This story is 100% true.

I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.

The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”

So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”

So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.

Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…

After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.

Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.

It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.

The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.

I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.

Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the side of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new Porsche screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist-watch, and a Versace tie, gets out and asks the Shepherd:

Man: “If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?”

The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies:

Shepherd: “Okay.”

The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to the mobile-fax, enters a NASA Webster, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with logarithms and pivot tables, then prints out a 150 page report on his high-tech mini-printer. He turns to the shepherd and says,

Man: “You have exactly 1,586 sheep here.”

The shepherd cheers,

Shepherd: “That’s correct, you can have your sheep.”

The young man makes his pick and puts it in the back of his Porsche. The shepherd looks at him and asks,

Shepherd: “If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?”

The young man answers;

Man: “Yes, why not?”

Shepherd: "You are an IT consultant."

Man: “How did you know?”

Shepherd: “Very simple. First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and third, you don’t understand anything about my business…Now can I have my DOG back?"

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

I honestly have no energy to even type this out because this is so draining, but here goes.

I am usually very calm and can keep my composure well, but boy do you push my limits. Do you think my work is so easy that it’s just “a bunch of queries and simple logic”? Well, fine. YOU FUCKING DO IT.. right before I grab you by your fucking neck and shove your face repeatedly into the keyboard. You even have the audacity to give us a project and come the very next fucking day and repeatedly keep asking us “iS iT FiNisHeD yEt?” so much and annoy even the calmest in our team even when we clearly stated that it was going to take us 30 work days to fucking finish it. Do you not know what a working day is? 30 work days is not the same as 30 days you dumbfuck. You have no idea how any of these work and yet you preach your bullshit and waste our fucking time when we could have used that time better to finish our work. THIS IS WHY EVERY SINGLE EMPLOYEE KEEPS LEAVING AND WHY THIS COMPANY HAS A VERY LOW EMPLOYEE RETENTION RATE. You won’t even let me finish my fucking lunch in peace. We have 45 minutes for lunch and since I’ve been eating out for almost the past year (I live alone and don’t usually have time to make food at home because of my hour and a half long commute), a close friend of mine’s mom reached out to and said “Hey, since you’ve been usually getting food from outside, why not join us for lunch?”, so I did and it was the most amazing food ever. Mind you, this was the first time I’ve ever left work myself to have lunch since I joined. I did get 10 minutes late because lunchtime tends to fall around the time where the schools close for the day (no shit) and school traffic is usually insane, and you unsurprisingly decided to make an issue out of a non-issue especially since I’M THE ONLY FUCKING PERSON WORKING IN THE COMPANY and also dock my pay for that. Let me also include the time where our one of the others in the management gave us a quick project that was to be quickly finished while we working on an existing project so we put aside a day just to complete and ship the app and the features and as usual, you decided to make an issue out of a non-issue and decided to shame us publicly and even made (my now former) colleague cry. You’re just a spoiled, selfish, ignorant nit-witted fucking imbecile who has no idea how to even properly run a business. Get fucked in the arse with a cactus. I'm done. I've held on for so long but this is the last straw. I'll be handing my letter of resignation soon. Good luck with running a company without any employees.

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

A few interview tips from the other side of the table:

1. Bring a laptop

I mean come up man! Bring a laptop. Especially if there was some kind of project or challenge to present. I have seen so many people do a big UI design presentation and then come in like “can I use your laptop???”. Of course you can, but your looking very unprepared.

2. Ask for clarification

Communication problems happen in business every day. Different cultures and accents can cause issues. The important part isn’t wether you understand everything said but that you ask enough questions to make sure you eventually understand. Most people just wrongly assume things and start rambling.

3. Know what kind of company you and talking to

In my case, this is a startup. We aren’t IBM or Amazon or Google. We work hard and we play hard. Work life balance is important in life but if your very first question is “work/life balance???” then you played yourself. Wait a bit, pepper it in on the sly. Just don’t ask it right away, it shows us that you aren’t ready to work harder than usual if needed. Maybe try “so how do you like working here? How are the people, hours etc?” Or something besides the first question being a bad signal.

