!n case someone is unfamiliar with this joke ::

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "Yes. You're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."

"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.

"I do" replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but It's of no use to anyone."

The man below replies, "You must work in management."

"I do," replies the balloonist, *"But how'd you know?"**

"Well", says the man, "you don’t know where you are or where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault."

The state of CS is a joke and I'm contributing to it.

I'm a final year CS student and like most students, I'm not exactly overflowing with money so any income helps. Now, it's not that uncommon for students to buy their projects but I swear a good 20% of people from my course don't know how to write a function. And let me remind you, they are in their final year, about to graduate, about to get their bachelor's degree in computer science and they don't know how to write a function, let alone a class, let alone piece together something that works.

I just want to say that no, I'm not proud of myself for doing other people's projects for money and letting such imbeciles pass. I'm fucking tired of sending over someone's project, them asking me to change something and me telling them to add an if statement to which they reply with "i don't know how, pls do it".

This is why having a degree doesn't mean shit anymore and yes, I'm aware that higher education has become more available over time.

I HATE working with MS Office products. Yes, Access, I'm looking at you, you backwards, whanabe database reject! You're invalid as a serious SQL database and retarded as an data application suite.

VBA, make up your MIND with your damn function calls! Either require me to use parenthesis or don't! I'm sick of this conditional parenthesis sh*t!

While we're talking about not making up your mind... screw 'sub', you half wit language! Either use functions like a real language or go the f&$k home and make room for a language that knows what it's doing!

Oh!!! WHY... WHY! do you have null AND... NOTHING?! Who... Who... WHO invented "nothing"?! And what sick joke are you playing at with isnull() and empty()??? How many damn ways so you need to test for "no value"?!?!

Access... That's right, I'm not done with you yet... How is it you've survived this damn long in the business world with all of the databases you corrupt? Sure, you suck as a real database, but at least have some freaking pride that people even USE you! How DARE your corrupt yourself with the regularity you seem to have! I wish my bowel movements were as regular as your database corruptions, for the love of humanity.

F$@k you, VBA! F@&k you, Access! F$#k you, MS Office! And Fuuuuuu$k YOU Microsoft for shoving these half assed reject tools down my throat!

I hope your cloud uses Access as a back end and gets some injection virus.

*Takes deep breath* need to say that.

Tl;dr

Longest Rant I've written so far.

How to manage a school (by out school director):

Did this student do something spezial to emphasize the school?
-No: Ignore him
-Yes: Did the student achieve this with the help of this schools staff?
-No: Take all the credit
-Yes: Hahaha, just a joke, nobody receives help from the school. Goto -No

Q: Should this class get the 5 day trip, they've been waiting for the whole year?
Director: No.
Q: But they don't even participate in other trips just to go there.
D: No
(Good thing she did not have the last word there)

Does the school director need this one week trip to india, just to talk once about stuff, you can talk about via email, to a sponsor?
D: "Of course I deserve it"

D: "We need faster internet in this school"
Network admins: "But it won't be of any use, if the network can't handle it. We'll need better pcs (and network conponents) on top of that"
D: "No, bot enough money available for that one." *browses email with IPad paid by school money*

Teacher: "I want to realize project xy with the students. We'll need around 1200€ (for 20 people)."
D: "Can place xy at our school to as advertise?"
T: "No, but it's be a valuable le-"
D: "600 at most."
(Again denied by people who aren't fcking assholes. We got 1500€, so 300€ per group)

D: So what makes you think you can teach informatics in this school"
Applicant: "Well, I'm friends with one of your teacher here. We went to university together, where I learn't nothing about informatics and I don't even understand the principles of this subject"
D: "Close enough. Hired, you can teach them all the theory stuffy. You don't have to prepare that yourself another teacher has done so. Just read it from his documents."

*In class with the mentioned teacher talking about Threads*
*Le wild code appears*
while (doStuff())
System.out.println ("Thread working...");
System.out.println ("Thread terminated");
T: "... and most importantly, when you have done all the work be sure to terminate the thread with 'System.out.println ("Thread terminated");'"

Should this teacher be allowed to participate in this seminar about burnouts?
D: "No, I can't afford paying the supplenze."

