As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

This code review gave me eye cancer.

So, first of all, let me apologize to anyone impacted by eye cancer, if that really is a thing... because that sounds absolutely horrible. But, believe me, this code was absolutely horrible, too.

I was asked to code review another team's script. I don't like reviewing code from other teams, as I'm pretty "intense" and a nit-picker -- my own team knows and expects this, but I tend to really piss off other people who don't expect my level of input on "what I really think" about their code...

So, I get this script to review. It's over 200 lines of bash (so right away, it's fair game for a boilerplate "this should be re-written in python" or similar reply)... but I dive in to see what they sent.

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

So, I certainly cannot violate IP rules and post any of the actual code here (be thankful - be very thankful), but let me just say, I think it may be the worst code I've ever seen. And I've been coding and code-reviewing for upwards of 30 years now. And I've seen a LOT of bad code...

I imagine the author of this script was a rebellious teenager who found the google shell scripting style guide and screamed "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!" at it and then set out to flagrantly violate every single rule and suggestion in the most dramatic ways possible.

Then they found every other style guide they could, and violated all THOSE rules, too. Just because they were there.

Within the same script... within the SAME CODE BLOCK... 2-space indentation... 4-space indentation... 8-space indentation... TAB indentation... and (just to be complete) NO indentation (entire blocks of code within another function of conditional block, all left-justified, no indentation at all).

lowercase variable/function names, UPPERCASE names, underscore_separated_names, CamelCase names, and every permutation of those as well.

Comments? Not a single one to be found, aside from a 4-line stanza at the top, containing a brief description of that the script did and (to their shame), the name of the author. There were, however, ENTIRE BLOCKS of code commented out.

[ In the examples below, I've replaced indentation spacing with '-', as I couldn't get devrant to format the indentation in a way to suitably share my pain otherwise... ]

Within just a few lines of one another, functions defined as...

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

Another_Function() {
------------stuff
}

There were conditionals blocks in various forms, indentation be damned...

if [ ... ]; then
--stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
--then
----some_stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
then
----something
something_else
--another_thing
fi

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]; then
--SOME_VAR="blah"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
----then
----SOME_VAR="foo"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
--then
--echo "SOME_VAR must be set"
fi

Do you remember the classic "demo" programs people used to distribute (like back in the 90s) -- where the program had no real purpose other than to demonstrate various graphics, just for the sake of demonstrating graphics techniques? Or some of those really bad photo slideshows, were the person making the slideshow used EVERY transition possible (slide, wipe, cross-fade, shapes, spins, on and on)? All just for the sake of "showing off" what they could do with the software? I honestly felt like I was looking at some kind of perverse shell-script demo, where the author was trying to use every possible style or obscure syntax possible, just to do it.

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

There was absolutely no consistency, even within 1-2 adjacent lines. There is no way to maintain this. It's nearly impossible even understand what it's trying to do. It was just pure insanity. Lines and lines of insanity.

I picture the author of this code as some sort of hybrid hipster-artist-goth-mental-patient, chain-smoking clove cigarettes in their office, flinging their own poo at their monitor, frothing at the mouth and screaming "I CODE MY TRUTH! THIS CODE IS MY ART! IT WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR WORLDLY STANDARDS!"

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

Then I contacted my HR hotline to see if our medical insurance covers eye cancer.

The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

I was hired as a senior software engineer. During handover I found out I'm actually replacing the CTO.

I queried why he was leaving and got a simple "just want a break from working" which I found odd.

Fast forward and now I also just want a break from work, permanently. This place has followed every bad practise and big no-no out there. Every bit of software is a built in house knockoff janky piece of crap that doesn't work and makes people's jobs 5000 times harder.

The UI looks worse than Windows 3.1, absolutely horrendous code formatting, worst database structure I've ever seen.

The mere mention of using a team communication tool results in being yelled at from the CEO whom communicates purely via email, who then gets annoyed when you don't reply because they sent the email to a client instead of you.

We get handed printed out "tickets" to work instead of the so called "amazing in house ticket system" built using PHP 5 and is literally crammed into an 800x600 IFrame. Yes a F$*#ing IFRAME!

It's not like we have an outdated TFS server that has work items we can use...

Why not push for changes you say. I have, many times, tried to suggest better tools. The only approval I've gotten is using PhpStorm. Everything else is shutdown immediately and you get the silent treatment.

The CEO hired me to do a job, then micromanages like crazy. I can't make UI changes, I can't make database changes, why? They insists they know best, but has admitted multiple times to not knowing SQL and literally uses a drag and drop database table builder.

Every page in the webapps we make are crammed into 800x600 iframes with more iframes inside iframes. And every time it's pointed out we need to do something, be it from internal staff or client suggestions, the CEO goes off about how the UI is industry leading and follows standards.. what in the actual f....

Literally holding on by a thread here. Why hire a CTO under the guise of being a senior developer but then reduce the work that can be done down to the level of a junior?

Sure the paycheck is really nice but no job is worth the stress, harassment and incompetent leadership from the CEO.

They've verbally abused people to the point they resign, best part is that was simply because the CEO made serious legal mistakes, was told about it by the employee then blamed it on others.

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?

Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.

Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)

Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.

Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.

After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.

Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.

As a developer in Germany, I don't understand why anything related to development like IDEs, git clients and source code documentation should be localized/translated.
Code is written in english, configuration files too. Any technology, any command name in a terminal, every name of a tool or code library, every keyword in a programming language is written in english. English is the language of every developer. And English is simply a required skill for a developer.
Yet almost everything nowadays is translated to many other languages, espacially MS products. That makes development harder for me.

My visual studio menus are a mess of random german/english entries due to 3rd party extensions.

My git client, "source tree" uses wierd translations of the words "push" and "commit". These commands are git features! They should not be translated!

Buttons and text labels in dev tools often cut the text off because they were designed for english and the translated text is bigger and does not fit anymore. Apparently no one is testing their software in translated mode.

And the worst of all: translated fucking exception and error massages! Good luck searching for them online.

Apple does one thing damn right. They are keeping all development related stuff english (IDE, documentation). Not wasting money on translations which no developer needs.

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

Worst experience with higher ups:

The Office team at Microsoft suddenly woke up to the possibility of innovation from the grounds up. We were asked to come up with ideas. The best ideas were to be shortlisted by management.

That's what i had a problem with. People are generally bad at dertermining what will work. So instead of managenst shortlisting, everyone should have run cheap experiments with their ideas and we could then double down on the ones that showed promise. That's what is done at all internet companies. But the Office team's culture hadn't changed from the boxed software days.

I was asked to have faith in the judgement of management.

Well, Ballamer didn't let Office develop mobile apps for Android and Apple. When Nadella took over, he fixed that mistake. But because competitors had already gotten ahead, the Office team had to work on Saturdays for almost a year to ship it quickly. Meaning employees having to unnecessarily sacrifice their family time because of a strategic blunder by the highest management.

So excuse me if I don't have faith in the judgement of management.

I just quit my job!
The company I worked for is a small company founded in Jan of this year and I was there since the early days but wasn't a founder nor a partner.
It was me who decided on which tech stack we should use, which languages, what servers to use, best practices and almost anything related to development. I was the lead developer and project manager for the biggest project they had.
But they decided that I don't deserve to be a partner. I was making more than 50,000 SDG per month for the company but only paid 6,000. The worst thing is that the partners don't know shit about software development. They have no vision for where should the company be in the future.
I just had enough. I already had my own software dev business before joining them, and it was successful.
I am going back to building my own company with my own vision.
I know I made the right decision, but it still hurts leaving a company after u made it what it is today. It is like your own baby and you are abandoning it.
Hopefully, it is for the best.

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

My primary hard disk of 500gb died with all the software, games, family photos and most importantly all my projects in it.
I'm in hell right now. Worst day of my life.

Buckle up kids, this one gets saucy.

At work, we have a stress test machine that trests tensile, puncture and breaking strength for different materials used (wood construction). It had a controller software update that was supposed to be installed. I was called into the office because the folks there were unable to install it, they told me the executable just crashed, and wanted me to take a look as I am the most tech-savvy person there.

I go to the computer and open up the firmware download folder. I see a couple folders, some random VBScript file, and Installation.txt. I open the TXT, and find the first round of bullshit.

"Do not run the installer executable directly as it will not work. Run install.vbs instead."

Now, excuse me for a moment, but what kind of dick-cheese-sniffing cockmonger has end users run VBScript files to install something in 2018?! Shame I didn't think of opening it up and examining it for myself to find out what that piece of boiled dogshit did.

I suspend my cringe and run it, and lo and behold, it installs. I open the program and am faced with entering a license key. I'm given the key by the folks at the office, but quickly conclude no ways of entering it work. I reboot the program and there is an autofilled key I didn't notice previously. Whatever, I think, and hit OK.

The program starts fine, and I try with the login they had previously used. Now it doesn't work for some reason. I try it several times to no avail. Then I check the network inspector and notice that when I hit login, no network activity happens in the program, so I conclude the check must be local against some database.

I browse to the program installation directory for clues. Then I see a folder called "Databases".

"This can't be this easy", I think to myself, expecting to find some kind of JSON or something inside that I can crawl for clues. I open the folder and find something much worse. Oh, so much worse.

I find <SOFTWARE NAME>.accdb in the folder. At this point cold sweat is already running down my back at the sheer thought of using Microsoft Access for any program, but curiosity takes over and I open it anyway.

I find the database for the entire program inside. I also notice at this point that I have read/write access to the database, another thing that sent my alarm bells ringing like St. Pauls cathedral. Then I notice a table called "tUser" in the left panel.

Fearing the worst, I click over and find... And you knew it was coming...

Usernames and passwords in plain text.

Not only that, they're all in the format "admin - admin", "user - user", "tester - tester".

I suspend my will to die, login to the program and re-add the account they used previously. I leave the office and inform the peeps that the program works as intended again.

I wish I was making this shit up, but I really am not. What is the fucking point of having a login system at all when your users can just open the database with a program that nowadays comes bundled with every Windows install and easily read the logins? It's not even like the data structure is confusing like minified JSON or something, it's literally a spreadsheet in a program that a trained monkey could read.

God bless them and Satan condemn the developers of this fuckawful program.

Hey guys :(
The rant will be long.

Today was one of the worst day ever.
I'm feeling so shitty right now.

I'm 19 and I started my apprenticeship about a half year ago on a very small company.
From day one I had many things to do, every day is hard and a new experience. But I'm learning a lot.

