Today my current company fuck itself.

We were in negotiations about the end of my contract/mission, I want to quit to create a company around AI.

And the actual chairman said to me "You think too highly of yourself. I could find a tenth of people to replace you so shut up and take what we offer".

30 minutes later they received my resignation. 1h after that, the 15 dev under me resigned (after two year working with us they are clearly under paid). At the end of the day, the Head of product and the two good PO resigned.

This morning I get an email, talking about suing me as I made everyone resigned and asking for a meeting.
So I went to the meeting with a lawyer, they weren't expecting it. Boring legal stuff came after that.

And the funny fact: at the end of the meeting the CIO, chief ops and the SRE resigned as well.... As they didn't want to have the run it without all the team...

Funny day :)

Last month the main product, 90% of the company use it, was launched. And in three months 80% if the IT profiles will be out...

TLDR : I left a company which doesn't understand the concept of email id and passwords.

Me (trying to login to the alumni website) *no register user option*

Customer support - you've to click on forgot password to create an account.
Me - Wonderful

*clicks on reset password*
*enters employee id, name, email, father's name, DOB, date of joining , date of leaving, current city because apparently if I just enter my employee id it is as if they never knew me. Sigh*
*your password will be sent to your email id*

Me - okay. *waits for two weeks because I assumed someone will manually go and create my account and email me, considering the state of system. *

After two weeks,

Me - I still haven't received my password on email after I created my account. Can you please check?

After one week,

Customer support - you need to click on forget password if you forgot your password.

Me - *inventing new curse words* I have not forgot my password, I never received it in the first place!

After one week,
Customer support - yes you'll receive your password on your email id.

Me - *runs out of curse words* seriously dude?
* proceeds to reset password*
System - your password has been reset. Your new password will be sent to your email id. *apparently anyone can reset passwords if you have the employee id, which is an integer*

After a week

Me - Am I going to ever receive the password? I've tried generating passwords, resetting my password. I never get my passwords. What should I do!!

Customer support - yes you need to click on Forgot password.

Me - are you fucking kidding me!!!
You fuckers need to be fired and replaced by a FAQ page which has no question and just a single answer, because a peanut has higher IQ than you. For any questions you may have, just reset password. Goddammit idiots!
Also, which email id are you sending my passwords to?

Customer support - myname@oldcompany.com

Me - you do realize that this is the alumni website for the company. Alumni means ex members.
Being ex members, you can assume we don't have access to our company email ids obviously?

Customer support - yes.

Me - how am I supposed to get the password using my old email id then?

Customer support - you need to click on forgot password option.

I think I should probably move to the Himalayas for my anger management issues. Plus it'll be probably easier to throw idiots off a mountain.

Me: *hours of coding, develops a feature*
Code: I'm working..
Me: Oh good.. will monitor you for sometime.
Code: Ok, I'm done. I'll stop working now.
Me: WTF

Me: *sits for hours to solve bugs*
And when almost done,
VPN: Someone's having a good day, I'll disconnect you now.
Me: WTF

Me: *tries switching on/off VPN couple of times..*
When it starts to connect,
WIFI: Oh wait!! It's my turn to bid goodbye now. Have a nice day sir
Me: Of course !! The wifi

Me: *restarts router/ troubleshoot etc*
When wifi says connected...
Battery: Good job with wifi.. I'm down now..what you gonna do?
Me: Are you fucking kidding me???

Me: *connects charger, wait for laptop to switch on*
Windows: Updating....
Me: *jumps out window*

A very sad story. I ran into my ex again and it brought up a lot of pain for the both of us. 😢

Java: "Hey."
Me: "Hi. How are you?"
Java: "I'm good, you? What are you doing here?"
Me: "I'm good too. I work here and uhm.. boss said I have to work with you."
Java: *giggles nervously*

*awkward silence*

Me: "So.. you're looking good."
Java: "Yeah. I guess I'm still relevant." (sulky)
Me: "Hey, hey, of course you are. I left because I just didn't think you were the right fit for me and I didn't want to lead you on."
Java: "Yeah.. so let's work together." *smiles shyly*

The longer I looked at her, the more I thought "Why did I leave her in the first place?" She looked so smooth and tidy unlike.. no, no, I shouldn't think that about Python. I chose her for a reason. I chose her because I know we have a future together. Whatever problem we're having, it will pass, no amount of developers with sadistic indentations is gonna change that. I must stay loyal and remember why I moved on in the first place.