Staff: "We need to talk with the director about this."
S: "Not in her office. The cafeteria maybe"
*Not in the cafeteria either*
S: "Seems like she didn't come to achool today. Let's try tomorrow"
(^ Stuff that happens almost daily. Screw semicolons. I see her only once a month at most)

*Student send 5000 emails by accident* (Shit happens 😂😅😂😅)
D: "You gonna work here for a full afternoon"
*Student arrives for his punishment*
Staff: "Good that you're here. Do this real quick."
*10 min. Later*
Student: "Done"
Staff: "Well, we have no more work to give you, so you might as well leave"

DONE!!! Good job coming so far.

Our school is supposed to be the best, but internally it's one big meme.

I suspect this may happen to alot of people:
Me: Is this the right way to implement the feature?
Lecturer: yes that looks good
Me: *happy*
*Results come out*
Lecturer: *deducts marks for no reason*
Me: You said this is the right way of doing this...
Lecturer: I didn't quite see what you're trying to do
Me: it's fully commented.................
Lecturer: *confused as fuck* i will remark and get back to you
Me: *thinking* fucking retard playing with my grades like it's a joke.

*WanBLowS shits itself as usual in BSOD*
FEATUREFUL FUCKING JOKE OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM..!!!! How about you do the only thing that you're good at - casual shit like letting me watch a fucking anime! - and do it properly?! Yes there's an rsync from btrfs to btrfs going on in the background - because yes I fucking detest your joke of a filesystem called NTFS!! Should that even matter?! ONE FUCKING JOB!!!

Meanwhile my tablet, a fucking €120 cheapie!! It can stay up and running - stable! - for fucking weeks in a row, only taken down by me forgetting to charge the bloody thing every few days. But yeah it's gotta be a hardware issue, it's gotta be an obscure setup. NO IT'S A FUCKING CRAPTACULAR SHIT OS!!! If only those Microshit certified enganeers would write a goddamn line of DECENT CODE!!!

(As for anyone who doesn't know already that I've tried countless times to convert this turd to Linux.. It's an Intel + Nvidia GPU hybrid and it doesn't even boot a Linux live session. Believe me, I've tried.)

My failed interaction with a girl:
So I go to a convention at the university.
It's nice I'm having fun, I see a girl dressed as Hermione, she is cute so I go talk to her for a little we joke around I'm really starting to like her. Then I say bye and hang out with friends for the rest of the evening. I see her leaving so I run to her and after catching up to her I ask if I could have her phone number. She says yes and enters her number on my phone. I'm super happy. I excitedly wait for the next day's evening to message her. We message for a while the next day she messages good morning, so I think things are going well, she must like me too right ? I mean we glanced at each other at the convention, she gave me her phone number and messaged good morning so I'm pretty sure she does...

Turns out she doesn't, she says she thought I wanted to be friends...
WHAT ?! FRIENDS ?? Are you 12 ? What friend would run to you to get your phone number and after getting it there would be a stupid grin on his face ??? She looks at 9gag and doesn't know the most overly used meme of "friendzone" ? Unbelievable either she was screwing with me or she is just that socially dense. So after that I'm pretty mad but I don't say any mean things I just accept the fact like a gentleman and carry on with my life. But also feeling depressed after believing we actually had a connection. Ugh I guess back to the coal mines for me huh, stupid conventions 😒

When it's 3am and windows decides to switch to light theme.

(1st week Monday)
Went to a game programmer job interview, job description says most of unity related stuffs; create games in Unity, code in c#, work within Unity to build robust game systems etc.

Interviewer asked for my experience and portfolios, showed him. Then he asked me some questions about making interactable objects in a VR scene, then asked if I'm able to do a demo (on oculus rift) to prove him I can do it.
I don't have oculus rift, I'm allowed to go their office and use their rift for testing though.
Dateline = 2nd week Friday.