Just some random tips for an interviewer.

From me to you, don’t make me have to tell you like DJ Khalid would ...

Congratulations, you played yourself.

Manager: I want the front ends to be more dumb, too much logic is happening on the frontend.

Me: both of the sites are just multi step forms, I’m confused about the complexity part.

Manager: yea but don’t we have a bunch of third party api calls?

Me: we have 4 and they are public facing apis.

Manager: yea, make a new api and move this api calls to the backend and I want both frontend teams to send the same shape payload.

Me: but…

Manager: oh and I don’t like how the business team does the a/b testing and splitting traffic, let’s move that to the backend as well.

Me: but… that a/b testing platform they use in ran by another team and they have a full set of features for business analytics…

Manager: yea let’s just replicate those features and move them to the backend.

Me: but it’s a product!

Manager: look! You are the best backend engineer we got! I know you can do this!

Me: I lead the frontend teams…

Manager: ….

Manger: good news we are giving you a promotion with raise you are now a senior engineer.

Me: I confused but happy… I think..

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

An important message:
PrOpErLy managing servers is HARD.

I get pissed off at customers with ZERO server knowledge who think they can manage their VPS. “Just get a control panel and a VPS” from some flashy provider that makes server management look way too easy.. Clicking around in their fancy control panel, until:

- they need help with their *self-managed* VPS;
- their email ends up in spam;
- they suffer from performance issues;
- they need to restore a backup;
- something breaks, because YES, things break

Way too little people are able to answer:

- when and how do you make backups?
- how do you monitor your servers and which services?
- how do you keep track of trend analysis?

Then I come by with necessary software. SNMP for trend analysis, Graphite for infrastructure health, Sensu for monitoring, Kibana, Ansible for configuration management..

Things that servers need but that customers have never even heard of.. because they can do everything in their control panel..

Until they come crying to me because it broke and they don’t even know how to get into SSH.

I think the ones to blame are VPS providers that tell the tale of how easy it is to install a control panel and never look at your server again.

Customers become responsible for something *business-critical*! Yet they don’t know how it works.

I fucking hate ppl who transferred from business program into the CS program. They are all talk and no action. Literally this girl who claim to be “good at algorithm” doesn’t even know how to write a quick sort. In the past 2 months I have received more request from business program students to “help debug program” than all of the other departments (science, engineering) combined. Worse, some just straight ask for my code so they can copy off my implementation.

Seriously, it’s okay if you don’t know how to do stuff. But it’s not okay if you don’t want to learn AND feel so fucking entitled. I have a lot of homework as well, it’s not my responsibility to **help** you.

Last week our department drama queen was showing off Visual Studio’s ability to create a visual code map.
He focused on one “ball of mud”, vilifying the number of references, naming, etc and bragging he’s been cleaning up the code. Typical “Oooohhh…this code is such a mess…good thing I’m fixing it all..” nonsense. Drama queen forgot I wrote that ‘ball of mud’

Me: “So, what exactly are you changing?”
DK: “Everything. It’s a mess”
Me: “OK, are any of the references changing? What exactly is the improvement?”
DK: “There are methods that accept Lists. They should take IEnumerables.”
Me: “How is that an improvement?”
<in a somewhat condescending tone>
DK: “Uh…testability. Took me almost two weeks to make all the changes. It was a lot of work, but now the code is at least readable now.”
Me: “Did you write any tests?”
DK: “Um…no…I have no idea what uses these projects.”
Me: “Yes you do, you showed me map.”
DK: “Yes, but I don’t know how they are being used. All the map shows are the dependencies.”
Me: “Do you know where the changes are being deployed?”
DK: “I suppose the support team knows. Not really our problem.”
Me: “You’re kinda right. It’s not anyone’s problem.”
DK: “Wha…huh…what do you mean?”
Me: “That code has been depreciated ever since the business process changed over 4 years ago.”
DK: “Nooo…are you sure? The references were everywhere.”
Me: “Not according to your map. Looks like just one solution. It can be deleted, let me do that real quick”
<I delete the solution+code from source control>
Me: “Man, sorry you wasted all that time.”

