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Colegue could not find data when running a very important report.
I did some research and found out that there was no data for for the month they searched . They ensured my boss that they did upload the data and that the program just does not work.
I spent two days of work trying to find out what the problem could be, under boss's pressure.
Still there was no data in the database or a record that there was ever any for that month.
The deadline passed. We got fined and only after that the colegue reilised that she had never generated the data, so there was not even data to upload.
Now it is my fault cause I never told her that she needed to do that.
I am the new guy and she has been working the same job for 7 years now. Like WTF1 -
Every time I do a dirty fix and someone in my MR comments "have you investigated the root cause" I wanna kill myself.
No bro, I havent investigated the root cause because this ticket is 3 months old and was passed around like a hot potato from team to team until it got assigned to me.
If you want I can add a comment to refactor this in the future. As far as Im concerned any refactors are out of scope, also I atleast came up with some kind of solution that noone else was able to in 3 months. So im not gonna waste my time on refactoring this piece of shit code under immense pressure from management who thinks it was me who dragged this ticket for 3 months.
Its working, it doesnt cause any side effects, we all gonna die soon and nothing really matters, so fuck off.9 -
ANTI VIRUSES AREN'T ALWAYS YOUR FRIEND!
So I'm under a little pressure to get an assignment done so I came home an was planning on working on it but Windows had other plans and decided to finish its update which I suspect copied my hard drive and uploaded it to the NSA at dial up speed because it it forever!!
But anyway back to the text in caps lock... I started working on it then when I hit compile I got an "access denied" error in the console and didn't know what the f*** was going on. So I decided to copy my filed to another directory and tried again... amazingly this worked so I carried on and after about 2 hours I get the same error -_- So instead of messing around and loosing my work I decided to commit it... but I cant... again "access denied" error.
After threatening my computer with a trip out the window, I finally decided to reboot it... cause "have you tried turning it off and on again" kept on rattling in my head.
After logging in I tried again and still the same error... Then I opened up my anti virus dashboard and went through the logs and found the screen shot attached.....
19 -
Once, I overheard a conversation between my former PM and a client during a phone call.
Client: I will send the final draft of the project by Thursday.
PM: That's great to hear!
Client: When can I expect the updates to review the changes after the draft is sent? I need to present it at a meeting this weekend.
PM: It should be ready by Friday without fail!
Client: Excellent! Thank you. I will be expecting it.
PM: Sure, goodbye.
(After the call, PM joined the team.)
PM: So, team, the client for Project-A will be sending us a new draft for review and updates. They are putting a lot of pressure on us and need it to be ready by Friday at the latest. We need to treat this with a sense of urgency.
(After hearing this, we felt compelled to respond.)
Me: There's no way they would expect us to deliver an unseen draft within a day. Both the backend and Figma team members were forced to work last weekend, on Saturday, because you mentioned that Project B was behind schedule and the client needed an update by Monday. We simply can't continue working like this.
Backend guy 2: I also worked last Sunday on Project B.
Me: We overheard you telling the client that they should expect an update by Friday. It seems like you're the one directly putting the team under pressure, even though we still have three ongoing projects with tight deadlines.
(The office fell into an uncomfortable silence.)
(PM left the office without saying a word.)
Later on, I heard that he contacted the client to reschedule the expected time of arrival (ETA) after receiving the draft.7 -
I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.6 -
Lately, in the company I work for, it's becoming the norm for the dev to finish workdays at 10pm or 11pm, but we still get yelled at when we arrive after 9am. Anyway, every week, the PMs and salesmen have a big meeting to debrief how everything is working so well in this so wonderful company, and whatever. From what I've been told, it's just a big session of self-satisfaction, applause, and gossips.
During the two or three last meetings, some PMs dared to point out that the dev felt underestimated and constantly under pressure. Last time, the boss of the managers answered: "Developers just like to complain."
Yeah, right! We work like hell everyday to respect deadlines of underestimated projects, we have to fight to get hardware, and even a good chair is a precious resource!
Ultimately, another PM trainee said projects were late because dev are just laughing all day long... Go figure!
I feel like most of IT companies treat dev like inferior robots :(5 -
I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.
First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.
That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.
This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.
We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.
TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.9 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? So many things. Here is another...
A developer purposely forged international shipping documents by 'hard-coding' data to get around international shipping restrictions (ex. we can't sell 'Widgets' to Germany...so under the category he would replace the value with 'light bulb'). He was 'under pressure' to make keep the money rolling in no matter what.
We were eventually 'caught', fined over $300,000 (which was better than the $10,000 per offense and we had thousands of offenses).
For this major frack-up, 'Rob' was promoted to manager of the International department, got to travel (including his wife) to several European countries, and eventually obtained a company-paid MBA degree.
'Rob' liked to joke about how he would sometimes have to pinch himself how lucky he was by working for such stupid people (yes, he used the word 'stupid') and how gullible government investigators were.
"All I had to do was say 'its a bug in Windows' or some other kind of nonsense and they believed me."
'Rob' quit 3 months after receiving his MBA degree (again, 100% company paid) and the international department closed due to some potential illegal activity.2 -
So about two months ago in my consulting firm I was asked to replace a colleague on a project (node and Angular). The project is only a few months old but it’s already a total clusterfuck. DB is very poorly designed. It’s supposed to be a relational database but there’s not a trace of a foreign key or any key for that matter and I’ve seen joins like tableA.name = tableB.description (seriously, that’s your relation??). The code is a mess with entire blocks of code copied from another project and many parts of the code aren’t even used. He didn’t even bother renaming variables so they would make sense in the context they were shamelessly thrown into. The code is at best poorly typed if not typed at all.
During our dailies I sometimes express my frustration with my other colleagues as I very politely allude to my predecessor’s code as being hard to work with. (They are all “good friends" with him). I always get the same response from my colleagues: "yeah but you’ve gotta understand Billybob was under a lot of pressure. The user stories were not well defined. He didn’t have time to do a proper job". That type of response just makes me boil inside.
Because you think I have time to deal with this shit? You don’t think I’m working with the same client and his user stories that are barely intelligible? How long does it take to write type definitions for parameters going into a function? That’s right, 30 seconds at most? Maybe a minute if it’s a more elaborate object? How much time do you think you’ll save yourself with a properly typed function or better yet an interface? Hard to tell but certainly A LOT MORE than those 30 seconds you lost (no, the 30 seconds you INVESTED) in writing that interface!!!
FUCK people with their excuses! Never tell me you don’t have time to do a proper job! You’ve wasted HOURS of my time just because you were too fucking lazy to type your functions, too lazy to put just a little more thought into designing your tables, too lazy to rename a variable so that it’s name actually makes sense where it’s being used. It’s not because you were short on time. You’re just lazy!
FUCK!!!!!!3 -
Due to covid, mgrs decided to fire 10% but could not negotiate schedule increase with internal IT. With no promotions or hikes, few full stacks we have leave.
Now am working with 2 data engg doing cloud java microsvs work while learning. Their first delivery was applauded by their mgr who is under pressure to retain them.
I as arch review their code. No unit tests, print statements all around, shoddy exception handling, variable naming issues. We have Sonar by default in our build. They ignore the report. I ask them about it. Seems mgr told them he is getting a contract person from another team on part time basis to do/fix. I share my confusion.
Mgr calls me up and checks if we can put it as tech debt backlog and deploy to prod !!!1 -
So today i had to visit this banks site to do updation on a document but for some reason the modal dialogue that was supposed to open was not working and i couldn't continue to next step.
On an attempt to contact customer support, i browsed the site for relevant details. As i do that, i observed this site is so shitty that it can't even properly render on Google Chrome! It was an horrific experience finding info in that site.
Finally found the customer support form and as I clicked the "submit" it didn't give any feedback whether it was processing or not. After like over a minute of uncertainty, it got redirected to a 404 page.
Frustrated, I went on to their twitter and I almost tweeted calling out their terrible web developer team.
But, my instinct told me to calm my titties and i tweeted a regular confused user tweet.
Got their attention and few hrs later i got a phone call from someone working there. He didn't sound like a customer service representative from the way he spoke. He told it was an issue with their website and had fixed it. I tried again as he was on the line but it was not working for me. And then i shared screenshot of the issue. He tested it again and said it was working for them. Still not working for me. ( Probably cache issue on my end ). Thought he would suggest to clear cache and try. But he asked me to try on another computer since it was working for him.
