You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

So I just got rejected for a job for being too introverted.

They were very impressed with my advanced and broad technical knowledge but they said I'm "too introverted to hang out with cool, young people". That's ageism and that's illegal. Anyway.

I have more knowledge than most senior specialist devs (I've worked with them and I know them) but just because I'm a reserved and thinking person, I'm not welcome in this society of idiots and I don't get a job.

Two words: fuck society.

Another funny Linux encounter from my study that I suddenly remembered.

This guy said he didn't want to work with things/services that use Linux because he wanted to support software devs by buying software. I get the idea but yah...

Linux teacher: well then why don't you start with disconnecting from the WiFi. After that drop services like fb and WhatsApp which you use a lot. Also, good luck in the dev world as you're mooost probably going to encounter Linux and for being able to finish this study you'll need to succeed on Linux classes as well!

He just sat there like 'help'. A lot of fellow students were giggling as well.

Really though, my Linux teacher was an awesome young guy!

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

Job interview goes really well. Senior Dev 90-100k.

Ok, so for your "test" write up a proposal for a web based bulk email sending system with its own admin panel for building list, tracking emails, and with reporting.

I write up an estimate. Low ball the absolute fuck out of it because I'm trying to get a job. Know a few good libraries I can use to save some time. Figure I can just use sendmail, or PHPMailer, or NodeMailer for the emailing, and DataTables Editor for a simple admin CRUD with reporting. Write the thing up. Tell them they can have it in LAMP or Node.

Come in at 36 hours.

Then these fucking wanks told me they wanted me to actually do the project.

My exact response was:

"I bill $50 an hour, let me know"

They did not let me know.

Young devs, jobless devs, desperate devs. I've seen a fair amount of this. And for the right job I might go as high as maybe 4 - 6 hours of unpaid work for some "programming test". But please be careful. There are those who will try to exploit lack of experience or desperation for free work.

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

For new or young devs

If you think you're like a 8/10 in a language........ you're probably a 2

#newdevs #behumble

Dark Theme / Light Theme,
Java / C++,
Young / Old,
Proprietary / Open Source...

We're all devs and whatever holiday or time in the year it is for you right now in your country have a great time.
I love you all :)

I as the "coffeedrinker" stopped drinking coffee and energy drinks. I do not want to be anyone's boss but if you think you can live without them, do it. I am fairly young and after a long period of frequent consumption ( 1 coffee or drink per day), I was waking up at nights or struggling during the days from constant heart pains. Now 2 months later this phenomenon happens seldom and I feel better and more refreshed after my sleeping. I know this is irrelevant but I know fellow devs that overconsume these kind of drinks. At least if you can limit your dose! :) I just want everyone to be healthy and happy! Have a nice day! ♥

I'm pretty young for a dev and I am still learning as one but I find it sad how nobody at my middle school knows anything about code. But I'm glad I got this app because I get to see what devs are up to 😃 blessdd

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

Countless times. Here is two:
- when he said he prefers an external hdd over git
- when he said that git is just a shiny new thing, we young devs use just because it's new
- etc

!rant

*me trying to add one more field to a SQL request*
*asks coworker* Hey, do you know how I'd get this field? You have to go through 4 tables just to find it because of the way the tables are related.
*coworker looks for a bit* Oh. That's crazy. We should ask the DBA.
*we ask our 60 year old DBA for some help.*
He walks us through a minefield of inner and outer joins and selects and we finally arrive at a solution. Kudos to our DBA, who in the eyes of us young devs is a wizard.

Code review time:

Hey Rudy, can you approve my PR? ??? Shouldn't it be can you review my PR?(thought to myself)
Anyway, as a new practice, we(royal we) do not approve PRs with js files. If we touch one, we convert it to typescript as part of a ramp up to a migration that never seems to get here. But I digress.
I look at the laziest conversion in history.