I could tell he was kinda’ pissed and I wasn’t really sorry. :)

Recent life lessons:
◆ Do not buy a domain name without obfuscating your contact information, lest you want to be harried by people offering to provide their services to “grow your business”

◆ Do not change descriptions on your most recent experience that’s set to be ongoing on LinkedIn without making note of the “notify your followers” toggle, lest you wish LinkedIn to post on your behalf a message urging people to congratulate you on your new position. A post which you cannae delete. And lo, if you comment upon it urging well-wishers to not comment upon it or offer congratulations as it is not what it appears, witness the lack of good that doth do. Resort to canned response to DMs explaining the situation and urging the well-wisher to learn from your misfortune. (I find it really difficult to not politely respond to folk. It was a good two days of like 50+ messages.)

◆ If you have a career coach that tells you to connect to as many people as possible on LinkedIn and accept connection requests, perhaps just don’t follow that advice. My second career coach was like “That doesn’t even make sense” “I KNOW!” ... I have so many LinkedIn connections. But I cannae just prune the list because it would take for freaking ever to figure out who was who and who I really still wanted to connect with. *sigh* 900+ is too many. And I have over 100 requests I haven’t even gotten around to looking at.

My gym decided to adopt a fitness app so members could sign up for classes. Their onboarding was terrible (to be nice about it). I really hate when businesses don’t understand the technology they want to use.

Me: I downloaded the app, but all the classes say to call the gym.

Gym: Are you using the email that’s on file for your apartment?

Me: Yes, I am because I read the gym’s instructions for using the app.

Gym: …

Me: I think the issue is I had an existing account on the app before the gym decided to use the app for its business.

Gym: Then that’s the problem. Delete your account and sign up for a new one.

Me: WTF 🤬 I am not deleting an account that I’ve had FOR YEARS just because you can’t figure out technical issues with the vendor. How did it never occur to you that gym members might already have accounts for a fitness app that’s been around for years and used by other businesses? Besides, this app doesn’t let users delete accounts from the app so I don’t know where you’re coming from with telling me to delete my account.

"Redesigning somebody else’s product is always a tricky business. You don’t know why they made the decisions they made. You don’t have the data they have." - Lukas Mathis

So two mini rants rolled up into one

1) programmers who can code in 8292 languages but don’t know shit about the business side and think they know better than the business folks when it comes to big picture decisions, please go fuck yourself.

2) People who respond to “Gotta set up a few machines for non tech folks” with “Oh you should try Linux, it’s so user friendly”. You need to go fuck yourself. You have no idea what you’re talking about and probably lack empathy too you rotten squid smelling cumsock.

nice, 10k reached before sidtheitclown! (that’s all that actually matters, heh)

so, yes, as promised it’s me… chris from chris’ full stack blog.

I think kiki knew this, as I used to be called fullstackchris… though very briefly... don't know why i was ever worried about the old clowns i used to work for knowing my identity here

i’m a host of react round up, and also an ex-futures trader (that life is / was hidden on Twitter), I’ve recently quit because I’m ALSO still building 4ish SaaS products including The Wheel Screener (wheelscreener.com) and CodeVideo (codevideo.io), over my LLC, Full Stack Craft (fullstackcraft.com)

oh yeah, and on top of that i have a full time job in Switzerland (read: not poor boi 38 or 40 hour work week, 42 minimum)

so yeah, its a fucking lot of shit to do and sometimes it’s too much! glad i have this place to vent

so, don’t be too harsh on me… really, 99% of my bitterness comes from the approximate 5 years of my working life (2018-2023) were taken from me by lying business folk type who actually didn’t know what the FUCK they were doing or talking about, even after promising me they did (at two different companies). Listen, I’m all for people telling me iTs a RiSkY VeNTuRe; i get it. But if you say everything is rock solid (like funding, my future employment, etc.) and it is not, then fuck you; you’re just lying to my face, it has nothing to with management vs employee, engineer vs. non-technical - you’re literally just a *bad person* (sorry, mechanical engineering genes and honesty to the core - sue me) To be sure, I was partially at fault - too optimistic, and too gullible, and I’ve have since learned my lesson. but still working on it. (obviously)

but things are look up - my company is running better than ever, the current job is great with insanely smart people

In the end, it’s always the hardcore engineers who are the most honest, hardworking, respectful, and the best to work with - you people know who you are…

Until then… see you in the next rant!!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Dutifully signed,

🤡

I do believe, genuinely that “I don’t know” is sometimes an acceptable answer. If you don’t know, you don’t know. I appreciate the honesty.

