I have this colleague from the previous hellhole company. We had our fights but he's a pretty good guy.

During our first few months there, he would tell us all that he will leave the company. Almost three years in and we're leading a team. He would always tell me "to prepare you when I'm no longer here" or "I'm gonna leave soon".

I left that company over a year ago and today, LinkedIn sent me a notification that he's celebrating his fourth anniversary. The face of frustration went away and was replaced by a huge grin. I immediately sent him a message saying, "Happy anniversary! Hahaha. Woooo!"

I can't help it. This moment is too precious. Anyway, he got the joke and took it well.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

You know I used to always think machines are stupid.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can never beat humans.

I hated fancy tech and companies like Google thinking they did bad stuff.

My mindset was very different back in 2013 to 2016 (my first stint at devRant).

Over the years and countless experiences with humans and tech, today I am a very different person.

Today.. I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HATE HUMANS AND FEEL I AM SURROUNDED BY FUCK NUTS.

There is no match to Natural Stupidity.

Now that I am promoted and have to herd sheeps, I realised how much dumb humans are.

The attention to details is something that doesn't exist along with the ability to listen and understand their basic task.

Rather these morons are egoistic who not only back answer with intention to insult you.

They absolutely overlook the fact that you are talking in their favour and benefit.

Now I value the accurate and timely delivery of a machine without much cost and efforts to setup.

Here I spend 3 fucking days to explain a simple Apple to Apple task and no deliveries at all. Dafaq do you expect me to do here? Why shouldn't I employ a robot and let you starve when you bring no skills to table and crib like a baby when I give you an honest feedback?

I agree some companies are bad. I agree there are good and skilled people. I agree exceptions are there everywhere.

But the fact that majority is just stinking waste makes me wonder how did humans evolve and survive so many years.

Average IQ is less than that of a Avocado.

Media has romanticised fancy tech and stupid Instagram trends which makes you wonder why are progressing as human race.

At times, it's better to not do things at all then do it wrong.

At times, the world doesn't deserve good.

In the end, everything is just as stupid as you and me.

And it doesn't even matter.

How to fuck up 45+ minutes of your life:

1) make sure you have a $4500 mac
2) download an image
3) realize its a webp
4) google "how to...."
5) brew install <whatever>
6) enjoy 45 minutes of your mac installing all sorts of fucking shit and recompiling the whole fucking planet with CPU at 100% and all apps lagging
7) ...?

I just wanted to convert a fucking image from webp to png or jpeg or even bmp. Without uploading it on some shit site because it's a scan of some confidential stuff.

Forgot to post a book yesterday, so maybe I’ll post two books today...

Anyway, this book, I found it recently never seen it before. But boy is it great.

It’s similar to the programming pearls book as far as what it’s about. Think of the refactoring book, clean code, programming pearls, and the mythical man month books, thrown in a blender, added some new spice and some new things, and filtered down into 100 or so page book, simple quick and enjoyable actually.

This book the references staple books by Sedgwick, knuth, Brooks, Myers, and so many others. It’s funny how things come full circle.

My favorite quote from the book. I’ve been essentially saying this for years, but to see it on a book, it’s lovely... more people need to realize it too.

“Understanding how things work at a low level becomes a base for making good decisions at the high level”

Followed up with if you’ve never built a computer from scratch your missing out... get yourself a breadboard and some TTL logic.. and build a 4 bit CPU, once you know how to program in assembly the next step is building your own computer ... if your university didn’t teach a class that did this they ripped you off....

Don’t bitch at me.. the book said that.. and I agree! 100% because it’s true, you can’t debate that.

Oh and btw this is another book written by a female developer.. kudos to her for nailing so many topics in such a short book!

A while ago I found one of my old notes. It was from around two years ago. I had written down my programming long term goals and what I wanted to learn (more like a wishlist). While I was reading it, I realised that throughout these two years, without me being actually aware, I had learned all of it. It had been a slow progress but eventually not only had I reached it, but I had also surpassed it. It made me feel pretty good about myself. 😊

Customer: "Yeah we need <insert bonkers 12 step circular logic> to find a thing(s) in the database."

Me: "Ok let me diagram this out and I'll send it to you to review.... but man this seems like the 8th version of this we're doing right?"