Looked like
Import 'something';
Import 'somethingElse';
Import 'anotherSomething';

export class SomeClass {
public prop1: any;
public prop2: any;
public prop3: any;

public doWork(param: any){
let someValue = param;
// you get the idea
return someValue;
}
}

Anyway, I question if all the properties need to be visible outside of the class since everything was public.
Then if the dev could go and use type safety.
Then asked why not define the return type for the method since it would make it easier for others to consume.
Since parts of the app are still in js, I asked that they check that that the value passed in was valid(no compilation error, obviously).
Also to use = () => {} to make sure "this" is really this.
I also pointed out the import problem, but anyway.

I then see the his team leader approve the PR and then tell me that I'm being too hard on his devs. ????

Do we need to finish every PR comment with "pretty please" now?
These are grown men and women, and yet, it feels oddly like kindergarten.

I've written code in the past that wasn't pretty and I received "WTF?" as a PR comment. I then realized I ate sh*t on that line of code, corrected it and pushed the code. Then we went to Starbucks.
I'm not that old(35), but these young devs need to learn that COMPILERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!!!!!
Ahhhhhh
Much better.
Thanks for the platform.

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

8 years later, i have successfully failed my first company. Good experience but for now burnt out.
To fellow devs who are considering entrepreneurship , don't be afraid, try it until you are young. This month I will lay off my last employees, luckily with bonus and 3 months worth of salary, i wish them best of luck. Difficult to explain but I am as happy in the end as i was in the start, just older.

I love the way young devs code assuming the product owner won't change their mind

As a senior dev with a house and a good salary im a bit afraid these young devs.

They are hungry, they are intelligent, they work hard, they want my comfort and my job!

I feel like im running naked through a forrest with a ham between my cheeks, chased by a pack of hungry wolves!

And im only 37...

Do you feel the same?

In my office there's a dev who regularly takes figurative shits on other devs — stuff like publicly shaming others for their mistakes, or dropping a conceited "I told you so" whenever his solution turned out to be the right one.

He's a young guy, still has lots to learn about office etiquette, and I know he usually means well (he privately apologized to me once after I told him to fuck off), but I'm not sure he knows of the effect it's having on the other devs he talks down to.

I like him enough that I don't want to go to HR about it, but I don't know how to approach the situation in a one-on-one level with this guy. I do know that something needs to happen, but I'm not sure how I can help the situation.

For now, he shuts up when I point out his flaws in logic and reveal that he's still got lots to learn about his demeanor.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

TL;DR: Stop using React for EVERYTHING. It's not the end-all solution to every application need.

My team is staffed about 50/50 with tenured devs, and junior devs who have never written a full application and don't understand the specific benefits of different libraries/framworks. As a result, most of these junior devs have jumped on the React train, and they're under the impression that React is the end-all answer to any possible application need. Doesn't matter what type of app is, what kind of data is going to be flowing through the app, data scale, etc. In their eyes, React is always the answer. Now, while I'm not a big fan of React myself, I will say that it does its job when its tasked with a data-heavy application that needs to be refreshed/re-rendered dynamically and frequently (like Facebook.) However, my main gripe is that some people insist on using it for EVERYTHING. They refuse to acknowledge that there can be better library/framework choices (Angular, Vue, or even straight jQuery,) and they refuse to learn any other frameworks. You can hit them with countless technical reasons as to why React isn't a good choice for a particular application, and they'll just spout off the same tidbits from the "ReactJS Makes My Nips Hard 101" handbook: "React is the future," "Component-based web architecture is the future," (I'm not arguing with that last one) "But...JSX bro.," "Facebook and Netflix use it, so that's how you know it's amazing." They'll use React for a simple app, and make it overly-complex, and take months to write something that should have taken them a week. For example, we have one dev who has never used any other frameworks/libraries apart from React, and he used React (via create-react-app) to write what is effectively a single form and a content widget inside of a bootstrap template. It took him 4 MONTHS to write this, and it still isn't fully functioning. The search functionality doesn't really work (in fact, it's just array filtering,) and wont return any results if you search for the first word in an entry. His repo is a mess, filled with a bunch of useless files that were bootstrap'd in via create-react-app. We've built apps like this in a week in the past using different libraries/frameworks, and he could have done the same if he didn't overly-complicate the project by insisting on using React. If your app is essentially a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.