(2nd week Monday)
Showed him a demo scene in GearVR, he seems pretty satisfied.
He: I will get back to you next Monday. I'll wait for client's reply first.
Me: (smile and jokingly said) so...... If the client doesn't get back to you or doesn't want the project anymore, means I don't get the job?
He instantly replied: no (with a serious face)
Then said: You shouldn't reply with that "attitude", you should instead think of "is there any reason to hire you if client doesn't get back to me"
*backfired, but wtf?*
*insert meme here*
(Please comment, am I too rude? Or *unprofessional*, but it's just a joke ffs)

He also asked if I'm able to do it on rift since I made it on GearVR already.
I said yes, depends on the controller used.
(Any dev with common logic should understand it'll work too, with given SDK, even without, some hacks should do it, just a matter of time)
(He even told me he's a dev himself)
(Should I insert the meme here again?)

But he doesn't accept the answer. He wants me to give him a text (through WhatsApp), telling him *in a professional way* that I can do it.
*wtf*
*insert meme here*

(Last day of third week)
Needless to say, he didn't get back to me. Thought he promised he would.

Things to note:
Job description doesn't say anything about VR.
Spend a week of my time to do his demo without obligations.
Didn't get to ask much about his role and job scope either.

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

Just learnt perfectly what the below joke means:

'I wanted to improve the world, but they wouldn't give me the source code'

I really don't understand why the world is full of obsolete processes that people fight against daily when changing things ever so slightly could take the weight of the world off their shoulders. The same thing goes for my work, I work in finance, and we use a remote app built in Windows forms (not xaml or wpf, the original forms) and it's insecure, slow, buggy, and crashes whenever you press ESC (yes, really). Even worse, I've offered to rewrite their whole network for nothing, just the improvement to people's lives. And they say no! WELL FUCK YOU FOR BEING A PLAGUE ON THE FUCKING WORLD! Why do people insist on staying behind the times when the world could be such a beautiful place?!?

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

People at work found out Teams in a nightmare and really screws with your normal email address processing. They also found out it isn't free with the shit tier of Office (or wherever it is bundled). So for everyone but sales there is no Teams. Whew... However, for the tech dudes: electrical and software we made a custom Discord server. Of course my avatar is "trolling DiCaprio".

Some technical and some not work stuff has gone on with this server. Kind of gives the tech people a place to talk and joke.

devdude: Apologies that I saw this (some question I had) too late to prevent you from walking upstairs.
me: oh, the exercise trauma!
devdude: it's 2024 and we still have to walk up and down stairs
me: I was expecting flying chairs like on Wall-E
devdude: Me too! that's why I put on this much weight so I can be prepared for when the chair finally is here.
me: That is the exact opposite of helping this tech along.

Another thing I noticed about my work place. The BMI of employees seems to increase the closer to a break room you get. The company is fond of bringing donuts periodically. Coincidence I am sure. The problem is I am right next to the break room... Yes, my BMI went up a bit when I moved to my new desk. Before I was much further away. Now I am on a low carb diet. I am going to break the stats damn it!

I think my laptop is living and hates me... I press shutdown (Yes the actual windows shutdown and not long-press power button) I close my Laptop, expecting it to shutdown, right? Nope... It goes to sleep mode and next time I open it up, it continues to shutdown... It's like it doesn't want to shutdown and is playing a joke on me.....

So we started a new Unity video game project for mobile in June 2021. Hooray!

Being a mobile project, one of the earliest things we think about is scaling the interface across all sorts of device screen resolutions and aspect ratios, right? Well, to preemptively solve this problem early on, I decided to letterbox the game view - just choose one aspect ratio for the game and pad black bars to the sides of the screen. Simple, solves the game's world space problem without trying too hard, and it automatically adapts to Android's split-screen mode.

I showed the early builds to management as well as game design team and they gave me some general nods. Sounds like green light ahead. I spent the next few months building the game logic and scale the UI around a consistent letterboxed game view. If you had experience scaling Unity UI to a letterboxed area, you should already knew that it takes a whole paradigm of its own that's kinda hard to break out of, but the fact that it stays consistent across all screen aspect ratios is so worth it. Regardless, the biggeer benefit of letterboxing is simpler world space setup. You don't worry about whether this particular area will be overflowed horizontally or vertically in a particular device or not. You have a 9:16 window to view the world through, nothing needs to move at runtime and that's about it.

Fast-forward to early September 2021 and 40+ builds later, the GD started having concern that the playing area is not filling up his phone screen and that the letterboxes are bothering him. He wants to get rid of the letterboxes and wants the game world as well as UI to fill up his screen.

