My coworker wanted to get some program from a website that requires a username/password to download. It is a utility program for controls automation. He didn't want to have to create a username/password so I said he could use mine.

I went over to his desk and read off the username to him which he entered. Then I started reading off the "password" to him:
"y o u r m o m i s a s l u t"
He got suspicious at the last few letters and then clicked on "show password" icon. He of course saw: "yourmomisaslut". At this point he just bust out laughing. I then gave him the correct password.

For fuck's sake, management is now asking us to provide data converted in % as to how genAI is actually making us more efficient as developers. How the fuck do you even measure that empirically?

It is already BS enough that they track how much we query these AI tools everyday in our development environments, but now they want genAI to produce most of the code templates in our SDK. It can barely produce a working regex or a working python script, let alone a small piece of code that won't stack overflow itself into oblivion. It sometimes takes more time to debug and refactor than to do it myself from scratch.

They ask for our professional opinion, we tell them, they don't give a fuck about it, proceed to think all is rainbows and unicorns, and still ask us the same moronic things as if they were the new messiah's on earth.

Don't get me wrong, genAI can be useful, but why the fuck does management think it will magically solve all our problems when they don't even understand how it works even on the surface.

The only thing that would make sense is a lot of them got money at stake in some AI investment sales pitch bullshit and they try to jam it up our collective throats because otherwise they will loose their investments like there is no tomorrow.

Fuck all of this, I just want to do engineering and build something useful to society. Is it too much to ask?

Opened a legacy PHP file from 2008.

No functions.
2,000+ lines.
Inline SQL.
HTML inside echo statements.
A single if (true) wrapping the entire thing like some cursed gift box.

At the top:
// Do not modify. Works perfectly.

At the bottom:
It writes to two databases. Only one exists.

Somewhere in the middle:
It sends an email…
to the client’s ex-wife.

I closed the file.
Rebooted my laptop.
Took a walk.
Still not okay.

AI can take my job. I can't do this anymore.

Best of luck waking up 7 A.M on Mondays, logging in to work and telling in those 10 am scrum meetings “I’m still wOrking on the sAme tiCket as last friDay.”

Enjoy my job graybot.

I’m gonna go outside and remember what sunlight looks like. Maybe touch grass. Maybe grow crops. Maybe herd some cows. Idk. Might start a farm or might scream into the wind.

Let's get ready for another rant. I work at a new company now which claims to be "fast paced" and startup-like culture. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen a place with more rules and bureaucracy when it comes to engineering.

By the looks of it, my manager seems to value process a lot more than actual outcome. Both my manager and another engineer in the team tend to nitpick over every line of code and will not approve anything until they believe it's absolutely perfect and up to their liking.

Every PR I create has to go through 5 cycles of review. On top of that, the comments that get added are rarely related to product impact, but rateher "let's rename this variable in a test file to this", "maybe we should have this many spaces in a config file". There's been actual cases where I had to go through different cycles and had my PR's blocked for days because of some minor comments about variable names and styling they "liked" more.

This is one of the main reasons why we lose critical time during the development of our features. There seems to be no sense of priorities or urgency. The other reason we keep losing time is because of the massive amount of team meetings we have. Our team has only 3 engineers. How many meetings can you possibly schedule in a day to "realign". We have technical meetings where it apparentely is necessary to all agree on every tiny detail, such as which types we're gonna use etc etc.

That's not all. Last week, weeks of my work was thrown out of the window, because it was slightly different from how "we" usually do it. Even though, I explained and motivated how my solution solved issues the other proposed solution did not, we ended up spending an additional two days reimplementing the same fixes more in line with "the rules".

I recently reviewed a coworker's PR pointing out actual functionality that was not working as expected. Real user impact...
I created an alternative solution that covered all cases, and sent it. It got basically ignored. Then we ended up having a meeting for hours with several engineers where they made me watch how they started fixing the same issues as I had already fixed.

Each week, I'm losing around 2-3 days of development time dealing with this nonsense. But then there's a deadline. Then the manager goes full-on wild and pushes everyone into overtime and will send you 700 messages a day in channels or privately to you if "you need help" and how things should be done.

I'm not looking forward to switching jobs again, but please tell me... how can I cope with this?