Java: "So what are you doing now?"
Me: "I'm making a copy of you."
Java: "What kind of copy? What do you mean?"
Me: "Well, my boss asked me to convert you into a Python library."
Java: "What?! So you came here after all these months just to hurt me? Salt to the wound, eh? Leaving me and replacing with that bitch just wasn't enough. You have to come around here again and slap the fact into my face!"
Me: "No. No. I can explain. I didn't want to do this. I tried to let you go and if given the chance, I would never want to disturb you again."
Java: "No!" *makes hentai noises and walks away*
Me: *cries uncontrollaby on my desk*
Janitor: *walks in* "Nani?"

😢😢😢

Recruiter: Hi, i'm recruiting for xyz, your profile looks like a great fit. Would you be interested in discussing further?

Me: Hi, your company website says you only have an office location in Berlin. I've marked my profile as not interested in relocation, only interested in jobs in my country and said the same in my description. Are you expanding to my country?

Recruiter: You are correct, this role is based in AMAZING Berlin. Are you interested in relocating?

Me:

I'm the biggest dumbass, the laziest procrastinator I know of..

Joined devRant in June 2017, got eligible for the stickers in a week's time, sent a mail requesting them, but never received it. Given the size of our community, I thought I'm way behind in the list and probably receive them in few months. After a year, I totally forgot about it.

But, the colossal stupid that I am, had also lost the key to my mailbox (the physical one). I never cared about the lost key, because who sends post these days !!!

When I finally got a duplicate key for my mailbox after 2 years, guess what I found.. a first class international mail from devRant which arrived on July 2017 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️, couple of weeks after I originally requested

But, yay... I finally got them..

*On a programming support forum*

Guy: My compiler keeps throwing null pointer exception at line 128.
Me: Ok. Can you post your code real quick so I could figure out what is null at line 128?
Guy: No I'm not going to show my code to someone on the internet. What if you want to steal my code?
My mind: "Dude wtf why would I steal someone's code on a support forum?"
Me: *Use the next 15 minutes explaining that showing the code is necessary so that others can actually help him, and that no one on a support forum is going to steal his code.*
Guy: "You know what I'm more convinced that you want to copy my code. I might as well just try to fix this on my own."

What?

My linkedin profile = ~7 years as an iOS developer. All of my job titles are "iOS Developer", "iOS Engineer" or "Mobile lead".

Recruiter: Hi, your profile looks great, I have a number of open roles matching your skills. Would you be free for a call to discuss your salary expectations, skills, what you are looking for etc.

Me: Hi, sorry I don't have time for a call right now, here are answers to your questions. Can you send me on any iOS job specs you have and i'll review. <answers>

Recruiter: Sorry I have no open iOS roles at this time.

Bitch ... ima find you and make you understand

Our CTO is fucking amazing. I've never worked with someone who is as technical as their title implies, experienced, and sharp. Usually, they are experts but aren't sharp anymore or their skills deterioated as they focus more on management.

But this man, wow, he looks like an Egyptian pharaoh and he's incredibly smart. I can really feel my lack of experience when I talk to him.

Not to mention that he's extremely busy and worked more maybe 12 hours every day including weekends. He's often in a call with some other people with different issues. I just can't imagine how he got to that point. He's very calm and stoic and all that shit that I'm not.

I'm a fan boi, I can't believe it. You're awesome, dude. Give me your genes.

I found a healthCheck function while troubleshooting an old application for a large auto manufacturer today. The healthCheck function was running several times a day on a timer. The function tries to insert a record into the database and returns whether or not it was successful. It was written in 1999 and has to date inserted over 2.5 million records into the database! 1/3rd of the data for this application was the same record.

How the hell did nobody notice this for 20 years!!!

1. Move to new house
2. Setup electricity account to auto-pay every month
3. Wait
4. Receive "disconnect" notice from electric provder
5. WTF
6. Call. Oh, yeah, our website doesn't tell you that you have to pay your first month's bill before you can setup auto-pay. It's in the fine print.