This happens every time a big new framework hits the scene. New young developers get sucked into it, because it's the cool hip new framework (or in React's case, library.) and they use it for everything, even when it's not the best choice. It happened with Angular, Rails, and now it's happening with React.

React has its benefits, but please please please consider which library/framework is the best choice from a technical standpoint before immediately jumping on the React train because "Facebook uses it bro."

Top gripes about getting older as I'm about to turn 40:

5. Actually starting to have moments at home after work where I'm contemplating saying 'Hey babe, wanna bang?' but before I can get the words out my body pipes in with 'Dude, cool your jets, we're wiped out today; check back tomorrow.' Women say they like older guys because <insert character trait here> but I'm now convinced it's just because they know there's less work involved. =/

4. Friends with young children. I hardly ever see them anymore, and when I do, all they talk about are their kids and their shitty relationship with their co-parent. The circle continues to get smaller...

3. Having to go get glasses in order to renew my driver's license. How do we not have a heads-up display in every vehicle by now that shows the street numbers of buildings as I'm perpendicular to them as well as the names of upcoming cross streets? That way I'd fix the problem the way I do for everything else: notch up the font scaling on my display a point or two. Elon, you're slipping...

2. Realizing that the "American Dream" isn't worth the paper it was printed on. (Anyone else remember paying 97¢ for a gallon of gas or $2 for a pack of Marlboros?) Concurrent realization: It's not easy to find work in another country without moving there first, even if you speak the language. Any devs in Portugal that read this, ligue-me.

1. Being too busy to just chat with new people I meet except on rare occasion. Mostly referring to work time here, when it seems I'm always needing to find the shortest route to the objectif du jour. If I could tell my teenage self just one piece of advice, it'd probably be "start your career in Europe, not the USA" but I really want it to be "treasure the time you spend on IRC talking about anything and everything with people that always have time for you and vice versa, because it's going to be over before you know it."

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

when you see devs with age <= 16 who look experienced than you and you say to yourself

"Where the fuck have I spent my early life"

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

Because of some theft this year and even though we already have security cameras, my apartment building decided to check the front door locks so it's more secure.

This key looks very high tech... Only issue though is I never use the key anyway... I just entered the door code...

So what is the point of changing the locks? I'm going to guess whoever is stealing isn't picking the lock... People would notice... They must know the code.

Also it seems most of the apartment locks are digital key card/pins too. Wondering if this just means most owners are young or just are techies/devs...

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

Got fired today due to one big cunt who just joined to sabotage all junior devs because his older than all of us, im dissapointed at how arrogant some of you old devs are, the good old days development houses used to be fun and young, i respect all of you with great heart but we are not trying to compete with you if we know knew tech better than you, times have changed, if you are still dumb about bootstrap dont hate on anyone but yourself. Grow deFaQuPndStopHating

What's the deal with Python? All the young devs coming out of school are so centered on it, but honestly I can't think of a project that I've had where it was even considered being used. Am I missing out on some hotness here? I know some schools are moving away from Java centered education to Python to help ease people into programming. To me that seems strange since you're learning so much less about the stack. </ rant>

I try to exercise a lot of patience when training other devs. Hell, I have always asked stupid questions and will continue to do so. But yesterday I almost reached my breaking point when the guy I was training (who is not young nor entry level) asked me where the CSS files were for a static HTML page. I had to awkwardly say, "they're located at the path being linked to in the head" 😣

Having a director who only got his position because the industry is so young and he was able to register domain names so seen as an expert by non-technical people. As few people do this role where I live he was able to move from role to role and rise up the ranks. Everyone in the company knows he's useless except a couple of older directors who are scared of technology so think he's knowledgeable.

He has no ability to plan, everything he says to clients is 'yes, asap' without getting proper requirements, then pulls the devs off one project mid progress to work on another. He also needs basic concepts explained to him many, many times. When pitching for work I end up writing most of his stuff for him and he also starts with the previous version of a document that I have proof read and corrected about ten times.

The frustrating part is I only have to deal with him due to a merger of two companies.

I hate people who think they are always right.

A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.

Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.

And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.

Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.

This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.

In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.

So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.

Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.

Along with weekly rant topics, devRant should have weekly polls where you create a poll on opinionated questions like "bash or zsh?". Devs would upvote one & post a rant why they prefer one over the other.