Yes. After 40+ builds, for all of which the letterbox was present, nobody in the project raised a concern about the letterbox. It's only NOW that they all of the sudden side with the GD and demand the removal of the letterbox. I feel like almost half of my effort on this game has been wasted. These clueless guys didn't spend one second looking at the early builds thinking of the possibility that the black bars at the top and bottom of their phone screens (which I repeat: has been around since the very first build) is gonna bother them? Somebody must be playing a cruel joke at this company. They had all the chances to bring this up as a potential issue and TODAY is the first time I hear of it.

See, designers. You waste our time and your time by doing this kind of thing. Please raise your issues early. Complain to us ASAP. If you wait for so long before raising an issue that has been in-your-face the whole time, I can't fault any developer for assuming you're trying to play a long prank. I can tell designers right now: it's not funny.

I try to pay attention to my moods. So when I have strong feelings I will tell my wife about them. I was talking to her on the phone on the way home.

me: It is the horny time of the month.
her: Oh, okay, thanks.
me: Yeah, it comes and goes...
her: <sigh>

At this point I realized I had made a really dirty dad joke.

me: Oh, that was bad wasn't it?
her: Yeah, it was bad.
me: I have ascended to subconscious dad joke competence.
her: Okay, sure.
me: Was it funny?
her: No.
me: Really?
her: I just like to tell you I think it's not funny.
me: You are trolling me?
her: Yes.
me: Damn it!

My manager asks, in Slack, if we can change the auto-tagger to update the patch instead of the minor version. I respond by saying, "Yes, it's in the Jenkisfile. Really we should switch to just <major.minor> and drop patch."

My manager asks why and I go on to say the last number is useless (unless you ship software externally and need to hotfix or security patch a minor release; internally they serve little purpose).

At my last job we dropped three numbers for two, and most other teams here only use two numbers.

He sends a link to the semantic versioning website.

The next day one of the other developers sends it to me in a private chat as a joke. 😂😅 I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks our manager shouldn't be a manager.

1 of the many windows rants i will make since i have to use that on work's laptop.

Let's start.
20GB for an IDE? what a joke.

Seriously MS. Are you fucking retarded? You have a fuckin retarded windows store, and i need to open it 3 times for it to be functional? Fuck you.

I want to change the default browser. YES I FUCKIN WANT TO CHANGE IT, STOP FUCKIN ASKING ME 500 TIMES IF I'M SURE ABOUT IT AND DO THE THING I TOLD YOU TO DO. Fuck you.

2GB on startup? Thanks, appreciated. Miss my 250MB on my linux laptop. FUCK YOU.

Did i fuckin tell you i want to sync the onedrive? I clicked that shit to disable it and you decided to sync the fuck out of it? Fuck you.

Candy crash and other retarded games? LOL, can't say anything. The laptop is from the job, i won't bother uninstalling that shit. In any case MS would reinstall them again. Fuck you.

Fans at 100% for no reason and battery draining like it's a cold drink that drinks someone who is thirsty? Thanks MS, very helpful. Fuck you.

Powershell? Well i leave that. Whenever i remember how slow it is i want to throw the laptop of the window. Fuck you.

Notifications? Thanks, it's very good thing to spam them for no fucking reason. Fuck you.

Skype? Who the fuck told you to install it? Fuck you.

Well i won't say anything about their fuckin updates. Every one knows how retarded and piece of shit they are.

The problem as i see it is summed up in the following: everyone is fucking crazy

asked this guy i see here alot working, 'ever feel left behind in hell' he says 'oh this isn't hell it's (redacted) and we're on (redacted)'s mountain so we're closer to heaven'

so i make a not very novel joke anymore and I say "maybe there's a hellmouth over there, and we'd just have a farther fall" he smiled. it was a funny joke. whenever it was first made.

it was cynical humore expressing my present level of personal misery as I rot with everyone else.

also. remembered being able to convince someone to work for 50/hr doled out each hour as was satisfactory.

wonder if its possible again, person in question doesn't appear to be here today. oh well.

far far more honest than the other fucked up shit they do here and yes this whole rant was made before.

so. not a bot :P

and not making the comment about ownership let someone take this piece of life and let me get booted forward 15 years. fuckers.