Two months ago I had my very first presentation for a client. I was really excited and nervous but everything was fine and the client as well as my boss were proud of me.

Today I should present again a prototype for the same client. But this time not directly personal, instead we did it via TeamViewer. After the client finally found out, how to open and start this shit, the disaster tooked its course.
After explaining him the conzept, I wanted to show him in the software. For some reason it suddenly stopped working. I've just made a change recently which leads in all appeareances to an error .
Because of that error I couldn't proceed, so I have to explain and show him the data I created before I made the changes.
With that everything Just worked fine, I could explain and visualize everything. It didn't Matter and didn't changed anything, only the Name was a Name from me.
The client was very relaxed about this error. He said that it is a prototype , it is not serious.
Furthermore I showed and demonstrated him everything.
But my boss wasn't very surprised and Happy about me. He made me responsable for the error, I should have prepared everything better and this all was Shit.
This made me really,really sad. It sounded so hard.
I know that I've made a mistake, but it's human. I'm only 19. I'm not perfect. Sure, I could have prevented it, if I had tested all possibilites right after I had made the changes again. I prepared the whole presentation on the weekend, on my personal freetime. I spent so often so much time in my freetime just for my job, for my apprenticeship. To get what? A fat bite, a kick in the ass. I'm doing so much, but this is not acknowledged. But when I make something wrong - then I'm the shittiest person.

Damn. Don't know how to handle this situation. This has gone to far today.
Yeah, I could have tested More, but I only tested the existing Data. I prepared the presentation very Well. This is so sad.

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

Forget about Internet explorer compatibility, EMAIL TEMPLATES are the actual worst. Outlook uses the same html rendering engine as MS WORD. It's sooo painful. All the bad practices you had to do 15 years ago, you have to do when you write email templates.

YOU WILL NOT KNOW PAIN until you have to make an email template, that works in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, OUTLOOK, outlook.com, outlook for mac, MOBILE, Android, the gmail app, IOS, apple mail, and so on. And after you make an unholy abomination of table garbage, then having to make it responsive/mobile friendly after all that!

If something is broken in one client, fixing it will break something in a different client! And then having to take a stab in the dark to try to fix it and then sending yet another test email (which costs $ per test)

I must have slashed decades off my life having to build email templates. It really is horrendous. There are frameworks like Zurb for email that at least let you feel like you're using a modern workflow. But things break just as often.

Honestly if you have the option, use a wysiwyg editor for building emails. At least when it does break (and they all will) you can at least blame the software.

Which is better than spending 4 hours on why that table cell doesn't line up correctly in outlook.

About a year ago, while giving interview for a pharmaceutical company. (role of software developer)
Interviewer : So why do you want to join X?
Me (in mind) : (Ok, be calm, I have practiced this and i know what to answer, just follo tbe script)

Me : (Following the script) I would like to join X because I think X could give me exposure to meet people with various skills. (Cant remember what was next) And i also think working in X would make my father proud as he always wanted me to become a Doctor.
After that I just sat there for a few seconds staring at desk contemplating my life failures and I suddenly remember Im in a INTERVIEW.
Me : And thats it. (smiling as if nothing happened)
Worst Interview ever.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

I joined a "multi-national" company in middle-east where 90% of the developers are Indian. And since it's a "multi-national" company with 50+ developers I thought they already figured it out. Most of them have 5-10 years of experience. They should know at least how to use git properly, deployment should be done via CI/CD. database changes should be run via migration script. Agile methodology, Code Review - Pull Request. Unit testing. Design Patterns, Clean Code Principle. etc etc

I thought I'm gonna learn new things here. I have never been so wrong in all my life...

Technical Manager doesn't even know what Pull Request is. They started developing the software 4 years ago but used Yii v1 instead which was released almost a decade ago. They combined it with a VueJS where in some files contains around 4000 lines of code. Some PHP functions contain 500+ of code. No proper indentions as well. The web console is bloody red with javascript errors. In short, it's the worst code I've seen so far.

No wonder why they keep receiving complaints from their 30+ clients.

This startup I started working for with their shitty code base written by interns, restrictive sys admin who had no actual use in the company since I was the one setting up their servers, know-it-all CEO, stupid HR representative who used to grill employees for being 10 minutes late in the morning, very small apartment "HQ", using fingerprints to signal our entry and our leave to and from the office, no formal process, and, to top it all, monitoring our own laptops which we use for work with a software that takes screenshots every few minutes. In short, it had the worst in corporates with the worst of startups combined in one company.

If, hypothetically, we could overlook all this, I couldn't overlook the horrible smell this place had. The apartment was overlooking a small garden which was a home for many stray cats and dogs. You can imagine how horrible this smell was. The weird thing was that no one there seemed to really care about the smell!!

I lasted there for only one week before I gave my resignation and I believe I had every right to do so.

Worst experience with a higher up?

At an old contract job (around 2013), I was contracted by the company to help guide their developers with me to rewrite their software (it was buggy as shit, they didn't know better.).

So, a month later, we are in the middle of the rewrite and the boss flies in pissed that it's not done yet, he had the audacity to accuse me of stealing contract work with no experience in the area.

I told him flat out, "you don't know what the hell you are talking about. If you didn't hire a JV coding team, you wouldn't need me to redirect your damn rewrite."

He fired me, so I went to his superior and told her the situation. She told me i completely deserved it.

Worse part was I got paid half of my contract. Didnt make that mistake again. 😒😒

Found out later that the company failed, declared bankruptcy. Felt pretty happy.

The best feature in Intellij is the export to Eclipse. I fucking hate Eclipse but we have to submit our assignments as eclipse projects. Eclipse is the worst software i have ever seen. It even crashed in the same Moment as a classmate asked why i hated Eclipse.

I’ve begun to notice a distinct pattern with devs. I realise it has probably always been there but Im just thinking out loud as Ive started to actively notice it.

*Dev has literally one problem with a library/framework/environment*

“Holy crap <NAME> is the worst thing ever!! its actually worse than an STD. whoever made it needs to quit making software and become a goat farmer” (paraphrasing of course)

What is it with us that the second we have difficulty with a library or framework we immediately brand it as a cancerous polyp on the anus of humanity?

Worst part of being a developer?

Everyone thinks you want to freelance a website for them...

Even when you're not a web developer

What do you do?

I write software.

Oh so you're good with computers and stuff?

Yeah

That's p sweet, can you build me a site?

No. 😃

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

I started to work in a new project for a house architect, basically a management system for his studio. Well, guess what? Twenty years ago he programmed some sort of software using BASIC, and of course that means he knows exactly how software works!

Worst kind of stakeholder, like going to the doctor and telling them how to diagnose, because you used a thermostat once.

A PCB I designed on the job over the last weeks shipped today! A benefit of hardware is the haptic element you have at the end of the design process - you made something touchable. (I am proud.)
Also, errors made earlier in the design process are permanent now. But other than on my software my design got reviewed, so I'm optimistic it'll not contain many if any.

I'm on vacation right now for moving stuff but I'm looking forward to do the "pick'n place" on monday. Soldering manually is quite relaxing for me, you should try it, too! ;)

In other news, I'm no longer sleeping on the floor in my home-office while the paint is drying in other rooms.
I already moved the most of my stuff - books and tech equipment are the worst - and I moved my furniture yesterday.
My new roommates are considerably quieter and my sleeping rhythm is slowly shifting back to normal.

Worst enterprise "software"?

Re:Re:Re:Re:Fwd:Re [specification-v0.1(4)-backup.doc.zip]

fuck you to the tech software engineer who would sexually harass me for over a year straight and would simply NOT GET THE FUCKING POINT that I'M NOT FUCKING INTERESTED.

Worst mistake of my life.

My apprentice quit!

Posted the other day about him quitting ...

He did ( he could of read the old post )

Just took him two days to do it

Worst fucking thing he fell asleep this morning on his way to work , so he's late anyway 9 start time actually arrives 9:40 .... ! Normally today it was 10:50 till he arrived... On a day he quits

Now he expects me to pay him extra money .... Holiday days etc ...

I want an apprentice who wants to be good at software 😐

Thing is he said it's not what he wants , I think development is something you learn to love.. because of the challenges. You always when starting out facing huge brick walls you have to get through.

Some people just don't have the capacity to get through them. I think. Developer has to love the difficulty .. you fail multiple times before the finished product ... All the errors. Little fixes no one sees.

It takes dedication.... Hard work to be the best. He didn't get that.

I now have more respect for other devs ( I had a lot already ) knowing that we all went through all of that and now. We are people with true talents.

OK heavy rant on 'modern' software development coming! --> don't take it to seriously though :-)

Electron... why does that shit exist? It is like stacking all the worst technologies available to mankind into an enormous pile of crap and polishing that turd to look like something wonderful. It is big, slow and overall AWFUL!

An example? ... Microsoft Teams :-( it burns your PC like fire and makes it squeal for mercy.

When a library/framework becomes the ultimate evolution of abstraction layer upon abstraction layer and it simply should stop to exist and a reset button needs to be pressed.

I would love to see some research on the real world environmental impact that all those shitty slow and bloated web technologies have.

Solution:

Software energy label!

C, C++ and Rust e.t.c. and all accompanying efficient UI libraries should be the only languages/implementations allowed to get a A, B and C label.

Python (without C libraries like Numpy), JavaScript and all those other slow interpreted scripting/Web API nonsense should get a D, E or F label by default.

Have fun!

Worst realisation of myself when I was a greenhorn dev? Nobody gives a f***ing damn of what you achieve as a software developer. For them you're just the uncool nerd - end of story. That's where I just stopped having any conversations about my job at all... unless it's with other devs.

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

The manager and selfperceived omnipotent cult leader was the worst kind of businessman. Slimey and trecherous, zero sense of ethics, but felt holier than the pope because he "helped" his weakling herd of piteous employees.

These employees were smart kids, most of them in their late teens. All of them legally disabled. There was this kid who gobbled up ritalin like candy, a boy who had received his measles shots and turned socially awkward (/s), a chubby girl who could name all the hex colors of her chocolate stained shirt... you know, what we call skilled developers in the industry.

Fiftyfive of them.

They were awesome, awkward highschool dropouts, like I had been a decade earlier. They worked 50h a week. They had great humor, were passionate, devoured information about new technologies, and they built custom websites from scratch in no time. I had to lead this flock, and felt honored to work with them.

Then things started to smell funny.

I discovered all 55 of their workstations ran pirated software, from Windows to Adobe CS. I'm not without sin in that regard, but as a company it's just plain stupid.

