.. well everyone aaaaand shit doesn't work (ofc ffs, why should it).. I see a slack notif and the feeling of dread gets me a couple of messages back I promise I'll be there in a couple of hours tops..and here I am ranting doing shit covering my desk with "food", hating my fucking self...
Me and the Head of Dev are literally the only ones working ATM... -
The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.
Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.
Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.
A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).
This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.
Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:
1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.
2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).
3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.
4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.
5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.
He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.
Here are some shitty stuff he has done:
1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.
2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.
3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.
4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.
One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.
While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.
Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.
I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.
Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.
Thanks for reading this far!5 -
Voice in my head: You should do something good this weekend.
My body: Yeah let's code up a community fostering app for the neighborhood.....
Two Nights later:
Amidst a half empty bottle of Jack ...
Voice in my head: dude why isn't this shit working, you've done this billions of times.
My body: It's your fault...time to drink you away.
And like that,
At the break of day,
A hungover and glazed developer,
Debugged! as they say.
Community app launched
On memorial holiday,1 -
Damn fucking channel diggers. One of them probably cut our fibre cable when working on the water pipeline to our house. And tomorrow is a holiday here, so no FTTH until at least wednesday (I am not that optimistic, though).
My mobile data plan is already stretched and I was very motivated to do something on my thesis.4 -
Boss: so we've got to call an app to verify data in this project. But I've got no more info and I'm on holiday next week. Please contact GuyA next week.
Me: ok I guess?
*writes email to GuyA*
GuyB: GuyA is on holiday please hold the line
*1 week later*
GuyA: we need more time it's not ready yet
*2 weeks later?
Me: so?
GuyA: yeah it's ready here's the wsdl etc your client already has the password
*1 week later*
Me: yeah so I got the data but the api says my auth isn't working
GuyB: yeah your user isn't activated on the test system. I'm gonna forward that and come back at you
*1 week later*
GuyA: so we're going live in about 2 weeks hows testing going?
Me: well I'm still waiting for the response and activation
*suddenly it works*
Me: yeah so auth is working but i can't find any data. Is there any special test data?
GuyA: oh no there is NO test data on the test system. You need to wait for GuyB but he us not here today...
Me: are you fking kidding Me?????
... no response since then and it's been days.... -
Regain work life balance.
The last few years especially with COVID I've started to do way to much for the company's I've worked for. Working while I was coughing my lungs out when I had COVID. Working during my holiday because it was finally a fun feature to develop. Working in lunch breaks because people would call me all the time (remote there are no boundaries)
I left that company on a good note, started actually healthy as the new company actually understands flex working. However as I gained responsibly more meetings started to appear also causing rushed lunches no more walks of sport activities. Than I was lead in a project and because of some personal circumstances (death in the family) that was running long. Again started to work overtime trying to catch up.
I need to stop doing this. Caring is fine but I just give to much when I feel responsible. Good thing is that my current company actually wants to help me with this.1 -
I'm new to Australia and trying to get a job here. The visa process is sorta complicated, but let me say that you usually start with a Working Holiday Visa (6 months work) and go on from there.
Had an interview the other day. First smalltalk, then coding questions, then hands-on exercises, then I was talking to 3 different people about their experiences in the company. Overall 2 hours plus 3 hours train. The same day I get a email with a positive response and I should send in my papers (passport, Visa etc.) for the contact. I stopped sending out applications at this point.
5 days later (!) I get an email telling me they won't hire me on that visa.
Crushed my motivation for rest of the week 💀3 -
Fuck the Fourth of July.
I was already feeling pretty unpatriotic after all the terrible things the USA has been doing lately, and then to top it all off, they closed down almost every street within a one-mile radius of my apartment just because I happen to live near the place where they're shooting off fireworks. I spent the evening with my girlfriend, enjoying a nice dinner and sort of forgetting it was even really a holiday, then got in my car at 9:00 expecting to be home by 9:30. Nope. I spent over an hour driving in a huge circle around my apartment, searching for even one single road that the police hadn't closed to traffic. Finally managed to get into the area on a back road and get home, but it took so long that I went through all five stages of grief before I got home at 11:00.