But at the same time

I don’t know how much longer I can take “I don’t know” as an answer from my boss when I ask about critical business things HE tasked me with, or things relating to career development and maximizing my time with this company.

Do I need my boss to have all the answers on company revenue? No.

Do I need my boss to at least have an understanding on wtf is going with projects when my priorities get changed mid-project for the 4th time? Hell yes.

Why would someone hire you to build a website, constantly say that you don’t know business, never give you anything you ask for, berate you for asking questions about what they want the website to be like, “that’s your job”, all while expecting under $500? Because they’re stupid, that’s why. Oh also, they now want an app instead of a website because their generic-ass domain name was taken already. Fffffffffff

Reasons why I hate the hospital I work for...

1. NO fucking budget, for fuck sakes our telecom system is still running Merlin Magix. (I’ve been working on getting the trunk and everything to at least push FreePBX out... Configuration configuration.) but, that requires a decent server to host said system... But guess what? We’ve still got a few servers online that are running server 2012 r2. NO FUCKING BUDGET.

2. Training. They don’t have the budget to send me to training, but the doctors here are rolling in Mercedes... Must be fucking nice.

3. I have 5 f-I-v-e job descriptions. I’m a bio medical technician, network admin, system admin, programmer, and help desk... I fucked up allowing them to know I program.

4. On call 365 days a year. That’s nice and all, but when I’ve got shit to do and the nearest Walmart is an hour away I don’t want a call from Louis “oh the printer has a jam” FUCK OFF LOUIS! Get the paper out, we’ve been over this, I believe in you!

5. Some of the FUCKING (l)users.... You wouldn’t imagine some of the calls I receive, some of my favorite being late late “Hey *anonyops* I know it’s late but we’re needing a chair moved from one room to the other.” FUCK YOU YOU CHEEKY FUCKING CUNT.

The only reason I’m still here is my direct supervisor and a hand full of people that I’ve grown to love. Also, because any computer related job here is either outsourced or filled by a YouTubing god. - reason 1 why I started my own business. Supply and demand.

Rural Kansas Hospitals = shit, inb4 thanks —insert president to blame—

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

So i am a diabetic and carry an insulin pump. Now being in India, the pump is not covered by insurance (for some god forsaken reason that I don’t know) and therefore is not a common sight here (contradictoraly India has a major diabetes problem). So I was at the metro station going through security check and the security personnel asks me what the pump was and asked me to show it to him. Now since insulin pumps are uncommon here I understood his concern and showed it to him. Now I like to carry the pump under my shirt with a clip pouch. So naturally I had to lift up my shirt to show it to him. But this isn’t the highlight of the story.
The guy behind me rised above and started peeking over my shoulder and constantly repeating like a 2 year old child what is this. And that too with my fucking abdomen exposed. I went into rage mode there and then like wtf dude, none of your business just step back a little.
Now my issue is that I do not understand that in their own curiosity, why do people forget to respect others privacy. And a very big problem with medical equipment manufacturing organisations (yeah you medtronic). Why are you only concerned with sales and why not awareness? I mean spreading awareness will only help your sales as more people will become aware about your product and it will be less awkward and concerning for people like me to wear your device out in the public

I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.

While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.

Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.

So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.

Those who had the "pleasure" of working directly with clients know a thing or two about how a clumsy communication can have grave consequences.

Software developer and an Imgur user BackDoorNoBaby shed some light on these humorous situations and misunderstandings that often occur with clueless clients. Because we all have our niche interests and specializations, and it’s easy to sneer at the plebs who just don’t get it. To be fair though, dealing with unrealistic demands by clients who have no real understanding of what you do must get pretty frustrating at times, and if you work in IT, you’ll surely have come across at least one of these situations before.