Clients were treated like shit. I mean, we all feel like punching a client in the face sometimes, but I'm taking about unjustified debt collections paired with death threats.

Then I found out these kids were often disappearing for a few months, only to return months later.

I started digging, and discovered they were all working reintegration internships (because they were on below minimum wage disability payments), at almost zero cost to my employer.

After 6 months, my boss gave them a negative recommendation, they were all too "sick" to function in normal jobs.

Then they were rotated to a shadow company, doing the same work for another 6 months, and so on to a third company.

He broke these kids, talked them down, made them feel worthless. He threatened the ones who understood what was happening.

I ended up bringing the company down, with the CEO and two government officials jailed for fraud and corruption.

Some employees were quite mad about it, at least at first — I was the shepherd who abandoned his sheep. Luckily, most found better paid positions in no time.

Truly one of the most fucked up and difficult situations I've been in.

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

Worst experience was my first job after study. They told me at the interview that the job has very low travel activity... "we are doing most of the projects in-house...just traveling to the customer now and then for kick offs or when the software has to be trained"

A half year later I had to travel every fucking week to the customer. Fixing shitty code from a freelancer who never worked in a team, in a language I've never used before (they told me the first day at the customer). Don't get me wrong, I love learning new stuff but this project and architecture was a totally fucked up mess. Flew every monday to the customer (had to get up at 4am monday morning to get the flight) and friday back. Quit the job after living 3 months from a fucking suitcase.

So one rant reminded me of a situation I whent through like 10 years ago...
I'm not a dev but I do small programs from time to time...
One time I was hired to pass a phone book list from paper to a ms Access 97 database...
On my old laptop I could only add 3 to 5 records cause MS access doesn't clean after itself and would crash...

So I made an app (in vb6) , to easily make records, was fast, light and well tabbed.
But now I needed a form to edit the last record when I made a mistake...
Then I wanted a form to check all the records I made.
Well that gave me an idea and presented the software to the client... A cheesy price was agreed for my first freelance sell...
After a month making it perfect and knowing the problems the client would had I made a admin form to merge all the databases and check for each record if it would exist.... I knew the client would have problems to merge hundreds of databases....
When it was done... The client told me he didn't need the software anymore.... So I gave it to a friend to use as an client dabatase software... It was perfect for him.
One month later the client called me because he couldn't merge the databases...
I told him I was already working in a company. That my software was ready to solve his problem, but I got mad and deleted everything...
He had to pay almost 20 times more for a software company to make the same software but worst... Mine would merge and check all the databases in a folder... Their's had to pick one by one and didn't check for duplicates... So he had to pay even more for another program to delete duplicates...

That's why I didn't follow programming as a freelance... Lots of regrets today...
Could be working at home, instead had a burn out this week cause of overwork...

Sorry for the long rant.

Windows 10 is a fucking piece of shit. It's the worst software ever made. It's the worst program ever written in the entire computer history.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

After three hours of emailing with a customer I can confirm that programmers are the worst customers.
Customer: We've found a bug in the system... <details>
Me: Thank you for letting us know, a ticket has been created and the issue is most likely to be fixed in the next release.
Customer: Please grant me UPDATE privileges in the live(!) database so I can fix it myself
Me: I cannot allow that. You have to use the client software for maintaining your data.
Customer: No, I don't want to spend my day clicking. I want to write queries.

We didn't reply to the last one yet...
If we give him access, then I would charge them at least 3x for fixing issues caused by him.

//Random Mr. Robot thought//
So this picture and this quote in general has been in my mind quite recently. The first time I saw this scene it just passed through my mind as just a wierd quirk of elliot. But upon further thinking, I question that given Elliot is someone who specializes in network security in a sense. A part of which focuses on finding exploits in networks or even software in general( basically finding the worst in them). And the more I think about that,the more I come to realisation that just like most programmers mix together logic in their life in dealing with people, this scene stands out as an example of just that happening with Elliot and what perhaps, makes him such a good hacker. Perhaps we could all learn from this, or perhaps I'm just looking too much into this. Eh.

So having gotten my hands on the books I need for the next semester I decided to go take a look at what's in them.

Now the first is mostly web stuff and the second is just about software design. It starts off with an introduction to HTML5, where they didn't really teach HTML5, more like they taught HTML3/4 but not in a way that was too dangerous. I can tolerate not having my semantic tags tbh. They also used spaces on both sides of the = for some reason.

Then a CSS chapter which was also surprisingly mediocre. They didn't use a dedicated CSS file, but I can live with that, for starters.

Then there were some surprisingly decent JS chapters. Although they did use newlines before their { kinda miffed me. There has also been a few developments since this books release, but tbh this isn't the worst case of outdatedness. (And at least they didn't use jquery when teaching JS)

Then a chapter on SQL which I ignored.

Then a chapter about PHP, and, uhm, when did this book get released? Well the ISBN is 978-0-13-215100-9 and using the power of Google we can reveal it was published in.. 2011..

I'm quite happy that I already know how to program

A week ago I put in my two weeks at the current company I'm a Software Engineer at because it has been one of the worst places I have worked at and start work on July 5th at a new place as a Senior Software Engineer and have heard only good things about everything! Can't wait to start!!!!

Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).

1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.

I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.

The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor​-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Got rebuked by the Java teacher today at the University for using proper long names for variables in the code. She though I was just wasting time being lazy in the lab. "If something can be achieved by a single character, why type that long variable again and again?". *Everyone in class laughs*

Then, there was an error in my code [turned out to be long long int in Java is weird], and I had no clue what was going wrong [I'm a week old in Java]. So, I had initially called her to help. She made me change all private methods and attributes to public. When asked "why?", got trolled again.

Now, I know it's okay, and not that I really care about what my classmates think of me, but getting this kind of treatment really sucks. And if this is how future software developers are crafted today, maintainability is surely going to be an issue tomorrow.

Maybe staying in this stupid country was my worst career choice. I should have tried harder and gone abroad.

"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.

Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.

During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.

I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.

It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.

I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.

After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.

We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.

I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.

I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.

I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.

I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.

I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.

This is what burnout looks like.

My family (dad, mom and I) runs a software business. Things were going decent when I was in college, and just as I was about to finish college, it went slightly bad due to lack of some technical insight. So I figured, I had the knowledge to do so, and joined in the family business as my first job. When I joined, I found out that things were worse that what I expected, (lack of processes in the company to handle day to day business). But we took a year to fix it and solve issues. But during this year, while the company finally runs as a proper company, we went into some serious debt to keep it running, as we were expecting it to get resolved soon. But now, although the company is structurally fine, the sales have seriously dropped. This has us cornered and we aren't able to do anything. We are seriously considering shutting the company down.

Which is not the worst part. The worst part is the debt. Since I, was a part of the company too, I am equally responsible for paying it off. And now, due to both my parents hitting the retirement age, I will be the only one repaying it. I really don't want to invest an estimated 8-10 years of my life living very modestly and spending a large (70-80%) of my income in repaying this.

I don't even know what to do, and things just seem very hopeless for me. Looking for any advice anyone has.

I guess if I had a bit more experience in the real world, I would be better at dealing with this, but I'm literally just 1 year out of my college.

The Setting:

Ola Cabs (One of the biggest competitors of Uber, for those who don’t know) comes to college to recruit software devs:

✅ Pre-placement talk

Now time for the aptitude/code round. Hackerearth used as the solution to run the test and compile code, as well as check the result immediately. Or so I thought.

3 programming questions, 2 hours.

The problem:
Me: *Write the code for the first question* (and I know it’s correct)

Me: Clicks “Compile and run”

Compiler: *Compiling*

*LITERALLY ONE FUCKING HOUR LATER*

Compiler: *Still compiling*

Hackerearth. What a fucking joke. Though the course of the HOUR I waited, I kept questioning the recruiter head from Ola and his response was:

Recruiter: “Try the other program, it’s possibly a problem with your code. I’ll check at my backend also, hold on.”

YOU FUCKING DIMWIT. MY CODE IS PERFECT AND EVEN IF IT WASN’T IT WOULDN’T TAKE MORE THAN A MINUTE (If you’re factoring in absolutely worst cases) TO COMPILE THIS SMALL ASS FUCKING PROBLEM’S CODE.

In the meanwhile I even coded one of the other remaining questions’ solution and the shit still didn’t work.

At the end of the 2 hour time limit, I’d finished code for all 3, the recruiter stops us all from coding and says:

Recruiter: “Just submit your code, we will evaluate it and get back to you.”

Like fucking hell, asshole.

*One hour post interview*

EVERYONE who attempted the aptitude code round (At least 30 of us) receive messages on our phones:

“Unfortunately you did not clear the aptitude round and we will not be able to take your application forward.”

FUCK YOU OLA. IN ONE FUCKING HOUR YOU “EVALUATED” ALL OF OUR CODE? FUCK YOU HACKEREARTH FOR YOUR SHIT FUCKING EXECUTION OF A “SOLUTION”. Maybe test your own fucking product before offering a solution to companies.

Fucking lost opportunity.

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

OsCommerce is literally the most awful piece of software ever. Granted, I'm migrating a version from 2007, but even still.

The admin area has a screen to set related products to a target product.

The page takes an age to load, even longer to save and is god awful to use from a UI POV.

Why may you ask?

The OsCommerce devs decided to display a flat list, which check boxes of ALL products in the database.

So for the site in question, that's a single list of 167,000 products, without pagination. Some of the worst development/design on a single page I've seen since last week when I inherited a god awful butchered Wordpress site :|

Wk78

My worst dev experience was my first software as freelance...
1 month codding
When delivering the app the client didnt want it anymore...
Two years latter the client calls me because he had a problem... Merging hundreds of access 97 databases... Exactly what my software did (besides editing, filters and remove duplicates)
Told him I got mad, deleted the source code and was already working on a company...
He had to pay for a software company to do the same 10 times the cost

so... 9 years ago we had this super awesome codebase. 1 file, complete logic COPIED to be used in ui and service/daemon. I scrolled to the middle of the file and there was no source. it was out of bounds of my monitor to the right because of nested ifs. ok... what the fuck!! the worst part: I had to implement a new FEATURE into this mess. 2 days. I said it would not work as expected because the feature was not thought through. but project said let's gooooo! ok there I was, a junior with an impossible to implement feature and a codebase from hell. I've implemented something, all night long. next day it was the problem of the consultants. they called me, I told them why it's impossible that this would ever work, they understood and talked to the customer. he accepted the solution. WTF?! anyway, in those days I thought about quitting developing software as my daily job....

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MS Access and VBA.