They also closed the nearest bridge across the river so I couldn't go shopping for groceries today, either. My pantry is almost completely empty. At least I'm working from home tomorrow so I'll have time to buy food then.8 -
I used to be at a company where it was kind of expected that you worked long days, which made it quite difficult to balance work and private life. It got so out of control that I was even called to work while I was on my holiday. At first I started with shutting off my phone after work hours, but the real solution I found was moving away from that company.
Pretty much everyone at my new company just stops working when the clock hits 4 or 5 pm unless there is something critical that needs to be done. Seeing that also discourages me (and everyone else) from working long days. We are also quite open about our workload so if anyone thinks they’re overwhelmed they can find a relevant person to talk to and eventually a solution is found. The salary isn’t incredible, but the work/life balance and the benefits I get are just way better than getting paid more and living to work.
I think a lot of people go for the high salaries, most of the time disregarding the other part of the equation. If the company has a meh work culture with low regard to employees’ work/life balance, there isn’t much the employee can do besides finding a place to work with better wlb. I’d pick a great work/life balance and peace of mind to a high salary any day.1 -
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*.7 -
So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.
And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).
And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.
First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.
Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.
Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.
Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉
What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆. -
So I went into work yesterday on my day off right? (Mardi Gras) to finish up a pretty significant addition to our application. I only had 2 days to work on it before we were to show it off to potential buyers today, so I came in to get it to at least a working state that we can improve later...
Well, that wasn't good enough. First thing my boss said when he saw it was, "this isn't what we had talked about". No dip-shit, this is what you get when you have 1 programmer working on their holiday. Like, I know we talked about this massive content update, but we talked about LITERALLY LESS THAN A WEEK AGO. I really don't know what you expect, but I made it very clear that all I could get done was a prototype at best. Not to mention that this whole app is a hard-coded "fake-prototype" that was never supposed to make it this far.... -
Rant and opinions wanted. Its a long one.
I have been working on a project for a month and a half. For the first week I was requesting designs that I got about 2 of out of 15. For the next week and a half the designer was on holiday so I couldn't do anything but delivered a few more designs once he got back.
This takes us 2 weeks in already. I have other things to do as well so at the same time I work on support tickets and some bespoke development coming in.
I get given 2 or 3 more designs and can't get anything else out of the designer after waiting a week so I have to design everything myself as I go and build it. Something I have never done before.
We are now 3 and a half weeks in. My boss randomly tells my pm it needs to be demo ready the next day. I work furiously to hack something together. It works but key functionality is missing.
I move house and work from home for a week and a half. I do my best but the project is full of bugs and the CSS is horrible because I didn't know what I was making at any stage. It is therefore CSS rules repeated in IDs everywhere.
My colleagues join me on the project because my boss has decided to try and sell it tomorrow.
They run through it and find all the bugs left from me working furiously to get things done quickly. Things like no search pagination and missing validation.
My boss is now pisses at me because the project is not finished, my colleagues are now all working on it. Throughout it all he knew the designer was not delivering me anything and that I was struggling.
Am I in the wrong for writing shit code that came about because I was coding with no idea of what the finished project should look like? Is he in the wrong for dumping this on me and just letting me get on with it even though he knew there were no designs?
Btw I am just finishing a 1 year internship and before this have never done web dev before.
Discuss.7 -
hey guys i need advise.
I currently got a job that i love with a lot of freedom. but the payment is not good and i am concerned that the company won't be there in the next 5 to 10 years.
I am a 25 years old, self taught programmer and my current employer is the only one I ever worked for. Recently I browsed xing and found a company which searches an employee with exactly my skillset (they need someone for a specific ERP system in which I am damn good at). The company is half an our away - my current job 20 minutes away. Also I think because the person they are looking for is rare because you need technical knowledge of windows and doors and you need to know how to administrate this erp system plus knowing some programming stuff.