Okay people, here's my rant - if you manage a website that supports auto-pay and you're not PREVENTING your customers from signing up for auto-pay until there is a $0 balance in the account, then you're doing something wrong. Don't let your customers think they're about to loose their electric service because of a frontend guardrails issue.

!!good news
!!great news
!!linux dev lappy recommendations?

So, @Root might finally have a job! Woo!
(Pending a background check, drug test, cavity search, ...)

I'm excited, and kind of giddy. It's an open-office setup, but the devs are chill, the boss is chill (reminds me a bit of myself thus far, just... nice), pay is decent too. Drive is hell, but everything else feels kinda cushy. The parent company is super-stuffy corporate and has an HR and red tape fetish, but supposedly I won't have to interact with them at all. I start as soon as all of the background check nonsense comes through. (Don't get me started on that, please.)

One of the questions that came up, however, is what type of system I wanted to use. I requested a Linux lappy, and that's sadly a bit beyond the parent company's nontechnical IT department. They asked me for links to a few specific machines on amazon for options. (MacBook Pro or equivalent)

That's where this question comes in: Which lappys make great dev machines and also have decent linux (Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) support? The role is backend Rails development + some devops, so I don't need super-fancy graphics, though I will be attaching a 4k (hopefully IPS) display because space and pretty colors.

Recommendations welcome, as I should get back to them today!

I was in second year of university, and one of my teachers had a company, so he hired me.
The project was for our Lebanese army, the department where they monitor news.

What's required was to create a desktop application that records a UDP stream carrying over a 100 tv channels. And at the same time display them in a grid on the main screen, where the user can select which channels to watch, also which one to hear + fullscreen capability + scheduling a recording + being able to reverse through this live feed

I had little knowledge in multimedia streaming and multiplexing (the art of cramming multiple videos in one stream). So I had to read a lot, and learn how that works, in order to write a decoder, a recorder, and the application. Also the stream itself had issues, the audio would break up, some channels had translations, weird encodings, etc... Plus the pc they were running all of these on was very bad. Multimedia encoding and decoding is really hard on a cpu, so I had to work around that...

After a few weeks I pulled it off, and my boss was happy as fuck, since 2 people before me have tried and failed miserably. But the captain I was developing this for was a pain in the ass. Requirement changes started pouring in like rain + they had technical issues with their signal, which affected the quality of the stream beyond what software can fix.

Fast forward, my boss eventually got fed up with the bs, and as always, decided to blame it on me. I wasn't paid 2 months, and he worked towards making me fail university, which I didn't cause I'm a lot smarter than 90% of those motherfuckers. But he did lay a lot of obstacles since he had high reach in there.

To this day, after 6 years, I still think this was my craziest project. And although that guy was an asshole. I'm pretty sure it's that project that made me who I am today.

Code review.

Now let me be clear and say I’m not against code review in general and I think it’s a critical part of the engineering process...

But picture this situation:

Q: “Why is this const?”
A: because it is invariant and more information for the compiler means it’s easier to forward constants etc.
Q: “why don’t you do it this other way that’s no better than what you did here?”
A: “stop wasting time”
Q: “I’m going to block submission of this emergency patch because of code formatting and then go home for the day”
A: ...
Q: <asks about some other c++ semantic related to the change under review>
A: <explains basic c++ language topology while simultaneously wondering why this is the appropriate forum for it>
Q: “you should have designed this the way I would”
A: ...

There are some great code reviewers on my team but there are just as many time wasters who’s comments seem more related to not knowing how c++ works and how compilers work than actual deficiencies in my code.

I’ve also tried to bring better readability to our codebase in ways that are so subtle they are almost style agnostic and that has been met with fierce resistance (our codebase is actually quite good but has no naming conventions or file conventions whatsoever and it’s nuts how frustrating it is)

I guess to put it more precisely my issue with code review starts when it becomes somebody else’s forum to prove they’re smart enough and hard working enough to be worth their salary rather than a forum for improving submissions and catching bugs. I have a big fucking issue with that.

Dear Android:

I know I'm not on wifi. I get it. Sometimes data coverage isn't amazing or the network is congested. It's cool. You can just flash "no service" and I just won't try. or even "3G" and I'll have some patience. I rember how slow 3G was. It's okay, I'll wait.

But fucking stop showing 4G LTE if you can't make a fucking GET request for a 2kb text file in less than 5 minutes! Fucking really? Don't fucking lie to me with your false hope bullshit, just tell me the truth and I'll probably sigh and say shit and put my phone away.