This combo is the worst dev tech I had to use it by now. Why? Because even if you try it, you can't make a single line of clean code. The syntax is horrible, it still use GOTO...

Maybe the reason why I hated working with it is linked to the context too: I was (and still) developing a system using NoSQL database and this system should be mostly fully configurable through metadata within JSON documents and it was. But we were still writing every JSON by hands so we decided we needed to develop a web based utility for us and clients who would need to configure the system but one of the head decision making people said that we don't need to use fancy technologies (because NoSQL is already "fancy") and that the configuration tool will be develop with Access because he used it a lot when he was younger and when he was coding during its free time. He said that using Access would be much easier and much time saving than our "fancy web based solution" and that he could help if we had questions...

Developing a MS Access software is already a pain in the ass but when you need to output JSON with it...

Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.

Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.

Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.

Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.

I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.

NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.

Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.

11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.

11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.

11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."

Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.

11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"

BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT

Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.

The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.

There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.

Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.

Rant over.

I was employed as a Researcher so for three months i basically did nothing but read, document, read, document, read, document. Then one day in a review i was doing a demo that required sql. Three months no coding. Of course I've forgotten. And now, this ass back boss of mine gets surprised because i asked for help on update syntax for sql?!?! Like, come on. I COULD GOOGLE THAT. No big deal. But it was to him. He thought i was incompetent as a software engineer. So hE DECIDED TO JUST RANDOMLY PUT ME IN A DEV TEAM and i was expected to perform as fAst AS THEM while still doing mountains of task on research. Worst part is THEY EVALUATED ME BASED ON THAT PERFORMANCE. AFTER I WORK MY ASS OFF FOR THREE MONTHS AS A RESEARCHER, I GET EVALUATED BADLY BECAUSE I DIDNT MEMORIZE THE UPDATE SYNTAX NGNGNNGGNGNNGNGGNF

The worst part of being a senior software engineer for a team is that the legacy code of the company is not clear, and there's no documentation.

Worst thing in my job is I have to record my daily activities in a Google sheet. Because my boss thinks using an activity app/software will waste more time.

Thanks to a fellow ranter who triggered my PTSD, I will ha e to go with not only the worst, but also most evil piece of software ever conceived: MOTHER FUCKING LOTUS NOTES

* Makes popcorn*
*Finds comfy chair*

So guys, what's the worst piece of crapy software you've used.

I'm taking dibs on windows update

Best:

Leaving my work in the soul crushing dog eat dog world of transportation and logistics for higher education software for colleges and universities .
I work at a college and I fucking love it and love my team.

Worst:

The soulc crushing dog eat dog world of transportation and logistics where I worked as a backend developer and lead mobile developer. Not only did it made me hate and despise native android development, but it also made me despise the human race as a whole. Watching a motherfucker letting go of employees that he knew personally (as in bbq with their families and shit) because my software automated a large portion of their work(it was meant to make it easier for them for that i was originally told) was absolute and total bullshit and i still carry that fucking remorse with me. After that I vowed never to do that sort of bullshit work again....sort off. No one gets fired at this institition for it. Logistics sucks big monkey dick and the people there are the absolute fucking worst. Every single motherfucker i met was a fucking shark, all of them and they would not think about fucking people over if it saved them some money.

Yeah, that even tops the military and that was fuuuull of fuck fuck games and other similar fuckery.

Ok people. I got a contract last year with a company, and I was their support for one year, which ended back in February. They still email me for all their problems. I don't know why. They emailed me today, for Christ's sake, on the Saturday of Easter, to tell me that their 3rd party software can't send them emails because the mailserver has that IP on greylist asking me to look into it and find a solution. AS IF I CARE! I'm with my family, taking a break for two days damn it. Panic attack came, my heartbeat rate problem kicked in and now I can't calm down. I'm trying to get into the "I don't give a fuck" mood but I can't, I'm too responsible for that, in the worst dramatic way (the world is gonna end etc).

Piece of advice:
Be very clear next time you come to terms with another company, be precise and don't let them have it their way.

Worst: Getting struck with Corona when moving to a European country via job, everything went shit, visa late, starting job is late and never certain, for 8 months I was in limbo.

Best: Finally got job and moved, been playing video games all day because it is government job and no way to check what I am doing. Fuck it, I dont like software development as my salary job, just as hobby.

Bye, have to play game.

Today was a SHIT day!

Working as ops for my customer, we are maintaining several tools in different environments. Today was the day my fucking Kubernetes Cluster made me rage quit, AGAIN!

We have a MongoDB running on Kubernetes with daily backups, the main node crashed due a full PVC on the cluster.

Full PVC => Pod doesn't start
Pod doesn't start => You can't get the live data
No live data? => Need Backup
Backup is in S3 => No Credentials
Got Backup from coworker
Restore Backup? => No connection to new MongoDB

3 FUCKING HOURS WASTED FOR NOTHING

Got it working at the end... Now we need to make an incident in the incident management software. Tbh that's the worst part.

And the team responsible for the cluster said monitoring wont be supported because it's unnecessary....

Do not touch Salesforce.

Especially Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

It is a fucking joke this product even exists. Buy Hubspot instead. Marketing Cloud is the single worst piece of software I have had to implement out of 4 years working in software and a lifetime working in tech.

Literally nothing works. You click a button and bam, nothing. The UI actively lies to the user. Nothing is guaranteed to work and support is some guy in India who shrugs his shoulders and walks away. Things will randomly break and warning messages are tiny, indecipherable babble that mean nothing.

If you are dev, walk away. If you are a potential customer, walk away. This company DESERVES a bad reputation for the absolute heap of dogshit that is Marketing Cloud.

The worst part is that it's likely going to affect my job and my career because of how fucking dogshit it is.

Fuck Salesforce in case the messaging isn't clear.

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺

I had spent about 3 months working on a feature for a CAD software in a company where I was an intern.
The day it was ready I commited everything to the main branch and asked a senior dev to check it.
It didn't work… we spent 30 minutes, tried almost eveything, but the software kept crashing (even if "it worked on my machine").
At that point he said "ok, we won't include this feature, it's ok"... even if I worked really hard for months to make it work, I felt so bad.

A few hours later I found out that for all this time I was trying it in debug mode, and a few types of errors were ignored, something which of course wasn't happening in release mode. Worst day in that company.

P.S.
The reason I wasn't testing it on release mode was the fact the solution was so big it took about 45 minutes to compile it (using IncrediBuild, compiling it using more than 10 machines at the same time), so I always used the debug mode to compile every small change in less than 2 minutes.

Motherfucking cocksucking Microsoft windows. The worst software ever written by shittiest developers.

Mother fucker blowed up all the partitions ( Linux installation, root and /home partition ), including windows recovery disk.

I wish, your HQ will blow up the same way, someday.

Bill Gates .... Go fuck yourself with a iron rod

Started new job almost two moths ago..

For almost 3 years I was developing custom themes, plugins, and widget for WordPress using PHP, jQuery/AJAX, and MySQL.

The new company that hired me brought me on as a backend developer to help rebuild their custom PHP Framework, and other web based software/products as their moving toward Google Cloud Platform.

When I started, MVC and OOP was new to me... took a couple weeks to get the hang of things, and understand their system.

Just when I was getting comfortable, I had a task assigned to me that was all NodeJS...

Had a 30 check-in the week I started the Node task, and was feeling pretty beat down because it was all new to me and I wasn’t making a lot of progress, and still not comfortable with Promises yet, and some other ES6 features but finding my way around slowly but surely.

Manager reassured me that I wasn’t going to be fired and it wasn’t unique to myself. Very encouraging to hear, but I’m my own worst critic so it’s frustrating not being able to make progress like I would with PHP projects.

Fast forward to this week, I started to review another task for a feed and found it’s all Ruby! Another language I have no familiarity with... and started to question if I’ll every get the hang of all these languages and be a solid team member...

Not only do I have to get a grasp on NodeJS and Ruby now, but then I’ll also have to get familiar with GCP and whatever else comes along with it...

Oh and I’m using Linux now instead of Windows/ OSX... so there’s that too.. plus the other command line tools the company built, and uses..

I was comfortable developing in PHP and know I needed to take a step and accept this job to move my career forward but it seems like I’m always behind the 8 ball...

Some days I wonder if it was worth staying a Wordpress developer and just focused on learning ReactJS and stay more Front-end than Backend..

I enjoy working with talented people but I don’t like being the low man on the totem pole knowing I don’t have the experience yet.

Does it feel like this for all devs?!?!

I didn't posted something in a long time so...

TL;DR: FUCK YOU ANDROID STUDIO YOU FUCKING SHIT PIECE OF SOFTWARE

Thank you for your time.

I am running my own meme social network. For quite some time I wished I knew a Android developer, which could help me.

Because I know java I tried it myself, and Android studio is one of the worst programms I've ever seen.

My app crashed the whole time, just because my studio version was 1 behind. Updated studio, everything worked.

My layout wasn't showing correctly, reopened Studio, all layouts deleted.

For no good reason video views aren't resizing, so I need to use exoplayer.

One video on my platform nearly crashes the app when creating a thumbnail.

And so one....

I fucking hate Android studio...

(PS: if your a German, Swiss, Austrian you could check out my network and may become a beta tester of the app)

After some months as head of our software department and one meeting after another I finally had a chance to program again for a whole day... I instantly felt happy for the first time in a while. I think taking this role on was the worst idea I had in my life... now I have to change this

I started my career 7 years back (at the same company I am currently working) as an Asp.net developer. My company used to work in Microsoft domains back then. 5 years back one of our directors decided to dig into the open-source technologies and move away from Microsoft. And I was the first employee who was assigned to learn python. I thought about switching the company so that my 2 years of asp.net experience doesn't go waste. But I didn't as I started liking python. It was easy, powerful, clean, and same code ran on every fucking platform. And I was introduced to open-source.