Thanks

been working in the same company for 7 years, founder removed all our remote flexibility, told us people who dont come to the office can be replaced with AI, we have no excuse to being late to the office, etc...

feeling violated i began applying to other companies, and im very surprised that after 8 years of development experience, many side projects and curious endeavours later, i keep getting rejected or ghosted... wtf is this job market? i used to get interviews at least in almost any company i applied for before...

how tf do you land a new job these days?

Dear employers, DO NOT FUCK WITH A PERSON'S DOCTORS. My doctors are paid to help me. If that means helping to sue your asses, they'll do it in a heart beat. Don't give them motivation.

My employer made dubious claims to my doctors in an occupational health referral. I've requested a copy of the referral. In the hopes I might not get a copy of the referral they've pushed this to my doctors as they don't want to give it to me. Because they've lied. Or they think I won't jump through the hoops to get access to MY OWN MEDICAL RECORDS.

I’ve typed a question into google and the AI generated response was directly contradicting every web search result on the first page.

So, you can’t even rely on it to pull out the correct info, on top of the fact that it might have hallucinated.

Completely useless and deceptive.

It’s depressing to think about how many people blindly rely on this crap not realizing how bad it is.

Manager: Keep the debug logs
Me: I won't use them as I use the status report or run it manually to see the problem, but fine whatever.

1 week later

Manager: the debug logs are hard to read, the status report is hard to read too but it's a bit more concise
Me: Yes. The fuck you want me to do? I don't use logs and don't care. You can write code, make the logs more useful to you if you want to use them.

My wife went to do some work for a charity. They "got her the best computer available". It was a poor mangled MacBook whose better days were somewhere in the dawn of the last decade.
She tries to type anything... and only gibberish appears on screen.

She comes to me, absolutely me puzzled. I try to type anything... gibberish. I boot up in safe mode, everything is OK.

I look around for system configs... there is a custom keyboard mapping enabled by default.
We check the weird stains on the keyboard... they are regular and in all keys. Like if there used to be adhesive stickers on the keys, and those stickers were later removed.

I boot up again... and type "q". It becomes "a". I type "w". It becomes "b". I dread typing "e". Sure as bug, it becomes "c".
By the love of byte, someone asked for a custom keyboard layout... IN FUCKING ALPHABETICAL ORDER.

It was easy enough to change the layout after that, but the weirdness continues: my wife asked around, and apparently the laptop used to belong to some old dude... who was convinced there were characters missing from his keyboard. Apparently he could never find them in a regular QWERTY layout.

I wish I could give some encouraging words for the kid who came up with the solution. Working around technophobes is a drying art, that needs to be rewarded.

New JoyRant build (38) with a new feature:

Every user that you see in a rant will be stored in a list which can be used for @mentioning and viewing the profile.

https://devrant.molodetz.nl/IMG_529...
https://devrant.molodetz.nl/IMG_529...
https://devrant.molodetz.nl/IMG_529...
https://devrant.molodetz.nl/IMG_529...

Sometimes you just don‘t remember the exact name of a user and hopefully this feature will help.

It might also be a nice summary of how many users are active.

We had a teambuilding last Friday. We went indoor karting and it was a lot of fun. My project manager does not have a driving license and it did show.

The karts have a boost button (electric karts) and my project manager used it before a turn and then slammed into wall. Now he got a few bruised ribs haha

Also, it's still funny to me that I was part of the teambuilding during my resignation but i'm not gonna complain about that. :D

my scrum master keeps changing the format of retro and it works worse every time. We're at the 2.5 hour mark right now. It is aggressively hot and humid in the office. Everyone is asleep.

I don't think there's a way to explain to him that the purpose of a retro is not to magically fix things within the format but to financially commit to the preference for conversation, from which the hidden work of resolving conflicts can be billed.

Want to know a sad story? I had a great idea for an internal application that would optimize a process in the company. My idea gets approved and.. guess what? Later it gets cancelled because Change Management didn't see a reason for me to get API rights on the company pipeline, which was what I needed to get my application going. I pitch my idea and they don't care and shut me down quickly because it's just another ticket they want to close asap.