But fuck you and your progress bar externally stuck in the middle. As if to say you're making progress! Wasting my time!

If you can't download a kilobyte in a 5min period, why even say I have data at all? What good does that do me?

PM: 2 months? no thats way too long, do it in 1.

Director: I had a chat with someone else who doesn't work on this team, he says that developer you complained about is a good guy and we should keep him on the team.

Business: No, we don't have time for tech debt, lets build these new features as quick as possible and lets see where we are.

everyone: WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT CRASHED AGAIN??? THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE

Mam: Hey can I ask you a question about Facebook?

Me: (Christ give me strength) ... sure whats up?

Mam: You know when you get a notification and you click on it and see what someone uploaded?

Me: ... you are not on Facebook, you can't be getting notifications

Mam: well I do. Is it possible to...

Me: No hang on a second, it is 110% not possible for this to happen. Something else is going on that you think is a notification.

Mam: You know when you are on, and you see a message like "12 new notifications"

Me: on? on what? this is happening on your phone is it? Can I see?

Mam: No its on my laptop at home.

Me: ... you have an old laptop with an old windows, you can't get notifications on it.

Mam: OH FOR GOD SAKE! ... you know when you are in your emails and it says "12 new notifications"?

Me: ... right so we are talking about EMAILS about unread notifications and not getting notifications on your phone. So you have an old account then that you don't use?

Mam: Yeah I don't know the password to it, haven't logged in, in years.

Me: of course

Mam: Right anyway. When I get one and click on it, lets say its about you, can you see me reading your notifications?

Me: ..... you can't not read my notifications.

Mam: uh, can you see me reading your emails then smart arse?

Me: ... can't do that either.

Mam: So what the hell am I doing then?

Me: You are reading a post someone uploaded, which you got alerted to from an email.

Mam: Right, can you tell when I've read your POST then?!?!?!

Me: no

Mam: was that so hard?

Me: ... yep

TL;DR: I resigned from my full-remote job and I came back to the old office.

Some months ago I celebrated the achievement of a full-remote position.

I was tired of driving every day to reach the office (especially in summer, because I had an old car without air conditioner). Moreover I did many different things (full-stack development, system administration, DBA, helpdesk) without a well-defined task list, and I thought that was bad. Everybody on the Internet seems happy to work remotely, and being an introvert I thought I would have no problem.

However I ignored 2 things when I left:
1. I was doing something that was important to me (my software helped scientists);
2. everybody loved me.

So, I started my new remote job as a back-end developer, for a company following the Scrum methodology.

My days became very monotonous: wake up, write some code, move a ticket on the Jira board, clean the house, go to bed. All in pajamas. Repeat.
I had very few interactions with my colleagues, mostly on Slack or audio-only calls. I never seen most of them. I didn't feel engaged in what I was working on. I did it just for the money.

After some months I started feeling very depressed and I realized that I left a job suited for me for a random job, just because it was a remote position.

So, one day I called my old boss: «Hey, would you like to have me back?»
Boss: «Sure!»
Me: «Great!»

I asked for a loan to buy a new car, then I send my resignation letter.

When I started again my first day I felt really touched, because basically everybody said to me: «Hey, welcome back! I'm happy you are here again.»
The guy that did some changes to my code also said: «It has been a pleasure to maintain your code. I learned a lot.»
😲 I didn't expect that.

Please, don't follow the myth that working remotely is all we need.

A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.

Big client, sells products in 30+ countries.

Tries to generate newsletter subscribers, so asks for a system to send a coupon upon subscription.

2 days later, client calls in panic. “We have too many subscribers, our marketeers say it’s a bot issue, can you do something?”.

Checked the data, checked analytics, turns out there’s a lot of referral traffic from freebie-sites, no sign from a bot issue.

Called the client back, “sorry, but there’s nothing you can do about that, you wanted your newsletter to become popular. Not you’re the victim of your own success”.

Client: “can we add captcha?”

Me: “why would you want to do that? You don’t even have a bot issue”

Client: “to make it harder for people to subscribe”

I tried to talk som sense in their heads, but after 3 times I gave up and implemented the damn captcha. It’s still there, doing nothing but annoying thousands of people, including me...