Don't know best or worst, but this decision definitely changed my view about software development. I understood that money is not everything, passion is also important. The open-source community runs on passion and dedication. And I love the way it works. The bottom line is, I am happy. And python is beautiful.

tldr: Fuck Adobe Premiere

What the flying fuck.
I have a school project together with a friend and decided to do a video. Not only do we now only have one fucking day left, because the teacher decided we dont need time or anything, but I have to learn video editing software, record clips and create the video withing one fucking day.
I've downloaded Premiere because I have a 7 day trial left and had Creative Cloud on my PC and WHAT THE FUCK kind of fucked up bullshit software is this human compiled piece of shit?! I needed to google how to add text and edit it because adding text gives you absolutely nothing, you get no possibility to edit the text in any way, except the content. After googling for 10 minutes because I have the newest version and they changed the text tool, I found out that you need to go to another tab... of which there is 7 and all have such telling names like: "Effects" and "Compose"...
I needed to go to "Effects" BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT, TEXT SURE LOOKS LIKE AN EFFECT TO ME! Then I wanted to align it to the right so its on 50% of the screen. You fucking cant, I've tried and looked for an hour the only possibility you have is to align it to the center or just throw it somewhere. The snapping didn't even work correctly. So I tried to do something else because I was ready to punch a kitten.
A box. A box thats black. A box thats black and thats aligned to the... FUCK YOU, YOU CANT ALIGN THIS BOX.

I cant align a box...
They dont even give me the possibility to...
But I can align the text BOX, not even the FUCKING TEXT itself...

What
The
Fuck

This is the worst program I've EVER had to use. I'm fucking mad and this fucking project can FUCK ITSELF.

Best career decision:
Doing many different jobs before programming, move to capital city to pursue first software development job without money, college degree, place to stay and plans for future.

Worst career choice:
Probably would be staying in Poland despite many opportunities to travel around the world, earn big money or work on really cool things as software developer but I won’t know until I die.

Worst architecture I've seen?

The worst (working here) follow the academic pattern of trying to be perfect when the only measure of 'perfect' should be the user saying "Thank you" or one that no one knows about (the 'it just works' architectural pattern).

A senior developer with a masters degree in software engineering developed a class/object architecture for representing an Invoice in our system. Took almost 3 months to come up with ..

- Contained over 50 interfaces (IInvoice, IOrder, IProduct, etc. mostly just data bags)
- Abstract classes that implemented the interfaces
- Concrete classes that injected behavior via the abstract classes (constructors, Copy methods, converter functions, etc)
- Various data access (SQL server/WCF services) factories

During code reviews I kept saying this design was too complex and too brittle for the changes everyone knew were coming. The web team that would ultimately be using the framework had, at best, vague requirements. Because he had a masters degree, he knew best.

He was proud of nearly perfect academic design (almost 100% test code coverage, very nice class diagrams, lines and boxes, auto-generated documentation, etc), until the DBAs changed table relationships (1:1 turned into 1:M and M:M), field names, etc, and users changed business requirements (ex. concept of an invoice fee changed the total amount due calculation, which broke nearly everything).

That change caused a ripple affect that resulted in a major delay in the web site feature release.

By the time the developer fixed all the issues, the web team wrote their framework and hit the database directly (Dapper+simple DTOs) and his library was never used.

F**king hate Windows for its insanely confusing proxy setup required for software development...

> Setup proxy in Windows network settings
> Then, setup HTTP_PROXY & HTTPS_PROXY environment variable at the system/user level.
> Followed by separate proxy settings for java, maven, docker, git, npm, bower, jspm, eclipse, VS Code, every damn IDE/Editor which downloads plugins...
> On top of everything, find out the domains which does not need to go through proxy and add them to NO_PROXY.. at each level..
> It does not end here. Sometimes, I need to setup proxy for SSH connections... like, if I have to use git with SSH and not HTTP/S... Uhhh....

More than half of the problems me and my dev team face is related to setting the right proxy. Why can't it be like, set in one place and everything picks up from there, like in any linux machine or for God's sake, a Mac ?

Worst of all is, my org uses a configuration script, which resolves into a list of proxy servers, from which one of them will be used. So, I need to download that script, find out which is the right proxy server and then, use it in all the aforesaid places... WTH ?????

Is this a common workplace problem for all developers ??? Will this be solved by Windows Subsystem for Linux ???

You know what's the worst in doing software?
being assigned that dreadful project, that's doomed and cursed just from the start. Nobody dared to try or touch it for 7 years, because it's destined to fail. You will never get the resources to do it properly, all the constrains are just against you. Even as the requirements bars are lowered and lowered you barely make it. You keep testing that shit with QA for like 8 months past schedule. Then before release some core changes need to be done. It passes QA, but you somehow now it's just a ticking time bomb. It will just crumble and fall somewhere out there, if somebody dares to use that shit for real.

And so it goes.

Bug reports coming in.

Why are banks so absolutely archaic and stupid when it comes to tech? I work in a Services based company and currently engaged with a very famous bank to build accounting software for Mutual Funds. The day to day stupidity of this client is driving me absolutely crazy.

They couldn't give us proper requirements, and my company was stupid enough to kickoff the project without official sign off. Not only did they change the requirements, but they added a shit ton MORE features, and essentially bullied us into completing it all in the same timeline. Their attitude is pathetic, they shit talk our dev team, they make us build the worst possible UX, and then complain that it's not looking good and not working well. They have absolutely no idea about any of the technical stuff and think that software is a magic box that will give them what they want.

I swear I have a lot of examples but I'm so angry right now that my words are fumbling and I can't think straight. Stand up is in 45 minutes and I'm just dreading it. Idk how to tell everything, it's just... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

For some reason, Tableau is really heavy. I mean, all reporting software is a little bullshit, but Tableau... The server we had took 45 minutes to restart (no exaggerating - we timed it).

Reading the log files, yes, it WAS doing shit the whole time. Lots of shit. It seemed to be running just... Tons of software.

Tableau seemed to be aware of this because they have a page where you can check the status of everything. I assume that starts up first.

If you're looking into Tableau, two things to consider:

1) No, your braindead financial manager won't be making their own visualizations, no matter how many times the marketing team writes "drag and drop" on the Tableau website.

2) You'll make some nice visualizations but find that when you try to do more complex things, you run into constant roadblocks. If your manager asks "can you make it do x"? No matter how much experience you have, your answer can never be 100% "yes"... Or even "no" for that matter.

Not the worst experience with enterprise software, but definitely a surprisingly bad experience.

- Favourite pastime while waiting for your code to compile
- Most heroic/ingenuous bug fix
- Hardest to track down bug
- Worst legacy code you wrote and left behind leaving a job
- Weirdest project
- Last side project you actually finished
- Explain your job like I'm five/the way you do it for non-tech people
- That time your past self (almost) got you in trouble
- Software pet peeves
- Story about how you freaked someone out
- Feature that most certainly was a bug once
- Post something for your favourite previous weekly tag!

-- Best --
> Submitted my notice of termination for my current job
> Found a new job starting next year
> Can switch from Windows to Linux/MacOS in new job
> Got more time to work on personal projects due to the pandemic

-- Worst --
> Huge amount of software restrictions (current job) almost got several projects at work canceled. Maybe its important to say that the core business of my current workplace is auditing so there are a lot of law regulations which then apply in the softwaredevelopment process.
> New managers that do not have the slightest clue of what they're doing
> Online Teambuilding events
> Absurd amount of segmentation of tools and also different coding guidelines that are used at work. E.g. one team uses jira, another trello, another github issue tracker and so on.

I told you fucking moron clients doing that "little" change would be complicated and in the worst case it would end fucking up your whole spaghetti crap. A really HUGE spaghetti monster of that you aren't aware because you guys don't know a shit about coding conventions.

*Clients call me complaining about their software is broken*

-Hey, we're in serious trouble. Our users aren't being able to see the proper calculated values. Why that little change had so much side effects?
- I already told you why.
- Can you fix it asap? Our clients are complaining.
- No. Deploy an old copy of the affected modules while you give me a prudent time to refactorize that crap.
- Refactorize?
- ...

I used to work in their place, 3 years later I quit that crappy job and decided to make them my clients. I escaped from the micromanaging thing but I didn't from their ugly practices.

Anyways, I have to fix this shit asap. Money talks, at least until I can find a better client.

The worst part of being a dev? Working in teams.

And I don't mean that in the "I'm the best ninja code wizard in the whole world and you're all holding me back" kinda way. I'm thinking more in the lines of someone who has to deal with that kind of attitude on a daily basis. As someone who recently was put in a leading position in a dev team, this is by far one of the worst experiences that came with it.

Some examples?
- One dev completely changed the naming scheme for variables in a class he worked on for one. single. bug fix. His reason? He just didn't like it!
- Another one noticed that data he was supplied with was not in the specified format. Instead of flagging this with the project leads, he just rewrote his parser to fit the data. A couple of weeks later the supplier noticed the error, fixed the format and suddenly everyone wondered why the software failed processing the data.
- Or that one senior dev, that just refuses to accept changes because "it was always done like this and it worked" No, it didn't. That's why it was changed!

Once a dev team reaches a certain size, people need to realize that stuff like coding rules and process guidelines are not there to annoy them but to help the whole team work as efficient as possible. I don't care how good a programmer you are, if you can't check your ego you don't belong in any kind of team-oriented development project!

monday.com: our manager has been pushing for it for weeks. We barely got any time with the demo before it expired and the company took forever to get licenses.

Now that we're on it ... this thing sucks ass. It hijacks all the browser keyboard shortcuts. You can't use Ctrl+F or Ctrl+L .. you can't even right click.

This is the worst project management software I've ever seen. It's amazingly even worse that Jira. I wish we had just gone with Redmine. It's free and not garbage

I think the worst thing I’ve seen from devs is lacking the curiosity to know how some software library works before using it which then almost always leads to bad design and code.

So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017

But apparently it's not finished yet!

This will probably a short one:

Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.

I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.

After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".

After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.

Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!

It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it!

We use a open-source business management software (incl. crm, e-commerce, billing, accounting, warehouse, ...) that is highly customizable.

Previously we had "Company A" that customized it for my company. It was very expensive so they hired something to do the same but cheaper & inhouse. The codebase that "Company A" has written was terrible (confirmed by CTO & the new colleague").

Then the CFO wanted functionality A. Colleague said that this will take 2 weeks to implement. One week later, it was no longer needed & functionality B was now mandatory. Rinse & Repeat.

The CFO: "Why is nothing ever gonna get finished" or "why is the quality so bad?"

So they hired another person for the same position. This person has more experience so it costs them a lot more... And suddenly, everything works well

They contacted a few months later a consultant that analyzed the company. The consultant asked (for good reason) why such a small company has 2 people maintaining the in-house BM software. And suddenly, they wanted to get rid of the worst person. <enter my previous rant>

He is thrown out. Now the head of Operations wants to remove that software because it was not "sexy" enough (her words). So they introduced a glorified spreadsheet with less functionality. That new colleague was offered to take the lead on that project... And thus he fled to another company.

That project failed and now everyone is fired... And they hired back "Company A" to maintain that BM project.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

Ubuntu 17.10...