What we have here are the daily trials and tribulations of an IT worker. Clients that read the latest trends in a tech magazine and want it right now. Business people who think that because they have the money, solutions should magically materialize. Clients that complain about something not functioning properly, when they clearly don't have a clue how to use it properly. We all know this kind of clients, and these kind of 'horror' stories are part of what makes working in IT so special. Sometimes humour is the only suitable response.

Rant #1
I’ve got a new client wanting me to take over their website, okay... I’ll take care of you.

What’s the hold up?
1. Anon, Get ahold of this person, they’ve got the info you’ll need.
2. We will get together sometime to go over paperwork.
3. We are waiting on the board to sign off on a contract switch.
4. I’m needing this changed immediately on the site or we will be fined, but I understand you don’t have the information to make that change - can you get ahold of X to get the information?
5. *gets ahold of X* - still waiting on Y to approve contract release and change.

Listen, I have my faults too on running my own business but at least I know what I can and can’t do when either accepting or turning away a client. I’d be happy to work on your website, but you’ve got to get approval from those on your team before you make a change, that’s not on me. It’s cool that you need whatever changed on your site before the end of the week, but I can’t help you until I’m officially signed on. Please don’t request content change when I don’t have access to the content to change it.

Go get approval by your team first before you call me about making changes to your site, we haven’t even exchanged any information or paperwork yet.

Rant #2
If you call me again knowing that I’m on a two month leave from work, I’ll slit your throat and fuck the wound. It’s 1:40. There are other techs, you’ve got the on-call list in front of you. I’m flattered you went through the trouble of finding my PERSONAL NUMBER, but I have rants to write damn it.

I’m from the UK, should I go freelance?

Last few weeks I’ve been feeling really bored with my job. Like mega fucking bored. It’s basically just meetings 7 hours a day, 4 hours planning and then 3 hours of talking about how everything didn’t get finish (I know. I keep saying it’s the fucking 7 hour fucking meetings).

Pay is pretty decent, we have a few juniors, not exactly great code base, kinda cool idea, pretty unique, business will defo work or be sold by corporate owners. (Start up owned by corporate)

I just feel really flat and bored. Mega bored. Keep wondering about going solo and being more of a consultancy or my own little agency? I’ve tried before but I suck at marketing and freelancer and similar sites never provided enough income.

I guess my questions are (if anyone wants to answer):
- What’s this new IR35 or whatever? Is it now pointless to be self employed?
- how would I boost my leads?
- should I do a bit of contracting to get used to it maybe?
- should I just stay where I am and deal with the feeling of not really feeling like I was hired to do anything?

I do also have a little side business I started that I could also work on whenever I have free time, it’s not taking any money at the moment though, early years I suppose?

I’m really sorry if anyone feels offended to read that I’m fucking bored and don’t have a clue what to do with myself. Please don’t reply with some sarccy comment. I really cba to have an internet keyboard troll fight about some stupid opinion we’ll all forget about in a few days. This now counts as a rant. So fuck you. It’s a rant. And I’m rant about the possibility you might comment on my post not bring a rant coz I can’t tell what category I’m posting on. I live in the 5th dimension. Deal. With. It. Or just ignore and scroll on 👍🏼

What the actual freaking fuck?!?! First this company postponed my jobinterview with a week. Ok shit is busy that can happen. No problem.

I was just about to leave my home when i got a call from them.

“I didn’t know if the interview was remote or not so blabla. Last week we talked to a company and are gonna outsource our development. Therefor we won’t hire any developer right now. But maybe in six months”

WTF?! Are you fucking kidding me? Goddamn asshole, this is ridiculous.

I should’ve just hang up right there. If you run your business like this and threat people this way, i don’t even want to work at your company. Motherfucker

!dev philosophical

Quality vs Opinion

I have a feeling that these things have always been at odds with each other and now with the constant connectedness it has just become more apparent that most people don’t understand the difference (or even realize there is a difference for that matter)

Let’s face it. Most people have awful taste. They listen to whatever new music their radio station decides was hot. They watch whatever show everyone else is watching. They are manipulated by large scale news organizations...