Customer: "Yeah well <employee Y> says they can't do B, C without this."

Me: "Wait... can't they just <insert the most simple step in the history of time> in step A, and then later on they won't have to do all this hunting later? Like you have that data at step A right?"

Customer: "Yeah but <employee Y> doesn't want to do that."

Me: "She's your direct report ....."

Customer: "Yes...."

Me: "Ok.... I'll send you the diagram and the cost estimate...."

Whatever reason sometimes it is a bit draining coding madness compared to making things actually efficient / people's jobs easier...

Three months into a new job, as a senior developer (12+ years experience) and updated an import application.

With one small update query that didn't account for a possible NULL value for a parameter, so it updated all 65 million records instead of the 15 that belonged to that user.

Took 3 people and 4 days to put all the data back to it's original state.

Went right back to using the old version of the apllication, still running 2 years later. It's spaghetti code from hell with sql jobs and multiple stored procedures creating dynamic SQL, but I'm never touching it again.

So, part of my job is working with SQL. Not my favorite technology to work with. But the tables have mostly non-descript fields, multiple schemas in the same table, and encoded relationships spanning multiple tables. Yes, the database from hell! On top of that, there is very little documentation on this mess. -- And my boss wants me to write queries against a combination of these tables to make sure the program is working. RIGHT...

So this is an funny one.
Im here enjoying some good music and coding.
Editing Marlin firmware (3D printer firmware).

I checked the code twice to be sure its ok as i had to have hands near the printer while its moving.

I apparently didnt check enough as i missed 1 if statement.
Making the printer to run at firmware allowed MAX speed.
I have my hands in there with piece of paper (For leveling)
I start it the function.
The nozzle was just in so perfect height that if i had my finger under it it would grab the skin and also burning it as it was at 215C.
How do i know so specifically ?
Well cause when i started the function that was what happened.
The printer moved very fast and i didnt react fast enough.
And to add to the injury as the axis was moving at nearly 900mm/s (Yes you read that correctly) i had to replace both the motor and stepper driver for the X axis.
If it didnt hit me it would be fine but as it hit me it tried to push more power to motor. Frying the stepper driver and the motor internals got fucked.

Also yes i was OK. It was just the top level skin layer and straight line only.
It just hurt a lot.

Now when doing something like this i wear gloves and also checking the code without my hands in there first.

Oh look. The monitoring channel is in flames, smartphone is vibrating so hard it's having a seizure.

Hm. Nah it's fine. Not my...

Damn it. Incoming call. -.-

I'm actually on vacation (more like you need to trim down overtime before management get's angry).

They decided to test the new hardware / os stack I set up in the last weeks. I'd actually be happy about it If I wasn't on vacation and would be part in something that I invested a lot of time...

Well now I am. Guess what. It's running too good.

And that's not a joke. It's partly due to an upgrade in infrastructure (got rid of some last remaining 1 Gbps networks)… but also because I changed quite a lot on the OS / VM side plus we changed from XEN to Proxmox... With major tweaks, too.

The whole stack can now handle peak traffic where it would choke before, and even go beyond the old peak traffic.

Enough of introduction, the simple reason why shit burned down was because they tried out the current development branch and let it ran.

The development branch had an currently unfinished ratelimiter framework, since I didn't had time for an full burn in and didn't knew what the maxima / limits were. And since I hadn't finished that, I didn't finish the traffic shaping either.

Hm. Guess it's not good when you let a bunch of heavy parallelized data generators / analyzers run for free....

In the end, we simply shotgunned the docker development machines, because thanks to network congestion / retransmissions and feedback, they were not really cooperative via network / REST.

But hey: To infinity and beyond. XD

"I want visibility in the sprint", "Information for everyone! When you do even a small refactoring, you should add a card to the sprint, clear?"
Those were the words of the product manager.

That sounds reasonable but when there is a bug to investigate, he just pops to the chat channel throw a request with a bit of information and asks to check/fix that.