With lots of devs here, the opinions of experienced devs would really help young buds. @dfox

So, I departed for a month long Erasmus in Portugal and got to work for an education related business. From day 1, all my tasks consisted in transcribing data from paper to excel sheets, and then using that data for various different tasks. It became obvious that I wouldn't have had much programming to do by default, so I started creating a series of Python scripts to automate part of my work or aid me in some bothersome areas of it, and what at first seemed a grueling series of boring and repetitive work soon actually became fun. From this point on I challenged myself to make the scripts better and better under as many aspects as possible. I eventually ended up concluding all my daily tasks in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes everyday, as that's the time it took to adapt the scripts to the new document formats of the day :P Jokes aside, this truly proves a point though: small businesses like this one, that very much depend on manual labor for tasks that can easily be automated by 50 lines of code, truly would benefit from a prepared IT and development team, and it shocked me to see how little these guys know, and are even afraid at times, about innovative techniques to speed up work substantially. Truly a great and humbling experience for very young devs like me :)

Companies try to find young devs, less experienced but more openminded and flexible.. do you think we will still find some cool sobs when we're > 40 || > 50 years old, even if we keep up with new technologies and stuff?

Never thought about it until now..

A loooong time ago...

I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.

Kind of.

Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.

Fast forward three months (yes, three months).

I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.

So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.

He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...

When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.

I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?

This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.

Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.

I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!

Haha. Oh no.

So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.

The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.

And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.

I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.

Hm.

Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...

On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.

This doubles the strangeness.

I want over to my colleague's desk.

I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.

"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"

What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?

"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"

"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."

"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"

You. Did. What?

I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.

So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.

Yep

It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.

Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.

Hm.

Project Management.

Karma's a bitch, right?

Devs with young kids: how the hell do you do it?

I am a foster parent for my cousin who is 4 months old and I don’t know how in the fuck to make this work. How do you do it? How do you balance code and kid?

For reference I work full time at a tech support place, I go to school full time, and I’m trying to pivot into software development, which means any free time is spent coding/studying code/building a portfolio. Problem is I don’t have free time because of the baby. How in the hell do people do this.

We have so much pl/sql at our company and it really sucks because the "young" generation of devs must convince the pl/sql guys to switch to some more powerful and newer languages like java.

But not everyone wants to use the new stuff or learn anything new. I mean there are some programmers who really appreciate that there is new stuff. They have no problem learning from the younger generation. But some of them just resist any change in that direction, and thats the much higher amount of devs.

Does anyone of you have such experience? What can i do against that?
Is that some kind of "i am too old for this"-trip?

So I work at a startup working on “cutting edge” technology with two other devs. Our lead engineer is an interesting fellow. The guy never ever writes a single line of code, just looks for similar projects online and receives a lot of credit for it, I have to hand it to him though, he has an ability to scheme through information and pick the gist of what’s going on but when it comes to detail, he’s seriously lacking. We recently started a projects a couple of weeks back and it was supposed to be an easy two days of hacking and we would be done but instead the guy looks for code online copies it I change the necessary variables to match the use case then it doesn’t work. So we’ve spent weeks debugging this code because someone is afraid to get their hands dirty. I can’t complain to the bosses because they’re not techies and the trust him more since I’m still new to the company.
I love their attitude though, they honestly believe they have a chance against some giants in tech and from the actual talent I’ve witnessed they’ll only get there through sheer luck.
I have to sit there and listen to them shit on more successful tech companies and that they have better ideas.
Maybe someone can change my mind on this issue as I’m still young and new to this industry.

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

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

I just started but I'm already tired.

For some years I have worked in the industry, not a lot, I know right but I really wonder how do you deal with all "not code-related" bullshit.

IT should be a dynamic field but somehow it is stuck inside the business logic which is all about the money and that does not take care of the real matter which is "code engineering".