There is also a very big company 10 minutes (walking) from home where I could apply. I think at this company i would start lower but could maybe study and working for them with higher expectations in long term (just google Hettich in germany here in the village this is big)
The problem I currently have is the following. If the company I work for is closing in lets say ten years, then I am 35 without a degree. I have a girlfriend - want to marry her and getting a child.
I have holiday now and i will apply for both companies. I feel very uncomfortable doing this because the company I work for is the company of my granddad. I don't have the balls to tell him that even if i get a raise that does not solve the 35 years issue.
Well, first of all I will just apply. Lets see how much value I have.
But I thought that asking you all may give me some other input to take into account. What are your thoughts on this?
PS: just a formal "sorry for my english" and thanks for reading6 -
It's the 5th day of my holiday, circa 10.20 AM. So far I've spent around 30h programming, and learned React (already having experience with the other 2 major ME*N stacks I decided it was time to give it a go), made a small 2D platformer with Unity and realised I really like writing unit tests. Maybe next I refactor the app I just made to use GraphQL and TypeScript next, since I'm in the mood of trying something new.
Funny how my significant other thought being on holiday actually would mean a break from programming - no, it means more time to spend learning and trying things you don't have the time or energy to after a working day of Vue/C#!
(To clarify, I would not spend this much time programming on my holiday, if my better half wasn't away from home for this week - won't probably spend nearly as much time on it for the remaining 4 weeks...)2 -
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...3 -
Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :
Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):
1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india
Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):
1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it
2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech
3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.
4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.
4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him
5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster
Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?3 -
Hire are a few tips to up productivity on development which has worked for me:
1) Use a system of at least 16gb ram when writing codes that requires compilation to run.
2) Test your code at most 3 times within an hour. This will combat the bad habit of practically checking changes on every new block you write.
3) Use internet modem in place of mobile hotspot and keep mobile data switched off. This will combat interruptions from your IM contacts and temptations to check your WA status update when working.
4) Implementation before optimisation... This is really important. It's tempting to rewrite a whole block even when other task are pending. If it works just leave it as is and move on to the next bull to kill, you can come back later to optimise.
5) Understand that no language is the best. Sometimes folks claim that PHP is faster than python. Okay I say but let's place a bet and I'll write a python code 10 times faster than your PHP on holiday. Focus more on your skill-set than the language else you'd find yourself switching frameworks more than necessary.
6) Check for existing code before writing an implementation from scratch... I bet you 50 bucks to your 10 someone already wrote that.
7) If it fails the first and then the second time... Don't try the third, check on StackOverflow for similar challenge.
8) When working with testers always ask for reproducible steps... Don't just start fixing bugs because sometimes their explanation looks like a bug when other times it's not and you can end up fixing what's never there.
9) If you're a tester always ask for explanations from the dev before calling a bug... It will save both your time and everybody's.
10) Don't be adamant to switching IDE... VSCode is much productive than Notepad++. Just give it a try an see for yourself.
My 10 cents.1 -
So, I have been working for a company XYZ for about 2 years now and for this 2 years, we are just two engineers handling everything. The job is becoming super stressful and time consuming, the founders dictates how the engineering team operate, ranging from choosing a third party service we are to integrate into the platform without letting us know and also study the api to see if it will be the most viable one to use.
Imagine using a third party service that you can't get through to when something is unclear?
I and my team mate has asked the founders to hire engineers so the work load on us will reduce, they said it's on their mind ( this request was made months ago), fast forward last week, we were told to start interviewing interns ( I don't have problem with interns working with us ), but what we asked for was experience engineers working with us but the founders did entire 180 degree of what we asked.
We have been asking for a QA Engineer for months and months now, all we get is we will hire one, and till now nothing is been done.
Following good software practice has been a problem in company XYZ, we have been finding it difficult to write test and documentation (this shit makes me seriously sick and hate myt po self).
On top of all this, the salary is shitty, there are no benefits, we are coerced into working during weekends (most times), and we are also told to work during our holiday, no single health insurance.
I think I have come to that point where I will have to say good bye ( but I am finding it difficult to do this).