So to keep my sanity, I asked him to create a ticket with relevant information and additional observations so we can have visibility as he was advocating for it ;)

It felt just good to see him going silent :D

I hate it when I vent to someone about something and I get some woke ass shit advice about how I should "just understand" the people who initiated the bad behavior. Goddamn holy maggots like you are the reason why the world is a fucking shitshow. You're so deep into your martyr image that you disregard the fact that people are abusive and will get away with whatever they can get away with.

If I can get away with murder, how much body count do think that would be? Every dickhole in town will drop dead including me. Well then maybe you should "just understand" me since I'm so sick of the unnecessary hostility of every arrogant developer I work with, every entitled peasant I run into, and every styro-brain hipster avocado-fucker I interact with.

People like this feel more invincible every time they get away with something. Just another incel clit-dick aiming for the moody asshole genius image. Let me whisper gently into your ear, "You're a code monkey and nothing more. If you died today, people will just be annoyed of the backlogs you left behind. No one's even gonna care about your stupid website. You will serve your only purpose, a human fertilizer, and my tomato plants are gonna love you."

"Oh, at least that's all he did." Every fucked up criminal on Earth has a backstory and always, they start with something small. Every stomach-turning crime scene is preceded by a number of people dismissing "small" incidents of abuse.

Fuck you.

My human is coming back tomorrow, finally. I've been organizing things around my unit especially my workspace so I don't get tempted to do "other things" while he's here. I have a desk that I only use when playing computer games. When I work, I just slack on the sofa naked like a homeless exhibitionist loitering in random people's garage.

Now my workspace looks like an actual workspace. Organizing cables was the best part especially when I imagine them being the intestines of all the people that pissed me off. Some of them are so thick, they wiggle. Then I clip them to corners like hidden Christmas lights. How fun would it be to stick LED strips or mount tiny light bulbs inside them? Merry Christmas! Let me create the Jira issue for this task, it would be Epic, so many Stories to tell so Sprint to my workspace, kids! Ba dum tss! *cringe*

Then I sit down in my workspace, talk to my rubber ducky to help me with some bugs except the rubber ducky is the head of the final boss and the bugs are gathering all over his face. Ew, Bill, have some manners.

I developed an app for a company when I was 19 years old freshly out of school, lead developer. When I was 20 a huge TV station in my country covered my app in a segment on how tax payer money was being wasted on stupid shit (I mean yeah lol). They found a super emberassing typo on the start page of the app that they then made fun of. Still haven't recovered from that one lol

You ask a simple question, and someone answers with a URL to a podcast they have already listened to that is 30 minutes long..

Yeah, that's really nice, but what about a single one sentence text answer that doesn't take me another 29 minutes and 30 seconds to find the answer going the podcast route..

Also, text consumes a lot less internet bandwidth too !

Is this the new thing, answers to podcasts with no transcripts for quick answer finding..

And not telling people the answer in the first place !

I mean its great for reference.

Just, don't beat around the bush !

There's only 24 hours in each day, I can't spend all my time watching videos for a handful of answers that I should be able to digest in 5 minutes if they was written down !

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

Of all the fuckups I love the ones with all the wrongs the most.

Like one junior: restarted a wrong app component in a wrong environment on a wrong agreed time after updating a wrong property in the config file.

Like today one of my teammates: updated a wrong script to add a wrong step in a wrong spot in the sequence... At least got the environment right I guess..

I am going to cry a little here: I am old piece of ...code, I've written so many things I can't even remember most of them. The code I wrote is currently running in NASA as well as in Apple HQ and other Apple facilities as in many universities and so on... but obviously I am not good enough to get the Apple Transition Kit, this one with ARM based Mac Mini, to test my code. I am not eligible, you know? I never thought about myself as an important person, thus I am not outraged nor offended, just sad.

Fuck this shit.
IDK how this even makes fucking sense.
I apply for a job im fully qualified for.
I get a no
I misread a job offer. I read it as C++ programmer. They wanted C++ unreal engine programmer.
So i applied.
Not being even qualified for the job. I was thinking i was but when i read the UE part im not.
I got an offer.
WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FLYING FUCKING HELL PEOPLE ?
HOW DOES THIS MAKE SENSE.
Ofc i refused the offer as i know nothing of UE and they wanted a small project to show skills but they were very much interested.

Can anyone explain how this makes even sense ?