- Most of the projects I have seen are an utter mess.
- No real structure
- Code is literally thrown somewhere to make stuff works and fix bugs
- Features which should require X amount of time are planned and shipped earlier ignoring best practices.
- The customer changes idea every week
- Nobody wants to pay for a reasonable architecture but prefer to keep financing un-maintainable projects that only God knows where they have been made (presumably in Hell)
- Juniors devs with no real senior following them committing unreasonable stuff
- Seniors devs thinking they are but they aren't.
- Company that keeps delivering projects even if they have not the required amount of people to make it in time.

Seems like nobody wants to stop and take time to think and make the right decisions. I see people running around me like crazy ants.

But, above all, what really kills me deep inside is HR. You are looking for "dynamic" "talented" "cool" devs but you are not willing to pay them enough.

Should I talk about LinkedIn?

Oh, God... Even the worsts companies sound like they are into Fortune 500. I feel so much hypocrisy here.

I have worked for big and small IT companies.
In the end, is all about "inside politics", everything which is getting financed is not because of usefulness but because of "relationship".

I started coding when I was really young.
After ten and more years, I finally take the job of my dreams but everything is shuttering under my feet.

If you have some words of wisdom, I'm here to hear you.

PS.
I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize for any mistake.

A bit late for wk61 but here goes:

Does anyone have any advice for an older dev (just turned 50) during job hunting?

One of the devs on my current project was let go some years a go, and hasn't found a new job yet.

He keeps applying to positions, but keeps getting rejected and being told "we went with another candidate".

Choosing the young buck who will leave in a year over a older dev who still can contribute for ten years seems like the most common descicion.

I hired him on the current project I'm doing for a client, which is on iOS, and I've thought him swift and the general process of development on ios. And he's taking to it really well :)

I hope this will better his chances, but the current client won't have the resources to hire someone full time now.

Been thinking about this a lot and I'd love your thoughts. Recently a friend was starting in dev. They asked me for some advice. I just said "be humble and hungry". I've built my career on that phrase. Be willing to listen and willing to put in the work.

What is your best advice for the young devs out there?

my biggest lol moment was talking to some hardcore always bring in your own algos and ds games to the table, always going to the core of the world devs, better than thou my shit is better than you ass, my point of view is the best in the world devs, cite papers and algos to you devs, shit like that that were making way less money than some dudester ruby on rails dev sitting at the the conf sipping on his drink.

Really, all that comp sci shit is legit and fun as fuck. But if you are not getting the green for it and living the life then what is the fucking point. Even then, those that are are normally fucking morons. This shit ain't some art, or a personality trait, it is a job.

Fuck me i am so tired of the whole hacker news reddit ass SO mentality of devs, then again I am also tired of mfkers with no knowledge of actual engineering publishing medium articles left and right.

As long as you cannot take human error out of this computer equation you will always have a shitfest of opinions, because regardless of correctness you will always have a shitfest as long as some dickwad has a difference of opinion in an otherwise young ass scientific field such as computer science.

Language wars, framework wars, editor wars you name it. This field is so fucking broken and so full of shit it ain't funny, made less comedic by the fact that it runs the world.

If we are going to die it will be by some massive kernel panic made possible because somewhere, some morons could not mergr a repo due to conflict in ideas. As if being right was going to bring you closer to not being an ugly fat nerd and getting pussy, or dick, whatever your flavor is you fucking losers.

I like working my 10 hours a day. So for the 6 of them I want to pair program with my grads I expect them to be as focused as I am, actually even more, but 25 minutes into a session they just zoom out and start making jokes.

Young aspiring dev asking for career advice here. I have to choose between two job offers:

1. The first for a larger company that mainly works with a top-tier company's solutions.
2. The other for a smaller company where I have more freedom to choose a stack.

I'm not really straight out from university. I'm wondering about what would be the most developing for me personally and professionally. Does the size of the company matter? I work hard and like to be rewarded for hard work, where is that more likely to happen? Should I choose from what stacks I prefer? Salary?

Do you fellow devs have any other input or advice? Perhaps guidance on other questions I should ask myself?

What do you think about young devs like me who are just starting out any tips/ advice?

Need some advice 🤔
This other dev company is unsecure and my client which is also there's should be secure
So Im getting them to secure it but what if they only do it for my client all their other clients are unsecure and they are teaching the young devs to do it unsecurely

Huge ethical issues here...