Another guy in my company, openly incompetent but big buddies with the higher-ups gets his idea approved without effort. They open the doors for him and talk to Change Management to get him in. Then he's seen as Mr. Big Ideas while this guy doesn't even know how to use a terminal (I'm not joking). Even the girls admire him but he's a complete idiot who just smiles a lot.

It's whom you know, apparently. And bureaucracy is a piece of shit. So are cronyism and corruption.

Youtube is disgusting.

They deliberately implement some crap that tries to circumvent ad blockers, fail at that, that causes videos to have a delay before loading.
Then they implement a fucking popup during this delay, telling you to klick there for more information why there is a delay.
And when you klick on that, they essentially tell you that your ad blocker is probably why there is a delay.

No, assholes, the ads is why there is a delay.

Dishonest, manipulative pieces of shit.

I noticed an increased usage of the word unalive, such as in "to un-alive someone" on youtube, spoken in the videos and written in the comments.

I suppose this is to avoid the word kill?

So we are at the stage of changing the language just to avoid using a bad word on a platform of hypersensitive woke snowflakes who will cancel you for saying a specific word regardless of the context it’s been used in?

Please tell me I‘m wrong. 😒

Shit.

Thought I had turned off the stove after making dinner but seems it stayed on.

Thankfully the kitchen automatically turns off after a set time, so only the pan and a couple nearby things were lost.

Still, seems some electric wire in the extractor got wrecked because the kitchen line breaker is down and won't go up.

Waking up to your house full of smoke really sends you into panic mode...

In my latest installment of "Swift, WTF?", we look at the "if" conditional in terms of the Swift convention of:

if let x = y { /* ... */ }

so what this does :
1. declares x in the scope of the braced code
2. sets x to y (an ahem, "optional")
3. decides if x is not *nil*, then executes the braced code.

This is very similar in both the visual and the operation to the C code of:

if (int x = y) { /* ... */ }

1. declares x in the scope of the braced code
2. sets x to the value of y
3. if x is not zero, then executes the braced code

which is considered *exceptionally* poor style.

Neither the C nor the Swift construct result in a legitimate boolean value of "true" or "false", although C comes closer than Swift.

In the Swift case the *imaginary* "nil" value has to be interpreted as "false" and thus there must be extra code is for the conditional to check on whatever constitutes the **actual** value of nil in Swift and then set the condition to "false".

(remember boys and girls, "optionals" are not real, they are an imaginary language construct of Swift and have no legitimate counterpart in the CPU operations with memory and registers)

At least in the case of C, if the value of x is zero or NULL (which is 0) then it is technically a "false" which in C is 0. Regardless, it is really poor programming and anyone doing that on my team gets an ear full.

But in Swift this obfuscation of code is common and condoned! Well, why not put more of the program in the condition of the if? In fact, stuff the whole thing in there.. why not? 🙄

This just reenforces my opinion that Swift is not a bird but the stuff that comes out of the underside of the bird. 🐦💩

My boss insists that we shouldn’t lock or password-protect a particular system because, in her words, remembering or write down a password is hard and email as a concept is confusing. I tried to explain if people who don't know what left versus right-clicking do have full admin access, it’s only a matter of time before something goes terriblely wrong. She listened but ultimately decided to keep everything open, confident that everyone would use it responsibly.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened, it never has been and never will be. The problems started, just as I feared, and now I’m stuck cleaning up the chaos, one issue at a time. I do have a backup and automation snapshots, but things got so tangled up that it will still be a hassle.
I tried soft lock so everyone could only access the section relevant to them. The reaction was immediate—they were confused and stressed, saying they’d be unable to do anything if it stayed that way. They didn’t get the idea that keeping them from touching certain things (that they shouldn't be touching in the first place) wasn’t the same as blocking their whole work. But since they’re all my superiors, I had no choice but to remove the restrictions and leave the system wide open again.

Nothing serious came out, just really annoying because something like this happens all the time.

For me, per day:
-> what the client pays/ what the gatekeeping consultancy sells me for: 1200 (profit +- 400/66%)
-> what the gatekeeping consultancy pays/ what my consultancy sells me for: 600 (profit +- 200/66% - extralegal advantages cost)
-> what my consultancy pays me gross: 300
-> what I get net after wage taxes: 150

The state takes +- 500 in wage & company tax in the whole process.
That´s why I give you my full 20%-capacity effort.