WORST UBUNTU RELEASE TO DATE!

Why oh why did they go with /swapfile by default? I was legacy booting with UEFI enabled and it still didn't work! And don't get me started on nouveau (Nvidia OSS).

When I click "use proprietary software" I want the OS to do everything in its power to just work. Disable 3D acceleration if you must - at least boot to a console.

I'm scared to try it on my main desktop now!

I switched to Linux Mint and I'm happy now, I just needed an instant OS that works. 😊

npm is the WORST MISTAKE THAT HAS EVER HAPPEND TO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING. I HATE IT AND I REGRET EVER READING ITS DOCUMENTATION, SO MUCH WAISTE OF TIME ON ABSOLUTE JUNK

"Describe your profession in the worst way possible"

I'm a software developer. I work really hard to create solutions that will make everyone else lazier. At least until I help make sentient AI that ends up replacing me (or killing me)

Apple Music is the worst music service I've ever used.
By far the worst UI/UX ever.
It doesn't allow me to easily organize my music the way I want.
Search is sluggish.
The recommendation algorithm sucks.
Can't LIKE a song without it asking me to also sync my local music files to the cloud. Seriously, why the fuck can't I like/favorite a song and be done with it? Why does it need to sync with my local files?
This is a basic feature that works in literally on any other music platform.
The damn thing can't even play FLAC.

I know Spotify has its issues, but it actualls feels like a well engineered piece of software.
Apple Music seems like it was made by junior devs for a school science fair.

The only thing going for Apple Music is the sound quality, everything else is bullshit.

Agile/Scrum is the worst project management style in software development.

Rather than focusing on delivering a feature or changes on the project, everyday there is always a meeting that you need to attend to, other than the daily huddle. And those meetings are none of your concern or why they needed you there

And my Product Owner and Scrum Master does not know even though how software development cycle works. When you discuss technical details or constraint to them, they either look confused or don’t know what to say and just say “If you need anything, always communicate or approach me” even you already told them the issue.

Or maybe we are doing it wrong. But it is been 5 years when they implement this Agile/Scrum and we are still bad at it.

Just ranting

Worst: Realizing there were crippling and horrible bugs in software that got shipped to customers. Also realizing that we truly don't know the amount of technical debt that contributed to these bugs. My most terrifying comment from a colleague: That software was written on a weekend and the dev was getting 3 hours a sleep a night. One of the bugs I found I was fighting for almost a year to even find what was causing the bug.

Best: Finding those bugs and eradicating them. Having confidence that the bugs we know about are truly dead and gone. Til we meet again...next...

The worst of Agile and Sc(r)um: All those people knowing the right way(™) to do it. Endless discussion about useless tooling: the proper use of the custom workflow in Jira, on when and how to create sub tickets. The hour-less meta-discussions on what should be discussed where and when (what's subject of the backlog refinement, retro, etc), the roles: the PO's, what he should do, cannot, the PM's. Who is allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint or not. How many reviewers need to acknowledge a pull request. To and fro. Pointless, but fought with heart and blood, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And everywhere I hear: "In my previous company, we did Scrum like.. and it worked perfectly!"

Some of you might remember my rants on Mr. Gitmaster, with whom I thought I'd made my peace. Guess what? He's now a team member and turning into Mr. Agile - a more severe reincarnation! As our company starts flogging that dead horse of Agility, he seems to feel strong tailwind. Our team lead would constantly cut his monologues, but he's now on holiday, so we have no escape from the never ending: "In my previous company..."

If it was so great, why didn't you stay?

We are not allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint unless every team member is notified? I don't fucking care. If our software fails on customer's machines and I can fix it, I will do if there is a ticket, if it's in the sprint or not. Screw Scrum, if it is getting in the way of it. You can waste your hours discussing horseshit, I want to sit at my desk, deep in the test-compile loop and ship some fucking code.

Fuck Anaconda Navigator. Sincerely, the worst piece of "software" that has ever existed

ms sql server may be the worst piece of software I've ever worked with.

When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.

Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?

Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.

You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.

You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.

They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.

Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.

I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

At my previous company, we used tools from all over the place. We switched between tools at will. Sometimes, some team would decide to use some tool while the rest of the company would use something else. The worst part was that there was no Single-Sign-On (SSO) either. Everyone would need to have an account on all of these said tools. It was chaos.

I realized that being integrated into one environment (even though would have the cost of a vendor-lock-in) was the best option to have because in that case, we wouldn't have to deal with operational hurdles like having integration from one tool to another. They would just come baked-in with the whole environment. That's how GSuite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Atlassian and other players succeeded - they gave a complete suite of services / software that integrated well with each other. You could jump back and forth between services without having to bother about integration with other tools. They'd all be there wherever you wanted them to be. Even cloud providers so that opportunity and built on it - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (in itself).

Another example is a company that used Jira, Confluence and Hipchat but for some dumb reason used Gerrit for their code review / hosting. Eventually, they realized that managing the integration with the Atlassian tools was far more expensive than getting bitbucket and migrating completely into the Atlassian environment.

It's always the integration that matters. Everything else is secondary.

I really like my position as the head of my department. But I am most definitely hitting walls(and in some way breaking them) concerning the way the CTO(my direct boss) deals with a lot of the things that his management team wants to do.

For example, the previous manager could only do so much in terms of directing a software team since she did not have a formal background in computer science or engineering, thus the developers that she had would tell her the different deals with many things and she would have to take their word for it. Nothing necessarily bad with this, but it just meant that a lot of things could have gone smoother had she the knowledge to fix said items. Whenever she would try to use resources(dev time or such) the CTO will resort to the all powerful manthra of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!".

but it was about more than fixing things that were breaking, our internal services and admin boards were built using all of the WRONG proper development practices, it feels as if they took the book of best practices.....and said fuck it and did whatever the fuck they wanted. It is the worst PHP/Java/JS code I have ever seen in my entire life and the reason why even though I do not concur with it I will always understand the dislike from other developers. Our services look like something that came out from the 90s, no style, no engineering concepts in place, no versioning no testing NADA zip(these are all web based services)

One in particular, it was an admin board used internally to let students evaluate their professors, the entire app is shit, and it was broken, for some UNGODLY reason, the original dev decided to use some weird external libraries he got from some blog somewhere and as such something that would take about 5 or 6 files is now a mess with over 200 php/js files all over the fucking place. The CTO insisted on fixing them, they were all broken, and I continuously told him that redesigning the application would be faster.

Mofo fought me on it, and in the end I did what I wanted and rebuilt the app.

It took me one afternoon. One fucking afternoon, over possibly 2 weeks of fixing it.

See, I am not one to just do whatever he pleases, but I am firm in my belief that if I know a better way I will do it and save precious time. The dude had to agree with me on this and promised to consider this shit on other items that will undoubtedly come up. He was lying out of his ass but oh well..........

W

Last day on my first job where I stayed for a year. I really enjoyed it, loved the team, we were always laughing and making jokes, even in the worst moments.

Had a leader who became a friend, I made some good friends in there.

But I was really unmotivated as a dev, we maintained a really old and complex software, with a poor infrastructure for the dev team.

The manager was a great guy, but couldn't handle much pressure, saw him about 3-4 times quarreling with someone when he should be talking with the team to solve the problem.

But as I said, he is a great guy.

Today the whole team will be making a happy hour as my farewell party. I love this guys.

After that, on monday, I'll be joining a new company, working with a whole new stack, studying a lot for this new challenge.

Worst Software/Language you've had to use for work?

It realy just warms my heart when the customer provides us with software that I need to go through manually and test every method individual before we can start implement it. Then I have to spend hours testing every fucking bit of it to make sure the modules we control with said sw doesnt meet their untimely doom cause the sw is too broken to actually run.
Any.net developers on this plattform? If you doesnt use these xml comments for commenting methods, you're on my hit list.
I realy hate these back-alley developers. Sorry of I sound salty and whiny but seriously. These past 3 weeks, most of my time Ive just worked around issues instead of solving them, cause their sw just keeps chaining good coding down to the ground. And theres no documentation cause "we have higher priorities ", testing is done by us at release cause "its faster and we dont make mistakes" and worst of all, our contact quote on quote "senior experienced developer lead design im far up my own ass and way more experienced than you" guy is a consultant who is only reachable about 2h on a daily basis.

Tldr: we live in a society.

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.

[Long rant about one of the worst school project I got]
I just saw that post about Lego coding, and it reminds me a project we had to do for high school.

The project was about a robot that will do volleyball services. My group decided with me that I should go on programming the robot since it was my idea to pick that subject to work on. So I started to investigate the robot and the programming software.

This was one of the worst thing si could get. For some reason I didn't find any tutorial about how to program the robot, so I had to test it out. When you don't want to break the robot, that's clearly not the best thing to do.

So what about the teachers? We had 3. Two told me they don't know stuff about this, and one MIGHT know stuff but not how to use the software. Great...
Plus I add that we were asking a teacher some help, being desperate, and literally, he came, made a joke about "how long he didn't play with Lego toys", laughed at his own joke and left. Thank you, that was really helpful while I was worrying about the project that will help us getting my degree, clearly helped us.

So I managed to do something really basic, where you input the direction for the aim with the arrows on the robot, and central button was for shooting. Basically basic stuff. Even not optimal because the robot hit its own screen but a weaker throw wasn't working, so we had to put some protection over the screen and the arm.

Another group of another class were working on the same subject, so we visited them one day to see their stuff.
They made a joystick that was fully operational, with analogic direction input, precise aiming and shooting stuff. The best way to make myself doubt about my stuff.

So we did the presentation and for whatever reason, the other class (not only the other group) got bad reviews of their projects, made by my famous joking teacher, and we got a good review. Didn't understand, but whatever.

So did I learn stuff?
Absolutely not. It was one of the worst pain in the ass to learn the programming syntax and stuff, and when I graduated, I forgot anything concerning programming stuff, my engineering school did all the stuff.

This is some experience you don't forget, the one that don't make yourself grow at all but the effort is real.

Acer vs MSI Laptops.