Basically, most people are sheep.

The problem is that sheep are a dangerous combination of loud and stupid. Giving these loud stupid sheep a platform to amplify their voice is a bad idea for a society, but a great tool for the pigs to manipulate them.

“Frightened though they were, some of the animals might possibly have protested, but at this moment the sheep set up their usual bleating of "Four legs good, two legs bad," which went on for several minutes and put an end to the discussion.”

This isn’t confined to one political party or view, it isn’t geographic, it isn’t based on education, it isn’t based on wether a person is ethical or not...

It’s universal.

You can translate “four legs good, two legs bad” into Agent Orange and his followers chanting “lock her up” just as well as it could be translated into the angry leaders of the modern feminist movement.

In both cases (both on opposite ends of the ethical spectrum) you have the loudest dumb, angry sheep getting the even dumber sheep to chant along, wether it is good for them or not.

Now to loop this back. The problem is that dumb sheep are emotional. They truly believe that they are NOT dumb and that their opinions and emotions are a measure of quality.

I FEEL bad, and you are talking to me, so you must BE bad.

I don’t LIKE this amazingly well made movie, so it must BE bad.

And anyone else who has a different opinion is just wrong. Anyone who try’s to explain the merits of the other side is either my enemy or is stupid.
^^^
Their opinion, incorrect.

————

Now for the tough part...

Most likely, based on probability, you are a sheep.

Yes, you! The smartest person you know. The guy/girl who has a degree or masters of a PHD. The person who builds amazing software. You! Are. A. Sheep. And you are dangerous to the world.

To put a cherry on top.

No, you opinions are not important. Your feelings are fucking meaningless. Your morals are worthless. Your voice has as much value and a loose asshole fart from a fat guy trapped in a deep well in Siberia.

But don’t get down about this. It’s doesn’t make you any less of a person. Remember that almost every person who has ever lived in history has been a sheep. They have chanted one useless, dangerous, misguided, harmful chant after another through the ages.

————

To those of you who try not to be sheep. Just keep trying to get a little better every day. When someone says...

“We do it this way because we have always done it this way”

... be skeptics. Explore the merits and logic of the situation.

And if you are tired of being led by stupid sheep then save some money, build something cool and start your own business.

Just remember, you will always need the sheep. They will be your employees, your friends, your bosses, your investors etc.

Treat them well, don’t hate them, and if you ever find yourself leading a pack of sheep then try to keep a healthy distance from their chanting while leading them down the right path.

They will thank you for it in the end.

———

PS. For those of you thinking “this is very judgemental and self centred”

All I can do is to try to speak your language....

Baaaahhhhh, baaahhhhh, bahhhhh

Which translates form sheep to human as...

“Eat a dick. Have a nice day”

Risk is part of my everyday life.

I take the risk everyday when opening IDE and changing line of code that can either break database or crash other systems that are depending on one I am developing. ( not instantly but in some time in the future )

So....

Many years ago I was updating some application server production code while being drunk.
Everything went fine except me waking up in the morning and didn’t remember how I did it.

... what I learned from my developers life except that heavy drinking and updating servers is not the best idea ?

First, don’t give a fuck, do your job and ask questions even if the person in front of you said that understood everything and you think you understood all of shit.
Second, if you think you know what to do think twice.
Third, having any backup, any tests and any documentation is always better then having nothing.

And the most important.
The most risky in every business are people around you, so always have good people around and there would be no risk at all or you won’t even think about it.

✌🏽 ❤️

I’m having this issue for the online marketplace I’m working on the side. It’s blockchain tech where you can purchase normal goods and services(no, not like Amazon or Fiverr, eww, this one’s more inclined with promoting organic growth for small businesses and freelancers).

I’m stuck with what solution is in the best interest of the user and the business for the long-term.

The dilemma about anonymity, online freedom and privacy is yes, it protects users from predators and attackers, but then, it’s harder for authorities to hunt down people who uses platforms for malicious intent, and also, digital footprint is helpful during litigation as evidence.