As i searched for a another system, i got a call from customer support guy and he said he will do the update on their end and told me to tell details. Since the info was not that sensitive in nature, I went with it.
Pretty sure the other guy i talked to was a developer.
This made me think - had i tweeted out a mean tweet calling out their shitty website it would have been probably awkward talking to him - I'd have to be mean again. It could've ruined his day, maybe he was under pressure from his pm that he had to make the phone call. He probably hates his job already managing that shitty legacy code..
I don't know - either way, I'm glad i was able to keep myself calm and not be a source of negative energy. -
Bootcamps get you up and running in coding quickly. If you are a programmer, companies are only interested on how quickly, error free and cheaply you produce marketable output. Bootcamps enable this.
More or less you are not more than a former assembly line worker putting parts on a car platform. Your value is not very high as you may be exchanged at any time at their will.
Nevertheless, you can earn money quickly. You trade in your youth and time which might be a dead end in the long-term. Trends go to machine learning, artificial intelligence. They will not need Bootcamp people and code workers.
It is better you set up Bootcamps and sell them versus absolving this. Like selling shovels during the gold rush, but not working in the mud of Alaska by yourself.
Your choice is: Making quick money, which fades anyway; or striving for the long-term future proof career.
C/S degrees from Technical Universities of reputation give to you the right direction under a strategic consideration. Companies which pay well, or freelancing with a solid acknowledged background, will always look for top graduates. People from Bootcamps are just OK for hammering assembly line coding. Even worse with SCRUM in one noisy room under enormous team server pressure controls, counting your lines of code per minute, with pale people all around. And groups of controllers never acknowledging nor trusting your work.
To acquire a serious degree, a Bachelor is nothing. Here, in INDIA, Bachelor now is what a former high school grade was. You must carry a diploma or Masters degree combined with internships at big companies with high brand recognition. This will require 4–6 years of your lifetime. You can support this financially by working part-time freelancing as making some projects front- or back-end web, data analysis and else.
Bootcamp people will lose in the long-term. They are the modern cannon fudder of software production.
It is your choice. Personally, I would never do Bootcamps. Quality and sustainability require time, deep studies and devotion. -
I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.
Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…
Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.
Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…
The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).
Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?1 -
<!doctype confusedRant 😕>
Plot: we need to release our website in two weeks which holds at least a thousand pages. All these pages are manually migrated from the old website, which doesn't have a database. Current status: 650 pages/1000 are completed, 40 different templates need to be adapted. I'm alone on these templates, my colleagues create the pages and fill the new database
So I'm working on the templates a WebDev coded for our website on a licensed CMS, and had this decently simple html block that looks like a square and consisting of roughly this (Emmet style):
a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p
After adding another <a> element inside the p, I noticed that my <a> wouldn't display and bust the whole look of the square.
Just for more details, the CSS the dev made is ultra specified (meaning each element is too precisely "described" : div.class .child .child2 { /* styles */ } when it could be .class .child2 for example). Also, the templates he made need to be compatible with any "module" the website has, thus the need of this high specificity
So I fired up the DevTools to check what happened, and had:
Expected: a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p > a
Actual result: some new a.area were wrapping the <strong>, the <p> and the <a> I just added. The source code was not showing any of this but just the rules I initially wrote - the expected result
Wtf?! I thought the JS the dev made was adding elements. I disabled said JS, and bam, these a.area were still wrapping everything!! What black magic would add these stupid tags I never asked for.
So I went looking in the CSS files in case some wizardry was happening, but everything was OK.
I tried changing my structure, changing tag (swapping a.area to p.area or without .area), HTML just said "nope, have those please".
Eventually I rewrote my own module out of frustration after three quarters of an hour fiddling with this stupid "module". I hate losing time for such shenanigans and under a lot of pressure because of deadlines.
Still haven't figured why those <element>.area would wrap everything out of nowhere...3 -
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...3 -
When you’re working under high pressure, a coworker writes you that you have a bug in the new feature which is blocking him and you start swearing about what an idiot you are...
And you then realize that this is the team chat with SM, PO etc., and not the private chat..
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