Any suggestions ? Should I wait until I get another job and then I resign from company XYZ or just resign.5 -
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 🎅2 -
i need some advice on how to deal with office culture. i am a covid graduate and this is my first wfo job. it is technically hybrid but quickly turning into full time office, and there are several examples of scenarios, where i am not only feeling just frustrated, but hurt and retaliation.
my whole team is in a different city except 4 of us : pm, sr ios dev, me(android dev) and a sr android dev. in our office, there are 50 more people , but i rarely need to contact anyone except my team from another city or these 3 folks. also, we 4 are new joinees like just joined in last 2 months.
so let's discuss the problems.
1. there have been very shitty decisions that are leading to loss of everyone just because a few are unlucky. here's an example. on may 1, international labor day, we 4 had a leave showing. but it was not showing for other people. maybe because ourbleave calender was aligned to other city or maybe coz we are new, idk. but someone told the boss of manager, and he mailed to us that there is no leave :/ wtf
2. another news: our is shifting from we work to another co-working space. it is being heard that office will be now 3/5 days instead of 2/5 . when we joined, it was showing 3/5 days in our hr portal, but hr assured that it is 2/5 days. and we would still go 2/5 days only. but like that holiday scenario, people are buzzing and talking, and they might end up getting our 2/5 culture tonget fucked too. this is very stupid, since i am wasting 4 hrs everyday travelling.
3. let's talk about the snakes in the 4 ppl group. the ios dev and manager are sweet looking girl snakes. ios girl is the meek snake and pm is the wicked snake. once i discussed with ios girl about how we need to rush every morning at 8 am to reach office as our standup is at 10. i told her that i would raise this matter in standup and when i did, she was just mum as fuck. didn't even voted a fucking yes when the boss said "ok let's have a vote on it" . i mean man what the fuck are your scared of? the boss won't kill you bitch for clocking 30 mins late
4. the other snake is pm. i am pretty sure she was one of the people for which that leave was not showing and she informed the boss's boss. day before that i told her jokingly that once i leave the office, I won't be opening my laptop and since today it was decided that tomorrow is the holiday, I am unreachable and therefore enjoying the vacay due to lack of latest info.
the bitch fucking whatsapped me to say that she got a call from boss that tomorrow's a working day. it would have been the perfect fucking leave.
I am pretty sure a lot of people are hating me for leaving so early too. i oeave at 5pm , as i have to be at gym by 7. also 1 minute past 5 and i would be travelling in a jam packed metro, so yeah, no thanks. but this bitch is definitely telling my boss about this.
5 finally the biggest snake is this *cough-cough* "sr" android guy. dude's code is so shittu and hacky, i can sense that he didn't tried to understand the class and just added a function at any place he felt fit. he also is a schemy bitch, as he has somehow convinced noss to let him wotk just 1/5 days in wfo.
but i didn't cared about him much until now. yesterday i sent a link regarding latest Android dev update in the official channel as a fun read, and his reply was "probably should have seen theeynote yesterday" bitch it wasn't even mentioned in that keynote! i just checked its summary after his message, but then it was too late to retaliate.
and now that i see, he always tries to be smug and cool. not that i care, roast me all you want in front of your crush, I won't mind, but if you're trying to show people that am not an able dev, then buckle up bitch, either you or me are counting last breaths.3 -
So... the guy from my last rant completely screwed up a site he'd been working on for our company (blaming the web hosters for their "shitty config" while it was just an error in his .htaccess).
He then proceeded to do it all from scratch (instead of using already existing stuff like he did before).
He asked me to help him out.
I put as conditions that we where going to do it "my" way, with the tools I am pushing at work (Docker, Git, CakePHP and Sass).
He rejected it (as always) saying: "I don't care if the site looks good or works good, I just want something out of the door ASAP".
So I declined because I just can't work with that mentality.
He asked an intern (of which he actually has no saying but w/e) whom barely understands the basics of HTML and CSS to help him out.
Intern agreed and they started working on it.
Two weeks in and the guy takes a nice two week holiday, leaving the intern all by himself :)
something something "I want it out of the door asap"...
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