You don’t know who to trust.

-There is nothing to differentiate normal users with spammers, scammers, etc.
-There is no accountability for if they break the rules. They can easily delete and create a new account.

Platforms, communities big or small are plagued with these.
There are a lot of people out there who would rather project their insecurities on other people than to seek therapy.

Also, how platforms uses psychology tricks to make platforms addicting, it’s safe to assume that it’s bound to get toxic. Fixation on these platforms, leads to other needs being neglected or people forget to stay present.

Another thing, automated moderation is not that effective as there are still biases in data and human verification is still required. But then, human moderators get exposed to extreme violence, gore, etc that leads to poor mental health. (see Facebook got sued by moderators)

Also, I’ve had a recent experience where some unstable dev was stalking and harassing me. During that turmoil, I’ve found the many loopholes in every platform out there and how crappy their support is. Like they’ll just say, “make your account more secure”, bitch it’s your platform not providing enough security, your blocking feature means nothing coz anyone can still create accounts and message anyone.
It happened like February-August (it ended coz I quit going online and made private all my accounts). UGH I MISS ALL MY FRIENDS THO. FUCK THAT DUDE. He deserves to be in jail TBH

Lol if this product booms, now u know the back story lololol

A home hosted build server for continuous integration is always crap and a blocker for everyone. If you don’t have 5(yes, five) full time admins/devops to support that, forget about building the infrastucture yourself. There are companies whose business is to provide CI as a service, why do you think you can beat them with your crappy Jenkins installation?

I’ve seen a 200 company failing with 2 people. I’ve seen another one completely failing, because the admins didn’t know what CI meant, and a small one failing with 0.5. The only place where it kind of worked used Gitlab.

How do you go about finding work in the tech industry, to me it seems far harder sell then anything else?

Right now I’m struggling to get new business in since I do websites and apps

It seems because it’s niche and it’s a lot of money to put down it’s a risky sell to someone you don’t really know.

I believe my sites are quite good and I get decent feedback from customers telling me they get good results from their new site

🤷‍♂️ so I’m a bit at a loss

Right guys and gals, I need your opinions.

Recently was approached by a recruiter who thought I’d be a good fit for a role, a role that is a step up from senior dev but without moving into people / project management.
More like a bridge between architects and senior devs.

I thought what the hell, why not. So I agreed to go for it.
It could be quite a decent payrise (though that wasn’t my motivation for going for it) and I like the idea of doing more mentoring, design and research than I do now. It would involve stuff like learning new tech, coming up with examples and implementations of how the dev team need to use it to churn out user stories.

For the last few years I’ve been mainly a back end developer, which didn’t start by choice and I always liked to be full stack.

But the recruitment process for this role has been quite slow (number of reasons) and since then I’ve been given a new piece of work at my current employer doing some greenfield angular work, plus the c# back end.

I’m really, really enjoying this angular work. Haven’t done it for a while and it feels great to get back into it. Seem to be picking it back up with no problems, like the old magic is still there.
Also the money at my current place is good enough.

So now I’m wondering if I should bail on this other role in favour of seeing this out and maybe going back to being full stack (tho for reasons I’ll outline below in the long term that might have to be elsewhere)

But I’m also trying to remind myself that up until enjoying this work there’s a reason I decided to go for this other role.
Current place is a small company that has no project management process. It’s chaos, and everything’s an emergency. There are no requirements for anything, not enough people etc. No one has a clue how to run an IT project.
The one thing we do have is good development practices in our team and we have been greenfield for the last 12 months working on a new product. But we do tend to be pigeon holed into looking after a specific service/area.

But this new place if I got the role, is a bigger company (I’ve worked in small, medium and massive companies so I know what the difference is like), they’re a household name, they have resources for learning, putting people through aws certs, etc. They give people time each week to invest in themselves. Much more agile.
And thinking about it now you don’t often see a role that allows you to ‘move up’ without having to take on people/project management and still having time to be hands on.
(Just maybe more hands on with strategic work than delivering user stories for business as usual)

So just in general, what do you think?