Five years ago I bought an acer aspire vn7-591 laptop in Redcoon. It was the expensive laptop I bought ever in those days. My experience at the beginning was really bad because the battery laptop crashed after few months and the screen had some vague/dead pixels, but the worst was the imminent bankruptcy of Redcoon. So I couldn't use the warranty. Anyway, It didn't bother so much I have been enjoying this laptop and still doing it. However, last year the screen put me on alert since it started to fail with vertical bars and color changes.
It was time to buy a new computer and due to the problems with some of the components, I've decided to buy a laptop from a company with a better reputation than Acer in aspects as the reliability of the components.
My choice was a Msi Prestige 15 because of the thunderbolts, since the rest of specs are 'more or less similar', although it has more updated hardware, it is lighter, battery holds up to 4-5 hours etc... But... It is really noisy compared to my Acer computer. 2 CPU fans are around 3000 rpm in idle state... Acer seems to be working without using the fans if you are doing intensive work. I google it as I thought it was a factory problem, but it seems to be not a malfunctioning... In fact I found other users complaining about the same and the community proposed to reduce the fan speed through software.
Right now I have both laptops working and since the new boy is in house, Acer is working flawlessly. I am preparing the Acer for my girlfriend as a gift, otherwise it is a pitty to shut it down and store it in a wardrobe.
So, this is my impression about ACER and MSI. I m still experiencing with the new laptop, but I find weird things like the fan speed or how hot it gets in idle despite it uses a new generation of intel i7 cpu with lower consumption... I should monitor the power consumption...

I must say the worst thing is the whole "branding" of closed and open source software. Giving systems/platforms/repositories/projects/libraries names that makes no sense, just for the sake of standing out. Just god damn call a shoe for a shoe...the difference lies in the creator/maintainers and not in the fucking name...sry

Fucking fuck! How could I be so naive?
I just started my masters in Enterprise Software Development. It's basically the continuation of the CS BSc I finished this year. I don't consider myself a lazy and bad dev and I finished in the top 5-10% of the class - I say this not because I want to brag, I know I'm not the best, I know I have my defects, BUT I don't think that it's a good sign that all of us, my top graduate friends all full of hate and anger against this whole MSc after just a week. And... It's mostly one fucking egoistic teacher's fault.
Okay, all of us are working full time which is obviously tiring if you combine it with the university classes. But I still think I could manage this first week better, if I wouldn't fucking came to the same line of the faculty.
I deeply fucking hate that I've been naively thinking that the masters will be different after experiencing one of the worst teachers last year. It's fucking first week, and I can't change the specialization anymore, only give up. I wanted to fill up the void with some usefulness, but I just fucking messed it up.

This "beloved" teacher is from the industry, he has a lot of experience and started to teach recently. Which is not a problem, no! It should be a great thing by default. But the way he holds his courses is inaccaptable. I don't think I have the right to share everything, but the following stuff just grinds my gears... Like a fucking lot:

1) He brags about a lot of stuff. Like he made really good deals in the past. Why should we know, that he made a contract with a client for 20 million euros. Okay. Whatever. That doesn't help us, and I think that bragging makes him look like an egoistic scum.

2) I hate this one the most: he fucking says that we have a choice in the administrative stuff. He gives us some hope and offers the possibility to argument and come up with our own solutions for grading and etc. But oh boy, is this a false hope, a fake idea of free will. He already knows what the final solution will be and on what kind of decisions will we all "agree". He did this last year, he does it again. Fucking naiveness of mine...

3) Lastly, he decided, that we have to go to theatre with him, all of us. No exception. And I like the theatre. But only when it isn't forced. Why and how could you pair this up with the grade you give to your students? Because that's what he does.

FML. How can I already hate this? How can I already be fed up with all the stuff? Anyways, I'm signing the contract with the university tomorrow, so let the fun games begin... I know, I look like a whining little boy now, but I just fucking had to went it after this deep fried shit-day. I probably have to get some sleep, and everything's gonna be fine. Eventually, skipping classes might become necessary in order to bear all this shit.

*breath in*

FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKK.

OK.
There are many things one can complain about when it comes to windows. But I swear, the worst thing ever invented is this motherfucking "Windows Credential Manager". Basically I have a private and a buissness git account. I worked on a buissness project and pushed my changes. And when I looked in the repo it did commit under my private account. Ex fucking cuse me? Wtf? When pushing I logged in with my buissness account, why on earth did it push with my private account??

*3h of investigation*

Turns out this cunt fuck credential manager stored my private credentials and used them even tho I explicitly pushed with my buissness account. What goatfucker of a developer decided its a good idea to store user credentials without the users permission/without asking, and then uses the stored credentials instead of the one explicitly given??

I swear to god, if this piece of software would be a person, I would have thrown it him of my window(s).

Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.

So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.

Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.

Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]

One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.

I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.

The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.

"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"

I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.

The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.

This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.

Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.

TL;DR: fear of bricking my laptop due to typo pinning.

The worst nightmare i am living in right now...

I was noticing i did need some software in sid so i decided to use apt pinning for said software...

I configure the system, ok test looks good... I push it to production, run it on the system....and the nightmare starts.

Lits of packages get updated, and i am screaming 'noooooooo' since debian sid softwarz can sometimes break everything! I discovered that i did test my apt pinning config for the presence of the amount of numbers, but not at their value... Sooo, by accident swapping pin numbers for stable and unstable you get... Your worst apt-get update nightmare...

I hope it does not become a brick.

Most the devs are yelling Linux is best and blah. But since I installed eOS on my new ideapad my productivity is zero.

I'm just solving problems with the OS or other software. It seems some of the drivers are missing, because sometimes this fucking piece of shit just don't boots or just hangs. Installing node and npm was definitely one of the worst experiences because I messed up sudo privileges... I had to change my workflow because node-sass wasn't able to compile because of this.

And still I kind of feel more comfortable with eOS. 😥

Best
typescript - I needed to learn it for a project and I like it, I know java and javascript and it is something in between of those two that makes writing enterprise web applications easier, it’s nice that you can debug it directly in chrome, it makes things easier

Worst
docker, Dockerfiles - devops tools - amount of shell commands inside them and mangled && to make everything running in one file layer makes those unreadable mess that you need to think twice to understand, there is no debugger for it, you do everything with try and see what happens, there is actually no real dev toolset for devops and that sucks, since you got builder images that makes things more mangled than before, it’s clearly missing some external officially approved scripting language or at least
FUNCTION and
WITH LAYER and indentation / parentheses syntax and they still trying to make it flat, why are you doing that ?
as a result next to Dockerfile cause you can’t import multiple ones you get bunch bash scripts with mangled syntax and other crap that is glued together to make a monster - and this runs most of current software on this planet

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

The worst? There is a company called Colleseum Software that makes a piece of shitware called Aimi Ebook. It was supposed to let you send your FFL paperwork directly so you could do background checks before letting people walk out of your store with a gun. The company itself is a bag of dick, and whenever there were problems, they would put together some shitty solution like using a bat file on our server to keep their stupid service from fucking all over itself. I encountered this when I was working for an MSP handling IT needs and I don't know that I've encountered anything worse.

We work with multiple platforms, a legacy language and c#. This dev uses underscore between variables in c# and camel case in the legacy platform. The thing is the legacy system has used underscores since 1981 and I've never seen a readable example of c# using them between words.

I also told him I was working on learning to use patterns and how the process of software development should work by training. His response... Why would you want to do that?

He also copies and pastes code everywhere and pays no attention to scope.

And worst of all I'm his coverage when he is gone. If I have to debug one more sloppy bug I am going to face desk.

Best software is the least famous. Worst software is the most. Because the more an organization spends on development of the software, the less it can spend on marketing it.

Webflow is the worst pieces of shit software I have ever used. Ffs why the fuck people use this crap

Worst: Having Toolchain Problems while responsible colleague is on sick leave and a software release is tightly planned
Best: Fixing that fucking toolchain, delivering in time and getting commendation from SW Project Lead

My best experience this year was to be the project manager of a software project and my worst experience was to work alone on this project.

Thread about Quality Analysts/Testers!

I've seen that Managers and HR get a lot of shit thrown their way but I'm surprised to see no love for our QA friends

What was your worst experience with a QA/Software Tester? When was the last time you felt like punching your monitor over an argument with them?

If you're a QA, what has been your worst experience with developers?

horror stories from my old job: we had to ask to get the internet 'turned on' (of course only for a short period of time), you had to disable loading images, because otherwise you'd have to wait for fucking EVER til you could safely move your mouse and: Google had a massive lag when you scrolled. let me repeat that: GOOGLE. LAGGED. I didn't even know that was fucking possible! and the worst part: my old job was at a software dev company. not a shitty IT department at -I don't know- a bakery?! I mean, wtf?! and it wasn't even a start up. and they still exist! how? why?! I'm still not sure how I managed to work there for five months...

Went to meet up last night. I was there acting like I have no experience and was just starting to learn programming. Suddenly this guy turns and faced me he said non verbatim “don’t use JavaScript thats the worst programming language, its used by wanna be software engineer. Use c# they have blazor so you wont have to code using JS”. My blood pressure went up guys. I understand this because hes kinda old and dont want to learn new things but i got caught off guard. To be honest im not mad, im just sad though, imagine if i was really new and had no experience and just started few months ago. All the hard work and studying will be nothing. Btw hes nice he offered me free food and beer its just JS.

If you’re learning any language specifically JS. Dont mind the naysayers. Just learn it and be good at it. Languages has its use cases. Conversation with whats better programming language is useless and a waste of time thats what my professor said and its true.

So I've recently got into college after programming for years by myself like many guys here, the thing is I was expecting to find some guys like me so maybe we could start some project or something like that but oh boy, freshman software engineer students are the "best": Don't give a fuck about coding. Most of them are gamers who think that just because they're gamers they can make a videogame (hahaha) and the worst part is that the only student of them who already have a lot of experience in programming is so fucking arrogant and annoying that I'd rather change majors before doing a project with him.

There are two other guys who are also really interested in programming and one of them already have quite a lot of experience too but they're on different majors...

College being disappointment since the first month: Check

Fuck Oracle, fuck you oracle! The stupidest shittiest worst nightmare company with the most user-unfriendly, productivity-killing, illogical, stupid pile of software garbage products ever! And unfortunately I want to extends my worm-fucks to all Oracle employees and maintainers and to the whole fucking community of shit that made up oracle-community and to every conscious being who ever liked, enjoyed or have found the slightest genuine interest of any product tagged "oracle".

I installed the pile of shit a.k.a Oracle 18c and imported a dumb file locally, everything was working in the slightest amount of the word (fine) before it turns to nightmare. I created a C# client to call a stored procedure in that shit of a database engine. I kept getting error related to the parameter types, specifically one which is custom type of Table of numbers. It turns out that the only of doing this is through that shit they called (unmanaged driver), the "managed" doesn't support custom types. So I had to install another package of shit they call (odbc universal install) "universal my a$$ by the way", at that moment, where everything just crashed and stopped working. I spent 3 hours trying to connect to the fucking database to no avail. I shockingly found a folder in my desktop folder called (OracleInstallation) and all windows services related to oracle installation "suddenly" got somehow (re-routed) to that folder.
In conclusion, fuck oracle.

!Rant but a question :)

So, I'm in college learning software engineering and kind of don't see the point of try-harding. I have always been very good at learning so I only started studying late high-school because grades were important for collage entrance. But now that I'm here and my grades have all been very good (15/20 in the worst cases), I'm not motivated to go the mile further, specially because I don't have friends to compete with (or enemies for that matter :P).

How do you developers motivate yourselves?

Worst enterprise software experience... I was fresh out of college, and needed money. I was working in a call center, fielding IT helpdesk calls for a major US telecom company, who had just acquired a competitor. One day I got to work and about ten of us were given a new desk, new phone number, an an email address at the newly acquired company. My manager said to us "We have no clue how any of their proprietary systems work, what servers they run on, or how to login to them. Your phones are ringing, make sure you take good notes so the Tier-1s can help out next week. Good luck."

Trial by shit-storm fire, all while trying to convince the caller that yes, I did know what I was talking about. It was a lot of cold calling random employees whose job title in the corporate directory looked even remotely close to somebody I could escalate a ticket to. They didn't use the same ticketing system we used, so it was a lot of copy/pasting between two ticketing systems. To this day, I still have no clue what happened to their original call center staff. I'm sure they must have had one, but it seemingly just dissolved overnight.

That job was the springboard to my development career. I left for a gig in software helpdesk, then to quality assurance, automated testing, and now I'm a senior DevOps engineer. It was worth it.

I used to be an iPhone user since iPhone 3, every year switching to the new model, always complaining about limitations and jailbreaking it with the concerns this brings up to the table, anyway, I also tried other cellphones like Samsung Galaxy XXX, worse shit ever, and those annoying Samsung apps you cannot uninstall, pfff, worst of the worst.

I started with pure Android phones some years ago, first with pixel 2, holly shit, software is amazing, I was amazed an happy with my phone, "infinite cloud storage for free" yes please!!!

The problem comes after 5 months of use, battery drains in less than 3 hours, even with the cellphone screen off and not using it, it was under warranty and got a new battery for free, well, no that bad. Suddenly the apps start blocking each other and takes a lot to open or switch between apps. I bought also the famous PIXEL BUDS, worst purchase ever, you never know if they are charging or still connected, no matter how hard do you try, it randomly connects, I tried all the possible solutions, didn't work, one random day, the buds went off, got new ones thanks to the warranty, now they are starting to fail again.

Bought the pixel 3, same exact shit as before, same errors, same shitty hardware, battery drains in hours, and I am a regular user, I do not have games or use it in an intensive way.

Conclusion:

- Google: Shitty hardware, great software, no limitations(I can send you one of my songs through Whatsapp and copy anything form my computer as a file), but god, why your hardware is so bad?
Also, a lot of free apps, but very bad designed, just look for any app to listen podcasts, you have to waste 10secs every fucking time to listen your shit, freedom comes with a price no doubt.

- Samsung: I have no idea who want that shit and why, , not satisfaction at all

- Apple: Fucking expensive, have to pay for everything, but quality is much better, hardware is flawless, I have to admit it, my GF has a freaking iPhone 7 and her phone is fine the whole day, on the downside, well, costs and limitations relative to sharing and use

So, I will switch again to fucking Apple, best of the 3 bad evils

HELP!!

I am starting a new contract to create a full stack web application with a medical company that will contain some sensitive data about their clients/patients.

I have been working as a salaried full-time employee for a medical software company, but I have been shielded from any sort of lawsuits from the client (worst case scenario, I'd get fired).

Do any of you have any advice on what I should do to protect myself in terms of LLC's, Insurances, etc?

No I love them all equally... 😂😂😂😂 ... Ok they are mostly all shit , with security holes, features that don't exist but should, terrible docs .... The worst ones , mainly by Microsoft ie, windows 10 updates , windows servers.... But apple ... Fuck them ... Google .... Manipulating barstards ....

There is good software just you usually have to go through the shit to get them, I mean people normally use ie through lack of knowledge , so educate!

When interviewing people still ask me if I work with Eclipse. I'm Android dev, why should I ever work with that piece of sh*t of an non-IDE?

Please just don't ask for Eclipse. No sane androider uses it. I don't like to waste my life using the worst software ever made. I would even say that no one should be using it. NetBeans is better, IntelliJ is best.

Best: Started my first real job as a software developer

Worst: wrote off my 2l turbo megane coupe and scraped the poop off my replacement car

!tech (sorta)

I am a 24yo Software Engineer guy and had just started working professionally 2 years ago, and most of my work life went in WFH due to covid. Before that, my college was also near to my home, so i have never left my home for more than a few hours to do studies.

Life had went pretty smoothly so far but now I see a lot of hurdles coming into my path . i am 24 and don't have a license for even a 2 wheeler. I don't have a good idea of my own city (but fortunately it has a great infrastructure , so i know how to travel via public transport to anywhere easily). mainly I don't know how to live alone.

The worst thing currently happening for me is that my company is transforming from WFH to WFO. The office is in a different metropolitan city which is crazy expensive and short on space. I already am uncomfortable with the idea living on my own but the thoughts of sharing a room/bed with some other guy and having my savings cut from 90 to 50% is worse.

i am hopeful that the financial hit will not be that bad as appraisals are coming, but this picture of hustle is scary. will i indulge into bad habits (drinking, gambling, smoking)? will i loose my health? would i need to wash my clothes and cook my food everyday? would i even have time to think and watch some web series, video tutorial? would i cut cost everywhere? every thing is scary. the market is also very bad right now, i am not getting any interviews even after applying to many places.

how do you prepare yourself to live away from home? Also , how do you prepare your family to live away from you?

(for 2nd question, i am a single child of a nuclear family with rarely any relatives or friends. my parents , especially my mom have been super involved in my life and we both have an exteem8 attachment to each other. i have recently started going away for short trips and travels, but she gets super emotional and concerned on thinking about me living and managing things on my own , away from her)

eTime Xpress by Celayix Software

Quite possibly the worst time and attendance software on the market. The only reason the company is still using it is because the big cheese refuses to pay any per user fees for any product whatsoever.

It requires an installation of Ericom because all supervisors must log in to schedule employees and record hours for payroll.

Printing is a nightmare to support because you're essentially printing through RDP and all print drivers for everyone's assortment of crappy printers must be installed on the server.

The software supports SOAP API calls, but it can't handle more than three concurrent requests without barfing, so you have to code your application around that...

I could go on...

Worst enterprise software... Maybe almost all manufacturer bloatware installed whitout being asked if you really want it or what it is usefull for, when you buy a new laptop or phone.

In terms of developing:
Best: made a responsive web app that connects to a desktop software and allows to make orders for providers.
Worst: the company for wich it was developed shows no signs of implementing that app now.

So for my software engineering class we have to write a game in Java, and let me tell you, it has been a time.

The worst part so far has been the transition over to using a JLayeredPane, so that we actually have a background and a foreground. I offered to handle it, since I've done a bit with swing before now.

So I put together something that I thought should work, only to find that layered panes and layouts do NOT like to work together. So it was off to google...after sooo many hours of pouring over tutorials and javadocs I finally got the layers to draw...only to find that our Buttons had stopped working!

For some reason, putting the buttons inside a JPanel stopped them from actually informing their ActionListener (since the random test button I just added had actually still worked). So OF COURSE that meant I had to rework the buttons too, since their logic relied on that panel.

All in all, what should have been a relatively simple refactoring of our view was tranformed into almost a week's worth of frantic googling and pain through the magic of Java Swing.

I swear I touched some weird and complex programming shit in over a decade of programming.
I interfaced myself through C# to C++ Firmware, I wrote Rfid antennas calibration and reading software with a crappy framework called OctaneSDK (seems easy until you have to know how radio signal math and ins and outs work to configure antennas for good performance), I wrote full blown, full stack enterprise web portals and applications.with most weird ass dbs since the era of JDBC, ODBC up to managed data access and entity framework, cloud documental databases and everything.

Please, please, please, PLEASE I BEG YOU, anyone, I don't even have the enough life force to pour into this, explain me why the hell Jest is still a thing in javascript testing.

I read on the site:
"Jest is a delightful JavaScript Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity."

Using jest doesn't feel any delightful and I can't see any spark of focus and simplicity in it.

I tried to configure it in an angular project and it's a clustefuck of your worst nightmares put togheter.

The amount of errors and problems and configurations I had to put up felt like setting up a clunky version of a rube goldberg's machine.

I had to uninstall karma/jasmine, creating config files floating around, configure project files and tell trough them to jest that he has to do path transformations because he can't read his own test files by itself and can't even read file dependencies and now it has a ton of errors importing dependencies.

Sure, it's focused on simplicity.

Moreover, the test are utter trash.

Hey launch this method and verify it's been launched 1 time.
Hey check if the page title is "x"

God, I hate js with passion since years, but every shit for js I put my hands on I always hope it will rehab its reputation to me, instead every fucking time it's worse than before.

There is nothing worst than being asked to use a proprietary software.

I literally started coding as a kid so I wouldn't have to learn anyone else's idiotic design, or waste time being limited by the lack of feature, or hit a paywall every time I'm finally about to get shit done.

Use open source industry standards or gtfo.

Working as a Dev for a while now, I tell new people not to bother with it. There is never any job satisfaction as people in charge never understand the basics.

Instead of learning to write efficient code, figure out how to solve real business problems, work towards a maintainable flexible product to quickly deliver value on changing requirements, write automated tests to improve quality, maintainability and prevent live issues - basically do anything a good Dev strives for - you will just constantly end up working for people with no interest beyond the next couple days, on a shit code base that no one can understand, with people that don't want to learn anything about software design and just check boxes off.

Apart from pay this must be the worst career possible in a technical field.

Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.

TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...

Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.

So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.

When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.

I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.

Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.

At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.

Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.

I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.

They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..

So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.

Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.

Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:

So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...

Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.

Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.

Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.

Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...

None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.

The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).

By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.

In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.

To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!

My collegue make remote assistance for our software, dedicated to doctors in Italy. A doctor had the hd completely full, so it can't update the software and he call my collegue angry, saying "i've an update error, is your fault!!!" etc...after my collegue explain him he had to free space on the disk because there is no space, he had a genial idea! he brought new laptop, worst than the other one, because of the free space on disk!